Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think."

- Socrates

"In foreign policy you have to wait twenty-five years to see how it comes out."

- James Reston

“The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind"

--Alexander Hamilton, 1790

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 9, 2023

2. China Relies on U.S., Allies for Hundreds of Products

3. China’s war planners are leaning harder on its militia

4. Inside the Air Force’s massive mobility war game in the Pacific

5. Overseas and under the poverty line: The system that keeps so many military spouses abroad unemployed

6. Korea Is a Model for Middle East Peace

7. What Washington Must Do to Check China’s Coercion

8. The complicated case of Nauru, which stood up to China

9. A Drone’s View Behind Russian Lines: Cratered Fields and Charred Armor

10. Back in the Trenches – Why New Technology Hasn’t Revolutionized Warfare in Ukraine

11. Nationalism’s questionable influence in China’s responses to international incidents

12. Taiwan Army major detained as spying case snowballs

13. US racing frantically to close missile defense holes

14. The Battle of Hostomel Airport: A Key Moment in Russia’s Defeat in Kyiv

15. Why You Should Worry About China’s Missing Minister

16. China is edging toward deflation. Here's what that means.

17. Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine

18. Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s

19. China Warns Japan Over ‘Resolve to Fight’ Remarks on Taiwan

20. Stablecoins Can Keep the Dollar the World’s Reserve Currency

21. Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life

22. The War in Ukraine Is Getting Closer to Putin's 'Frontdoor'

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 9, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-9-2023

Key Takeaways:

Speculations about the Wagner Group’s withdrawal from Belarus suggest that aspects of the deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin following Wagner’s armed rebellion on June 24 have collapsed.
Putin is likely still concerned about the threat that Prigozhin poses to his long-term goals and continues to focus on definitively separating Prigozhin from Wagner.
Alternatively, Putin may intend for Wagner's forces to return to Russia in order to facilitate the destruction or restructuring of Wagner.
The likely collapse of aspects of the Wagner-Putin-Lukashenko deal indicates that Putin has failed to decisively resolve issues posed by Prigozhin and Wagner following Wagner’s June 24 rebellion.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attempted to justify the recreation of the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts by reamplifying boilerplate rhetoric posturing NATO as an existential threat to Russia.
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and advanced in some areas on August 9.
The Russian veteran community may be attempting to rehabilitate the nominal Russian deputy theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Sergei Surovikin, following scrutiny over his affiliation with the Wagner Group.
Marchenkov’s interview may suggest that Surovikin and the anti-Gerasimov faction believe there is a chance for Surovikin to return to the frontlines.
Russian sources claimed that poor safety regulations led to an explosion near the Zagorsk Optical Mechanical Plant in Moscow on August 9, and notably most Russian sources did not suggest that Ukrainian actors may have been responsible for the incident.
Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut area, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced on the Svatove-Kreminna line, north of Bakhmut, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and advanced in some areas on August 9.
Footage published on August 9 further supports ISW’s assessments that the Ukrainian incursion near Kozachi Laheri in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on August 8 was likely a limited raid.
Russian forces may be moving military equipment through Kazakhstan to Russia, but ISW has observed no geolocated footage confirming these reports.
Russian officials appear to be setting conditions to justify the possible need to cancel or postpone regional elections in the occupied territories in case of Ukrainian counteroffensive successes.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 9, 2023

Aug 9, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 9, 2023

Nicole Wolkov, Riley Bailey, Grace Mappes, Angelica Evans, Kateryna Stepanenko, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 9, 2023, 6:30 pm ET

Click here to see ISW’s interactive map of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report.

Click here to access ISW’s archive of interactive time-lapse maps of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. These maps complement the static control-of-terrain map that ISW produces daily by showing a dynamic frontline. ISW will update this time-lapse map archive monthly.

Note: The data cutoff for this product was 12:00pm ET on August 9. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 10 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Speculations about the Wagner Group’s withdrawal from Belarus suggest that aspects of the deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin following Wagner’s armed rebellion on June 24 have collapsed. A Russian insider source claimed on August 8 that Wagner forces are conducting their first stage of withdrawal from Belarus by bussing groups of 500 to 600 personnel from Belarus to Krasnodar Krai and Voronezh and Rostov oblasts and that the second stage will begin after August 13.[1] The insider source and a Wagner-affiliated source speculated that Wagner forces may be leaving Belarus because Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko refused to finance Wagner when he discovered that Russia would not be paying for Wagner as he had evidently expected.[2] Putin and Lukashenko allowed Wagner forces and Prigozhin to continue to operate in Belarus after the armed rebellion.[3] The insider source claimed that a small group of Wagner instructors would remain in Belarus to train Belarusian forces.[4] ISW has not observed visual evidence of Wagner forces moving out of Belarus, however. The insider source claimed on August 6 that Wagner forces that did not deploy to Libya “urgently” went on leave in Russia, and that Wagner's command called on their fighters to keep in touch because new orders could come at any time.[5] Wagner-affiliated sources claimed that the main Wagner forces will “activate” at the end of August but did not elaborate on the statement.[6] Claims that Wagner forces are moving out of Belarus — a relatively safe haven for Wagner and Prigozhin — back to Russia, Wagner command’s mentions of new orders, and claims of the future “activation” of Wagner forces at the end of August likely suggest that aspects of the deal that allowed Wagner to move to Belarus and continue operations there and in Africa have collapsed.

The validity of these claims and the future of the Wagner Group remain unclear at the time of publication. ISW offers the following assessments and hypotheses for the potential implications of these claims, if true, on the Russian power composition, Putin’s regime, and the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) efforts to integrate Wagner personnel into conventional Russian formations. ISW will continue to monitor and report on indicators and counter-indicators that support, undermine, or inform these hypotheses and assessments.

Putin is likely still concerned about the threat that Prigozhin poses to his long-term goals and continues to focus on definitively separating Prigozhin from Wagner. Putin has previously attempted to present Prigozhin as corrupt and a liar to destroy his reputation among Wagner personnel and within Russian society and to rhetorically separate Prigozhin from Wagner.[7] ISW assessed on June 27 that the Kremlin would likely continue to attack Prigozhin’s character to break Prigozhin’s popular support, discourage Wagner personnel from following him to Belarus, and destroy his financial power.[8] Putin’s June 29 meeting with Prigozhin and 35 Wagner commanders further indicated that Putin intends to maintain the Wagner Group as a cohesive fighting force rather than breaking it up while also seeking to separate Prigozhin from Wagner leadership and forces.[9] Prigozhin’s presence at a Wagner base near Asipovichy, Belarus, on July 18 and on the sidelines of the Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg on July 27 suggests that Prigozhin has maintained his position as the effective leader of the Wagner Group and that Putin has thus far failed to separate Prigozhin from Wagner.[10] A Russian insider source claimed on August 9 that the Kremlin’s rhetorical attacks against Prigozhin decreased dramatically after Putin’s meeting with Wagner leadership on June 29, but began to increase again in early August.[11] An increase in Kremlin attacks on Prigozhin, if true, could indicate that Putin has recommitted to his original goal of destroying Prigozhin and creating a clear separation between Prigozhin and Wagner.

Putin’s prioritization of separating Prigozhin from Wagner and attempting to maintain a reconstituted Wagner fighting element appears to be at odds with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s objectives. A Russian insider source claimed that Shoigu has taken over Russia’s relationships with African countries from Prigozhin, angering the Wagner leadership and personnel and depriving Wagner of opportunities in Africa.[12] If true, Shoigu’s ambitions in Africa are likely to create issues for Putin’s greater goals with Wagner by angering the very people Putin is trying to woo. Putin’s and Shoigu’s priorities have become periodically misaligned throughout the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, often when Putin prioritizes balancing competing groups and interests while Shoigu attempts to establish full control over the Russian military in Ukraine.[13]

Alternatively, Putin may intend for Wagner's forces to return to Russia in order to facilitate the destruction or restructuring of Wagner. Putin appealed to Wagner commanders in a speech on July 26 seeking to persuade them to continue to fight in Ukraine by joining the Russian military.[14] Putin’s appeal may have suggested that the Kremlin intended to organize Wagner forces into the Russian MoD. This appeal appears not to have been successful as many Wagner personnel deployed to Belarus and individual Wagner commanders and personnel continued to express loyalty to Wagner and Prigozhin.[15] The Kremlin has also reportedly attempted to control Wagner’s operations in the Middle East and subordinate Wagner's operations there to the Russian MoD following the rebellion on June 24.[16] Wagner commanders released a statement on August 9 claiming that Wagner fighters have been receiving calls advertising opportunities to work with other private military companies (PMCs) in Africa.[17] The calls may suggest that the Russian government seeks to lure Wagner personnel away from Wagner with new work opportunities. Putin may intend for Wagner's forces to return to Russia so that he can more easily facilitate Wagner’s subordination to the Russian MoD or disband the organization entirely.

There are other possible outcomes that would see Wagner reconstitute as a unitary fighting force reminiscent of its operations in Ukraine, although ISW has observed no indicators for these outcomes, which appear unlikely based on available information. The Kremlin’s likeliest courses of action vis-à-vis Wagner will likely lead to an overall decrease in the combat power that Wagner could offer the Russian military, as either approach will likely dissuade some elements of Wagner from continuing to serve, whether in a Wagner without Prigozhin or in some type of entity completely subordinated to the MoD.

The likely collapse of aspects of the Wagner-Putin-Lukashenko deal indicates that Putin has failed to decisively resolve issues posed by Prigozhin and Wagner following Wagner’s June 24 rebellion. Putin is unlikely to resolve the Wagner problem as long as tensions remain between Putin’s own aim of separating Prigozhin from Wagner and Shoigu’s aims to secure full MoD control over Wagner and the other armed forces fighting for Russia. Speculations about Shoigu taking over Russian military operations in Africa from Wagner, if true, will likely only exacerbate tensions between the MoD and Wagner personnel returning from Belarus or Africa to Russia rather than persuading the Wagner personnel to join conventional Russian military formations in accord with the prior deal.[18] Pro-Wagner sources have historically coalesced around Prigozhin because of anger at the MoD and likely retain the ability to rally the support of Wagner rank-and-file and supporters regardless of Prigozhin‘s actual participation in current rhetoric.[19] Angering Wagner personnel further while bringing them back to Russia poses challenges if Putin seeks to eliminate the Wagner threat. Putin’s decision to allow Shoigu to undermine this aspect of the prior deal, if true, then threatens to undermine the careful façade of internal security that Putin has extensively attempted to project following the June 24 rebellion.[20] This situation is evolving dynamically in an increasingly complicated information environment marked by the absence of direct commentary from Prigozhin or other Wagner leaders. ISW will continue to evaluate these and other hypotheses and assessments as more information becomes available.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attempted to justify the recreation of the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts by reamplifying boilerplate rhetoric posturing NATO as an existential threat to Russia. Shoigu opened a meeting of the Russian MoD Collegium on August 9, focusing on issues related to the creation of the two military districts but primarily commented on Western support for Ukraine and NATO’s expansion.[21] Shoigu stated that the NATO countries’ attempts to help Ukraine win are creating serious risks for further escalation and that Finland’s accession and Sweden’s planned accession to NATO are “a serious destabilizing factor.”[22] Shoigu stated that it is likely that NATO will deploy military contingents and strike weapons on Finnish territory that can strike critical targets in Russia, and Shoigu accused NATO of intentionally militarizing Poland as part of America’s alleged anti-Russia policy.[23] Shoigu stated that Eastern European militaries have a combined manpower of 360,000 personnel with 8,000 armored vehicles, 6,000 artillery systems, and 650 aviation units deployed to the immediate vicinity of the borders of the Union State.[24] Shoigu suggested that the Russian MoD is strengthening the Russian grouping of forces along Russia’s western borders to respond to these alleged threats.[25] Shoigu announced on January 17, 2023, that the MoD will reestablish the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts as part of long-term goals to significantly increase the size of the Russian military.[26] Shoigu is likely framing the recreation of these military districts as a necessary response to alleged Western aggression towards Russia in order to justify the cost of resources, time, and institutional capacity required for their recreation.

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and advanced in some areas on August 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in the Bakhmut, Berdyansk (Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area), and Melitopol (western Zaporizhia Oblast) directions.[27] Geolocated footage published on August 9 suggests that Ukrainian forces advanced northeast of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast, but the duration and extent of these advances are currently unclear.[28] Ukrainian Tavriisk Operational and Strategic Group of Forces Spokesperson Serhii Kuzmin stated on August 8 that Ukrainian forces reached the Russian first line of defense in an unspecified area in the Melitopol or Berdyansk directions.[29] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported on August 9 that Ukrainian forces were partially successful south of Velyka Novosilka near Urozhaine and Pryyutne and southeast of Orikhiv near Verbove.[30] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced into Urozhaine in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and suggested that Ukrainian forces may have captured some Russian positions south of Bakhmut.[31] Malyar stated that the Ukrainian forces are conducting the counteroffensive as expected and are successfully degrading Russian offensive potential as Ukrainian forces did during the summer-autumn 2022 interdiction campaign in Kherson Oblast.[32]

The Russian veteran community may be attempting to rehabilitate the nominal Russian deputy theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Sergei Surovikin, following scrutiny over his affiliation with the Wagner Group. Surovikin’s former commander, Colonel General Valeriy Marchenkov, told state affiliated URA.ru outlet that Surovikin did not and could not ever renege on his oath and praised Surovikin for pioneering a defensive strategy that is slowing down Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in southern Ukraine.[33] Marchenkov claimed that Surovikin successfully reduced the frontline length and strategically redistributed Russian forces in Zaporizhia Oblast. Marchenkov also defended Surovikin’s decision to withdraw Russian troops from the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast in November 2022, stating that this decision allowed Russian forces to construct the current defensive lines in Kherson Oblast and prevent military and civilian deaths. Marchenkov also attributed the creation of the Russian military police to Surovikin and boasted about Surovikin’s efforts to suppress the August 1991 coup in Moscow. Russian veterans communities were instrumental in rehabilitating and promoting Surovikin’s claimed affiliate, Russian Airborne (VDV) Forces Commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky, in March-April 2023.[34] Russian VDV veterans appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin on behalf of Teplinsky, after which Teplinsky returned to the frontlines ahead of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.[35] Former Commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army Major General Ivan Popov has also rallied veteran and army groups, sparking a discussion around his removal from command in mid-July.[36]

Marchenkov’s interview may suggest that Surovikin and the anti-Gerasimov faction believe there is a chance for Surovikin to return to the frontlines. Marchenkov’s public defense of Surovikin is in line with previous veteran efforts to secure the reinstatement of commanders who oppose Chief of the Russian General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov. Marchenkov notably did not publicly disclose Surovikin’s whereabouts. One Russian insider source claimed that the Kremlin’s agreements with Wagner began to “sag,” a claim that accords with ISW’s assessments as noted above, which the source claimed can explain the lack of a new appointment for Surovikin.[37] ISW assessed on April 30 that Putin fails to decisively dismiss commanders and instead demotes them in order to encourage them to seek to regain his favor and to retain options for future appointments.[38] Surovikin’s return to command will likely depend on his ability to convince Putin of his loyalty and usefulness on the battlefield – both narratives presented in Marchenkov’s interview.

Russian sources claimed that poor safety regulations led to an explosion near the Zagorsk Optical Mechanical Plant in Moscow on August 9, and notably, most Russian sources did not suggest that Ukrainian actors may have been responsible for the incident.[39] The explosion caused widespread damage to the plant and surrounding areas, injured at least 60 people, and killed at least one person.[40] The explosion reportedly occurred at a facility at the plant leased by Russian pyrotechnics company PiroRoss, and the Russian authorities have reportedly opened a criminal case against PiroRoss for the violation of industrial safety requirements.[41] Russian sources also claimed that Russian authorities have detained PiroRoss Director Sergei Chanakev in connection with the explosion.[42] Shvabe Holding Company, a subsidiary of Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec, owns the Zagorsk Optical Mechanical Plant, and the plant produces pyrotechnics and precision optical equipment for the military.[43] Russian media outlet Agentstvo reported that the Zagorsk Optical Mechanical Plant has also been participating in the development of a next-generation strategic stealth bomber “Poslannik” since 2019.[44]

Key Takeaways:

Speculations about the Wagner Group’s withdrawal from Belarus suggest that aspects of the deal between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin following Wagner’s armed rebellion on June 24 have collapsed.
Putin is likely still concerned about the threat that Prigozhin poses to his long-term goals and continues to focus on definitively separating Prigozhin from Wagner.
Alternatively, Putin may intend for Wagner's forces to return to Russia in order to facilitate the destruction or restructuring of Wagner.
The likely collapse of aspects of the Wagner-Putin-Lukashenko deal indicates that Putin has failed to decisively resolve issues posed by Prigozhin and Wagner following Wagner’s June 24 rebellion.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu attempted to justify the recreation of the Moscow and Leningrad Military Districts by reamplifying boilerplate rhetoric posturing NATO as an existential threat to Russia.
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and advanced in some areas on August 9.
The Russian veteran community may be attempting to rehabilitate the nominal Russian deputy theater commander in Ukraine, Army General Sergei Surovikin, following scrutiny over his affiliation with the Wagner Group.
Marchenkov’s interview may suggest that Surovikin and the anti-Gerasimov faction believe there is a chance for Surovikin to return to the frontlines.
Russian sources claimed that poor safety regulations led to an explosion near the Zagorsk Optical Mechanical Plant in Moscow on August 9, and notably most Russian sources did not suggest that Ukrainian actors may have been responsible for the incident.
Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Svatove-Kreminna line, in the Bakhmut area, along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line, along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast and advanced on the Svatove-Kreminna line, north of Bakhmut, and in western Zaporizhia Oblast.
Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations on at least three sectors of the front and advanced in some areas on August 9.
Footage published on August 9 further supports ISW’s assessments that the Ukrainian incursion near Kozachi Laheri in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on August 8 was likely a limited raid.
Russian forces may be moving military equipment through Kazakhstan to Russia, but ISW has observed no geolocated footage confirming these reports.
Russian officials appear to be setting conditions to justify the possible need to cancel or postpone regional elections in the occupied territories in case of Ukrainian counteroffensive successes.

We do not report in detail on Russian war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We will continue to evaluate and report on the effects of these criminal activities on the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian population and specifically on combat in Ukrainian urban areas. We utterly condemn these Russian violations of the laws of armed conflict, Geneva Conventions, and humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
Activities in Russian-occupied areas

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations on the Svatove-Kreminna line and reportedly made gains on August 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks north of Synkivka (8km northeast of Kupyansk) and northeast of Ivanivka (20km southeast of Kupyansk).[45] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces have formed an offensive group that is attempting to break through Ukrainian defenses in an effort to advance directly to Kupyansk.[46] The Russian MoD claimed that assault groups of the 6th Combined Arms Army (Western Military District) seized four Ukrainian positions and five observation posts near the Mankivka tract (around 15km east of Kupyansk).[47] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Russian forces are trying to build on previous success in Novoselivske (15km northwest of Svatove), and attacked Ivanivka and Synkivka.[48] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are clearing Ukrainian positions near Lyman Pershyi (12km northeast of Kupyansk).[49] Ukrainian Luhansk Oblast Military Administration Head Artem Lysohor reported that Russian forces are continuing to suffer significant casualties on the Svatove-Kreminna line and have deployed medical staff of the 442nd District Military Hospital of the Russian MoD to Svatove to evacuate the wounded.[50]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued to counterattack on the Svatove-Kreminna line on August 9. The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces launched unsuccessful counterattacks in the vicinity of Novoselivske, Synkivka, and the Mankivka tract.[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks along the Raihorodka-Karmazynivka line (12km west to 13km southwest of Svatove).[52]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued ground attacks near Kreminna but did not advance on August 9. A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near the Serebryanske forest area south of Kreminna.[53] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Terny (17km west of Kreminna) and Hryhorivka (10km south of Kreminna).[54]

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian Objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations on Bakhmut’s southern flank on August 9 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations south of Bakhmut and are entrenched at newly reached lines.[55] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations near Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut), Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[56] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces failed to advance in these areas, although one prominent milblogger claimed that Russian and Ukrainian forces have exchanged control over unspecified strongholds in the area several times.[57] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut) and Minkivka (16km northwest of Bakhmut).[58] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces also conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Berkhivka (4km north of Bakhmut).[59]

Russian forces continued limited counterattacks in the Bakhmut area on August 9 and recently advanced north of Bakhmut. Geolocated footage published on August 8 indicates that Russian forces advanced west of Yahidne (2km north of Bakhmut).[60] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on August 9 that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults on the outskirts of Klishchiivka, northeast of Druzhba (20km southwest of Bakhmut), and near Zaitseve (21km south of Bakhmut), and Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar added that Russian forces consistently counterattack in these areas.[61] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces also unsuccessfully counterattacked near Kurdyumivka.[62] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted successful counterattacks near Klishchiivka on August 7 and 8 and pushed Ukrainian forces from several unspecified strongholds, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[63]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on August 9 but did not make gains. The Russian MoD claimed that elements of the Russian Southern Grouping of Forces repelled Ukrainian assaults near Avdiivka.[64]

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City front on August 9 but did not make any confirmed gains. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive actions near Avdiivka, Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), Marinka (27km southwest of Avdiivka), Novomykhailivka (36km southwest of Avdiivka), and Novokalynove (13km northwest of Avdiivka).[65]

Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis (Russian objective: Maintain frontline positions and secure rear areas against Ukrainian strikes)

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted a limited ground attack in western Donetsk Oblast on August 9. Russian Eastern Grouping of Forces Spokesperson Oleg Chekov claimed that Russian forces repelled a Ukrainian ground attack in the direction of Mykilske (4km southeast of Vuhledar).[66]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and marginally advanced on August 9. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success in the direction of Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) and Pryyutne (15km southwest of Velyka Novosilka).[67] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces captured positions on the northern outskirts of Urozhaine, and other milbloggers reported unspecified Ukrainian gains near Urozhaine.[68] Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces also attacked near Staromayorske (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) on August 9.[69]

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations along the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area and did not make any confirmed or claimed advances on August 9. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attempts to recapture lost positions near Staromayorske.[70]

Ukrainian forces continued offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and reportedly advanced on August 9. Geolocated footage published on August 9 shows that Ukrainian forces recently advanced northeast of Robotyne (12km south of Orikhiv), but the extent and duration of this presence are unclear due to geolocated footage showing a Russian presence in the area and milblogger claims that the area is contested.[71] Ukrainian Tavriisk Operational and Strategic Group of Forces Spokesperson Serhii Kuzmin stated on August 8 that Ukrainian forces advanced hundreds of meters near Robotyne.[72] Malyar stated on August 9 that Ukrainian forces achieved partial success near Verbove (18km southeast of Orikhiv).[73] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces entrenched themselves in new positions three kilometers northeast of Robotyne and consolidated control over an unspecified position but did not penetrate through Russian defenses, and other milbloggers reported continued attacks near Robotyne.[74] Another prominent milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces from positions near Verbove but failed to capture the positions themselves.[75] Another milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces have shifted the focus of their assaults from near Robotyne to the east towards Bilohirya (16km southeast of Orikhiv) in recent days.[76] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked Russian positions north of Pyatykhatky (25km southwest of Orikhiv).[77]

Russian forces continued limited offensive operations in western Zaporizhia Oblast and marginally advanced on August 9. Geolocated footage published on August 9 shows that Russian forces marginally advanced northeast of Robotyne.[78] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted counterattacks on a section of the T0408 highway near Robotyne and west of Novopokrovka.[79] Another milblogger claimed that Russian scouts broke into Ukrainian positions in fields near Robotyne and that fighting in the area is ongoing.[80]

Footage published on August 9 further supports ISW’s assessments that the Ukrainian incursion near Kozachi Laheri in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast on August 8 was likely a limited raid.[81] Geolocated footage published on August 9 indicates that Russian forces maintain positions in and northwest of the settlement, but Ukrainian artillery fire suggests that these positions may be unsafe.[82] Malyar stated that the Ukrainian General Staff and Ukrainian military do not confirm reports of Ukrainian forces crossing the Dnipro River.[83]

Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts (Russian objective: Expand combat power without conducting general mobilization)

Russian forces may be moving military equipment from Kazakhstan to Russia. Footage reportedly filmed on August 5 and 8 shows Russian trucks transporting tanks, missiles, semiconductors, microchips, and other materiel through Zhambyl Oblast, Almaty Oblast, Akmola Oblast, and near Astana in the direction of Russia.[84] ISW cannot verify where the military equipment is coming from, its destination, or if Russian forces intend to use the equipment in the war in Ukraine, however. ISW has also not observed geolocated footage of Russian forces moving military equipment through Kazakhstan.

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party may be facing challenges in recruiting military personnel who fought in Ukraine to serve as candidates for the 2023 and 2024 elections. A Russian insider source claimed that many veterans of the war in Ukraine recruited by United Russia are “extremely weak candidates” especially in provincial areas and small towns due to their lack of experience in politics.[85] The Russian insider source claimed Russian officials are considering either more carefully selecting veteran candidates or organizing a “special political school” to prepare veteran candidates for a political career.[86] ISW continues to assess that United Russia aims to recruit Russian military personnel who served in Ukraine as political candidates likely in order to establish itself as a definitive pro-war party.[87]

Russian authorities appear to be implementing some social benefits accorded to the relatives of Russian military personnel serving in Ukraine. Russian opposition news outlet Vazhnye Istorii reported on August 9 that 833 students have entered the top 13 Russian universities in accordance with university quotas for participants of the war in Ukraine and their children.[88] Vazhnye Istorii reported that 24 percent of students enrolled without taking any entrance exams and that 69 percent of students who took entrance exams did not score well enough to enter these universities on their own merits.[89]

Activities in Russian-occupied areas (Russian objective: Consolidate administrative control of annexed areas; forcibly integrate Ukrainian civilians into Russian sociocultural, economic, military, and governance systems)

Russian and Ukrainian sources continue to report the forced deportation of Ukrainian children to Russia. Zaporizhia Oblast occupation administration head Yevgeny Balitsky stated on August 9 that occupation authorities sent an unspecified number of Ukrainian students from Zaporizhia Oblast to Kuban State University in Krasnodar Krai to participate in a summer program.[90] Local Mariupol news outlet Mariupol Resistance reported that Russian occupation authorities took an unspecified number of Ukrainian teenagers from Mariupol, Khrestivka, Yenakiieve, Horlivka, Shakhtarsk, Makiivka, and Donetsk City to Penza Oblast for a military-patriotic camp that will last almost three weeks.[91] Mariupol Resistance stated that occupation authorities also took another group of children to Saransk, Republic of Mordovia, and attempted to brainwash the children through “patriotic excursions” to Russian historical sites.[92] Kherson Oblast news outlet Tavriya reported on August 8 that Russian authorities took an additional 100 schoolchildren from Nova Kakhovka Raion, Kherson Oblast, to the “Medvezhonok” children’s health complex in Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Krai.[93]

Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) occupation officials appear to be fostering a patronage network with the Chechen Republic. DNR and Chechen officials, including Chechen Republic Chairman Muslim Khuchiev and DNR Head Denis Pushilin, signed an agreement on August 7 regarding trade, economic scientific, technical, social, and cultural cooperation between Chechen Republic and the DNR.[94] Grozny Mayor Khas-Magomed Kadyrov and Mariupol administrative head Oleg Morgun signed an agreement on August 9 naming Grozny and Mariupol “sister cities.”[95] Pushilin reportedly stated that DNR occupation officials “remember the pace of the restoration of Grozny” (following its destruction by the Russian military) and that the Chechen Republic’s previous experiences will help the DNR rebuild its own settlements in the future.[96]

Russian officials appear to be setting conditions to justify the possible need to cancel or postpone regional elections in the occupied territories in case of Ukrainian counteroffensive successes. Russian Central Election Commission (CEC) Head Ella Pamfilova announced on August 8 that the CEC may postpone regional elections in the occupied territories at the last moment due to security threats, but that this measure is currently unnecessary.[97] The Ukrainian General Staff reported on August 9 that occupation authorities and United Russia party candidates are planning campaigns in the occupied territories ahead of the elections on September 10.[98]

Russian authorities continued efforts to indoctrinate Ukrainian schoolchildren in the occupied territories. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian authorities are planning to introduce new history textbooks in the occupied territories aimed at destroying Ukrainian identity through false narratives about the “liberation” of Ukrainian lands and the presence of Nazis in the Ukrainian government.[99] Ukrainian Mariupol Mayoral Advisor Petro Andryushchenko stated that Russian officials are sponsoring a propaganda program at a Mariupol school and suggested that this program is part of Russia’s plan to indoctrinate Ukrainian children and destroy Ukrainian identity.[100] The Russian Kherson Oblast occupation administration claimed that United Russia and Kherson Oblast occupation head Vladimir Saldo provided Kherson Oblast libraries with over 300 Russian-language books, most of which are Russian-language children’s literature.[101] Russian President Vladimir Putin announced Russian government initiatives to provide Russian-language books to occupied territories of Ukraine on August 2.[102]

Significant activity in Belarus (Russian efforts to increase its military presence in Belarus and further integrate Belarus into Russian-favorable frameworks and Wagner Group activity in Belarus).

See topline text.

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, as part of ongoing Kremlin efforts to increase their control over Belarus and other Russian actions in Belarus.

Note: ISW does not receive any classified material from any source, uses only publicly available information, and draws extensively on Russian, Ukrainian, and Western reporting and social media as well as commercially available satellite imagery and other geospatial data as the basis for these reports. References to all sources used are provided in the endnotes of each update.

2. China Relies on U.S., Allies for Hundreds of Products

Excerpts:

China has at least a 70% dependence on about 412 items imported from the U.S. and allied countries, at a value of roughly $47 billion annually, according to the analysis. Beijing lacks ready-made homegrown alternatives for many of the items.

Virtually all of China’s imports of silver powder, essential for solar panels, arrive from Japan, the U.S. and South Korea, according to the analysis. Australia, Canada and the U.K. represent about 86% of China’s imports of nickel powder and flakes used for batteries and other electrical components. China imports from the U.S. nearly two-thirds of its grain sorghum used for the traditional Chinese alcohol “baijiu.”

The analysis, set to publish Wednesday in the International Security academic journal, uses data from the United Nations Comtrade database, which tracks official global trade statistics. China’s high-dependency exposure was calculated by bundling together trade activity from the U.S. and more than a dozen allies across a range of categories.

...

The data show how potentially potent the U.S. and like-minded partners could be if they acted together to dissuade—or even punish—Chinese economic coercion, said Cha, a former U.S. National Security Council director.

“All of our answers are about playing defense, and none of our answers are about playing a little offense,” Cha said. “Two can play this game if you want to.”

Cha, a senior vice president for Asia and the Korea chair at CSIS, said he has shared his concept with government officials who have expressed interest in the research findings. He acknowledged the difficult part will come in execution, getting the commitment from companies and legislators and staving off Chinese attempts to target the weakest links.

“That’s why China always feels it can isolate or bully any country,” he said. “They can assume there is not going to be any collective response.”

China Relies on U.S., Allies for Hundreds of Products

New research argues countries could use those exports to counter economic pressure from China

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-allies-could-counter-chinas-economic-coercionif-they-unite-c45d2f8d?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Timothy W. Martin

Updated Aug. 9, 2023 4:43 pm ET

(6 min)

China’s imports of silver powder needed for solar panels come mostly from Japan, the U.S. and South Korea. PHOTO: STR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

China has at least a 70% dependence on the U.S. and its allies for more than 400 items, ranging from luxury goods to raw materials needed for Chinese industries, a new analysis of trade data has found.

Countries could potentially use those products to counter economic pressure from China, but it would require a collective effort on a scale they haven’t previously deployed against the world’s second-largest economy, according to an analysis of 2022 global trade data by Victor D. Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

China has faced criticism for attempting to use its trade heft for political retaliation against countries, targeting a range of products and industries—from Norwegian salmon and Australian wine to South Korean group tourism.

Beijing denies using trade as a weapon. It has also accused Washington of being the real offender, pointing to the U.S. curbs on tech exports to China as an example.

Countries such as the U.S. and Australia have found themselves in one-on-one trade fights with China. That risk has prompted efforts such as de-risking and friend-shoring that seek to create alternative supply chains that bypass Beijing.

Another option, Cha argues, is that the U.S. and other like-minded countries could collectively weaponize their own trade with China. Doing so would demonstrate a clear and immediate cost to Beijing, he says.

China has at least a 70% dependence on about 412 items imported from the U.S. and allied countries, at a value of roughly $47 billion annually, according to the analysis. Beijing lacks ready-made homegrown alternatives for many of the items.

Virtually all of China’s imports of silver powder, essential for solar panels, arrive from Japan, the U.S. and South Korea, according to the analysis. Australia, Canada and the U.K. represent about 86% of China’s imports of nickel powder and flakes used for batteries and other electrical components. China imports from the U.S. nearly two-thirds of its grain sorghum used for the traditional Chinese alcohol “baijiu.”

The analysis, set to publish Wednesday in the International Security academic journal, uses data from the United Nations Comtrade database, which tracks official global trade statistics. China’s high-dependency exposure was calculated by bundling together trade activity from the U.S. and more than a dozen allies across a range of categories.

China has retaliated against other countries by curbing imports of products including Norwegian salmon. PHOTO: CHEN YAQIN/ZUMA PRESS

The data show how potentially potent the U.S. and like-minded partners could be if they acted together to dissuade—or even punish—Chinese economic coercion, said Cha, a former U.S. National Security Council director.

“All of our answers are about playing defense, and none of our answers are about playing a little offense,” Cha said. “Two can play this game if you want to.”

Cha, a senior vice president for Asia and the Korea chair at CSIS, said he has shared his concept with government officials who have expressed interest in the research findings. He acknowledged the difficult part will come in execution, getting the commitment from companies and legislators and staving off Chinese attempts to target the weakest links.

“That’s why China always feels it can isolate or bully any country,” he said. “They can assume there is not going to be any collective response.”

Some previous CSIS research has shown that China’s trade restrictions and other punitive measures haven’t shown to be successful tactics for Beijing, as some of the targeted countries ended up drawing closer to the U.S.

Japan has the largest number of high-dependency items for China at 124, followed by the U.S. at 87, Germany at 64, South Korea at 28 and France at 27, according to the analysis. The U.S. represents the country with the largest total value of imports at $11.5 billion, while Australia comes in at No. 2 at $10.6 billion.

China’s war planners are leaning harder on its militia

The PLA’s reserve auxiliary force dwarfs the regular military, but is understudied and too often overlooked.

By THOMAS CORBETT and PETER W. SINGER

AUGUST 9, 2023 01:07 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Thomas Corbett

A late-June exercise in Hunan Province saw members of China’s militia taking on growing responsibilities, including piloting drones, driving assault boats, and manning command-and-control vehicles. While the People’s Liberation Army has for years relied on its reserve auxiliary force for supplementary support, the recent exercises point toward a larger direct role—even as some sources allude to potential strains in the system.

China’s militia system, which includes up to eight million personnel, dwarfs its uniformed service. It makes heavy use of demobilized veterans and civilian organizations, which have signed cooperation agreements with their local PLA base. During times of emergency, these personnel would be deployed to complement the local PLA force, providing crucial wartime support. For example, in early July more than 400 militia members helped PLA personnel respond to devastating floods in Chongqing. The militia engaged in search and rescue cleared roads, while the PLA troops used boats to transport civilians out of danger.

In 2016, China took a big step to foster militia capabilities and their integration with the PLA: it created the National Defense Mobilization Department or NDMD, which, among other things, inspects various localities, assessing their capabilities and proposing methods for improving military integration during a national crisis. One of its commonly recommended steps to improve PLA access to civilian assets is to use joint-cooperation agreements to more deeply integrate civilian and military personnel.

A recent report by BluePath Labs for the China Aerospace Studies Institute found two key developments for militia. First, it provides ever more critical support to PLA aviation. And, secondly, China’s senior military leaders have come to believe their civilian assets will be key in a protracted conflict.

The responsibilities tasked to local militias through joint-cooperation agreements can be extremely diverse, depending on both the base’s needs and what local civilian capabilities are on offer. One base agreement uses local militia to provide medical treatment, repair vehicles, and help defend against chemical attacks, while another uses militia excavators and road rollers to resurface its runways—and train to repair airstrike damage. Another PLA Air Force airfield relies on its local militia for meteorology, surveying, mapping and navigation, and equipment maintenance.

Civilian businesses will often supply their work equipment to PLA bases; one branch of the China Railway Group drove their equipment to an air base to provide emergency repairs during an exercise. These kinds of civilian organizations can also provide access to transportation facilities, airport terminals, and local fuel supplies that might be needed during PLA operations.

In addition to the aid they supply, militias also reduce the PLA’s need to maintain in-house support capabilities, which can reduce costs. For example, one PLA Army Aviation regiment signed a cooperation agreement that allowed the regiment to recruit local emergency response vehicle crews, air traffic control personnel, meteorological specialists, and oil and gas workers. This allowed the regiment to halve its own support force and shed more than 200 vehicles.

Such joint-cooperation agreements are often cemented by training exercises. Militia may be invited to the local PLA base for training by PLA personnel or even joining PLA units in their own exercises. One air base in Xuzhou brought its militia members to train them in various support specialties, while another base held a three-day evaluation focused on coordinating activity between militia members and base personnel. One air base took it a step further and conducted a 15-day support exercise of potential roles in wartime, in which more than 150 militia members performed emergency response activities, provided medical treatment, and repaired a damaged runway.

As the role of militia grows from “pre-combat support”—e.g., preparing supplies and equipment—to include active emergency response, they are taking on increasingly important and complex missions. Some begin to blur the line between support and front-line combat. For example, several airfields have begun tasking their militias with setting up anti-aircraft platforms and building field communication facilities. The recent Hunan militia exercises are a stark example of this trend: during the exercises, personnel not only provided the more traditional forms of support, but also operated command and communications vehicles, drones, and assault boats on behalf of their colleagues in uniform.

Yet the exercises in Hunan also hinted at problems behind the scenes. The head of the local militia department described their resources as “limited” and their personnel numbers as having “shrunk.” It also described the new expectations of the militia members to be having “one specialty, and multiple capabilities.” While this phrase is often used in PLA literature in a positive way—as in, it’s good to have troops who can do more than one job—in this case it appears that cross-training is being used to fill technical gaps that are opening in the PLA and militia’s ranks.

Militia members have also expressed displeasure with the amount of time their militia training and increased demands takes away from their day jobs. Chinese media have chalked up this latter complaint to “a lack of ideological and political education,” which would need to be rectified through integrating ideology into drills.

Finally, some militia members have expressed doubts about their own usefulness, describing modern warfare as highly technical and questioning their ability to meaningfully contribute.

Indeed, the utility of the militia in more expansive operations and warfare remains to be seen. It is unclear how effective civilians with only basic training will be in high-stress environments, up to and including coming under enemy fire. Adding in the potential of the militia dwindling in size, skill, and commitment as the exercises in June hint, this type of civilian participation is likely to be less effective than their counterparts in uniform.

Nevertheless, if individual militia members are questioning their place within China’s military system, CCP leaders certainly aren’t. The militia can supplement the military in ways not always tracked by raw numbers and org charts. As tensions with China rise, the U.S. and its allies ought to pay closer attention to this understudied and often overlooked aspect of the PLA.

Thomas Corbett is a research analyst with BluePath Labs. His areas of focus include Chinese foreign relations, emerging technology, and Indo-Pacific security studies.

defenseone.com · by Thomas Corbett

4. Inside the Air Force’s massive mobility war game in the Pacific

INDOPACOM: the tyranny of distance.

The biggest logistical and warfighting challenge is time and distance.

Inside the Air Force’s massive mobility war game in the Pacific

airforcetimes.com · by Rachel Cohen · August 9, 2023

OVER THE MARIANA ISLANDS — The airmen have five seconds.

Poised next to nearly three tons of cargo — plastic barrels of water — these loadmasters aboard a C-17 airlifter know the stakes. If they airdrop the precious supplies too early, the cargo ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Too late? Same result.

When the countdown hits zero, the barrels zip down the open ramp and dip off the edge. White parachutes unfurl and the cargo sails to its destination: a dirt strip on the edge of Tinian, the tiny island outpost 100 miles north of Guam.

New Zealand Army Pvt. Alexander Lam Sam and Staff Sgt. Geoffrey Troughton inspect and clean pallets on July 11 to prepare for a coalition airdrop near Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. The airdrop, part of Mobility Guardian 23, showed how the U.S. and its allies are capable of resupplying remote areas. (Staff Sgt. Bailee Ann Darbasie/Air Force)

This practice run is part of a bigger test, a race with higher stakes: How quickly could the Air Force respond to a Chinese attack on Taiwan?

“We stand united with our partners and allies for a free and open Indo-Pacific,” said Gen. Mike Minihan, the Air Force’s top mobility officer. “We’re ready, we’re integrated ... and we can handle any mission set that our civilian leaders choose for us to accomplish.”

The Pentagon views China as America’s top competitor in military strength, technology development and global influence. Defense leaders are also wary of Beijing’s growing aggression toward Taiwan, the democratically self-governed island that maintains military and trade ties with the United States but is claimed by China.

That’s why, for the first time, the U.S. Air Force’s massive biennial training exercise for airlift and aerial refueling brought together around 3,000 troops and 70 mobility aircraft, such as the C-130 and A400 airlifters and the KC-46 tanker, from the United States and six allies to the Pacific.

For two weeks in July, the training, known as Mobility Guardian, helped solidify the use of the so-called “Second Island Chain” — the string of archipelagos from Japan to the Mariana Islands to Indonesia — as a key logistics hub for the U.S. and its allies in a future war.

It was a test of several crucial questions: How quickly can the Air Force get there? What and who does it need to bring? And can the airmen do it all themselves?

The answers began more than 8,000 miles away in Charleston, South Carolina.

Royal Australian Air Force Cpl. Charlotte Roe, left, and U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jason Livingston, both C-17 loadmasters, watch other C-17s fly over the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands July 12 during Exercise Mobility Guardian 23. (Tech. Sgt. Sean Carnes/Air Force)

‘Back to the future’

On a scorching, muggy morning at Joint Base Charleston July 3, Air Force Times began an exclusive 10-day trip with Air Mobility Command to Andersen Air Force Base in Guam.

Airmen milled around the Installation Deployment Readiness Center, a one-stop shop for last-minute paperwork checks, briefings and vaccinations before shipping overseas.

They were preparing to deploy as the 437th Air Expeditionary Wing, the unit that would lead Mobility Guardian from a makeshift headquarters at Andersen. Their goal was to bring to life the Air Force’s vision of a speedier, more holistic approach to combat tours.

It marks a fundamental shift in how the Air Force thinks about fighting in the Pacific.

For the past two decades, the war on terrorism has relied on a stream of airmen who cycle through well-established bases around the world. Sometimes that requires deploying an entire squadron for one mission; other times, airmen are tapped piecemeal from different squadrons or bases to fill open jobs overseas.

Now airmen who work under the same wing at home will deploy together as one team, with a built-in air staff to manage missions and morale. Along with more predictable schedules and ample training, the Air Force hopes the new approach will lead to more capable expeditionary units that can function away from brick-and-mortar bases.

“[U.S. Central Command], quite frankly, has created some bad habits with how we employ our assets,” said Lt. Col. Jake Parker, Mobility Guardian’s lead planner. “We have a very robust infrastructure, and we got so reliant on that, that now we don’t have the ability to pivot from one place to the next.”

For 437th Operations Group commander Col. Carlos Berdecía, Mobility Guardian was a chance to tackle new challenges after the U.S. military’s tumultuous 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“Joint Base Charleston had a hangover from [Operation Allies Refuge], because we did so well. We were the last ones on the ground,” said Berdecía, a career C-17 Globemaster III pilot who served as expeditionary wing commander for the exercise. “There had to be something to say, ‘I need to focus on what’s next.’ ”

U.S. Air Force Col. Carlos Berdecía, who served as 437th Air Expeditionary Wing commander during the Mobility Guardian exercise, poses in front of the flightline at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, July 18. (Airman 1st Class Caleb Parker/Air Force)

Revamping how the Air Force goes to war means reviving practices like deployment lines that fell by the wayside during the war on terrorism — and before today’s youngest airmen were born.

“It’s almost back to the future,” Berdecía said. “There’s some knowledge that hasn’t been retained. Breaking open [regulations] that haven’t been looked at, making sure we’re doing things by the book, is really important. That muscle memory isn’t necessarily there, so we’re trying to build that right now.”

Outside the deployment center, tan and olive luggage bound for Guam and Australia lined the parking lot and piled up on trucks; a staffer handed out first-aid supplies in the lobby.

Airmen filed inside for briefings on what lay ahead. Mobility Guardian is an opportunity to show the world what the U.S. and its allies can do, they were told, so take it seriously. Be respectful to locals as Guam recovers from Typhoon Mawar, the strongest storm to hit the U.S. territory since 2002.

And they were warned: Guam is a popular destination for Chinese intelligence officers, so be wary of strangers in bars and the questions they ask. For added protection, troops were told to turn off geolocation services on their devices for the duration of the exercise.

Then airmen headed down the hallway to a counter where administrators ensured their paperwork was in order, from survival training certificates to medical documents, and picked up printed deployment orders and dog tags.

Master Sgt. Justin Braden, a combat communications specialist, said it was a chance to interact with the airmen, soldiers and Marines who would rely on that equipment for their own training around the region.

“We’re supposed to go with generators and nothing, and set up initial comms,” Braden said aboard a C-17 Globemaster III as it prepared to leave Charleston for Australia. “We’re getting to do more of what we’re supposed to be doing … when you go on deployment.”

Airmen from Joint Base Charleston, S.C., work in a trailer at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, July 18 as part of the 437th Air Expeditionary Wing's air staff for the Mobility Guardian exercise. (Staff Sgt. Bailee Darbasie/Air Force)

Getting there

The exercise formally kicked off July 5 with one of its toughest challenges: rushing dozens of planes and thousands of airmen to the Pacific in record time.

Air Force leaders have said that deploying in a matter of hours or days by air, rather than weeks or months by sea, can deter Chinese and North Korean aggression in the region. It also gives commanders more options to respond if a crisis erupts.

“No one wants a conflict. We’re doing this to show our adversary that we want peace in [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command] and we can all exist here together,” said Lt. Col. Jason Walker, 61st Expeditionary Airlift Squadron commander. “But this is the line. … Do not cross it.”

The 8,100-mile trek from South Carolina to Guam starts with a 10-hour flight to Honolulu, plus another seven hours to the southernmost point in the North Pacific. Getting to Japan or Australia takes even longer.

For comparison, the journey is farther than Afghanistan, and the Pacific lacks the network of large, U.S.-run bases across Europe and the Middle East where airmen are used to stopping for sleep and equipment. And though Air Mobility Command regularly travels around the Pacific, those flights are scheduled farther in advance and with fewer planes at once.

The 628th Air Base Wing and 437th Airlift Wing from Joint Base Charleston, S.C., prepare to depart for Guam on a C-5 Galaxy July 5 as part of the Mobility Guardian exercise. (Tech. Sgt. James Cason/Air Force)

Most airmen made the trip in three or four days; all reached their destination within a week or so. Minihan called the outcome a “game changer.”

Walker said his airmen flew from Arkansas to Guam in 38 hours, and to the Philippines in 42 hours — a first for Little Rock Air Force Base’s C-130s, which fly lower and slower than larger cargo jets. One British airman boasted that the Royal Air Force was able to reach the Pacific in under 21 hours.

It was made possible by maintainers who stretched their limits and tackled last-minute problems; schedulers who navigated the puzzle of aircraft and crew availability, cargo and passengers, destinations and timing; and pilots who worked in shifts between naps in the back of the aircraft.

Still, crews faced plenty of hiccups. Some were turned away from Australia due to bureaucratic complications; others were slowed by weather, broken jets, disconnects when new crews weren’t ready to go, or small gas tanks that required frequent refueling.

C-17 maintainers from Travis AFB in California were stuck in Hawaii when their jet broke en route to Guam, said Master Sgt. David Moser, a Globemaster III maintenance superintendent. Another jet did reach Andersen, but airmen couldn’t offload their equipment or personal belongings because of confusion over biosecurity inspections. Then the team fell several hours behind schedule because jet fuel trucks were slow to arrive and carried less gas than those at Travis.

“It’s what Gen. Minihan wants ... to see,” Moser said. “How do you work when you’re … stressed out?”

“We need to see how we fail when it fails, so that way, when real-world situations do arise … we can be more proactive,” he said.

Long flights presented an opportunity for Air Mobility Command to study how to safely handle extensive missions across several time zones.

For Mobility Guardian, the command allowed its crews to take stimulants like Modafinil or sleeping pills to control their circadian rhythm. “Go” and “no-go” pills are commonly used in the combat and intelligence communities but have remained off-limits for mobility pilots.

“A lot of the crews reported feeling better than expected when we got here,” said Walker, who said he opted for sleep and caffeine rather than drugs. “I wouldn’t do it again tomorrow. … But it definitely wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be.”

In the fight

On the ground in Guam, another experiment was unfolding.

The Air Force has long relied on the rest of the U.S. military to set up its bases of operations around the world. Now Air Mobility Command wants to become the service’s own “maneuver force” that opens airfields and launches flight operations.

For Mobility Guardian, that job fell to the 621st Contingency Response Group. The Air Force’s in-house rapid-reaction teams specialize in clearing the way for air operations and directing forces in austere locations.

A team of 88 contingency response airmen began arriving in Guam on July 3, where they marshaled themselves into the airfield and got to work building the exercise’s deployed headquarters on the far edge of the flightline at Andersen AFB.

Over the course of six days, the exercise’s footprint in Guam grew from 25 people and one aircraft to 1,100 people and 27 aircraft from seven countries.

First came satellite communications, so the contingency response team could talk to the aircraft that began arriving within hours. Then came a logistical hub where airmen could unload planes and prepare them for their next flights out.

The 437th Air Expeditionary Wing operated out of a makeshift camp of trailers, known as Forward Operating Base LFG, during the Mobility Guardian 2023 exercise at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam. (Tech. Sgt. James Cason/Air Force)

The site became known as Forward Operating Base LFG (“let’s f***ing go”) — a camp of about a dozen air-conditioned, generator-powered trailers arrayed around a small hangar filled with aeromedical evacuation supplies, airdrop cargo and towering stacks of water bottles. A black flag bearing a skull and crossbones fluttered overhead.

Contingency response handed off control of the base to the air expeditionary wing staff at noon on July 10 — 54 hours after Berdecía’s team landed in Guam.

That put the wing’s air staff in charge of ensuring life in the field ran smoothly: Procuring more than 650 roast beef sandwiches for boxed lunches. Ensuring dozens of port-a-potties were regularly serviced. Figuring out who, exactly, owned the fleet of 53 rental cars.

It was a smaller, more austere footprint than the Air Force had envisioned. Because of Typhoon Mawar, the Category 4 storm that hit Guam May 24, the Federal Emergency Management Agency had taken over an area at Guam’s international airport that the Air Force had planned to use. That brought more jets and airmen to Andersen, where leaders worried that the influx of people would strain already-struggling resources.

“It’s a very congested operation … a ballet of those elephants out there,” 621st Contingency Response Group commander Col. Daniel Mollis said.

Troops from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, New Zealand and the U.S. conduct mission planning during Mobility Guardian 23 at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, July 9. Portions of this image were blurred for security reasons. (Tech. Sgt. Joseph Pick/Air Force)

Airmen charted each day’s planned missions on large whiteboards and handed out paper copies of their flight profiles — a way to navigate differences in each country’s security clearances and software that wouldn’t list non-U.S. flights.

Leaders tasked airmen with moving troops and equipment in support of other U.S. and allied exercises around the Pacific, like the U.S. Air Force’s Northern Edge. When not on real-world missions, they practiced skills like aeromedical evacuation.

Island-hopping in the Pacific offered the chance to practice refueling aircraft with gas pumps on the ground, and with engines running, to reduce reliance on tanker jets. The Air Force found there’s a greater demand for those operations across the joint force than expected, a spokesperson said after the exercise.

Airmen also practiced launching and landing airlifters at steep angles on unlit, short runways. Those “assault landings” can protect aircraft from incoming fire, and prevent them from damaging the plane by overshooting smaller-than-usual airstrips.

Pilots and crews flew missions on jets from other countries to learn from their foreign counterparts, and maintainers swapped tips on how to repair the airframes they have in common with their allies.

Airman 1st Class Trenton McGregor, a C-17 maintenance crew chief, said the exercise pushed his team to anticipate a jet’s needs before it returned to base, and to work more efficiently with fewer people and tools.

“You have to learn to adapt and ... spread out between different people,” he said. “Guys that normally don’t do my job are having to do my job, and I’m having to go out and help these guys that I don’t know too much about. We’re all learning on the fly.”

A U.S. airman, left, and a U.S. Marine unload a UH-1Y helicopter from a C-5 Galaxy at Royal Australian Air Force Base Darwin July 13. The C-5 transported two Venom helicopters for Marine Rotational Force Darwin and Exercise Talisman Sabre, which Mobility Guardian participants helped receive and unload. (Airman 1st Class Stassney Davis/Air Force)

Unexpected emergencies tested the coalition, too.

On July 10, the U.S. Coast Guard called for help to save 11 people whose 21-foot boat was in danger of capsizing in rough waters off the coast of Rota in the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Air Force said. Planners at Andersen dispatched French A400 and Canadian CC-130J airlifters to find and maintain contact with the boat until U.S. Navy rescue forces arrived.

Mobility Guardian participants also rescued a hiker who fell down a cliff, and transported a 10-day-old newborn with an enlarged heart from Yokota Air Base in Japan to the United States for emergency medical care.

Capt. Mike Thomas, who guided the exercise’s daily operations as the agnostic “white cell,” said the coalition planning cell did far better than expected at navigating the daily grind.

“The scariest thing that you can see as a mission commander or an air planner is if you walk into a mission planning cell and it’s quiet, because that means that nobody’s talking, nobody’s actually highlighting problems,” he said. “When we walked into the coalition mission planning cell, it was just humming.”

Coalition participants praised the chance to work through problems unlike those they faced with the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“It’s funny when you’re working on each side of the [International Date Line], because sometimes we are [on] the 14th, but some guys are still [on] the 13th, and even when you’re trying to discuss in Zulu time, it’s Zulu on which day?” said Col. Franck Bottero, who led France’s delegation to the exercise. “We are using the same procedures, but considering the size and different spokes, I think it’s quite new for us.”

Airmen from multiple countries noted that the American penchant for process meant the U.S. planned missions more cautiously than others, forcing foreign airmen to move slower as well.

“The U.S. has a lot of very well-established systems and processes, which is very required for the large scale that the U.S. forces have. In Australia … some things can be more agile,” said Flight Lt. Peter Spearman, who led Royal Australian Air Force C-17 operations at Mobility Guardian. “That sometimes is useful, especially being able to change regulation when it is limiting us.”

Maj. Michael Bakke, with the 621st Mobility Support Operations Squadron, Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J., prepares as a Japanese C-130 Hercules lands at Baker Landing Zone on Tinian, U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, July 12 during Mobility Guardian. (Airman 1st Class Kadielle Shaw/Air Force)

In the coming months, the coalition will try to turn lessons learned into future fixes.

Mobility Guardian highlighted the need to work in smaller teams with enough tools to do the job if others take longer to arrive, to remove the red tape that keeps cargo on jets too long, to ensure all airmen are communicating using the same apps, and to invest in equipment like secure radios and the militarized version of SpaceX’s Starlink.

It has illustrated the frustrations of trying to navigate the Pacific’s many airfields and finicky weather, and the opportunities that arise from sharing airmen and jets.

And it showed airmen that even with a fraction of their team on the ground, demand for air mobility assets never lets up. Berdecía said the exercise proved the difficulty of starting from scratch, even with support from contingency response and the local base.

“We have proven that this concept works,” he said. “We will continue gathering lessons learned, as small as they can be all the way to as large as they can be, and adjust for the next Mobility Guardian and/or real contingency that would call for this type of structure.”

There’s plenty that isn’t ready for primetime yet. But Mobility Guardian showcased what could be: A more self-reliant, swift-moving international air coalition in even the remotest places.

A U.S. Army cavalry squadron, freshly arrived from Hawaii, loitered at the edge of camp on July 13. An airman nodded in their direction.

“The Army’s here now,” he told Berdecía.

Berdecía smiled back. “And look who got them here.”

About Rachel S. Cohen

Rachel Cohen joined Air Force Times as senior reporter in March 2021. Her work has appeared in Air Force Magazine, Inside Defense, Inside Health Policy, the Frederick News-Post (Md.), the Washington Post, and others.

5. Overseas and under the poverty line: The system that keeps so many military spouses abroad unemployed

SOFA agreements are negotiated by diplomats and not the military (though the military does provide advice, assistance, data, etc to the diplomats). Diplomatic relations are generally the priority. What I have heard some say in response to the argument to renegotiate a "better" SOFA agreement is the fear that to try to renegotiate a specific part of the SOFA will lead to the demand to renegotiate the entire SOFA which could result in a SOFA that is less protective of US interests than the current agreements.

Overseas and under the poverty line: The system that keeps so many military spouses abroad unemployed

Stars and Stripes · by Alison Bath · August 7, 2023

(Illustration by Sean Moores/Stars and Stripes)

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NAPLES, Italy — For thousands of U.S. military families, an overseas assignment means living on the edge of poverty.

In Europe, nearly 7,000 U.S. service members or their spouses or children were in danger in the past year of not having enough to eat, Defense Department data show.

Those military families qualified for a low-income program designed to ensure that pregnant women, babies and toddlers don’t go hungry.

The reason for that hardship after being sent to Europe is rooted in a loss of income resulting from U.S. and NATO country prohibitions that keep military spouses from working overseas, program administrators say.

But the harm to military families doesn’t end there. The rules have created a pipeline of highly skilled, cheap — and in many cases free — labor exploited by military hospitals and other base organizations, a yearlong Stars and Stripes investigation shows.

For example, military spouses who are nurses, physical therapists or other medical professionals told Stars and Stripes they were encouraged to give as much as 40 hours a week to the American Red Cross or other organizations in the hope that doing so could lead to an eventual paid position.

In Germany, those professionals saved the DOD’s largest hospital overseas more than $600,000 in unpaid labor, according to Red Cross figures.

Other military spouses who found jobs on base in retail, food service or other areas earned as little as $10 an hour without paid holidays or leave.

Sometimes those spouses worked alongside local nationals who were paid considerably more for a similar job under union contracts.

Meanwhile, many spouses who hold U.S. green cards are effectively shut out of overseas base employment because of rules that require U.S. citizenship for most jobs.

Even lower-paying jobs in fields with critical shortages, like child care positions at bases in Europe, are open only to citizens of NATO member countries, leaving spouses with U.S. green cards who hail from allies like Australia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere ineligible.

Other military spouses seeking to continue their home-based businesses must contend with confusing and inconsistently applied regulations that, among other restrictions, bar them from competing with base services and businesses, like the Army and Air Force Exchange Service — which took in $8.5 billion in worldwide revenue last year.

As a result, most military families sent overseas are forced to live on a single income, cutting expenses, digging into savings and, for some, relying on low-income government assistance to get by.

“It's depleted our family’s savings account, forced us to lower our standard of living and affected my mental health in that I feel I'm no longer a useful contributor for my family's well-being,” said one respondent in an informal Stars and Stripes survey posted to private Facebook groups for military spouses in Italy.

Federal food aid necessary

Mallory Hardgrove, a teacher, couldn’t find a job that paid enough to cover day care expenses during an assignment to U.S. Army Garrison Italy in Vicenza.

Relying solely on her active-duty husband’s income saw the family of five struggle to pay bills and buy groceries, she said.

Hardgrove and her three daughters were among 1,176 people at five bases in Italy receiving benefits from the Women, Infants and Children program, according to data from U.S. European Command spanning from Jan. 1 to Oct. 26, 2022.

In all, 6,786 people at U.S. bases in Europe qualified for the supplemental food program managed by the Defense Health Agency. More than half were assigned to bases in Germany, data from the same period show.

The DHA did not respond to multiple requests by Stars and Stripes for updated and more complete data.

Worldwide, including at bases in Japan and South Korea, there were 7,825 people receiving WIC Overseas vouchers for milk, cheese, eggs, peanut butter, vegetables, formula and other nutritious foods as of Jan. 5, EUCOM said in a separate statement.

“It was a bitter pill to swallow,” Hardgrove said of the first time she used WIC vouchers at the commissary. Hardgrove, who never had previously received low-income assistance, recently returned to the U.S. with her family after three years in Italy.

A NATO Status of Forces Agreement identification card is effectively a residency visa for U.S. military personnel and their families living in Europe. But in many countries where U.S. forces are stationed, spouses either can't work or face daunting obstacles to employment. (Stars and Stripes)

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Sunk in the SOFA

At issue in Europe is a pact signed in 1951, when fewer women worked outside the home and well before the existence of a digital workplace. There are similar agreements between the U.S. and other countries, such as Japan.

The NATO Status of Forces Agreement sets the rules, rights and responsibilities according to which U.S. troops may live and work in allied member countries.

However, the agreement doesn’t directly address dependents’ employment, making military spouses vulnerable to U.S. and host country interpretations that often limit their job opportunities.

For example, in Italy and Belgium, spouses must give up their SOFA status if they want to work anywhere other than on base, including remotely for an American employer.

But military spouses living in Germany can work for a German employer or telecommute to their American job without losing their SOFA status in most cases. Telework also is allowed in Japan, South Korea and Bahrain.

Various agreements also restrict on-base jobs available to military spouses, frequently limiting them to entry-level, low-paying positions regardless of their education, experience or skills.

Confusion about what is allowed is made worse by opaque diplomatic and military agreements as well as vague and misleading official interpretations of those pacts.

Many spouses don’t pursue telecommuting or other career options because they lack clear information or fear unintended consequences, advocates say.

For example, in summer 2021, military spouses attending an orientation briefing at Naval Support Activity Naples were given information implying that work anywhere but on base was illegal, according to a photograph of a presentation slide given to Stars and Stripes.

That information was false and amounted to fearmongering, said Beth Conlin, Military Spouse Chamber of Commerce board chair and Blue Star Families research and policy team adviser.

Conlin argues that clear explanations of all employment options overseas should be made available to military spouses.

After she pointed out the error, the base made modifications to explain that off-base employment is possible, Conlin said.

The briefing slide in question is no longer used, Morgan Gilliam, a U.S. Navy Europe Africa Central spokeswoman, said in a statement.

Gilliam went on to say that the Navy periodically updates the information it offers based on questions from its community.

But confusion about overseas spouse employment persists, and the quality and accuracy of information offered varies among bases, spouses say.

For years, U.S. military installations in Italy have warned spouses that giving up their SOFA rights would result in the loss of certain privileges, such as shopping on base, visiting the commissary or using the mail system, among others.

Those fears also are expressed by spouses living in Belgium and in non-NATO countries, such as Japan.

But spouses at NSA Naples and other naval bases in Italy learn different information.

“As long as dependents have a valid military ID, they have access to the commissary, (Navy Exchange, Morale, Welfare and Recreation) services, and emergency medical/dental services while in Italy,” Gilliam said in a separate response to Stars and Stripes questions.

That position is more in line with that of Conlin and others who say those privileges are tied to an active-duty service member’s orders, not SOFA status or an Italian residency permit.

However, NSA Naples does warn that spouses who get an Italian work permit could be taken off military orders and likely would lose some benefits, such as a NATO driver’s license, Gilliam said.

Members of Blue Star Families participate in a food drive benefiting military families in May 2021 at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center in New York. The organization provides food drives for military and veteran families in need. Similar needs exist in Europe, where military families receive federal vouchers to buy food. (Blue Star Families)

Heavy on unpaid labor

Kennedi Pettway, a registered nurse whose husband works at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, has been unemployed since moving to Belgium about a year ago.

Pettway interviewed for a nursing job several months ago and recently learned that she had been selected.

But during her job search, Pettway had considered following advice to volunteer for the American Red Cross because it would get her foot in the door, she said.

“People would know my face, and it probably would be easier for me to get a job on base,” Pettway said she was told.

She ultimately didn’t volunteer for the organization.

Faced with letting their skills and knowledge atrophy or licenses lapse, military spouses work as much as 40 hours a week for on-base organizations that pay them nothing for valuable nursing, marketing, management or other abilities.

Using nurses in volunteer positions at bases is common, said Elayne Saejung, a military spouse who couldn’t get a job in her field of health care emergency management while she was in Okinawa during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s good enough for volunteer service but they won’t pay them for it,” Saejung said.

At Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, about 275 Red Cross volunteers accounted for about 20,600 volunteer hours in the past year, a service worth about $655,000, based on a $31.80-per-hour federal estimate for volunteer work, according to the nonprofit agency.

Those volunteers performed such duties as clerical tasks, assisting patients or drawing blood for lab work. Spouses also have worked unpaid as obstetricians, dentists, nurses and physician assistants, among others.

“The employment opportunities just aren’t the same here, so (military spouses) are more likely to volunteer in that professional capacity,” to keep their skills or resume current, said Samantha Wudel, program director for the Kaiserslautern Military Community American Red Cross chapter. “At home, they could get a full-time job in that area.”

Red Cross and Pentagon policies prohibit volunteers from filling paid staff billets, Wudel noted.

Cindy Gourlie, an experienced restaurant manager and trained sommelier, wanted to continue her U.S.-based catering business when her active-duty husband was assigned to a post in Belgium.

But that wasn’t possible because of SOFA-related restrictions that limited her work-from-home options.

Gourlie did find a job helping to open a coffee shop at Chievres Air Base. She also created a menu for it and ultimately became the manager. But the job paid far less than a comparable position in the U.S. and offered no paid vacation or holiday leave, she said.

“You end up having no job or selling your soul for $10 an hour,” Gourlie said.

Even when spouses can put advanced skills to work through a home-based business, they face a daunting review process that can take months and significantly limit the products or services they offer.

Victoria Negrete Furnary wanted to offer physical therapy services in her home at Yokota Air Base near Tokyo. It took more than four months to get the necessary approval, which came just before Furnary’s active-duty husband received early orders for a new assignment.

“You can work in Japan but it’s very limiting,” Furnary said.

Onerous rules to ensure that hairstylists, bakers and other home-based workers don’t compete with or use products from base businesses, such as the commissary or exchange, further restrict spouse employment efforts, she said.

A mother helps her child sponge paint on heart-shaped paper at RAF Lakenheath, England in February 2018, at an event hosted by the Women, Infants and Children Overseas program. Because many military spouses cannot get a job overseas, thousands turn to the WIC Overseas program to buy groceries. (Shanice Williams-Jones/U.S. Air Force)

Remote obstacles

Hardgrove and other spouses in Italy and Belgium said they understand host country concerns about protecting jobs, but they argue that working for an American employer shouldn’t be a problem.

Lan Mai, a nurse who lives at NSA Naples, said being able to work remotely would allow her family to spend more money in Italy rather than stay on base for lack of funds to eat out or travel.

“If I’m doing remote nursing for Americans, I’m not taking away from the Italian economy because I’m not taking their jobs,” said Mai, whose husband is active-duty Navy. “Everybody wins if we have more jobs. We have more money to spend on our economy and this economy.”

U.S. officials say they understand the worries and frustrations of military families. They point to base programs that help spouses with job searches, resume writing and education or skills acquisition as part of an effort to address the problem.

Policies that give military spouses preference over other federal job applicants in some cases also help, they say.

And diplomatic efforts, such as ongoing conversations with Italy about loosening restrictions on employment and a recent agreement with Bahrain that allows military spouses there to work off base, are evidence of U.S. commitment to a resolution, they say.

For example, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman discussed U.S. military spouse employment with Italian officials in January, a State Department spokesman said in February.

“We hope to find a solution soon,” the spokesman said.

Back home to get work

More than lost income, though, many people married to a service member said moving overseas with their active-duty spouse has robbed them of the sense of identity, purpose and accomplishment that comes from working.

They also are plagued by low self-esteem and feelings of worthlessness and shame.

“It’s tough financially not having a second income but it’s also hard on the morale and mental state of spouses having to sacrifice their career to support their active-duty spouse,” one Stars and Stripes survey respondent said.

Those feelings and a desire to contribute financially leave some spouses considering returning to America without their husband or wife.

Aurora Venden, whose husband is active-duty Army, volunteered for a couple of service organizations at Vicenza since arriving in January 2020.

She was fortunate enough to get a job at one for a couple of years, but the position was eliminated. She was applying for stateside employment and had planned to go home early rather than remain unemployed.

But Venden recently was hired to do part-time work for a military contractor. Although she earns less than she used to, the job has eased her worries about student loan payments and allowed her to stay in Italy.

“I have no idea how we would have afforded the move (back to the U.S.), but it was like being backed into a corner,” Venden said. “There were just no other options.”

Claire Carter, whose family recently returned to the U.S. after six years in Belgium, doesn’t want to move overseas again unless she has more control over her job opportunities.

Carter resumed her career in human resources but is earning significantly less. That’s due to years of unemployment as part of living overseas, she said.

“If my husband goes, I would not follow this time,” Carter said, adding that she knows of other spouses who are making a similar decision. “I would stay in the States, and if a job came up, I would go and then be my own sponsor.”

Stars and Stripes reporter Jennifer H. Svan contributed to this report.

Stars and Stripes · by Alison Bath · August 7, 2023

6. Korea Is a Model for Middle East Peace

A view from Israel. I find it interesting how much Korea is involved from Ukraine to the Middle East.

Korea Is a Model for Middle East Peace

A U.S. defense commitment could shield Arab states from Iran, as it protects Seoul from Pyongyang.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-is-amodel-formiddle-east-peace-defense-umbrella-iran-nuclear-weapons-388646ba?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1

By Eli Cohen

Aug. 8, 2023 5:19 pm ET

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(3 min)

The signing of the Abraham Accords in Washington, Sept. 15, 2020. PHOTO: SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Jerusalem

Next month marks the third anniversary of the signing of the Abraham Accords, a groundbreaking peace agreement that reshaped ties between Israel and several Arab nations and offered a beacon of hope for lasting stability in the Middle East.

Since the signing of the peace and normalization accords by Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco—and especially after the establishment of Israel’s new government—Jerusalem has sought to build bridges with additional Arab and Muslim countries. A significant focus has been on forging ties with Saudi Arabia, the powerhouse of the Arab world.

Securing an alliance with Saudi Arabia wouldn’t be merely another diplomatic achievement; it would form the foundation upon which true regional harmony can be built. Such a partnership might inspire other nations to pursue enduring peace.

The U.S. has done a great deal to help facilitate dialogue between Saudi Arabia and Israel in recent months. As part of these efforts, the Saudis made several demands of the U.S., which, in their view, are key to advancing the normalization process with Israel. Most of these requests concern Iranian aggression and the kingdom’s ability to defend itself against this threat.

This underscores Saudi Arabia’s perspective: The primary challenge isn’t Israel but Iran, which is intent on spreading its Shiite Islamic revolution throughout the region by means of violence, terrorism and nuclear-weapons development.

A nuclear-armed Iran is no mere hypothetical threat. If the regime builds a nuclear weapon, it would almost certainly ignite a regional nuclear arms race. Nations such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Egypt and Turkey might feel pressured to bolster their defenses. While a regional arms race might seem an inevitable response to Iran’s growing might, it would severely destabilize the area, potentially plunging the entire Middle East into conflict.

A potential blueprint for de-escalation exists in East Asia. My recent trip to South Korea and the demilitarized zone was revealing. South Korea, despite living under the shadow of a nuclear-armed neighbor and having the means to develop its own nuclear weapons, has abstained from nuclear-weapons development. The U.S.’s defense commitment acts as South Korea’s deterrent against Northern aggression.

A comparable American defense pledge could reassure Middle Eastern nations, primarily Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. This approach would make individual nuclear ambitions unnecessary, bolster regional stability, and promote the peace and normalization agenda.

A united front, bringing together moderate Sunni nations and Israel, would be an effective check on Iran’s growing ambitions.

This solution is no substitute for the ceaseless efforts of the international community, and of Israel, to prevent the Iranian ayatollah regime from attaining nuclear military capabilities. The way to achieve this is through international economic and diplomatic pressure and a credible military threat that will force the Iranian regime to recalculate its path and stop the race for a nuclear weapon once and for all.

Mr. Cohen is Israel’s foreign minister.

7. What Washington Must Do to Check China’s Coercion

Excerpts:

This offer must focus on the Global South—where there is great skepticism about friend-shoring and understandable reluctance to get caught in the middle of the United States and China superpower competition. The Western offer need not be premised on rejecting China but instead on the rules of the liberal, open capitalist system through which China and the United States have all thrived—rules that China now seeks to dismantle.

Washington must communicate that America is not trying to check China’s economic rise. Still, if China continues to use its economic and political influence to foist its authoritarian system on the world, the United States will blunt its tools of economic and political coercion. Doing so will slow the spigot of open-market, export growth that China has benefitted from for years.

By implementing a determined and detailed policy of friend-shoring, the United States can keep critical supply chains and industries in friendly hands while continuing to drive forward an integrated and mutually reinforcing international economic system.

What Washington Must Do to Check China’s Coercion

The Western offer to the Global South need not premise itself on rejecting China but instead on the rules of the liberal, open capitalist system through which China and the United States have all thrived.

The National Interest · by John Austin · August 5, 2023

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen returned from her trip to China earlier this month, in an attempt to soften the edge of U.S.-China competition. Reopening a constructive dialogue with Beijing is a good thing, and Yellen articulated a hope for competition that is not “winner take all” but rather competition within a fair set of rules benefitting both nations. Hopefully, the Biden administration wishes to thaw relations with China while not turning a blind eye to China’s aggressive behavior. Indeed, the United States and its democratic allies must ensure that any engagement with China is premised on reinvigorated support for open, transparent trade and competition and respect for democratic institutions. Ignoring China’s coercive actions within its own borders and around the world will accomplish little.

Yellen has pointed out that the “decoupling” of our giant, interdependent economies is neither possible nor desirable. On the other hand, Yellen clarified that the United States is planning strategic “derisking” of critical supply chains with countries invested in maintaining and strengthening a rules-based economic and political order. Investing in what Yellen calls “friend-shoring” can help communicate to China that the United States and its allies will end dependencies that Beijing can weaponize for political and economic blackmail.

Yellen is correct that talking about decoupling and “picking sides” between Washington and Beijing is both naïve and unhelpful. This is not a new Cold War. Unlike the Soviet Union, China’s economy is highly integrated with that of the United States. It ranks as its third largest trading partner behind Canada and Mexico. As China and the United States continue massive commercial engagement, both seek to take advantage of emerging markets—pushing infrastructure, development, trade, and military partnerships throughout the Global South.

China promises easy money, quick and plentiful infrastructure, and big-ticket projects that play well with local leaders looking to impress constituents. The cost of that infrastructure, however, is not just high-interest rate payments but also Chinese-exported corruption, surveillance technology, contractual and procurement opacity, shoddy workmanship, and political influence. Meanwhile, the United States and its private sector can offer a deal more likely to deliver enhanced prosperity, good jobs, and respect for environmental justice, worker and human rights than China’s coercive authoritarianism.

The United States and China are economic and geopolitical competitors with starkly different visions of the role of governments, capital, industry, and development. Despite Chinese president Xi Jinping’s claim that “competition among major powers does not conform to the trend of the times,” China has moved to outcompete the United States on technology, global leadership, clean energy, and military might, among countless other issues. Beijing further complains that Washington is trying to decouple from China, while furtively decoupling its economy for years.

The healthy competition that Washington advocates does not suggest that the United States seeks to fully untangle itself from China or disconnect China’s economy from the world. Rather, a U.S.-driven competition enhances the interdependence, economic and political hand of countries that respect an open, rules-based international order.

In this context, the United States and all Western democracies should avoid false dichotomies premised on forcing countries to choose between rival hegemons. Instead, Europe and North America should both offer better economic development plans. This means unleashing the power of Western private capital by de-risking investment in infrastructure, technology, and industry in emerging economies. The United States is also in a position to build potent free trading blocs and promote trade-based alliances that open American markets to more than cheap Chinese goods.

An especially powerful tactic in this competition is ally-shoring—developing and expanding supply chains with countries that respect and genuinely participate in a rules-based international order. Decoupling our most sensitive and critical supply chains from China is an opportunity to connect with trading partners that share a goal of mutual economic security based on democratic norms. Rather than capitulating to the Chinese pressure to view democratic rules and standards characterized as “interference,” we can foster a values-based system that speaks to the hearts and minds of citizens everywhere. It’s hard to find people anywhere who support government-sponsored corruption and censorship of opposing viewpoints.

To operationalize ally-shoring, the United States can’t just talk in general terms, as Secretary Yellen and other leading officials in the Biden Administration have done. Rather, the United States must pull together with our closest friends and partners to explicitly define a joint offer to other countries that encourages mutually beneficial investment, transparency, economic development, trade, and business expansion assistance.

This offer must focus on the Global South—where there is great skepticism about friend-shoring and understandable reluctance to get caught in the middle of the United States and China superpower competition. The Western offer need not be premised on rejecting China but instead on the rules of the liberal, open capitalist system through which China and the United States have all thrived—rules that China now seeks to dismantle.

Washington must communicate that America is not trying to check China’s economic rise. Still, if China continues to use its economic and political influence to foist its authoritarian system on the world, the United States will blunt its tools of economic and political coercion. Doing so will slow the spigot of open-market, export growth that China has benefitted from for years.

By implementing a determined and detailed policy of friend-shoring, the United States can keep critical supply chains and industries in friendly hands while continuing to drive forward an integrated and mutually reinforcing international economic system.

John Austin Directs the Michigan Economic Center and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Brookings Institution and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

Elaine Dezenski is Senior Director and Head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by John Austin · August 5, 2023

8. The complicated case of Nauru, which stood up to China

Excerpts:

The engagement by Australia and by some Australians in Nauru has often been less than helpful, including muzzling the press, bribery, and participating in the devastation of the environment through phosphate mining, prompting the proposal a while back to just move Nauruan to Australia. (Another phosphate island, Banaba was largely depopulated as a result of the mining. It was the sort of “easy” solution that destroyed families for generations.)

What China would like to do to the country is likely even worse for the people of Nauru.

One idea floating around is perhaps seeing if Nauru is interested in a Compact of Free Association-style relationship with the U.S., similar but perhaps more simple than the ones the U.S. has with three other Micronesian countries, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.

The Australians might not like it, as some there seem to have the sense that Nauru is “theirs”, and any bilateral relationship that doesn’t involve them is a threat to Canberra. This limited view of larger regional security doesn’t help anyone, including Australia.

Regardless, whatever Nauru decides is up to Nauru, as it should be. But next time you complain that your job is complicated, spare a thought for leaders of small states on the geopolitical and geoeconomics front lines. It ain’t easy.

August 6, 2023 | The Sunday Guardian

The complicated case of Nauru, which stood up to China

Some of Nauru’s decisions made on principle, for example recognizing Taiwan, likely hurt Nauru’s economy. Nauru doesn’t just recognize Taiwan, it has stood up to China in diplomatic venues in ways some Western diplomats could only dream about.

https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2023/08/06/the-complicated-case-of-nauru-which-stood-up-to-china/

Cleo Paskal

Non-Resident Senior Fellow

Nusa Dua, Indonesia

Think your job is complicated? Try being a leader in Nauru.

Nauru is an island country of about 8 square miles, around 2,000 miles north-east of Australia, with a population of around 12,000 people.

It is completely independent. With that independence, it makes independent decisions, sometimes to the consternation of other countries that use their overwhelming power to let it be known they disagree. What does that mean?

SOVEREIGN NATION, SOVEREIGN DECISIONS

First positions Nauru has taken.

* Nauru is one of the 13 countries on the planet that recognizes Taiwan.

* In 2019, it recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

* In the U.N., it voted against Russia on Ukraine four times.

* It let Canberra set up a controversial off-shore detention facility for “boat people” who had been trying to get to Australia, effectively off-shoring Australia’s problem to Nauru. This created social and political problems in Nauru, which then resulted in the Australian press saying Nauru had a lot of problems, without fully reporting a lot of those problems were caused by Australia.

So far it seems like Nauru is going above and beyond what most other countries in the West do to back allies.

But it gets more complicated.

Soon after Russia seized Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Georgian war in 2008, Nauru recognized them as independent republics.

Almost a decade later, in 2017, the U.S. signed an appropriation bill cutting aid to countries that recognised Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

I have repeatedly heard U.S. government officials tell Pacific Islands leaders, in the context of U.S. and China in the region, “we don’t want to ask you to pick sides”.

Well, Nauru has taken some of the most difficult sides to support democracies and its neighbours—Taiwan and Jerusalem, voted against Russia at the U.N., and took in Australia’s problems—but one misstep taken years before a bill was passed by people who likely couldn’t place Nauru on a map, and then suddenly, when it came to certain projects, the rest doesn’t count.

Imagine being a leader in Nauru on the day they learned about the bill. What are you going to do?

POLITICS OF ECONOMICS

Of course, part of Nauru’s reasons for some of its decisions may have been financial—but that’s normal. Notice that Australia is no longer talking about the origins of Covid now that China is talking about dropping the barley tariffs.

And some of Nauru’s decisions made on principle, for example recognizing Taiwan, likely hurt Nauru’s economy.

Nauru doesn’t just recognize Taiwan, it has stood up to China in diplomatic venues in ways some Western diplomats could only dream about.

When Nauru hosted a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in 2018, then President Baron Waqa stood firm when the head of the Chinese delegation (China is not a member of the PIF) tried to speak to the meeting before the Prime Minister of Tuvalu (another country that recognizes Taiwan) had a chance to.

Waqa called the Chinese diplomat “very insolent” and a “bully”.

Waqa has now been chosen by Micronesian region countries as their choice for the next Secretary General of the PIF. Whether he becomes Secretary General or not will say much about China’s control over the PIF and its members.

Nauru has also been trying to diversify its economy. Given its central location, it made sense to develop an international port.

The original US$80 million project, the Nauru Sustainable and Climate Resilient Connectivity Project was financed by Asian Development Bank (ADB), Green Climate Fund, and the governments of Australia and Nauru.

The main construction contract went to China Harbour Engineering Company. Yes, in a country that recognizes Taiwan.

WB AND ADB FUNDING BRI (BRIBERY AND REPRESSION INITIATIVE)

This issue of Chinese companies winning a disproportionate amount of World Bank (WB) and ADB projects in the Pacific Islands (and elsewhere) is serious.

It often looks like the sort of projects that used to be thought of as typical of the BRI (Belt and Road Initiative)—though given the way PRC companies operate, BRI could just as easily stand for Bribery and Repression Initiative—are now done via Chinese companies funded by WB and ADB. Which means subsidized by the U.S., Japan, etc.

PRC companies seem to have“mastered” the bidding systems, resulting in, for example, a reported 80% of ABD infrastructure projects in 2019 in Papua New Guinea going to Chinese construction companies. There were similar numbersfor Chinese companies in Vanuatu, though mostly WB funded.

BRI isn’t in decline, it’s evolved, and is now being subsidized by others—including the U.S.—instead of just the Chinese government.

What does that mean for Nauru?

What incentive does a Chinese company have in finishing a project that will increase the economic autonomy of a country that recognizes Taiwan and, at the same time, will compete with other Chinese projects in nearby states that are much more compliant to Beijing’s whims?

Nauru’s port project is very behind schedule.

NAVIGATING ROUGH GEOPOLITICAL SEAS

So, you are a leader in Nauru. What do you do? Bow to U.S. pressure and derecognize South Ossetia and Abkhazia? Bow to Chinese pressure and derecognize Taiwan? How can you diversify your economy through multilateral organizations without opening yourself to economic manipulation?

And, throughout all this, there are some basic needs that few of your partners are taking seriously, like how can you patrol your maritime exclusive economic zone (your most valuable resource)—or even run search and rescue operations—without any real patrol vessels or drones. Taiwan gave Nauru two ten-meter-long rigid inflatable patrol boats in 2022, and that’s about it to patrol an area almost the size of Germany.

It is not easy being a leader in Nauru. And many in larger countries think it would be “easier”(or at least easier for them) to just take it over. But take a look at the track record of two of the largest hegemons in the region, Australia and China.

The engagement by Australia and by some Australians in Nauru has often been less than helpful, including muzzling the press, bribery, and participating in the devastation of the environment through phosphate mining, prompting the proposal a while back to just move Nauruan to Australia. (Another phosphate island, Banaba was largely depopulated as a result of the mining. It was the sort of “easy” solution that destroyed families for generations.)

What China would like to do to the country is likely even worse for the people of Nauru.

One idea floating around is perhaps seeing if Nauru is interested in a Compact of Free Association-style relationship with the U.S., similar but perhaps more simple than the ones the U.S. has with three other Micronesian countries, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and Marshall Islands.

The Australians might not like it, as some there seem to have the sense that Nauru is “theirs”, and any bilateral relationship that doesn’t involve them is a threat to Canberra. This limited view of larger regional security doesn’t help anyone, including Australia.

Regardless, whatever Nauru decides is up to Nauru, as it should be. But next time you complain that your job is complicated, spare a thought for leaders of small states on the geopolitical and geoeconomics front lines. It ain’t easy.

Cleo Paskal is a non-resident senior fellow for the Indo-Pacific at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow her on Twitter @CleoPaskal. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

fdd.org · by Krystal Bermudez · August 6, 2023

9. A Drone’s View Behind Russian Lines: Cratered Fields and Charred Armor

Photos at the link.

A Drone’s View Behind Russian Lines: Cratered Fields and Charred Armor

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/10/world/europe/ukraine-drones-russia-war-zone.html?referringSource=articleShare&smid=nytcore-ios-share&utm

By Carlotta GallPhotographs by Diego Ibarra Sanchez

Reporting from the Zaporizhzhia front in Ukraine

Aug. 10, 2023,

5:00 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Carlotta Gall · August 10, 2023

A Ukrainian unit sent a drone into Russian-occupied territory to surveil the battlefront, and it brought back vivid images of the Russian side of the war zone.

A member of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army drone unit launching a reconnaissance craft to monitor and gather information about Russian positions.

Photographs by Diego Ibarra Sanchez

Reporting from the Zaporizhzhia front in Ukraine

Aug. 10, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

The images a reconnaissance drone sent back to Ukrainian forces provided a vivid portrait of the Russian side of the war zone.

Damaged houses gave way to cratered fields on Ukraine’s southern steppe. There was burned-out armor in a scorched forest. A jagged Russian trench along a tree line had been blasted by American-supplied cluster munitions barely a week earlier, according to Lt. Ashot Arutiunian, the commander of the unit that recorded the images.

He pointed to holes in the roofs of several large agricultural buildings in a village and said they had most likely been hit by the American-made HIMARS rocket system; it is known for its accuracy, and there was no damage to surrounding buildings or to a nearby church.

This was on a recent morning, with Ukrainian artillery firing relentlessly, the deep rumbling explosions of the impact resonating in the distance. Mixed in were the louder explosions of Russian shells landing on Ukrainian positions.

But Lieutenant Arutiunian was focused on the skies above. Drones have become a mainstay used by both Russian and Ukrainian forces, reconnoitering the battlefield and directing fire against enemy targets.

A screen shot from a drone reconnaissance mission provided by the Ukrainian Volunteer Army showing Russian positions along the southern front in Ukraine.Credit...via Ukraine Volunteer Army

Lieutenant Arutiunian, who uses the military call sign Doc — a reference to the doctorate in data mining he holds from Kyiv Polytechnic — commands four teams in the unmanned aerial vehicle service of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, operating on the southern front. They deploy a variety of propeller-driven drones and planes to track Russian forces for the Ukrainian military and are constantly adjusting tactics and equipment to evade Russian interceptors.

This week, one of the units allowed a team of New York Times journalists to accompany it on a mission close to the front line as it sent a drone into Russian-occupied territory to surveil the battlefront. A condition was that the unit’s precise location could not be reported.

Amid a background of artillery fire, the team got to work under cover of a small copse of trees, unpacking equipment and setting up four antennas; those were needed to work round the threats of both Russian and Ukrainian electronic jammers that can swiftly end the flight of a drone.

The fixed wing craft the unit’s members were using was equipped with two cameras and an independent global positioning system as backup, to give the pilot several options to bring it home should one or more of the systems fail.

“In this reconnaissance mission we are investigating the terrain,” Lieutenant Arutiunian said. Later, back at base, they would examine the video footage on a big monitor to try to spot Russian military, he said: “We are looking for soldiers, warehouses, gasoline depots, whatever.”

Lt. Ashot Arutiunian, commander of the drone unit, analyzing footage from a reconnaissance drone mission with his team.

Occasionally, as they worked, a faint humming sound made them pull back under the trees, wary of Russian drones. Just as they go hunting for targets, Ukrainian drone teams have become targets themselves.

Lieutenant Arutiunian’s other teams were out searching for Russian artillery and electronic warfare systems, and in real time they were directing and correcting Ukrainian artillery onto targets.

Ukrainian volunteers, many of them entrepreneurs and computer and technology professionals, were quick to exploit the use of cheap, commercial drones in the first months of the war. This gave the Ukrainian Army an advantage over Russian forces, which struggled with poor communications during the battle for Kyiv in March last year.

But Russia has always had a sophisticated electronic warfare capability, military analysts say, and it has since deployed its own drones, both reconnaissance drones that can spot a unit on the ground and direct artillery or mortar fire in its direction, and so-called kamikaze or attack drones, which are loaded with explosives and can find and hit a target immediately.

On our outing, as the early morning haze dissipated, one of the team threw the drone into the air. It dipped and then soared, buzzing loudly, and soon was gone. The pilot directed the craft from a small hand-held control panel, while two other members of the team monitored the flight separately on a laptop and a tablet.

A member of the drone unit searching for a place to set up an antenna to launch a drone near the front line.

Ukrainians have frequently brought down their own drones, mistaking them for enemy aircraft. So Lieutenant Arutiunian was in touch with the Ukrainian military to ensure safe passage for the drone — and that other Ukrainian drones did not interfere — but also clearing a way for his drone to cross the front line through Ukrainian electronic defenses.

The Russian interference was visible on the small monitor as the drone crossed the front line, but it managed to fly on, deep into Russian-occupied territory. The GPS system stopped working, and the feed to the laptop dropped. The drone was two kilometers (a little more than a mile) off target, the lieutenant said. “Russian electronic warfare,” he muttered.

But the pilot kept the drone flying for 30 minutes, passing over villages and empty fields before circling over battle scenes — the destroyed armor in the charred woodland and the trench that ran along a battered tree line — and landed it safely.

Back at their base, members of the team sat together on a bed watching the video footage on a large monitor. There was a new civilian car parked in the yard of a house that had not been there before and could indicate the presence of Russian military, said the pilot, who uses the call sign Hacker. He paused the video several times, examining new shapes, trying to work out if Russian equipment was concealed under foliage or camouflage netting.

An operator piloting a drone on a reconnaissance mission.

Much of the damage on the Russian side has been caused by Ukrainian shelling during its two-month-long counteroffensive, Lieutenant Arutiunian said.

And the circular craters that were visible signaled the use of American-provided cluster bombs, he added.

The heaviest fighting of Ukraine’s counteroffensive is focused on two axes along the southern front, where Ukrainian forces are trying to break through Russian defenses. As Ukrainian artillery has reached deep behind Russian lines to disrupt supply lines and knock out critical weapons systems, they have also started using cluster munitions to wear down Russian resistance in tree lines and trenches.

The Russians have been using cluster munitions from the first day of the war, Lieutenant Arutiunian said, adding, “We started last week.”

His team had filmed a cluster bomb strike on a tree line in the area a week earlier, he said. “It’s a really effective instrument,” he said, but added that Russian troops had quickly adapted and taken measures to take cover to survive the strikes.

His team members scoured the battle fields and tree lines for signs of life of Russian troops. They pointed out the difference between old tracks and new ones made by vehicles through the fields.

This was an area that the Russians had abandoned after recent fighting, said a soldier using the call sign Gremlin, 23, who was a software developer before the war. She was comparing the new footage with an earlier satellite map of the area. “The Russians come back to positions they have left,” she said.

In the end, the team found nothing, the commander said. “It was a failed mission,” he said, shrugging. But that was good news, too, he added: “There were no Russians.”

Gremlin, 23, who is a member of the unit, holding a drone.

Oleksandr Chubko contributed reporting.

Carlotta Gall is a senior correspondent currently covering the war in Ukraine. She previously was Istanbul bureau chief, covered the aftershocks of the Arab Spring from Tunisia, and reported from the Balkans during the war in Kosovo and Serbia, and from Afghanistan and Pakistan after 2001. She was on a team that won a 2009 Pulitzer Prize for reporting from Afghanistan and Pakistan. More about Carlotta Gall

The New York Times · by Carlotta Gall · August 10, 2023

10. Back in the Trenches – Why New Technology Hasn’t Revolutionized Warfare in Ukraine

Excerpts:

The crux of the revolution thesis, however, is an argument about the pace and nature of needed change. If warfare is being revolutionized, then the traditional, incremental updating of ideas and equipment is insufficient, and something more radical is needed. Tanks, for example, should be mothballed, not modernized. Robotic systems should quickly replace humans. Preparation for large-scale offensive action should be replaced with a heavy emphasis on defense and injunctions against attack in all but exceptional conditions.

The war in Ukraine, to date, offers little support for such ideas. It is still in progress, evidence is imperfect, and the future course of the fighting could be different. But so far, few of the observable outcomes are consistent with an expectation of revolutionary change in results or a need for radical reequipment or doctrinal transmogrification. This, too, is consistent with previous experience. It has been almost 110 years since the tank was introduced in 1916. Some have argued that the tank is obsolete because of technological improvements in antitank weapons. This argument has been commonplace for over 50 years, or almost half the entire history of the tank. Yet in 2023, both sides in Ukraine continue to rely on tanks and are doing everything they can to get their hands on more of them.

The U.S. Air Force redesigned itself in the 1950s around an assumption that the nuclear revolution had replaced conventional warfare and that future aircraft would be needed primarily for nuclear weapons delivery. The subsequent nonnuclear war in Vietnam was waged with an air force that was designed for a transformational future that never arrived and that proved ill suited for the war it actually fought. Or consider U.S. Army doctrine. This was reshaped in 1976 to reflect a view that precision weapons had made offensive action prohibitively costly under most conditions, yielding a new emphasis on mostly static defense from prepared positions. This “Active Defense” doctrine was highly original but ill conceived and had to be abandoned in favor of the more orthodox “AirLand Battle” concept that the U.S. military used for successful offensive action in Kuwait in 1991.

Calls for revolution and transformation have been commonplace in the defense debate in the generations after World War II. They have mostly not fared well in light of observed experience in that time. After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, there is no reason to think that this time they will be proved right.

Back in the Trenches

Why New Technology Hasn’t Revolutionized Warfare in Ukraine

By Stephen Biddle

August 10, 2023

Foreign Affairs · by Stephen Biddle · August 10, 2023

The war in Ukraine is being waged with a host of advanced technologies, from remotely operated drones to space-based surveillance, precision weapons, hypersonic missiles, handheld jammers, artificial intelligence, networked communications, and more. Many argue that this array is transforming warfare, with omnipresent surveillance combining with newly lethal weapons to make legacy systems such as the tank obsolete and to make traditional methods such as large-scale offensive action impractical. As the military analyst David Johnson has put it, “What I believe we are witnessing is a pivotal moment in military history: the reascendance of the defense as the decisive form of war.” Drones, artificial intelligence, and rapid adaptation of commercial technologies in Ukraine are creating “a genuine military revolution,” according to military strategist T. X. Hammes. Former Google chief executive and Pentagon adviser Eric Schmidt has argued that Ukraine is showing that “the future of war will be dictated and waged by drones.”

But in many ways, this war seems quite familiar. It features foot soldiers slogging through muddy trenches in scenes that look more like World War I than Star Wars. Its battlegrounds are littered with minefields that resemble those from World War II and feature moonscapes of shell holes that could be mistaken for Flanders in 1917. Conventional artillery has fired millions of unguided shells, so many as to strain the production capacity of the industrial bases in Russia and the West. Images of code writers developing military software accompany scenes of factory floors turning out mass conventional munitions that lack only Rosie the Riveter to pass for images from 1943.

This raises the question of how different this war truly is. How can such cutting-edge technology coexist with such echoes of the distant past? The answer is that although the tools in Ukraine are sometimes new, the results they produce are mostly not. Armies adapt to new threats, and the countermeasures that both sides have adopted in Ukraine have dramatically reduced the net effects of new weapons and equipment, resulting in a war that in many ways looks more like a conflict from the past than one from an imagined high-tech future. U.S. defense planners should understand that the war in Ukraine does not portend a “revolution in military affairs” of the kind that has often been predicted but somehow never quite arrives. Policymakers and analysts should closely study what is happening on the ground in Ukraine, but they should not expect their findings to produce transformational change in U.S. military strategy. Instead, as has often been the case in the past, the best path forward will involve incremental adaptations, not tectonic shifts.

HEAVY LOSSES?

One way to assess the net results of the use of new weapons in Ukraine is to look at the casualties they have inflicted. Those who see a military revolution in Ukraine usually argue that new surveillance techniques, such as coupling drones with precision weapons, have made the modern battlefield radically more lethal. Yet the realized lethality (as opposed to the potential lethality) of Russian and Ukrainian weapons in this war is little different from that seen in previous wars, and in some cases it is actually lower.

Consider, for example, tank losses. Many revolutionists see heavy tank casualties in Ukraine as the key indicator for the tank’s looming obsolescence in the face of newly lethal precision antitank weapons. And tank losses in Ukraine have certainly been heavy: Russia and Ukraine have each lost more than half the tanks with which they entered the war. At the time of the invasion, Russia had about 3,400 tanks in active service. But in the first 350 days of the war, it lost somewhere between 1,688 (the number verified photographically by the open-source organization Oryx) and 3,253 (the number claimed by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry), for a loss rate of somewhere between 50 percent and 96 percent. Ukraine fielded about 900 tanks at the time of the invasion and lost at least 459 (the Oryx figure) in the first 350 days, for a loss rate of at least 51 percent. Both countries have either built or been given additional vehicles as replacements. Russia, especially, has extensive reserves of older vehicles that have been pressed into service. Damaged tanks can sometimes be repaired and returned to battle. So even though the armor fleets in the field have thus not shrunk massively, it is clear that many tanks have been lost in battle.

Yet these are not unusually heavy loss rates for major warfare. In just four days during the Battle of Amiens in 1918, the United Kingdom lost 98 percent of the tanks it had when the fighting began. In 1943, the loss rate for German tanks was 113 percent: Germany lost more tanks than it owned at the beginning of the year. In 1944, Germany lost 122 percent of the tanks with which it started the year. The Soviet Union’s loss rates for tanks in 1943 and 1944 were nearly as high, at 109 percent and 80 percent, respectively. And in a single battle in Normandy (Operation Goodwood, in July 1944), the United Kingdom lost more than 30 percent of all its armor on the continent in just three days of fighting. Few, however, argued that the tank was obsolete in 1918 or 1944.

In war, new technology matters, but adaptations dramatically dampen its effects.

Or consider aircraft losses. Some have suggested that modern antiaircraft missiles are so lethal to traditional piloted aircraft that these, too, are headed for the ash heap of history. And like tanks, aircraft have suffered heavy losses in Ukraine: in almost a year and a half of fighting, the Ukrainian air force has lost at least 68 aircraft, or more than a third of Ukraine’s prewar fleet; the Russian air force has lost more than 80 of its preinvasion inventory of 2,204 military aircraft. Yet this level of destruction is hardly unprecedented. In 1917, the life expectancy of a new British pilot was just 11 days. In 1943, the German Luftwaffe lost 251 percent of the aircraft it had at the beginning of the year. Its loss rate for 1944 was even higher: in the first half of the year alone, it lost 146 percent of its January strength. The Soviet loss rate for aircraft was 77 percent in 1943 and 66 percent in 1944. Yet few argued that the piloted airplane was obsolete in 1917 or 1943.

Or consider artillery. Since at least 1914, artillery has inflicted more casualties in major wars than any other weapon. And today, some observers believe that as many as 80 to 90 percent of Ukrainian casualties have been caused by artillery fire. Many accounts of the fighting in Ukraine feature scenes of the two armies using drones to find enemy targets and then using networked communications to quickly relay the information for precision engagement by guided artillery. Of course, not all artillery in Ukraine is precision guided; most rounds fired by either side are relatively old-fashioned. But the teaming of these unguided rounds with new drone reconnaissance and rapid-targeting systems is often described as a new and profound development in Ukraine. If one assumes, however, that 85 percent of Russian casualties are caused by Ukrainian artillery, that Russia suffered as many as 146,820 casualties in the first year of the invasion (the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s figure), and that Ukraine fired a total of around 1.65 million rounds of artillery in the first year (as the Brookings Institution has estimated), then drones and the mix of guided and unguided artillery in the Ukrainian army inflicted, on average, about eight Russian casualties per hundred rounds fired in the first year of the invasion.

That rate exceeds the world war rates, but not by much. The historian Trevor Dupuy estimated that in World War II, around 50 percent of casualties were caused by artillery, which means that on average, it inflicted about three casualties per hundred rounds fired. In World War I, the figure was about two soldiers wounded or killed per hundred rounds fired. Casualties per hundred rounds has thus grown since 1914 but at a steady, almost linear annual rate of around an additional 0.05 casualties per hundred rounds. Artillery in Ukraine looks more like an incremental extension of long-standing trends than a revolutionary departure from the past.

STALEMATES AND BREAKTHROUGHS

Of course, casualty infliction is only one element of warfare—armies also seek to take and hold ground. And many revolutionists think that new equipment has changed the patterns of advance and retreat in Ukraine relative to historical experience. In this view, today’s newly lethal weapons have made offensive maneuver prohibitively costly, inaugurating a new era of defense dominance in which ground is much harder for attackers to take than in previous eras of warfare.

Yet the Ukrainian war to date has been far from a uniform defensive stalemate. Some attacks have indeed failed to gain ground or have done so only at great cost. The Russian offensive at Bakhmut eventually succeeded, but only after ten months of fighting and a casualty toll of perhaps 60,000 to 100,000 Russian soldiers. Russian offensives in the spring of 2022 gained little ground, and the Russian attack on Mariupol in southern Ukraine in February lasted almost three months before an outnumbered defense was overwhelmed and the Russians captured the city. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in Kherson began with weeks of slow, expensive attrition warfare in August and September 2022.

But other attacks have moved much farther and faster. Russia’s initial invasion in February 2022 was poorly executed in many ways, yet it gained over 42,000 square miles of ground in less than a month. Ukraine’s Kyiv counteroffensive then retook over 19,000 square miles in March and early April. Ukraine’s Kherson counteroffensive in August 2022 eventually gained almost 470 square miles, and its Kharkiv counteroffensive in September 2022 retook 2,300 square miles. The war has thus presented a mix of successful offense and successful defense, not a pattern of consistent offensive frustration. And all this—both the breakthroughs and the stalemates—has occurred in the face of new weapons and equipment. Conversely, older legacy systems such as tanks played prominent roles in both the offensive successes and failures. These variations are hard to square with any technologically determined new epoch in war.

A Ukrainian serviceman in Donetsk region, Ukraine, July 2023

Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

This, too, is an important echo of the past. The popular imagination sees World War I as a technologically determined defensive stalemate and World War II as a war of offensive maneuver unleashed by the tank, the airplane, and the radio. This perception encourages observers today to look for another such epochal shift in Ukraine. But in reality, neither world war followed a uniform, technologically determined pattern: the same technologies produced both offensive actions that took ground quickly and defensive stalemates in which battle lines barely moved. Both world wars displayed wide variations in offensive success that correlate poorly with variations in equipment.

In World War I, for example, the trench stalemate of 1915–17 dominates the popular image of the conflict. Yet the initial German invasion of Belgium and France in 1914 advanced more than 200 miles in four weeks in spite of modern machine guns and artillery. The German spring offensives of 1918 broke through Allied lines on the western front three times in succession and took nearly 4,000 square miles of ground using virtually no tanks; the subsequent Allied Hundred Days Offensive then drove the Germans back over open ground on a roughly 180-mile front, capturing more than 9,500 square miles of German-held territory in the process. In fact, 1918 as a whole saw more than 12,500 square miles change hands in some eight months of fighting. World War I also saw many unsuccessful offensives, but stalemate is not the whole story.

Conversely, the popular image of World War II is dominated by tanks and blitzkrieg offensives. And certainly, there were plenty of tank-equipped offensive breakthroughs, whether during the German invasions of France in 1940 or of the Soviet Union in 1941, or during the American offensive in Operation Cobra in Normandy in 1944. But the war also saw some of the most costly offensive failures in military history. The 1943 Battle of Kursk in Russia cost the German attackers more than 160,000 casualties and destroyed more than 700 German armored vehicles but failed to break through Soviet defenses. The failed British offensive at Goodwood in 1944 has been described by the historian Alexander McKee as “the death ride of the armored divisions.” Repeated Allied attacks on the Gothic Line in Italy in 1944 and 1945 produced failure after failure at the cost of more than 40,000 Allied casualties. Like World War I, World War II involved a great deal of variance in outcomes: it was not a simple, uniform story of offensive success. And in Ukraine, both the war’s offensive successes and its defensive stalemates have occurred in the face of drones, precision weapons, hypersonic missiles, and space-based surveillance. In none of these wars have the tools predetermined the results.

ADAPT OR PERISH

The reason technological advances are not more determinative in war is that they are only a part of what shapes outcomes. How combatants use their technology and adapt to their enemy’s equipment is at least as important and often more so.

This has been true since the dawn of the modern era. For over a century, weapons have been lethal enough that armies who mass exposed forces in the open have suffered annihilating loss rates. As early as 1914, as few as four 75-millimeter field guns could saturate an area the size of a football field with lethal shell fragments in a single volley. A French version of this—the 1897 Model Soixante-Quinze—could do this 15 times in one minute with sufficient ammunition. An army that simply charged defenses armed with such weapons would be committing suicide. Even heavily armored tanks can be destroyed en masse by modern antitank weapons if they operate this way: the British tanks that charged German antitank guns at Goodwood and the German tanks that charged Soviet antitank guns at Kursk offer vivid examples.

As a result, most armies adapt in the face of modern firepower. Sometimes this means deploying new tools to counter enemy technology: antitank guns encourage the development of tanks that use heavier armor, which encourages the use of bigger antitank guns, then still heavier armor, and so on. Multiple cycles of these technological measure-countermeasure races have already occurred during the war in Ukraine. For example, expensive, sophisticated drones were countered by guided antiaircraft missiles, encouraging combatants to deploy simpler, cheaper, and more numerous drones, which have been countered by simpler, cheaper antiaircraft artillery and hand-held jammers, and so on. The long-range guided HIMARS missile systems the United States provided to Ukraine in June 2022 use GPS signals for guidance; the Russians now routinely jam the signals, which has dramatically reduced the accuracy of the missiles. Technical countermeasures are ubiquitous in war, and they quickly limit the performance of many new weapons.

Casualty rates in Ukraine have not been unusually high by historical standards.

But the most important adaptations are often not technological but operational and tactical. They involve changes in the way armies use the tools at their disposal. Over a century ago, armies developed tactics that reduced their exposure to enemy fire by exploiting dispersion, cover, concealment, and suppressive fire. The complex topography of the earth’s surface provides many opportunities for cover (impenetrable obstacles such as hillsides) and concealment (opaque obstacles such as foliage) but only if armies disperse by breaking large, massed formations into smaller subunits that can fit into the patches of forest, the interiors of buildings, and the irregular folds in the earth that offer the greatest opportunities to escape hostile fire.

For centuries, armies have augmented such natural cover by digging trenches, bunkers, and fieldworks. And by 1917, armies discovered that by combining suppressive fire with sprints from cover to cover, they could reduce casualties during brief periods of exposure to gunfire and survive forward movement on the battlefield. Attackers learned to combine infantry, tanks, artillery, engineers, aircraft, and more to enable this “fire and movement” style of fighting: infantry who could see concealed enemies, tanks that could bring firepower forward to destroy the enemies, artillery to provide suppressive fire to cover the attackers’ movement, engineers who could clear mines, and aircraft to strike from above and protect troops from enemy airplanes. Defenders learned to distribute dug-in forces into depth to delay offensive advances by such attackers while rearward reserves maneuvered to reinforce defenses at the threatened point. These methods were what broke the trench stalemate in 1918, and continued extensions of these concepts have been in use ever since.

Air forces, unlike ground armies, cannot dig in for cover and still fly combat missions. But air forces can avoid enemy fire in other ways. They can restrict aircraft to altitudes and flight paths designed to evade enemy air defenses. They can coordinate their operations with ground forces or other aircraft in ways that suppress the fire of enemy air defenses during brief periods of aerial exposure. They can move between multiple runways to reduce vulnerability to preemptive attack on the ground. And air forces, too, can reduce their formation density when in flight; the massed thousand-bomber raids of World War II are now a thing of the past. As antiaircraft weapons have grown more lethal, air forces, like ground forces, have increasingly adapted to reduce their vulnerability.

Checking a destroyed vehicle in Storozheve, Ukraine, June 2023

Oleksandr Ratushniak / Reuters

These methods can be extremely effective when used properly. Unhindered by suppressive fire, a single BGM-71 guided antitank missile crew can destroy seven tanks at ranges of over one and a half miles in just five minutes. If forced by suppressive fire to take cover and relocate between shots, its kill rate can be reduced to one tank or fewer. A 100-soldier infantry company massed in the open on a 200-yard front can be wiped out by a single battalion volley from hostile artillery; dispersed over a 1,000-yard front with a depth of 200 yards, the same unit might suffer less than ten percent losses. If the unit has even partially concealed itself and the artillery misses the formation’s center, losses might be reduced to as little as five percent.

Dispersion can also make targets unworthy of engagement. A $100,000 guided 155-millimeter artillery shell is too expensive to fire at a two-man target even if a drone locates the soldiers’ foxhole perfectly. When soldiers spread out on the battlefield, it makes more economic sense to try to hit them with cheaper, unguided rounds. But that has drawbacks, too: artillery risks detection every time it fires, so to fire multiple unguided rounds at a single small target makes the shooter vulnerable to counterfire in exchange for a limited payoff. Aircraft that could be shot down quickly if they overfly enemy air defenses are far less vulnerable if they fly below enemy radar while firing from behind friendly lines.

Such methods can be challenging to implement correctly, however. Most armies can manage dispersion, cover, and concealment at the small-unit level, if only by digging in. This reduces casualty rates, but it also limits what an army can accomplish if this is all it can do. Air forces can restrict themselves to low altitudes in safe rear areas, but this limits their contribution to the fighting.

The Ukraine war is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

To take ground on a large scale and prevent the enemy from doing so requires forces to coordinate deep defenses with mobile reserves; to combine infantry, armor, artillery, engineers, air defense, and more, on the offensive; and to integrate fire and movement on a large scale—and these are much harder tasks. Some militaries have mastered these skills; others have not. When defenses are deep, prepared, and backed by mobile reserves, they have repeatedly proved very hard to break through—regardless of whether the attackers have tanks or precision-guided weapons. But when defenses are shallow, poorly prepared, or inadequately supported by reserves, attackers that can implement combined arms and fire-and-movement methods on a large scale have been able to break through and take ground quickly—even without tanks and even against precision-guided weapons. Think, for example, of the German infantry breakthroughs in 1918 or the Ukrainian gains in the face of Russian drones and precision weapons at Kharkiv in 2022.

New technology does matter, but the adaptations that armies have increasingly adopted since 1917 dramatically dampen its effects on outcomes. Precision weapons that are devastating on the proving ground or against exposed, massed targets yield much lower casualty rates against dispersed, concealed forces. And as weapons have grown more lethal over time, armies’ adaptations have kept pace accordingly. In the nineteenth century, for example, armies typically massed their forces to battlefield concentrations of approximately 2,500 to 25,000 troops per square mile. By 1918, those figures had fallen by a factor of ten. By 1945, they had fallen by another factor of ten. By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, a force the size of Napoleon’s at Waterloo would be spread over an area about 3,000 times as large as the one the French army occupied in 1815.

This combination of ever more lethal technology but ever more dispersed and concealed targets has produced far less net change in realized outcomes over time than one would expect by looking only at the weapons and not at their interaction with human behavior. Better tools always help, and Western assistance to Ukraine has been critical in enabling Ukraine to cope with a numerically superior Russian army. But the actual battlefield impact of technology is shaped powerfully by its users’ behavior, and in Ukraine, as in the last century of great-power warfare, that behavior has usually been a better predictor of outcomes than the tools themselves.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE

Although the Ukraine war has seen plenty of new equipment, its use has not yet brought transformational results. Casualty rates in Ukraine have not been unusually high by historical standards. Attackers in Ukraine have sometimes been able to advance and sometimes not; there has been no pattern of uniform defensive stalemate. This is because those fighting in Ukraine have responded to newly lethal weapons just as their predecessors did: by adapting with a combination of technical countermeasures and further extensions of centurylong trends toward increased dispersion, cover, concealment, and suppressive fires that have reduced both sides’ exposure to hostile firepower.

Losses are still heavy, as they have often been in major wars, but loss rates in Ukraine have not prevented major ground gains in offensives at Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Kherson. Success on the attack is hard, and it normally requires a combination of offensive skill and defensive error, as it has for generations. In Ukraine, as in the past, when skilled attackers have struck shallow, ill-prepared defenses that have inadequate reserves or logistical support, they have broken through. But in Ukraine, as in the past, when this combination has been absent, the result has usually been stalemate. This is not the result of drones or access to broadband Internet, and it is not anything transformational. It is a marginal extension of long-standing trends and relationships between technology and human adaptation.

If the Ukraine war is more evolutionary than revolutionary, what does that mean for defense planning and policy? Should Western countries abandon the pursuit of modern weapons and equipment and freeze doctrine development? Of course not. Evolutionary change is still change, and the whole point of adaptation is that militaries must adopt new methods and equipment. A 1916 tank would stand little chance on the battlefield of 2023—the stable attrition rates of warfare since World War I are products of continuous, two-sided adaptation in which combatants have always worked to avoid allowing rivals to gain much of an edge.

A Ukrainian soldier preparing to fire a rocket near the town of Avdiivka, Ukraine, July 2023

Sofiia Gatilova / Reuters

The crux of the revolution thesis, however, is an argument about the pace and nature of needed change. If warfare is being revolutionized, then the traditional, incremental updating of ideas and equipment is insufficient, and something more radical is needed. Tanks, for example, should be mothballed, not modernized. Robotic systems should quickly replace humans. Preparation for large-scale offensive action should be replaced with a heavy emphasis on defense and injunctions against attack in all but exceptional conditions.

The war in Ukraine, to date, offers little support for such ideas. It is still in progress, evidence is imperfect, and the future course of the fighting could be different. But so far, few of the observable outcomes are consistent with an expectation of revolutionary change in results or a need for radical reequipment or doctrinal transmogrification. This, too, is consistent with previous experience. It has been almost 110 years since the tank was introduced in 1916. Some have argued that the tank is obsolete because of technological improvements in antitank weapons. This argument has been commonplace for over 50 years, or almost half the entire history of the tank. Yet in 2023, both sides in Ukraine continue to rely on tanks and are doing everything they can to get their hands on more of them.

The U.S. Air Force redesigned itself in the 1950s around an assumption that the nuclear revolution had replaced conventional warfare and that future aircraft would be needed primarily for nuclear weapons delivery. The subsequent nonnuclear war in Vietnam was waged with an air force that was designed for a transformational future that never arrived and that proved ill suited for the war it actually fought. Or consider U.S. Army doctrine. This was reshaped in 1976 to reflect a view that precision weapons had made offensive action prohibitively costly under most conditions, yielding a new emphasis on mostly static defense from prepared positions. This “Active Defense” doctrine was highly original but ill conceived and had to be abandoned in favor of the more orthodox “AirLand Battle” concept that the U.S. military used for successful offensive action in Kuwait in 1991.

Calls for revolution and transformation have been commonplace in the defense debate in the generations after World War II. They have mostly not fared well in light of observed experience in that time. After a year and a half of war in Ukraine, there is no reason to think that this time they will be proved right.

STEPHEN BIDDLE is Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and Adjunct Senior Fellow for Defense Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle.

Foreign Affairs · by Stephen Biddle · August 10, 2023

11. Nationalism’s questionable influence in China’s responses to international incidents

Excerpts:

Contrary to assertions that suggest China blindly caters to nationalism, the reality is far more complex. Unless an international incident threatens political and social stability, China rarely resorts to escalation measures that cater to nationalism. This is because China emphasises the economic value of diplomatic relations and, when non-core interests are harmed, China usually refrains from escalating. China also seeks to resolve disputes through achieving agreements it supported.

The Chinese government responds to nationalism with pragmatic actions rather than widely perceived instrumentalist policies — and it is misleading to exaggerate the role of nationalism in China’s foreign policymaking.

Nationalism’s questionable influence in China’s responses to international incidents | East Asia Forum

eastasiaforum.org · by Chenchao Lian · August 9, 2023

Author: Chenchao Lian, Oxford University

In recent years, there has been a prevalent discourse which suggests that nationalism has emerged as a key driving force behind China’s foreign policy, particularly in international incidents and crises. But China’s actions on the global stage exhibit a range of responses to nationalism in different incidents — at times embracing it and at other times adopting a more detached approach.

Policymakers, academics and the general public lack a clear understanding of the role Chinese nationalism truly plays. Why and under what condition would the Chinese government choose to escalate as nationalists require in some state-to-state international incidents, but not in others?

When the Chinese government responds to international incidents, its primary concern lies in garnering public support while safeguarding national interests. Policy formulation is significantly influenced by legitimacy concerns, of which economic development and nationalism hold paramount importance.

When decisionmakers perceive nationalist sentiments are likely to bring political and social instability, external escalation measures will be taken to safeguard China’s interests and pacify domestic discontent.

For instance, during the Kosovo War in 1999, NATO bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, resulting in the loss of 3 lives and injuring 27 individuals. In September 2012, despite repeated warnings from China’s leadership, the Japanese government ‘nationalised’ the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. In August 2022, US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan despite China’s strong opposition. All three incidents damaged China’s national dignity and sovereignty and brought overwhelming nationalist sentiments to the fore — which prompted China to swiftly respond with robust escalating countermeasures.

These incidents caught global attention. But China did not escalate in many other cases. Of course, reacting without escalation does not mean ‘doing nothing’ externally, as appropriate countermeasures targeting the other country in international incidents are expected.

China’s priority in developing its economy explains its rationality and restraint in handling many contentious incidents. After the 1978 reforms, economic development has been the government’s central task. When diplomatic relations hold significant economic value, China strives to handle incidents smoothly to foster active cooperation.

During the 2001 Hainan aeroplane collision incident, China did not escalate, and resumed active dialogue with the United States once its demands were met. In the 2023 ‘balloon incident’, China again did not escalate against the United States, despite its strong opposition to the US military’s strike.

Even if a diplomatic relationship holds low economic value, escalation is not China’s first choice. Empirical evidence demonstrates that the government will assess whether the incident harms China’s core interests. If not, it will usually not excessively cater to nationalism. This is because such actions may lead to unnecessary disputes and negatively impact diplomatic relations.

Even if China’s core interests are harmed, reaching an agreement to resolve an issue becomes crucial. During the 2016 South China Sea arbitration case, China initially imposed diplomatic, military and economic sanctions on the Philippines. But China’s policies began to moderate after the new Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte visited China. During Duterte’s visit, China and the Philippines reached extensive and in-depth cooperation agreements under the consensus of shelving the arbitration, resulting in a significant turnaround in China–Philippines relations.

Canada and the United States’ arrest of Huawei’s Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou in December 2018 was a critical case. During this incident, the Chinese public ‘rallied around the flag’, leading to increased public support for the government. China’s relatively restrained response to the United States can be attributed to the substantial economic value of the Chinese–US relationship.

The value of the Chinese–Canadian relationship was not as significant. Meng’s arrest was viewed as part of the West’s technological war against China, posing a threat to China’s core interests. When China and Canada failed to reach an agreement regarding Meng’s release, China took significant diplomatic and economic measures to escalate the situation. These actions exerted immense pressure on the Canadian government and eventually contributed to the agreement to release Meng and the detained ‘two Michaels’. This brought an end to this international incident, which lasted for more than 1000 days.

Contrary to assertions that suggest China blindly caters to nationalism, the reality is far more complex. Unless an international incident threatens political and social stability, China rarely resorts to escalation measures that cater to nationalism. This is because China emphasises the economic value of diplomatic relations and, when non-core interests are harmed, China usually refrains from escalating. China also seeks to resolve disputes through achieving agreements it supported.

The Chinese government responds to nationalism with pragmatic actions rather than widely perceived instrumentalist policies — and it is misleading to exaggerate the role of nationalism in China’s foreign policymaking.

Chenchao Lian is a PhD Candidate in International Relations at the University of Oxford. This article is based on his published research.

eastasiaforum.org · by Chenchao Lian · August 9, 2023

12. Taiwan Army major detained as spying case snowballs

Taiwan Army major detained as spying case snowballs

Top brass ensnared in treason accusations said to have leaked secrets to China

https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4966793?utm

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By Huang Tzu-ti, Taiwan News, Staff Writer

2023/08/09 14:22

An AH-64 Apache helicopter flies during the annual Han Kuang military exercises that simulate an attack on an airfield at Taoyuan International Airpor... (AP photo)

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — An Army major surnamed Ho (何) has been detained for allegedly spying for China in one of the most serious national security breach cases in Taiwan amid heightened cross-strait tensions.

The defense ministry confirmed on Wednesday (Aug. 9) Ho was placed in incommunicado detention for his role in handing secrets to China. His case is part of an ongoing investigation that saw an Army lieutenant colonel, surnamed Hsieh (謝), detained following raids last month.

Ho is a serving commander at the Huadong Defense Command and is said to have provided classified information to a former Army major surnamed Hsiao (蕭), who retired in April from a teaching post at the Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear defense (CBRN) training center, reported Liberty Times.

Hsiao was questioned on July 31 and released on bail of NT$600,000 (US$18,879), reportedly because he had confessed about the source of the sensitive data he possessed.

Seven collaborators in the spying operation have been named defendants, among whom three were detained and four granted bail. The personnel ensnared in the case include serving military officers from six camps nationwide, retired officers, and civilians, per Liberty Times.

Earlier this year, Nikkei ran a series of articles alleging that up to 90% of retired military officials in Taiwan provide intelligence to China. Beijing has continued its campaign to recruit retired Taiwanese military personnel to access state secrets.

13. US racing frantically to close missile defense holes

Excerpts:

Underscoring that fact is the GBD’s low success rate in testing. Missile Threat noted back in 2017 that out of 30 GBD tests since 1997, 17 of which were intercept tests involving a target ballistic missile, only nine of the 17 hit their mark, resulting in a success rate of just 53%.

Lockheed Martin notes that the most recent attempt to modernize the GBD was the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV), initiated in 2015. However, the program was canceled due to engineering flaws resulting in multi-year delays and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns.

Lockheed Martin says that reusing standard technologies that were not designed for space use has resulted in the need to overhaul completely most related flight systems.

US racing frantically to close missile defense holes

Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman gunning to field Next-Generation Interceptor against China, Russia and N Korea’s fast-evolving threats

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · August 10, 2023

The US is racing to develop its next-generation homeland missile defense system as China, Russia and North Korea field new, sophisticated types of missiles capable of punching through existing US defenses.

This month, Breaking Defense reported that US defense contractors Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman are accelerating the Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) development with plans to shave months off their earlier production schedule to develop a prototype by 2027.

A Lockheed Martin spokesperson said that the company has validated all the design elements of its Next-Generation Interceptors with the US Missile Defense Agency (MDA) on an accelerated schedule, according to the report. The spokesperson said Lockheed Martin has been consistently on track to deliver its prototype by 2027.

On August 7, Lockheed Martin announced that, following successful subsystem reviews, the company is gearing up for an “all up round” preliminary design review this quarter.

The report indicated the MDA will assess if Lockheed Martin’s designs are ready for the critical design review phase. For Northrop’s part, the company finished the systems requirements review three months ahead of schedule and is now aiming for a two-month preliminary systems review.

The Breaking Defense report notes that the move accelerates the critical design review process to the end of 2024 from early 2025. Breaking Defense also reported that Northrop has produced the initial batch of solid-fuel rocket cases for the program.

The report notes that these cases will be filled with inactive propellants and transported to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama, where they will be combined with an interceptor.

After that process, Northrop will continue pathfinder activities and further validate the process, noting that the interceptor will undergo further testing and process verification once the integration process is completed.

Patty-Jane Geller notes in a March 2023 article for the Heritage Foundation think tank that unlike the older Ground-Based Interceptor (GBI), which was declared operational in 2003, the NGI will include multiple kill vehicles to intercept multiple objects such as warheads and decoys coming from one missile.

A Ground-Based Interceptor launch in an undated image: Picture: Missile Threat / CSIS

Geller also notes that the NGI is designed as a single system explicitly for missile defense, in contrast to the GBI, which was rushed into service due to operational needs and employed parts initially designed for other missions, adding complexity to maintenance and upgrades.

Ultimately, Breaking Defense says the MDA plans to buy 20 NGIs starting in 2028 to augment the current GBI.

Asia Times notes that, as of 2021, the GBI is a significant component of the US Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GBD), the only US system defending all 50 US states against a limited intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) attack from China, Russia or North Korea. China and Russia can credibly currently threaten the US while North Korea is actively developing ICBMs to break the logic of US extended deterrence on the Korean Peninsula.

China’s solid-fuel DF-31 ICBM family poses a severe strategic risk to the US. Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance (MDAA) notes that the modernized DF-31A variant, which entered service in 2007, is a road-mobile and silo-capable design with a projected range greater than 11,000 kilometers, giving it the potential to strike all areas of the US, Europe and Russia.

MDAA mentions that, unlike the older DF-31, the DF-31A conceals its warhead under a shroud and reportedly employs penetration aids, including at least eight decoy warheads.

It also says that a newer variant, the DF-31B, is reportedly under development. MDAA says that the DF-31 reduces the ICBM technology gap between the US, China and Russia, with its MIRV capabilities having the potential to defeat US missile defenses. That, in turn, may give China strategic cover against US intervention during a Taiwan contingency.

Similarly, MDAA notes that Russia’s RS-28 Sarmat, which was first commissioned in 2010, can strike targets 10,000 kilometers away with between 10-16 MIRVs and possibly 24 YU-74 hypersonic glide vehicles in the future.

MDAA notes that the RS-28 serves both symbolic and strategic functions for Russia, underscoring its status as a nuclear power on par or more advanced than the US, which is still belatedly modernizing its nuclear arsenal.

MDAA also notes that the RS-28’s capability to carry hypersonic weapons has the potential to make current-generation missile defenses such as the GBI obsolete.

Alexander Ward claims in a February 2023 article for Politico that North Korea may already have enough ICBMs to overwhelm US missile defenses, noting that it unveiled 10 to 12 Hwasong-17 ICBMs during a military parade that month.

Ward also mentions that the Hwasong-17 can theoretically hit the US from North Korea, although he says Pyongyang has yet to demonstrate that capability.

More pointedly, he notes that the US has just 44 GBIs to intercept a potential limited ICBM attack from North Korea, but if it can fit four MIRVs into each Hwasong-17, Pyongyang can launch more nuclear warheads than the US has interceptors.

Given China, Russia and North Korea’s missile advances, the GBD may no longer be an effective defense against ICBM attacks. In a September 2020 Breaking Defense article, Lockheed Martin explained why the long-serving system is overdue for a replacement, which it said is unfit to defend the US from ICBM threats from the 2030s and beyond.

Hwasong-15 ICBMs, mounted on TELs, advance through the streets of Pyongyang in a pre-dawn parade. Photo: Asia Times Files / AFP

Underscoring that fact is the GBD’s low success rate in testing. Missile Threat noted back in 2017 that out of 30 GBD tests since 1997, 17 of which were intercept tests involving a target ballistic missile, only nine of the 17 hit their mark, resulting in a success rate of just 53%.

Lockheed Martin notes that the most recent attempt to modernize the GBD was the Redesigned Kill Vehicle (RKV), initiated in 2015. However, the program was canceled due to engineering flaws resulting in multi-year delays and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns.

Lockheed Martin says that reusing standard technologies that were not designed for space use has resulted in the need to overhaul completely most related flight systems.

asiatimes.com · by Gabriel Honrada · August 10, 2023

14. The Battle of Hostomel Airport: A Key Moment in Russia’s Defeat in Kyiv

Excerpts:

This battle offers many lessons: It demonstrated the necessity of having sufficient supporting fires — from artillery and/or aircraft — for deep strike operations. Lacking this vital asset, Russian forces were vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery fire coming from the capital, with no ability to counter their fire since no artillery had been included in the air assault. As a result, the airborne forces failed to seize and secure the airfield quickly enough to support the assault on the capital.

The battle also demonstrated the importance of attaining and retaining air superiority early on. The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) had some initial success when it came to jamming radars and suppressing fixed sites, but were not effective at dealing with mobile air defense systems once they deployed. In the opening days of the war, they forced Ukrainian air defense systems to displace to survive, but a few days later, Ukraine’s ground-based air defense systems came back online and began to close the skies to Russian airpower. When the initial invasion plan failed, the Russian VKS found itself without the capability, experience, or the plan to take on Ukraine’s air defense network. Although it had success in the short term in initially taking on Ukrainian air defenses, the Russian VKS did not prioritize training to destroy ground-based air defenses as a key mission, given that NATO militaries banked on attaining air superiority and had divested ground-based air defense in their force structure. Having failed to achieve a knockout blow to Ukraine’s air defense, Russian forces were not able to gain the air supremacy or air superiority that they likely expected to enjoy for the duration of the war.

This pivotal battle also illustrates the primacy of political assumptions in shaping the concept of operations and military strategy — in this case, to detrimental results. Russian forces attempted a high-risk operation, which could and did, go wrong. Had they invaded Ukraine as a joint force operation, assuming a prolonged conventional campaign and extensive resistance, the outcome would be uncertain at best. Yet while many of the Russian assumptions behind the invasion plan were fundamentally incorrect, the initial assault was not doomed to failure. A stubborn defense and counterattack by Ukrainian forces at Hostomel was decisive in scuttling Russian attempts to conduct a decapitation attack. Had the Russian operation at Hostomel gone differently, and Russian forces entered the capital in those early hours, it may have had a cascade effect on the course of the overall invasion.

The details above remain an early and at best imperfect attempt to capture this history. What they should illustrate is how contingent history truly is, and the importance of agency. The actions of individual commanders, soldiers, and citizens can and did have a profound impact in a pivotal battle that would help decide the course of the war.

The Battle of Hostomel Airport: A Key Moment in Russia’s Defeat in Kyiv - War on the Rocks

LIAM COLLINS, MICHAEL KOFMAN, AND JOHN SPENCER

warontherocks.com · by Liam Collins · August 10, 2023

The battle for Hostomel Airport was the first major battle of the Russo-Ukrainian War (2022-present) and a decisive event in the war. This battle started on the morning of February 24 and lasted less than 36 hours. In the opening hours of the Russo-Ukrainian war Russian forces sought to seize a key airfield just 12 miles from the capital’s center. Additional airborne battalions would follow on transport planes. They would rapidly deploy, seek to take control of the city, and overthrow the government or make the leadership flee. Russia ultimately gained control of the airport but failed to achieve the objective of the assault. Ukrainian National Guard conscripts, backed by artillery units, were able to delay the elite Russian airborne troops long enough to prevent the Russian military from using the airfield as an airbridge to support a rapid seizure of Ukraine’s capital.

Russia’s primary objective was to take control of Kyiv within 3-4 days. Vladimir Putin believed that if the Russian military could reach the capital quickly enough, President Volodymyr Zelensky and his government would capitulate, the population could be subdued, and a pro-Russian regime installed before effective resistance could be mobilized or the international community could react. This is undoubtedly why some senior U.S. officials, in the run up to the war, thought that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours.

Russian leadership planned a decapitation attack emphasizing speed of action, but it also involved substantial risk to the forces involved. Rather than a joint forces operation, with the destruction of Ukrainian armed forces as its main effort, Russia attempted a coup de main targeting Ukrainian leadership with the Hostomel operation as its centerpiece. Large incursions by maneuver forces along other axes were meant to take place simultaneously to generate paralysis in the Ukrainian armed forces. The operation was intended as a counterpart to extensive subversion and infiltration activities, with expectations in the Russian leadership that much of the Ukrainian resistance could be disabled from within. Moscow assumed it would not have to fight most of the Ukrainian military conventionally, but that once the capital was taken, parts of the military would stand down or could be readily isolated.

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This high-risk, high-reward strategy was not atypical given the number of such operations in Russian and Soviet history, including Operation Danube in 1968, Storm-333 in 1979, the seizure of Pristina airport in 1999, and the airborne airlift into Simferopol airport during the seizure of Crimea in 2014. If anything, the attempt was stereotypical of prior regime change operations. This risky approach to seizing the capital was also reminiscent of the initial failed attempt to secure Grozny in 1994, when a multiprong assault into the heart of the city went badly during the first Chechen War. Russian operations have often featured an opening move that involved securing a sizable airbase followed by a rapid buildup of airborne forces, which then attempted to secure the political leadership and set the conditions for a larger land force operation.

Prior to the invasion, Russian intelligence had moved infiltrators into Kyiv and its suburbs, including Irpin and Bucha. All three of us have conducted fieldwork in Ukraine, and we have learned via interviews that there was an extensive infiltration and support effort ahead of the invasion whose goal would have been to enable Russian airborne and special forces to quickly access the capital. These pro-Russian saboteurs marked landing zones, attempted to secure infrastructure, and were tasked with other supporting efforts. The Russian military strategy was premised on the assumption that the right conditions had been established by intelligence services in Ukraine to enable a lightning assault that would paralyze Ukrainian leadership.

This, however, did not materialize. Russian intelligence grossly overestimated what they could accomplish, as Ukrainian intelligence and police were able to neutralize important elements of the Russian network in the run-up to the operation. Furthermore, Russian units executing the invasion appear to have had little notice regarding the plans and outlines of the operation. Many were surprised that their initial deployment along the border “on exercise” had transitioned to a complex scheme for a large-scale invasion involving tight timetables and numerous axes of attack. Ukraine’s military assumed a Russian attack would focus on the Donbas, rather than a large-scale invasion of the whole country, and positioned its forces accordingly. As a result, both forces were to some extent surprised by what they faced on the opening day of the war.

The Battle

Russia’s operational plan called for a rapid air assault into Hostomel Airport, while mechanized forces would concurrently advance on Kyiv from Belarus, on the western side of the Dnipro River, and from Russia, on the river’s eastern side.

Hostomel Airport, a military airfield and base also called Antonov Airport, is located near Hostomel, a town in the Kyiv oblast about 12 miles northwest of Kyiv’s city center with a pre-war population of approximately 17,500. The military airbase included an 11,483 foot (3,500 meter) runway, capable of supporting the largest of transport aircraft, and several dozen single-story and multi-story structures — some up to six stories — and two large hangers. The built-up area, or cantonment area, was the home base of the Ukrainian National Guard’s 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade and located to the southeast of the runway.

We believe the Russian military selected Hostomel due to its large runway, its location along the Russian military’s mechanized forces route of advance, it having defendable terrain around the airfield, and it likely having lighter defenses than other nearby airfields, so that a small strike force could seize and hold the airfield long enough for reinforcements to arrive by air or ground.

Russia’s assault force consisted of approximately 34 helicopters and 200 to 300 Russian airborne soldiers from the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade and 45th Separate Guards Spetsnaz Brigade. Both units were part of the Russian Airborne forces, Vozdushno-desantnye voyska Rossii in Russian, commonly referred to as “VDV.” The helicopters included a mix of Mi-8 Hip transport aircraft — to carry the airborne soldiers — Ka-52 Alligator attack helicopters, and a few older Mi-24 attack helicopters. The force staged from VD Bolshoy Bokov airport in Belarus, approximately 170 kilometers north of Hostomel. Their objective was to seize the airport and establish an airbridge to support the assault on the capital.

We believe the Russian military expected minimal resistance at Hostomel, since only a small number of Ukrainian forces were left to defend the capital. The 72nd mechanized brigade, which was charged with Kyiv’s defense, was still on the move from its garrison south of the city. While many Ukrainian units began moving the day prior, they had not yet reached their planned defensive positions when the airmobile strike force arrived at Hostomel.

Thus, on the morning of the attack, approximately 200 soldiers from the Ukrainian National Guard’s 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade were left to defend the airport. The rapid reaction brigade was a new unit, organized according to NATO standards, combining light infantry, tanks, artillery, and surveillance drones. Ukraine expected Russia’s main effort to be in the Donbas region, so most of the brigade had been moved southeast. The 200 personnel left to guard the airfield were largely new conscripts and rear-echelon troops as opposed to combat soldiers. With the infantry, tanks, artillery, and drones out east, the defenders were left with small arms, older Igla man-portable air defense missile systems, and at least one ZU-23-2 towed 23×152 millimeter anti-aircraft gun to defend the airfield. They also had some air support consisting of two Ukrainian Su-24M bombers and two Mig-29 fighters. The handful of officers left were more akin to finance officers than infantry officers. Nonetheless, this small group had the enormous responsibility to defend the airfield.

Ukraine possessed the largest ground-based radar-guided air defense network in Europe, which it had inherited from the Soviet Union. This consisted of three brigades and two regiments of S-300PS/PT (SA-10) systems, a brigade of S-300V1s (SA-12), two brigades of Buk-M1s (SA-11), a few modernized S-125 systems (SA-3), and a mix of Osa (SA-8) short-range air defense systems, with reconditioned Tor (SA-15). The air defense network, combined with the skill of the operators, was arguably the most capable yet encountered by an air force in recent decades. The Russian Air and Space Forces were responsible for degrading and neutralizing this network, but analysts believed the aerospace forces were generally weak when it came to the dynamic targeting of enemy air defense systems and timely battle damage assessment of those systems. Consequently, they employed a static engagement plan, firing on pre-determined targets at pre-determined times. Thus, many of the Russian missile strikes on the morning of the assault struck fixed sites and predetermined targets, missing many of the Ukrainian air defense systems that began moving the day before. As a result, we believe the initial Russian attack was probably far less successful than the military had expected.

The Russians commenced their attack on February 24th with pre-assault strikes across the city, the airbase, and the infiltration corridor. Two 3M14 Kalibr cruise missiles struck Hostomel airport around 6 or 7 a.m. but proved ineffective. One missed the barracks and instead cratered a nearby parade field; the second missed a nearby residential building. The Russian aerospace forces, however, were effective at suppressing some Ukrainian air defenses. Other elements targeted Ukrainian command and control, leaving the Ukrainian air force to contest the sky that morning.

The Russian Aerospace Forces created a corridor for the air assault by successfully jamming some Ukrainian radars and damaging or suppressing two major air defense sites responsible for screening the Dnipro River north of the city. With Ukrainian air defenses weakened, Russian helicopters crossed the Belarusian border and entered Ukrainian airspace at approximately 9:30 a.m. They conducted a low-level, “nap of the earth” infiltration along the Dnipro River to avoid any Ukrainian radars that might have remained operational. They remained undetected until they neared the dam at the Kyiv hydroelectric powerplant just north of Kyiv around 10:30 a.m. After being spotted, Ukrainian anti-aircraft missiles downed two of the lead helicopters near the dam. A damaged Ka-52 crash-landed near the river’s shore while a destroyed Mi-24 crashed into the river. Trailing helicopters fired their flares and avoided further losses.

Around 11 a.m., the attack formation neared Hostomel airport. As they approached, the attack helicopters broke to the north — to engage targets on the airfield — and the transport helicopters broke to the south — planning to land and secure the airfield’s barracks and facilities. The Ukrainian Commander, 36 year-old Lt. Andriy Kulish, was unaware of approaching helicopters until he heard the chopping of the helicopters’ rotor blades. Minutes later, the sounds of the rotors were drowned out by the sounds of rockets and machine gun fire from the attack helicopters.

But the Russians faced stiffer resistance than they expected. Kulish had deployed his small force to defend the airfield earlier in the morning. Roughly 20 Ukrainian National Guard soldiers defended the radar at the northern end of the airfield with the ZU-23-2 anti-aircraft guns while the rest — which included a couple of squads of National Guard reinforcements that had been sent to help defend the airfield earlier in the morning — defended the airfield from battle positions at the airfield’s south. The Ukrainian military had also moved large trucks and other vehicles onto the airfield to make it unserviceable for fixed-wing aircraft until after the vehicles had been moved.

It did not take long for the National Guard conscripts to make their presence known. As one of the KA-52 Alligators was making a strafing run, a soldier attempted to engage it with his 9k38 Igla (SA-24) infrared-homing surface-to-air missile system, but the Russian helicopter was too close. As it passed, he reacquired the attack helicopter in his sights and fired. The direct hit brought the helicopter careening onto the runway, fortuitously creating another obstacle. This successful engagement provided a morale boost that quickly spread across the Ukrainian fighters. The rear echelon conscripts started to believe that they could actually succeed in fighting the Russians. It was the first, but not the last, helicopter that these soldiers would bring down. Over the next two hours, the National Guard defenders appear to have downed two more KA-52s and one Mi-8s using a mix of man-portable air defenses, anti-aircraft guns, and small arms fire.

Despite the resistance, the Russians eventually inserted the roughly 300 airborne soldiers onto the airfield in two waves of 10 helicopters each. Once on the ground, the soldiers — armed with just small arms, machine guns, and man-portable anti-tank weapons — moved out to secure the airfield and adjacent structures. Although these specific elements of the Russian airborne regularly trained for heliborne assaults, there is no evidence that the Russian units involved knew the plan sufficiently in advance or had time to rehearse it. The flat airfield also offered little cover or concealment for the Russian soldiers, whose numbers were too few relative to the force required to control an airbase of that size.

Running low on ammunition, the Ukrainian National Guard soldiers had consolidated near the cantonment area just prior to the Russian insertion and were preparing to withdraw after exhausting their basic load of ammunition. For whatever reason, the National Guard conscripts failed to carry or cache the ammunition necessary for an extended fight.

Regardless, the Ukrainian National Guard soldiers conducted a deliberate withdrawal down a relatively narrow street on the airbase and were able to escape, largely unscathed. The Ukrainians claimed not to have suffered a fatality or a significant casualty during the battle. The fact that they were able to withdraw so easily leads credence to this claim, as they did not appear to be slowed by the evacuation of any litter patients. The 20 or so conscripts guarding the radar at the northern end of the base, however, were not as lucky. Surrounded by nothing but fields offering no concealed escape routes, they were among the first prisoners of the war.

Around 1 p.m., nearly two hours after the battle’s start, the Russians finally secured the airfield, but they were left in a precarious position. The helicopters had returned to Belarus, and the airborne soldiers — lacking tanks and artillery — had to defend the airbase with only limited air support, possibly consisting of two Su-25 Frogfoot ground attack jets, until reinforcements could arrive. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces were mobilizing manpower and had a decisive advantage in fires around the capital.

The first Russian reinforcements were supposed to arrive by air. This force consisted of approximately 1,000 soldiers that had staged from an airbase in Pskov, Russia, approximately two hours (by air) from Hostomel. This force had loaded onto 18 Il-76 transport planes earlier in the day and appeared to be en route to Hostomel before the mission had to be aborted midair when the Russians failed to rapidly seize and secure the airfield. This was a pivotal moment in the then-nascent fight, but the reason why the Russian airborne abandoned their reinforcement plan is unclear. It may have been due to Ukrainian artillery fire targeting the airstrip, rendering it unusable, or it may have been the general inability of the Russian airborne to control the airfield. Alternatively, the Russian military may have been concerned about losing Il-76s due to residual air defenses after having lost 6-7 helicopters during the assault.

The second set of Russian reinforcements were the mechanized and armor forces that were advancing toward Kyiv from Belarus on the west side of the Dnipro River. After the initial Russian mechanized forces crossed the Ukrainian border at 4 a.m. on the morning of February 24, they only had to drive 79 miles by road to reach Kyiv. The Russian plan likely assumed that either the transport planes or mechanized forces would reach the airport by late afternoon, but neither was the case. The advancing mechanized forces were encountering their own difficulties while fighting along the narrow corridor through Chernobyl and Ivankiv, meaning the Russian Airborne forces would be on their own through the first night.

The Counterattack

The Ukrainian military recognized the strategic importance of Hostomel Airport. If Russian forces could hold the airfield and establish an airbridge, the capital would be at grave risk. Thus, Ukrainian military leadership immediately ordered a counterattack to retake the airfield with elements from the 80th Air Assault Brigade, 95th Air Assault Brigade, 72nd Mechanized Brigade, and the 3rd Special Purpose Regiment of the Special Operations Forces (SSO). Volunteers, consisting of veterans and other Ukrainian citizens, also took up arms to support the counterattack and defend Kyiv, as they did throughout the country in the early hours and days of the invasion. The air assault forces launched from Zhytomyr utilizing helicopters, while mechanized forces moved by land from a military base at Bila Tserkva, approximately 60 miles south of Hostomel.

Around 3:30 p.m., President Volodymyr Zelensky declared, “The enemy [airborne soldiers] in [Hostomel] have been blocked, and troops have received an order to destroy them.” Yet the attack would not begin until closer to sunset (around 5:30 p.m.). Around 4 p.m., CNN reporter Matthew Chance was surprised to be greeted by the Russian airborne soldiers establishing blocking positions on the perimeter of the airfield. Shortly before sunset, the Ukrainian counterattack started with strikes from artillery and Su-24 bombers to soften the Russian defenses. As the ground assault commenced, some of the Ukrainian soldiers noted that the Russian airborne soldiers failed to occupy good defensive positions and found it fairly easy to dislodge them. One Ukrainian soldier described engaging the minimally protected Russian forces on the airfield as being like “playing a video game, just shooting and knocking them down from our positions outside the airfield.”

Before the night was through, Ukrainian soldiers claimed to have retaken the airfield after killing many of the airborne soldiers; the remainder having retreated into the woods to the airfield’s west. By 9 p.m., the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade posted an image on their Facebook page of soldiers celebrating the victory, but their stay on the airfield would also be short-lived. The Ukrainians knew that the Russian mechanized forces were closing in from the north and that they lacked the combat power to hold the airfield, so they withdrew. But as they were withdrawing, the Ukrainians used artillery and aerial bombardments to crater the runway to make it unusable as an airbridge for Russia’s invasion.

The following morning, February 25th, Russian ground forces reached the airport and took control again. The Eastern Military District’s grouping of forces was intended to screen the Russian airborne operation, encircling the city from the west and preventing reinforcement. Ukrainian officials initially denied claims that Russia controlled the airport, but by the end of the day Ukrainian officials admitted that Russia controlled the airport after the Minister of Defense declared that the airfield was too damaged to be used.

The Aftermath and Lessons Learned

The battle of Hostomel was arguably the most critical battle of the Russo-Ukrainian war to date. Although the Ukrainian military was unable to maintain control of the airfield, the National Guard conscripts delayed the assault long enough to prevent Russia from immediately using Hostomel airport as an airbridge. Ukrainian forces north of the city also delayed the mechanized battalions advancing south from Belarus long enough to create a window for Ukrainian forces to counterattack and deliberately crater Hostomel’s runway enough to make it unusable.

The failure at Hostomel was compounded by the slowness of the Russian advance from Belarus, which forced the Russian troops to attempt to seize the capital without the element of surprise, days behind schedule. But based on how events played out over the next month — through a series of seemingly haphazard and uncoordinated attacks in Irpin, Bucha, Moshchun, and other Kyiv suburbs — it appears that the Russian leadership had not developed a serious alternate plan. Ukraine lacked suitable defenses and defensive forces on the city’s western side during the first week of the war, but the Russian military failed to adapt, sticking with the original plan to assault from Hostomel into the city center. They also failed to complete an encirclement of the city, which allowed Ukrainian forces to reinforce the capital.

Having failed in establishing an airbridge and the abortive attempt at a rapid victory, the Russian military was forced to fight Ukrainian forces entrenched in the urban sprawl around Kyiv. Russian units, which privileged maneuver warfare with mechanized formations, lacked the training and failed to adequately prepare for combat in dense urban environments. Airborne units, without the preparation and training to effectively operate in urban environments, were not more elite than the regular Russian infantry. Beyond the challenges in the city, the Russian military also faced challenges to its supply lines. Ukrainian forces strangled the narrow ground lines of communications that ran from Belarus by blowing bridges, flooding rivers northwest of the city, and conducting ambushes. The Russian sustainment problem was born not of a general logistical failure, but of effective Ukrainian efforts to stymie the Russian advance from Belarus, including destroying bridges and flooding rivers.

Over the next month, Ukrainian forces steadily attritted the Russian forces, ultimately decimating the best trained components of Russia’s airborne, Spetsnaz, and special forces units. On March 25th, the Russian military announced a withdrawal from Kyiv (having never penetrated the city’s limits), and by April 1st, Russian forces had pulled out of Hostomel, giving up on their goal to seize the capital and win the war quickly. By April 6th, Russian forces had completely withdrawn from Kyiv Oblast. The lack of trained infantry and the losses suffered in the early weeks of the war would have a lasting impact on the Russian campaign in 2022, which suffered from a structural deficit in manpower, especially forces capable of fighting in urban terrain.

This battle offers many lessons: It demonstrated the necessity of having sufficient supporting fires — from artillery and/or aircraft — for deep strike operations. Lacking this vital asset, Russian forces were vulnerable to Ukrainian artillery fire coming from the capital, with no ability to counter their fire since no artillery had been included in the air assault. As a result, the airborne forces failed to seize and secure the airfield quickly enough to support the assault on the capital.

The battle also demonstrated the importance of attaining and retaining air superiority early on. The Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) had some initial success when it came to jamming radars and suppressing fixed sites, but were not effective at dealing with mobile air defense systems once they deployed. In the opening days of the war, they forced Ukrainian air defense systems to displace to survive, but a few days later, Ukraine’s ground-based air defense systems came back online and began to close the skies to Russian airpower. When the initial invasion plan failed, the Russian VKS found itself without the capability, experience, or the plan to take on Ukraine’s air defense network. Although it had success in the short term in initially taking on Ukrainian air defenses, the Russian VKS did not prioritize training to destroy ground-based air defenses as a key mission, given that NATO militaries banked on attaining air superiority and had divested ground-based air defense in their force structure. Having failed to achieve a knockout blow to Ukraine’s air defense, Russian forces were not able to gain the air supremacy or air superiority that they likely expected to enjoy for the duration of the war.

This pivotal battle also illustrates the primacy of political assumptions in shaping the concept of operations and military strategy — in this case, to detrimental results. Russian forces attempted a high-risk operation, which could and did, go wrong. Had they invaded Ukraine as a joint force operation, assuming a prolonged conventional campaign and extensive resistance, the outcome would be uncertain at best. Yet while many of the Russian assumptions behind the invasion plan were fundamentally incorrect, the initial assault was not doomed to failure. A stubborn defense and counterattack by Ukrainian forces at Hostomel was decisive in scuttling Russian attempts to conduct a decapitation attack. Had the Russian operation at Hostomel gone differently, and Russian forces entered the capital in those early hours, it may have had a cascade effect on the course of the overall invasion.

The details above remain an early and at best imperfect attempt to capture this history. What they should illustrate is how contingent history truly is, and the importance of agency. The actions of individual commanders, soldiers, and citizens can and did have a profound impact in a pivotal battle that would help decide the course of the war.

Become a Member

Liam Collins, is Executive Director of the Madison Policy forum and a fellow at New America Foundation. He was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and served as a defense advisor to Ukraine from 2016 to 2018. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America. He is co-author of the book Understanding Urban Warfare.

Michael Kofman is a senior fellow at Carnegie Endowment. His research focuses on Russia, specializing in Russian armed forces, military thought, capabilities, and strategy. Previously he served as Director of the CNA Russia Studies Program, along with prior research fellowships at Modern War Institute, Wilson Center, Center for New American Security, and National Defense University, Department of Defense.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Liam Collins · August 10, 2023

15. Why You Should Worry About China’s Missing Minister

Excepts:

The thickening shroud of secrecy is a problem not only for policy makers around the world, but also for those governing China. Domestic officials responsible for addressing the consequences of the country’s slowing growth and social pressures are not talking to one another, says Mary Gallagher, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Michigan. “I don’t think the system is as responsive as it used to be, and I think that will be very problematic based on how many problems it needs to solve in the next five to 10 years,” Gallagher told me.

In other words, Xi’s secrecy could imperil his ambitions for China and its role in the world. The Qin Gang mystery is thus a warning sign of profound and dangerous weaknesses in the Chinese political system that have emerged under Xi’s rule and are likely to continue to deepen.

The Qin affair “points to this issue of elite instability that I think we’ll see more of in China,” Gallagher said. “We don’t know the process by which the next leader is going to be chosen, and we also don’t know when the next leader will be chosen. That just makes the people who are jockeying for that position and of course the people around them just more prone to internal struggles.”

The world will likely have to guess at those machinations as well. “I really worry that we are moving into an era where people understand less and less what’s actually taking place in China,” Minzner told me. “I find it very difficult to figure out how this gets reversed.”

Why You Should Worry About China’s Missing Minister

If the world’s best China experts can’t figure out what happened to one of the country’s most internationally recognizable officials, then imagine what else remains hidden behind the regime’s closed doors.

By Michael Schuman

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · August 9, 2023

The disappearance of Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has generated a torrent of speculation about what might have happened to him. The mystery points to a larger, and disconcerting, truth: We understand very little about the inner workings of Chinese politics at a moment when we need to know more than ever.

China’s Communist regime has always been opaque. But the more China’s global power rises, the more problematic the Communist Party’s secrecy becomes. The decisions made in Beijing influence the wealth and welfare of billions of people, the health of the planet, and war and peace itself. Yet policy makers and diplomats around the world are too often left guessing about how these decisions are made, who is making them, and why.

The current Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has further narrowed the already small window into the cloistered halls of power. “Secrecy is the default position of the Communist Party anyway, but it has been put on steroids under Xi,” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me.

Read: Can a million Chinese people die and nobody know?

In the strained relationship between the United States and China, the dearth of reliable information about Beijing’s circumstances and decision making could lead to dangerous misunderstandings. “This is a real problem in U.S.-China relations,” Carl Minzner, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who specializes in Chinese government, told me. “You start to lose your appreciation for what is actually taking place in China and why,” with the result that “it is always easy to ascribe the worst narrative” to China’s actions.

The missing minister is a case in point. Qin Gang is a well-known figure in Washington, where he previously served as ambassador to the United States before being promoted to foreign minister in December. He has been widely seen as an up-and-coming politician and a Xi loyalist. He was awarded a seat on the powerful Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in October.

In early July, Qin failed to appear at several important diplomatic meetings. China watchers took note as Beijing abruptly canceled a planned visit by the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, and as China’s foreign ministry later cited health issues as the reason Qin did not attend a summit with Southeast Asian nations.

Later that month, Qin was suddenly removed as foreign minister and replaced by his predecessor, Wang Yi. Two days after the announcement, the foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning was asked about that decision at a briefing, and she offered no explanation, instead protesting the “malicious hype of this matter.”

The government appears to be confused about how to present Qin’s disappearance. After his dismissal, the foreign ministry began erasing Qin from its website, only to reverse course and restore the deleted references. Meanwhile, Qin’s whereabouts remain unknown. He has not been seen in public since June 25.

Tsang attributes the obfuscation surrounding Qin to the Communist Party’s tendency to place its own perceived interests ahead of concern for the international community or even the nation. “What the Chinese foreign minister does or doesn’t do, or what happens to him, matters to the rest of the world,” Tsang said. “Does the Communist Party, in particular its core leader, give much of a monkey for this implication for the rest of the world? No.”

China watchers have stepped in to fill the information void with debate and speculation about Qin’s apparent downfall. Conditioned by experience with official deception, many experts have suspected that something sinister is afoot. Perhaps Qin ran afoul of the party bosses and became the target of a purge, or was the subject of an investigation for unknown infractions. A narrative emerged that alleges Qin had an affair—and possibly a child—with a journalist at a Chinese-language television network. Though hardly moral paragons, China’s top leaders frown upon such personal foibles if they can potentially compromise the Communist Party.

But the sex-scandal saga could just as easily be utter nonsense. Qin so far seems to have retained his other, more influential, posts, including on the party’s Central Committee, which implies that politics may not be at play. Or that Xi has not yet decided on Qin’s ultimate fate. Or that the party is trying to deflect criticism from Xi, who elevated Qin over more experienced officials, in the hope that the controversy blows over.

Or … who knows. But therein lies the big point. If the world’s best China experts can’t figure out what happened to one of China’s most internationally recognizable officials, then imagine what else remains hidden behind the regime’s closed doors.

The party prefers it that way. Michelle Mood, a longtime China expert at Kenyon College, commented to me that the Qin affair reveals “the limits of the knowable with regard to China.”

Xi has consistently tightened the state’s grip on information within China. In recent years, censors have suppressed discussion of economic policy, LGBTQ issues, and even K-pop. Regulators recently finalized new rules for chatbots run by artificial intelligence that, though less stringent than an earlier draft, insist the content generated must be in line with the country’s socialist values. In May, authorities detained a comedian who told a joke about China’s military and fined the company he worked for $2 million—a sign of just how sensitive the state can be.

Xi’s government has shown heightened paranoia about what the world knows about China as well. Earlier this year, a prominent database of Chinese academic research curtailed foreign access to its platform. Vincent Brussee and Kai von Carnap, analysts at the Mercator Institute for China Studies, argued in a recent paper that a newly amended anti-espionage law could target “almost anyone who exchanges information with international counterparts” and that the aim is “to make the Communist Party the sole narrator of China’s story.” The state security ministry, in its first post on a social-media account, encouraged Chinese citizens to get involved in antispying efforts by spying on others.

Tsang argues that the trend toward greater secrecy is a consequence of Xi’s centralization of power. “Unlike in collective leadership, when the top leader can hide behind collective decisions, there is nowhere for Xi Jinping to hide,” Tsang told me. Exerting control over information through secrecy allows a strongman to protect his stature and to claim infallibility: “If nobody knows what actually happened, you were never wrong, because they can never find evidence to show that you were wrong,” Tsang said.

But in truth Xi has often been wrong, and China is suffering for it. His policies have contributed to a sagging economy, hostile relations with most of the world’s major powers, and growing pessimism about the nation’s future. With a shortage of good news to boast of, Xi preserves his political standing by wielding ever greater influence over narratives about China.

Read: The end of optimism in China

The effort to stave off criticism and bad news has led the leadership to treat topics of discussion that were once considered relatively safe ground—such as economic policy—as potentially threatening. To Minzner, the Council on Foreign Relations fellow, this rise in sensitivity toward formerly innocuous subject matter is evidence of a broader trend toward “securitization,” in which the system responds to economic and social pressures by locking down access to information. Put another way, according to Mood, the Communist Party’s “political legitimacy, no longer supported by a growing economy, is now based on censorship to control information and knowledge.”

The thickening shroud of secrecy is a problem not only for policy makers around the world, but also for those governing China. Domestic officials responsible for addressing the consequences of the country’s slowing growth and social pressures are not talking to one another, says Mary Gallagher, a specialist in Chinese politics at the University of Michigan. “I don’t think the system is as responsive as it used to be, and I think that will be very problematic based on how many problems it needs to solve in the next five to 10 years,” Gallagher told me.

In other words, Xi’s secrecy could imperil his ambitions for China and its role in the world. The Qin Gang mystery is thus a warning sign of profound and dangerous weaknesses in the Chinese political system that have emerged under Xi’s rule and are likely to continue to deepen.

The Qin affair “points to this issue of elite instability that I think we’ll see more of in China,” Gallagher said. “We don’t know the process by which the next leader is going to be chosen, and we also don’t know when the next leader will be chosen. That just makes the people who are jockeying for that position and of course the people around them just more prone to internal struggles.”

The world will likely have to guess at those machinations as well. “I really worry that we are moving into an era where people understand less and less what’s actually taking place in China,” Minzner told me. “I find it very difficult to figure out how this gets reversed.”

The Atlantic · by Michael Schuman · August 9, 2023

16. China is edging toward deflation. Here's what that means.

China is edging toward deflation. Here's what that means.

CBS News · by Aimee Picchi

Whereas the U.S. continues to grapple with elevated prices, China is dealing with the opposite problem. In July, the world's second largest economy slipped into deflationary territory, with consumer prices declining 0.3% from a year earlier.

The decline in consumer prices sets China apart in more ways than one. In the post-COVID era, many nations, ranging from the U.K. to the U.S., have struggled with high inflation sparked by a combination of government spending and tight labor markets, which have sent their economies into overdrive.

China's deflation comes amid high unemployment for its younger workers, with more than 1 in 5 people between 16 to 24 unable to find a job. Meanwhile, the country's economic activity fizzled out earlier than expected following the lifting of virus controls, prompting Chinese leaders to try to shore up business and consumer activity.

"China's economic trajectory has been a focal point of global attention for decades, with its staggering growth and transformation capturing the world's imagination," noted Nigel Green of wealth management company deVere Group in a Wednesday research note. "But the recent emergence of serious deflationary pressures in the world's second-largest economy is triggering concerns that extend well beyond its borders."

Here's what to know about deflation.

Janet Yellen warns China to end "unfair economic practices" 05:38

What is deflation?

Deflation is a decline in overall price levels, and is the opposite of inflation, when prices rise over a period of time.

Deflation typically is linked with economic downturns, such as during the Great Depression in the U.S. during the 1930s, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

Is deflation bad?

Deflation might seem like a good trend, at least on the face of it — after all, if prices decline, that means your paycheck will go farther because and, in theory at least, you'll have more purchasing power.

But deflation's impact can hit a nation's broader economy in a number of negative ways. For one, if people believe items will cost less next week or next month, they may hold off on buying products or services, strangling the lifeblood of an economy: consumer spending.

If that happens, companies could respond by cutting workers, trimming wages or making other adjustments.

Secondly, deflation is a negative for people or businesses with debt, such as mortgages or other loans. That's because even though prices are falling, the value of debt doesn't change, which puts pressure on consumers and businesses to cut spending in order to service their debt payments.

Why is China experiencing deflation?

China's deflation appears to be coming from two sectors — transportation and food, with pork prices down 26% year over year, Ben Emons, senior portfolio manager and head of fixed income at NewEdge Wealth, said in a Wednesday research note.

Stripping out volatile food and energy prices, China's consumer price index rose 0.8% in July, he noted. Overall, the deflation experienced last month in China is "mild" and could be quickly reversed, Emons added.

"China may be in deflation but that is less likely to persist as the Chinese government is set on hitting the GDP target of 5.5%," he wrote. "Moreover, pork-driven disinflation can be manipulated, which means that China CPI deflation is likely to reverse quickly."

Could deflation in China impact the U.S.?

It's possible, partly because the U.S. imports a lot of goods from China, according to economists and market experts.

"As its exports become cheaper due to deflation, other economies might face increased competition, forcing them to lower their own prices or risk losing market share," Green of deVere group noted.

He added, "Also, reduced demand for raw materials and commodities due to its economic slowdown is likely to lead to a decrease in global commodity prices."

In:
China

CBS News · by Aimee Picchi

17. Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine

Excerpts:

As for the counteroffensive, she said: “Our expectations were higher. If it’s going on, it’s going slow.”

In Kryvyi Rih, doctor Valeriya Maslyanyk, 58, sighed as she looked up at her damaged apartment this week — just one entrance over from a section of the building destroyed in a strike last month. A gaping hole sits where her neighbors used to live. Outside, a pile of flowers and stuffed animals memorializes them.

Already thinking ahead to winter, she fears her windows will not be replaced by the time temperatures start to drop. She is tired and sees no end in sight. “I want to go to the sea,” she said wistfully. “But the Russians took all of our seas.”

Across the street, construction worker Volodymyr Pravednyk, 46, stopped to observe the wreckage. His sister lives in the same apartment block but escaped unscathed.

Pravednyk said that he fears that the attack was “just the beginning” of more strikes on this industrial city. He lives around the corner, and each time he passes the ruined building, he said, “I feel sorrow for us Ukrainian civilians who have to suffer so much.”

Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in Ukraine

By Siobhán O'Grady, Kostiantyn Khudov and Heidi Levine

August 10, 2023 at 3:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · August 10, 2023

KYIV, Ukraine — This nation is worn out.

For nearly 18 months, Ukraine has stood against its Russian invaders — rallying support for its troops by embracing last year’s battlefield victories in the Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson regions.

Those wins carried beleaguered Ukrainians through a winter of airstrikes on civilian infrastructure and a brutal and symbolic battle for Bakhmut, the eastern city that fell to the Russians in May.

Throughout, Ukrainian officials and their western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive — one that, buoyed by a flood of new weapons and training, they hoped would turn the tide of the war.

But two months after Ukraine went on the attack, with little visible progress on the front and a relentless, bloody summer across the country, the narrative of unity and endless perseverance has begun to fray.

The number of dead — untold thousands — increases daily. Millions are displaced and see no chance of returning home. In every corner of the country, civilians are exhausted from a spate of recent Russian attacks — including strikes on a historic cathedral in Odessa, a residential building in Kryvyi Rih and a blood transfusion center in the Kharkiv region.

This week, two Russian missiles hit a single block in the eastern town of Pokrovsk — where an evacuation train regularly picks up people fleeing front-line areas nearby — killing civilians and emergency workers who rushed there to save them.

Ukrainians, much in need of good news, are simply not getting any.

Music teacher Svitlana Zhdanova, 75, was sitting in her living room in Pokrovsk on Tuesday evening when the missiles rammed into her block, shattering all her glassware and breaking her piano. Not knowing where else to go, she cleaned up the apartment she has lived in since 1969 and decided to stay.

Raisa Rybalchenko, 78, lived on the fourth floor of a building badly damaged in the double strike. She was in the kitchen when the first blast hit. Soon after, five men banged on the door, shouting “Is anyone alive?” She called back that she was.

One of them carried her down the stairs. Soon after, the next strike hit. At least nine people have died so far, and dozens of others were wounded.

On Wednesday, Rybalchenko was among the crowds of shocked people helping board up windows and sort through the remnants of their lives. She hopes the government will repair her apartment. “But right now, I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t have any idea what is next. I’m just in shock.”

In Smila, a small city in central Ukraine, baker Alla Blyzniuk, 42, said she sells sweets for funeral receptions daily as parents prepare to bury their children killed on the front hundreds of miles away.

Before, she said, even when the situation was painful, “people were united.” They volunteered, made meals for one another and delivered food to soldiers. Now, she said, there’s a sense of collective “disappointment.”

Blyzniuk also lives in fear that her husband or two sons of fighting age will be mobilized. She has already noticed that far fewer men walk the streets of her city than before. Ukraine does not disclose its military casualty counts, but everyone shares stories, she said, of new soldiers at the front lasting just two to three days.

“The defenders of our country should be professionals,” she said. “I’m really sad,” she added. “We Ukrainians did not deserve this destiny.”

In the Donetsk region, an Estonian Ukrainian soldier who goes by the call sign Suzie works at a stabilization point where wounded soldiers are treated before being transferred to hospitals in safer towns. On a recent day, he helped organize body bags that would soon be used in the makeshift morgue that already reeked of death.

Sometimes, he said, soldiers’ bodies are so blown apart they have to use two or three body bags to contain them. There are times when a soldier is returned with “just 15 percent of the body,” Suzie said. “I never saw so much blood before.”

“It is such a hard price for freedom,” he added.

These scenes are unfolding a world away from Kyiv, the capital, where civilians — somewhat protected by strengthened air defenses — often hardly even react to air raid sirens. But even here, painful signs of the war lurk everywhere.

On park benches, freshly wounded soldiers being treated in the capital sip coffee and smoke cigarettes before returning to their hospital beds. They watch as civilians stroll by, dogs and babies in tow.

Viktor, 34, a former restaurant waiter, is among them. He came under mortar attack in a trench on the front line in Zaporizhzhia last week. His wrist was split open and his face — now covered in scabs — was sprayed with shrapnel. His knee was also hit.

Now, in Kyiv, he sees bars and restaurants are packed and the city hums with traffic. A group of children walked by, craning their necks to look at his injuries. Viktor, who asked that his last name not be disclosed for security reasons, considered himself lucky to at least be able to walk.

Many other men in the same park are missing limbs, and Viktor’s Facebook is flooded with photos of soldiers who did not make it home at all. The images haunt him so much he no longer likes to check his phone.

“It’s too depressing,” he said.

The latest fight has been grueling. One day, it took his unit seven hours to move forward just 400 meters, he said — about a quarter of a mile. “And that was quite fast.”

He and his wife, who is also serving in the military, were due to see each other that afternoon for the first time since he was wounded. “I’ll probably cry,” he said. Once he is healed, he said, he will go back to the front.

Ruslan Proektor, 52, lost his leg this summer when he stepped on a mine fighting in the east. He was immediately wounded again when the soldier trying to carry him to safety stepped on another. Now that he is recovering in Kyiv, his wife, Anna Oliinyk, 47, said she wants “the counteroffensive to be more active.”

“We’ve got all these guys coming back from the front line without limbs,” she said, looking at her husband, who was in a wheelchair. “I want the price they paid to be reasonable. Otherwise it’s just useless, what they went through.”

Given the choice now, Proektor said, he would not sign up again. “They are taking everyone and sending them to the front line without proper preparation,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the company of unmotivated people.”

Others like him are mainly enraged at Russia — but they also aren’t afraid to criticize Ukraine.

Last week, President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged that a government audit of recruitment centers discovered “revolting” practices among corrupt officials.

One soldier who goes by the call sign “Positive” and is recovering at a hospital in Kyiv after suffering concussions in Kherson and Bakhmut, said people profiting off the war “should be sent to the front line.”

Yulia Paltseva, 36, a receptionist in Kyiv, said she has been shocked by how residents of Kyiv still party and socialize. Her boyfriend is at the front and will soon be transferred to fight near Bakhmut, she said.

“All those dancing and smiling people should remember that there are those soldiers like my boyfriend in the trenches without any rotations and being shelled every day,” Paltseva said.

As for the counteroffensive, she said: “Our expectations were higher. If it’s going on, it’s going slow.”

In Kryvyi Rih, doctor Valeriya Maslyanyk, 58, sighed as she looked up at her damaged apartment this week — just one entrance over from a section of the building destroyed in a strike last month. A gaping hole sits where her neighbors used to live. Outside, a pile of flowers and stuffed animals memorializes them.

Already thinking ahead to winter, she fears her windows will not be replaced by the time temperatures start to drop. She is tired and sees no end in sight. “I want to go to the sea,” she said wistfully. “But the Russians took all of our seas.”

Across the street, construction worker Volodymyr Pravednyk, 46, stopped to observe the wreckage. His sister lives in the same apartment block but escaped unscathed.

Pravednyk said that he fears that the attack was “just the beginning” of more strikes on this industrial city. He lives around the corner, and each time he passes the ruined building, he said, “I feel sorrow for us Ukrainian civilians who have to suffer so much.”

O’Grady and Khudov reported from Kyiv, Kryvyi Rih and Smila. Levine reported from Pokrovsk and elsewhere in the Donetsk region. Mykhailo Melnychenko contributed to this report.

The Washington Post · by Siobhán O'Grady · August 10, 2023

18. Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s

Published before yesterday's incident in Utah.

Political violence in polarized U.S. at its worst since 1970s

In contrast to the 1970s, much of today's political violence is aimed at people instead of property — and most of the recent deadly outbursts tracked by Reuters have come from the right. Case in point: the Trump supporter who shot a neighbor he suspected of being a Democrat.

By NED PARKER and PETER EISLER Filed Aug. 9, 2023, 11 a.m. GMT

Reuters · by NED PARKER and PETER EISLER · August 9, 2023

OKEANA, Ohio

As Kristen King’s husband lay dying in their yard from three gunshots to his head, the 911 operator asked her: Did she know who killed him – or why?

Sobbing, King identified the shooter as her neighbor in the small Ohio town of Okeana. “His name is Austin Combs,” she stammered. “He’s come over, like, four times confronting my husband because he thought he was a Democrat.”

Then she broke down. “Why?” King wailed on the 911 recording, struggling for breath. “He’s the love of my life!”

The Nov. 5 killing of Anthony King was among 213 cases of political violence identified by Reuters since the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by supporters of former President Donald Trump on the U.S. Capitol. Three academics who reviewed the cases say they add to growing evidence that America is grappling with the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s.

The violence has killed at least 39 people, including King, roiling many aspects of American life, from small gatherings to large-scale public events. Some deaths followed one-on-one disputes, such as a fatal brawl last year between two Florida men arguing over Trump’s business acumen. Others happened in public settings, such as the shooting of five social justice protesters in Portland last year by a man immersed in far-right political rhetoric. Politically motivated mass killings claimed 24 of the lives, including the May 2022 shooting of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo by a white supremacist who called for a race war.

About two-thirds of the politically violent incidents documented by Reuters were assaults by lone assailants or clashes between rival groups at public events, such as demonstrations over police killings, abortion and transgender rights. The rest involved substantial property damage, often associated with social justice protests and frequently attributed by police to left-wing militants.

Incidents of political violence began rising in 2016, around the time of Trump’s first run for the presidency, said Gary LaFree, a University of Maryland criminologist who has tracked such violence in a terrorism database between 1970 and 2020.

Austin Combs after his arrest for the murder of neighbor Anthony King in November 2022. Butler County Sheriff’s Office/Handout via REUTERS

Political violence surged for nearly a decade starting in the late-1960s – 1970 alone saw more than 450 cases, LaFree said. But it had become relatively rare by 1980. There were a few spikes in the 1990s, including the 1995 Oklahoma City federal building bombing that killed 168 people, in what the Federal Bureau of Investigation describes as the nation’s worst act of homegrown terrorism. Political violence started to climb again in 2016, LaFree added, and “it doesn’t seem like we’ve hit the top of the wave yet.”

This wave differs in both its aims and its means.

In the early 1970s, American political violence was perpetrated more often by radicals on the left and focused largely on destroying property, such as government buildings, said Rachel Kleinfeld, who studies political conflict and extremism at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington think tank. “There were many, many bombings, but usually at night, or after called-in warnings,” she said. “The goal was not to kill people; it was to affect decisions” by policymakers.

In contrast, much of today’s political violence is aimed at people – and most of the deadly outbursts tracked by Reuters have come from the right. Of the 14 fatal political attacks since the Capitol riot in which the perpetrator or suspect had a clear partisan leaning, 13 were right-wing assailants. One was on the left.

The recent violence coming from the right, Carnegie’s Kleinfeld said, “is focused on stopping people or ending people’s lives.”

Explanations for today’s violence vary, ranging from widespread financial anxiety and the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic to unease at America’s changing racial and ethnic demographics and a coarsening of political rhetoric in the Trump era. Traditional divisions, typically rooted in policy differences between right and left, have given way to a perception that members of the opposing political party are an evil force bent on destroying America’s social and cultural fabric, recent polls show.

In a Reuters/Ipsos poll of nearly 4,500 registered voters in May, roughly 20% of both Democratic and Republican respondents called violence “acceptable” if committed “to achieve my idea of a better society.” But that sentiment alarms most Americans: about 65% of respondents in a separate Reuters/Ipsos poll in March and April expressed concern about “acts of violence committed against people in your community because of their political beliefs.”

Threats of violence and intimidating rhetoric soared after Trump lost the 2020 election and falsely claimed the vote was stolen. Much of that activity targeted election workers, as Reuters documented in a 2021 series of reports.

Academics, election officials and law enforcement agencies see more potential triggers. Heated debates over issues such as abortion and transgender rights are stoking animosity between right and left. And the prosecutions of Trump on charges of mishandling classified records and conspiring to overturn the 2020 election are intensifying partisan rancor over his campaign to retake the White House. Some local election offices have installed bulletproof glass and security doors amid threats of violence.

Political extremists “motivated by a range of ideological beliefs” pose a “persistent and lethal threat,” the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said in a public bulletin for law enforcement in May. That followed FBI Director Christopher Wray’s warning at a congressional hearing in August last year that election disputes and domestic grievances are fueling rising tensions. “I feel like every day I’m getting briefed on someone throwing a Molotov cocktail at someone for some issue,” he said. “It’s crazy.”

“I warned you about the Democrats”

Some of the violence has pitted neighbor against neighbor, upending communities like the hardscrabble section of southwestern Ohio where Austin Combs was raised – and where there’s little love for Democrats.

Settled in the late 1700s, Butler County is dotted with shuttered factories and storefronts, blighted by industrial decline and opioid and methamphetamine addiction. Like Combs and his neighbor King, the vast majority of residents are white. The county has voted Republican in every presidential election but one since 1952, helping to transform Ohio from swing state to Republican stronghold.

Political banners near Combs’ home still support Trump, now the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Some bear his “Make America Great Again” slogan or “Let’s go Brandon,” conservative code for an expletive directed at Democratic President Joe Biden, who captured just 37% of the county’s vote in 2020.

Conservatives in this community of about 390,000 people frequently disparage Democrats as “socialists” or the “extreme left,” dismissing the entire party as outside the mainstream. Some academics call this mindset America’s new “political sectarianism,” in which each party demonizes the other as traitorous enemies.

Dave Spurrier moved to Butler in 1979 and is vice chair of the local Democratic Party. He says he watched over time as Republicans branded themselves advocates of “God and country” and Democrats “as doing the work of the devil.”

Combs, the man who killed his neighbor after calling him a Democrat, considered himself a staunch conservative and ardent Trump supporter, according to interviews with four people who knew him.

Combs and members of his family declined to be interviewed for this story.

Combs confessed to the shooting in jail, the county prosecutor said, and was charged with murder. His attorney, Wayne Staton, said the killing was not political but a matter of “mental illness,” and Combs pleaded not guilty. In March, the prosecution and defense agreed he would undergo up to a year of mental health treatment before standing trial.

The gaunt 27-year-old dressed like a cowboy: flannel shirts, pressed jeans and a huge shiny belt buckle that cinched his clothes to his six-foot frame. His early life was tumultuous. His parents obtained restraining orders against each other, citing fear of physical violence, and divorced when he was three, according to court records.

The home of shooting victim Anthony King. Neighbor Austin Combs, a Trump supporter, attacked King after coming to believe he was a Democrat. REUTERS/Ned Parker

One former classmate, Bri Smith, recalled Combs being frequently in trouble. In an interview, she said Combs would run through the high-school hallway and try to grab at girls’ bodies, shouting “honk honk.” Two other students said in public comments on Facebook that Combs was disciplined for bringing an air gun to school. Both declined interview requests. Combs, who went by the nickname Bubba, transferred to another school his senior year.

Ross High, where he spent three years, did not respond to requests for comment on the air gun or why he changed schools. The other school, Talawanda High, confirmed his attendance and graduation but also declined further comment.

Another classmate, Cody Lee Harbaum, said Combs was “a nice kid,” always looking “to make people laugh.” Combs’ talent on guitar blew him away. “He could have played for any band,” Harbaum said.

After high school, Combs struggled to find regular work, in part because of “psychological impediments,” his attorneys wrote in a Nov. 22 court filing. At age 21, Combs stabbed his father, Edgar, in a quarrel over his dad’s girlfriend. But his father did not press charges, according to police and court records, and the two continued to live together.

Terry B’s Tavern in Hamilton, Ohio, is a hangout for supporters of ex-President Donald Trump. Austin Combs was a regular. REUTERS/Ned Parker

A life-sized poster of Trump at a storefront owned by the founder of Terry B’s Tavern in Hamilton, Ohio, where Austin Combs was a regular. REUTERS/Ned Parker

Combs and his father, a trucker, moved to a brick home in Okeana on a hilly two-lane road in 2019. Combs often appeared alone, sometimes mowing his lawn or shooting targets in his backyard, said a neighbor, Floyd Rockwell.

His schedule was like clockwork, according to more than a dozen people who knew him. Most days, he drove his red pick-up truck 13 miles to the county seat, Hamilton. He often stopped by Terry B’s Tavern, a bar decorated with Trump campaign paraphernalia, from a mini statue of Trump to a brown sports cap reading, “Hillary for prison.” An adjoining storefront owned by the founder of the bar features a life-sized Trump poster with a pointed message: “I warned you about the Democrats.”

He spoke with a polite air, answering questions with “yes, ma’am” and “yes, sir,” said Kim Jenkins, a Terry B’s bartender. A close friend of Combs at the bar, Patti Betz, said he dreamed of raising cattle and finding a girlfriend. “Austin was sweet,” said Betz, 62, a retired package delivery driver from southwestern Ohio.

The two frequently expressed mutual admiration for Trump and spoke of how much better America would be if he were reelected, she said. Others at the bar shared those sentiments. That was part of the draw of Terry B’s, Betz said. One regular joked that the bar was a satellite office of the local Republican Party.

Combs had casually mentioned to Betz that he didn’t like his neighbor, but never said why. Then, in 2022, she recalled, he told her that his neighbor was a Democrat, and “you know how I feel about that, Miss Patti.”

That autumn, about a month before the midterm elections, Combs complained to Betz that his neighbor had approached him and proclaimed, ‘I am a Democrat’,” she said. Combs told her, “I hope he never comes and tries to come through my window or break into my house, ’cause I got my gun and I’ll shoot him.”

Police body camera footage shows David DePape grasping Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at the couple’s house in October 2022. The assault prompted joking among many Republicans. San Francisco District Attorney’s Office/Handout via REUTERS

Betz said she urged Combs not to judge his neighbor based on politics. People “can believe what they want and you can believe what you want,” she recalls telling him. “It doesn’t need to become violent.”

On Nov. 4, the morning before he shot Anthony King and days before the midterm elections, Combs walked into Terry B’s and joked about the attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of then-U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A week earlier, a right-wing conspiracy theorist had fractured Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer at the couple’s San Francisco home. The incident sparked gleeful joking among some prominent Republicans.

“Did you hear about Nancy Pelosi’s husband?” Combs said, according to a witness. “His head got cracked open.” Combs laughed.

Combs was wrong about King’s politics.

After Combs killed Anthony King in his yard, King’s family told authorities they had rarely spoken with Combs and that none of them were Democrats, according to Butler County Prosecutor Katie Pridemore.

King had been registered as a Republican for at least a decade, county records show.

“Political warfare”

There’s no official tally of how many Americans die each year from political violence.

Donald Henry is accused of killing a friend who disparaged Trump’s skills as a businessman. DeSoto County Sheriff’s Office/Handout via REUTERS

Such violence isn’t tracked in federal or local crime data. At least six universities and private research groups document the problem in databases built on news reports, court records, social media and police statements. But their definitions of political violence differ. Some include police violence and random hate crimes. Others exclude such data. And among the relatively few institutions that track the violence, most haven’t released comprehensive data since 2020.

Guided by half a dozen specialists and academic research, Reuters defined political violence as incidents linked to an election or a partisan political dispute, or premeditated acts driven by an identifiable ideology. Random hate crimes and violence involving police such as officer-involved killings or aggressive crowd-control tactics at protests were not included.

Reporters used that definition to identify cases from a universe of more than 600 violent incidents since January 6, 2021, when a mob of pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol in one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.

Most of the incidents reviewed for this story were captured in the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, run by a nonpartisan research group in Wisconsin. Reporters culled additional cases from court documents, police records and news databases.

Some incidents drew national headlines, such as the attack on Paul Pelosi and a series of shootings targeting Democratic lawmakers in New Mexico in December and January. Media also extensively covered three mass killings that Reuters classified as political violence – a small fraction of the dozens of mass shootings across the U.S. since the start of 2021. The U.S. government defines a mass killing as three or more deaths, not including the perpetrator.

But many political attacks were at the community level, aimed at local politicians, activists and random bystanders, and got little public attention. Even those that proved fatal – or close to it – often caused little more than a blip on the national radar.

In all, Reuters documented 140 physical attacks and violent confrontations involving guns, knives, pepper spray, cars and fisticuffs. Some involved rival demonstrators at protests. Others were individual disputes, such as the brawl that left Shawn Popp dead last year in Florida.

Popp was at a friend’s home, smoking pot, when he got into a heated argument with another visitor, Donald Henry, about Trump’s business skills, according to police reports. Popp noted that some of Trump’s ventures ended in bankruptcy; Henry blamed the failures on Trump’s business partners. The two began fighting and Henry, who was sharpening a kitchen knife, plunged the blade into Popp’s chest, according to police. Popp staggered outside, collapsed and died.

Henry later told police that Popp had hit him in the face, so he used the knife to “stop the threat.” He has pleaded not guilty and awaits trial on murder charges. His attorney did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

An excerpt from a sheriff’s report on detectives’ interviews of Trump supporter Donald Henry in the stabbing death of Shawn Popp. Source: Florida State Attorney’s Office, 12th Judicial Circuit.

Quintez Brown, a leftist social-justice activist, is accused of attempting to kill a Democratic mayoral candidate in Louisville, Kentucky. Louisville Metro Department of Corrections/Handout via REUTERS.

Other cases involved local political figures, such as the attempted killing of Democratic Mayor Craig Greenberg of Louisville, Kentucky, as he campaigned for his first term in office in February 2022. Quintez Brown, a left-wing social justice activist, barged into Greenberg’s campaign headquarters and fired six shots, missing Greenberg so closely that one bullet grazed his sweater, prosecutors said.

Brown, then a university student, faces federal and state charges for attempted murder and trying to intimidate a political candidate. Brown targeted Greenberg, enraged by his economic policies, prosecutors said.

In the days before the shooting, Brown, who is Black, had tweeted a picture of Greenberg, who is white, in flames with the hashtag “gentrification is violence.” Brown also had written online that African Americans faced an environment of “political warfare” that did not end “at the ballot box,” according to prosecutors. Three of his former professors lamented the decline of a promising young man when they urged a federal judge unsuccessfully to keep Brown under house arrest instead of jail.

Brown, 22, pleaded not guilty. His attorneys said in court filings he struggled with mental health issues and that they plan to argue an insanity defense.

The Greenberg shooting was notable in part because the perpetrator was a leftwing activist – a rarity in political attacks involving lethal force.

Most of the fatal political violence identified by Reuters was carried out by people who embraced far-right views.

There have been a total 18 deadly political attacks since the Capitol riot, killing 39 people and eight perpetrators, Reuters found.

In 13 of the incidents, accounting for 34 deaths, the perpetrators or suspects articulated clear right-wing motives or views. Another four people died in four incidents that were political, but not tied to partisan U.S. politics. These include a May 2022 shooting in which police said a suspect, enraged by China-Taiwan political tensions, opened fire at a Taiwanese church in California, killing one worshiper and injuring five.

Only one of the fatal incidents was perpetrated by a suspect clearly identified with the political left: a case last year in which Robert Telles, a Democratic public administrator in Clark County, Nevada, is accused of stabbing and killing a Las Vegas journalist who had written critical stories about Telles’ conduct in office. Telles has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Benjamin Smith pleaded guilty in April to murder and other charges in the shooting of five people at a social justice protest last year at Normandale Park in Portland, Oregon. Dave Killen/Pool via REUTERS

A killing in Portland

Threats of violence were nothing new to the handful of women gathered at a street corner near Normandale Park in Portland, Oregon, on a chilly February evening last year. Veterans of the city’s left-wing social justice protests, they had served regularly as traffic control volunteers and were accustomed to armed right-wing agitators.

But something was different about Benjamin Smith, the bearded, somewhat disheveled man who accosted them as they gathered to work at a Black Lives Matter protest on the far side of the park. “He was immediately making specific threats,” said Dajah Beck, one of four women who recounted the events that night in interviews with Reuters.

Smith’s rage was unusually intense, the four said, especially since no protestors were in sight “I’ll shoot you in the fucking head!” he yelled. As Beck began recording from her motorcycle helmet camera, Smith turned to a woman, identified in court records only as Deg, shouting, “Stay the fuck out of our neighborhood.”

Another volunteer, Allie Bradley, told Smith they didn’t want to fight. Smith shoved her, the women said.

June Knightly, a 60-year-old cancer survivor awaiting knee replacement, approached Smith on a cane, urging him to go home. Smith shouted at her. “Push me. Do something. Make me go,” he said, according to Beck’s recording. “You’re not going to intimidate us,” Knightly responded.

Smith pulled a .45 caliber handgun from his pocket and shot Knightly in the face. Then he shot Deg, Bradley, Beck and a volunteer medic who had joined the group and tried to help.

An armed volunteer providing protection at the protest ran towards the gunfire, pointed a semi-automatic gun at Smith and shot him twice in the hip. By then, Knightly was dead. Deg was paralyzed by a bullet that severed her spinal cord. Bradley, Beck and the medic were gravely injured.

Smith pleaded guilty to murder, attempted murder and assault. He was sentenced in April to life in prison.

In an email from prison, Smith told Reuters that the attack “was much less politically motivated than people have assumed.” He did not elaborate.

Dajah Beck, one of the victims in Normandale Park shootings, testifies at shooter Benjamin Smith’s sentencing hearing. Before the attack, Smith vented online against liberals. Dave Killen/Pool via REUTERS

Allie Bradley, one of the victims in the Normandale Park shootings, testifies at the sentencing hearing for convicted assailant Benjamin Smith in Portland, Oregon, April 18, 2023. Dave Killen/Pool via REUTERS

Leslie, whose daughter “Deg” was paralyzed in the Normandale Park shootings, testifies at the sentencing hearing for convicted assailant Benjamin Smith in Portland, Oregon, April 18, 2023. The mother and daughter were not identified by their full names for security reasons. Dave Killen/Pool via REUTERS

In the months before the shooting, as protests over police violence roiled Portland and other U.S. cities, Smith went online to vent, making racist and anti-semitic comments and denigrating liberals, according to his posts. His roommate, Kristine Christenson, said in an interview that he was “tolerable pre-COVID” but “drank the fascist tea” and “threw tantrums,” including shouting about shooting liberal activists. She added that Smith kept several firearms.

Smith’s victims said they see little prospect of easing the cycle of political violence. “The way the political climate is heating up, I think there are more Ben Smiths out there,” said Deg, now bedridden and on a ventilator. Reuters is withholding Deg’s full name because of her security concerns.

Two of the women, Beck and Bradley, noted that when some progressive Portland protesters and security volunteers began carrying guns to protect themselves from armed rightwing hecklers, conservative media seized on images of gun-toting liberals to further inflame their audiences. “They’re capitalizing on fear,” Bradley said.

Knightly’s widow, Katherine Knapp, used to be anti-gun. She now believes the only way to counter right-wing violence is to threaten violence in retaliation. “De-escalation only works for people who don’t really intend to hurt anybody,” she said in an interview.

China Warns Japan Over ‘Resolve to Fight’ Remarks on Taiwan

Beijing blasts senior Japanese ruling party official’s speech
Tension raises question over China package tours to Japan
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-08-09/china-warns-japan-over-resolve-to-fight-remarks-on-taiwan?sref=hhjZtX76

By Jacob Gu

August 9, 2023 at 11:44 AM EDT

China warned Japan against “being led astray again,” after its former Prime Minister Taro Aso said his country, the US and Taiwan must show Beijing their “resolve to fight” to deter any possible invasion.

Aso’s “balderdash severely interfered in China’s internal affairs and undermined stability in the Taiwan Strait,” the Chinese embassy in Tokyo said a statement posted on its WeChat account Wednesday.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing later issued another statement, slamming Aso for what it called “irresponsible remarks that sought to hype up cross-Strait tensions, stoke antagonism and confrontation, and blatantly interfere in China’s internal affairs.”

Japan has increasingly leaned toward support for Taiwan in recent years and tightened its defense ties with the US, sowing tensions with China, which claims Taiwan. The visit by Aso, who remains a powerful figure in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party and currently serves as its vice president, comes just months before Taiwan’s presidential election, where ties with the mainland are a central issue.

China has made serious representations to Japan and strongly condemns Aso’s remarks, China’s Foreign Ministry added.

At a security forum in Taipei on Tuesday, Aso said that Taiwan and Japan, along with their allies, need defense capabilities as a deterrence.

“There has never been a time like now when Japan, Taiwan, the United States and other like-minded countries need to resolve to put into action a strong deterrence,” Aso told the forum, according to Japan’s Kyodo News. “This is a resolve to fight.”

Aso’s visit came as a Taiwan coastguard vessel made a rare port call in Japan and docked at Harumi Wharf in Tokyo “for routine maintenance and supply,” the South China Morning Posted reported.

Tourism Industry

Amid this week’s tensions, the Japanese newspaper Nikkei reported that China is planning to lift its ban on group tours to Japan as soon as Thursday, citing unidentified people — though it’s unclear whether the move may be affected by the flap over Aso’s comments.

In the Foreign Ministry statement, China also referred to Japan’s acts during World War II and before on Taiwan and the mainland, calling on Tokyo to “deeply reflect on its history of aggression.”

“China is no longer what it was when the Qing government signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, and what makes this Japanese politician think he is in a position or has the confidence to make such unwarranted remarks on Taiwan?” the ministry said.

20. Stablecoins Can Keep the Dollar the World’s Reserve Currency

Interesting perspective.

Excerpts:

Any tool that could boost the U.S. dollar should be considered. Dollars as a share of reserves held by foreign central banks have fallen in the past generation. In 2000 dollars represented almost 73% of global central bank reserves; today the share is around 59%. Though much international trade and many commodity transactions are still settled in dollars, this year large countries including Brazil and Argentina entered bilateral agreements with China to use the yuan and their local currencies for trade settlement.

Rumors abound that a summit next month including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will consider creating a new currency arrangement. While leaders of the so-called Brics countries deny an impending currency union, Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large for Asia and Brics, said “the days of a dollar-centric world” are “over” and Brics nations intend to settle trades in their local currencies in the near future. This year, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan said Riyadh is open to settling oil trades in currencies other than dollars—once an unthinkable idea.

...

Stablecoins could be to finance what Voice of America has been to diplomacy. They can communicate U.S. monetary policy directly to the people living in other countries, when American efforts to engage other governments aren’t succeeding. If stablecoins flourish, citizens of other countries will increase the demand for dollars independent of (and perhaps contrary to) their governments’ political decisions. But for stablecoins to succeed, U.S. politicians need to agree that re-dollarizing the global economy is important.

Stablecoins Can Keep the Dollar the World’s Reserve Currency

Blockchain-based assets could be to finance what Voice of America has been to U.S. diplomacy.

By Brian P. Brooks and Charles W. Calomiris

Aug. 9, 2023 12:35 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/stablecoins-can-help-keep-the-dollar-the-worlds-reserve-currency-yuan-china-ef1047c?utm_campaign=Illicit%20Edge%20Daily&utm

PHOTO: DADO RUVIC/REUTERS

Stablecoins, blockchain-based assets backed by bank deposits and Treasury securities, are at the heart of a dollar-based revolution happening throughout the developing world. Their price is supposed to stay steady, often at $1. Think of them as digital versions of prepaid cards with the potential to be important tools of American soft power in a world where the role of the dollar is in question.

Stablecoins aren’t merely a more efficient means of electronic payments. With some economists and policy makers worrying about “de-dollarization”—the eclipse of the U.S. dollar the world’s reserve currency—stablecoins could bolster the postwar arrangement in which the dollar’s dominance helped foster global trade and the biggest reduction in global poverty ever. But that can happen only if Congress implements a sound and stable regulatory framework.

That is why House Financial Services Committee Chairman Patrick McHenry’s bill to regulate stablecoins is vital. It would establish federal and state oversight for stablecoin issuers, impose qualifications for reserve assets, and implement rules on redemptions and public disclosure. It’s hard to argue with these seemingly bipartisan goals, and Mr. McHenry (R., N.C.) had collaborated on the bill with Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) for more than a year. Yet at last week’s vote on the measure, Ms. Waters and most of her Democratic colleagues pulled their support, with no clear reason for the sudden change of heart. Did they suddenly decide stablecoins aren’t important?

Any tool that could boost the U.S. dollar should be considered. Dollars as a share of reserves held by foreign central banks have fallen in the past generation. In 2000 dollars represented almost 73% of global central bank reserves; today the share is around 59%. Though much international trade and many commodity transactions are still settled in dollars, this year large countries including Brazil and Argentina entered bilateral agreements with China to use the yuan and their local currencies for trade settlement.

Rumors abound that a summit next month including Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will consider creating a new currency arrangement. While leaders of the so-called Brics countries deny an impending currency union, Anil Sooklal, South Africa’s ambassador-at-large for Asia and Brics, said “the days of a dollar-centric world” are “over” and Brics nations intend to settle trades in their local currencies in the near future. This year, Saudi Finance Minister Mohammed al-Jadaan said Riyadh is open to settling oil trades in currencies other than dollars—once an unthinkable idea.

U.S. policy hasn’t boosted global confidence in the dollar. The asset freeze on dollar holdings in Russia’s central bank imposed after Russia invaded Ukraine, while understandable politically, shocked investors and central bankers, who realized for the first time that the dollar may not be the safe store of value it once was.

A de-dollarized world would damage the U.S. The dollar’s reserve status reduces U.S. borrowing costs, which is crucial in an era when government borrowing and spending are at a record high and still climbing. Reserve status also insulates the U.S. government, banks and the general public from foreign-exchange risk. All things being equal, reserve status also allows American consumers to buy foreign goods more cheaply, since foreign producers would rather have dollars than other currencies.

The nationalist and anticolonialist impulses behind de-dollarization in the developing world aren’t likely to help citizens of those countries. Argentina’s decision to price trade deals with China in yuan and pesos may reflect Argentina’s national pride, but the country’s 114% annual inflation rate means that workers there will still see their purchasing power quickly decline. And that’s nothing compared with Zimbabwe’s 175% rate or Venezuela’s 400%. At the end of last year, 17 countries had inflation rates above 20%, and 57 had rates above 10%.

This is where stablecoins come in. Faced with the dismal prospect of saving their wages in local currency stored in local bank accounts, more citizens of high-inflation countries are opting to use dollar-backed stablecoins as a synthetic savings account. Dozens of startups offer stablecoin savings and payment options in Latin America and Africa—often in countries whose leaders are vocally and visibly moving away from the dollar.

Dollar-backed stablecoins have market capitalizations in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and they support transaction volumes many multiples of that amount. These offerings are attractive to ordinary people in those countries because they don’t require an account at a local bank, only an internet connection. In addition, many stablecoins pay interest and have no minimum-balance fees and low or no transaction fees. Most important, they free people from tyrannical developing-world monetary policy and allow them to store the value of their hard work in relatively stable dollar form.

Stablecoins could be to finance what Voice of America has been to diplomacy. They can communicate U.S. monetary policy directly to the people living in other countries, when American efforts to engage other governments aren’t succeeding. If stablecoins flourish, citizens of other countries will increase the demand for dollars independent of (and perhaps contrary to) their governments’ political decisions. But for stablecoins to succeed, U.S. politicians need to agree that re-dollarizing the global economy is important.

The McHenry bill is a good place to start.

Mr. Brooks is a partner at Valor Capital Group. He served as acting U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, 2020-21, and was chief legal officer of Coinbase, 2018-20. Mr. Calomiris is dean of economics, politics and history at the University of Austin. He served as chief economist of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, 2020-21.

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Journal Editorial Report: The week's best and worst from Kim Strassel, Kyle Peterson, Kate Bachelder and Dan Henninger Images: Reuters/AP Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the August 10, 2023, print edition as 'Stablecoins Can Keep the Dollar the World’s Reserve Currency'.

21. Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life

Some thoughts for the soul.

I always like reading Arthur Brooks' articles.

Aristotle’s 10 Rules for a Good Life

An Ancient Greek recipe for happiness

By Arthur C. Brooks

The Atlantic · by Arthur C. Brooks · August 10, 2023

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Many people say they are looking for happiness. They spend a lot of time and resources searching for the secrets of well-being, like old-time miners prospecting for gold. But for some sages throughout history, this is the wrong approach. Happiness isn’t something to be found; it’s something to attract.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of the second path was the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He defined happiness as eudaemonia, which means “good spirit.” To us moderns, this might sound vaporous, like the superficial happy feelings that so many people (incorrectly, in my view) chase. Instead, the philosopher meant that happiness was a divine state that would visit each of us as it pleased. Our only responsibility was to open the door to it. And we do so by living well.

To live well, we should practice specific virtues and make them into habits. As Aristotle wrote in his Nicomachean Ethics, “If it is better to be happy as a result of one’s own exertions than by the gift of fortune, it is reasonable to suppose that this is how happiness is won.” Here are 10 of the virtues he recommends—which, as modern research shows, do generally attract the good spirit.

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1. Courage

Aristotle wrote about courage in the context of the willingness to sacrifice one’s life, such as in war. Whether he would recognize the virtue in our modern settings is hard to guess—who knows what he would say about the fear of being canceled on social media? But the question at hand is not the source of fear but whether courage—to act in the face of fear rather than give in to it—invites happiness. And the research suggests that it does: Scholars have shown that courage can lead to resilience after adversity, and resilience leads to greater happiness.

2. Temperance

By this, the philosopher means self-control in the face of one’s appetites and base impulses. He would classify the hippie motto “If it feels good, do it!” as a recipe for misery. Modern researchers investigating self-control agree, but with a twist. Scholars writing in the Journal of Personality in 2017 found that as impulse control among college students increased over the course of a day, positive affect initially fell. As self-control kept rising, however, negative feelings decreased; happiness rose to its highest levels when self-control was at its highest as well. In other words, a little moderation isn’t so good for well-being, but immoderate moderation may be great.

3. Liberality

By this, the philosopher is referring not to politics (liberalism) but to money. Specifically, he recommends avoiding stinginess but without being profligate. In fact, evidence suggests that being a cheapskate influences your well-being. For example, three economists in 2014 set up an ultimatum-bargaining game in which participants had to split a certain amount of money: One participant offered a certain split; the other could say yes or no, but no meant that neither side got anything, so the offer of a lousy split could be answered with spite. The authors found that physical stress levels were higher for both parties when the bargaining involved offered a split lower than 40 percent.

4. Magnificence

Related to liberality is what Aristotle calls “magnificence,” according to which a person “will think how he can carry out his project most nobly and splendidly, rather than how much it will cost and how it can be done most cheaply.” He was not asserting here that the path to happiness is to buy an ostentatious yacht; rather, magnificence means giving to projects that benefit a large number of people. Today, we might call this “munificence”—to be as philanthropic as you reasonably can be. For this, the support is unambiguous: Giving feels good.

5. Greatness of soul

A great-souled person, according to Aristotle, acts like his close predecessor in ancient Greek philosophy, Socrates, who was a “being indifferent to good and bad fortune.” This requires being high-minded—not that you can’t tell the difference between pleasant and unpleasant things, but that you are occupied by what is deeper and more meaningful in life than transitory pleasures and passing irritations. Indeed, research comparing the pursuit of pleasure versus of meaning among adolescents shows that the latter leads to greater happiness. In other words, get off social media and read, say, Nicomachean Ethics.

Read: To understand anti-vaxxers, consider Aristotle

6. Gentleness

The virtue of gentleness refers to a propensity toward kindness and an ability to control your temper. The idea is that to be self-possessed in this way brings happiness. If true, then gentleness’s opposite, aggression, should lower well-being by making it harder to manage one’s own emotions. Researchers have tested this idea by asking people to think of someone they despise, and then either to imagine violent, malicious actions toward the person or to focus on a neutral thought (specifically, what they planned to do the following Wednesday—presumably not beat up the person in question). They found that the aggressive thinkers began to brood over their fantasy assault and experienced lower well-being than the temperate crew as a result.

7. Truthfulness about yourself

Aristotle put a great premium on honesty. He counseled against “pretense in the form of exaggeration” and boastfulness, but also against self-deprecation. You might say he recommended that we seek something like secure humility, through which we recognize ourselves and can show others who we are without either puffery or self-denigration. This tracks with the general work on humility, which correlates with lower levels of neuroticism and depression, as well as with a greater love of life. But it is also consistent with research showing that insecurity and excessive self-criticism are associated with anxiety and sadness.

Read: When philosophy becomes therapy

8. Equity

This is a word that gets a lot of attention in our modern debates. It commonly involves efforts to increase fairness and to redress past discrimination. And it is manifestly true that when people believe they are being treated unfairly, it lowers their happiness. But Aristotle meant something totally different. “The equitable man,” wrote the philosopher, “is one who by choice and habit … does not stand on his rights unduly, but is content to receive a smaller share although he has the law on his side.” He called this “a special kind of Justice.” For this proposition, I can find no specific empirical evidence. However, it is almost certainly related to the next virtue.

9. Forgiveness

Aristotle. wrote about the virtue of consideration for others. To the contemporary ear, this sounds like politeness, or sensitivity to others’ feelings, but the philosopher was recommending something much trickier: forgiveness and forbearance toward others’ faults. The wisdom of this advice has a large modern literature to support it. Virtually every study of forgiveness shows that practicing it purposefully and letting go of grievances lowers depression and anxiety symptoms.

10. Modesty

Modesty is often thought in the modern world to resemble humility. But Aristotle defined it as refraining from shameful (if tempting) behavior—and applied this even to private conduct. This conception of modesty makes it similar to temperance, except that instead of moderation in the face of base appetites, we should abstain completely from vices. He added a caveat, however: Modesty could be a virtue only if “a good man would be ashamed if he were to do so and so.” In other words, you have to believe a certain action is vicious in order to be virtuous in avoiding it. I personally have no moral qualms about liquor but don’t drink myself, so by the Aristotelian standard, my teetotaling is not a virtue. Bearing this caveat in mind, this kind of modesty is indeed a happiness strategy: When people undertake what they consider moral acts, they gain in happiness and even more so in sense of purpose; when they commit immoral acts, they experience the opposite.

Aristotle proposed these happiness virtues more than two millennia ago, but I believe they provide a handy checklist today for living well. Here’s an abbreviated list you might just want to put up on your fridge, or tape to the bottom of your computer screen.

1. Name your fears and face them.

2. Know your appetites and control them.

3. Be neither a cheapskate nor a spendthrift.

4. Give as generously as you can.

5. Focus more on the transcendent; disregard the trivial.

6. True strength is a controlled temper.

7. Never lie, especially to yourself.

8. Stop struggling for your fair share.

9. Forgive others, and forbear their weaknesses.

10. Define your morality; live up to it, even in private.

None of these rules is easy to follow. It is harder still to make them into habits. But the payoff—a well-earned visit from sweet eudaemonia—is worth the effort.

The Atlantic · by Arthur C. Brooks · August 10, 2023

22. The War in Ukraine Is Getting Closer to Putin's 'Frontdoor'

The War in Ukraine Is Getting Closer to Putin's 'Frontdoor'

19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · August 9, 2023

At least 45 people were injured on Wednesday from a massive explosion at a factory outside of Moscow. Windows of nearby buildings were also blown out, as a result of the blast that occurred at the Zagorsk optical-mechanical plant in the city of Sergiev Posad. Six people were reportedly in intensive care.

Russian state news agency Tass claimed that according to emergency services, the explosion happened “in the area of the boiler room,” while reports from Russia also said the source of the detonation was a pyrotechnics warehouse rented by a third company on the site of the plant. The plant is a developer and manufacturer of optical and optoelectronic devices that are used by the Russian military, law enforcement agencies, industry, and healthcare.

About 20 apartment buildings and four social facilities have sustained damage in an explosion, Russian state media reported.

“As for the blast at the Zagorsk Optical-Mechanical Plant, only preliminary information is available at this point as all emergency services are working at the site. The explosion occurred at a fireworks warehouse, which was rented by a well-known local company. The blast was caused by a violation of technological processes,” Chairman of the State Duma (the lower house of parliament) Committee on Construction, Housing and Communal Services Sergey Pakhomov said, as cited in the statement.

Russian authorities were also quick to say that the blast was not caused by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or the military drones that Ukraine has employed in recent attacks on Moscow and other Russian cities.

Drones Did Target Russia

Early on Wednesday, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin reported that two drones had been shot down by the air defense systems over the capital. He added that there was no information on any casualties.

“Two combat drones have attempted to fly to the city. Both were shot down by air defense systems, one in the Domodedovo area, and another one in the vicinity of Minskoye Highway. No injuries have been reported,” Sobyanin wrote on his Telegram channel, according to a report from Tass.

Ukraine has increasingly targeted the Russian capital city in recent months, and the city came under attack four times in just the last month. While Kyiv hasn’t taken responsibility for the attacks, following the reports of Sunday’s strike on the Russian capital, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that “war” would come home to Russia.

In one attack, drones crashed into two office buildings in the Moskva-Citi business district, just miles from the Kremlin. One of the buildings houses several government offices including the Russian Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Industry and Trade, the Ministry of Digital Development and the Federal Agency for Nationalities among other agencies.

Some glass panels in one high-rise building were blown out and glass and debris littered part of the pavement below, according to a Reuters reporter who was on the scene.

Moscow is about 500 km (310 miles) from the Ukrainian border.

Two drones reached the Kremlin in the heart of the city in May, and that remains the most-profile incident of its kind. Russia’s foreign ministry has said such attacks “would not be possible without the help provided to the Kyiv regime by the U.S. and its NATO allies.”

Author Experience and Expertise

A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.

From 19FortyFive

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19fortyfive.com · by Peter Suciu · August 9, 2023

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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