Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”

- Thomas Paine

“The woman of the future, who is really being born today, will be a woman completely free of guilt for creating and for self- development. She will be a woman in harmony with her own strength, not necessarily called masculine or eccentric or something unnatural. I imagine she will be very tranquil about her strength and her serenity, a woman who will know how to talk to children and to the men who sometimes fear her… So that is my first image — she is not aggressive, she is serene, she is sure, she is confident, she is able to develop her skills, she is able to ask for space for herself.”

- Anais Nin

"I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am sorry for him and wish to lighten his load by all means possible ... except by getting off his back."

- Leo Tolstoy

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 21, 2023

2. Opinion: Stop Listening to ‘Ukraine Experts’ Who Don’t Know Ukrainians

3. As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up

4. Women in Army SOF sidelined by ‘benevolent sexism,’ study finds

5. Women in Army SOF resorted to buying their own armor, study finds

6. With China and Russia on the Warpath, It’s the Wrong Time to Reinvent a Triad (i.e., the Space, Cyber, SOF Triad)

7. Female soldiers in Army special operations face rampant sexism and harassment, military report says

8. Special Operations News Update - August 21, 2023 | SOF News

9. Army further distancing itself from 'information warfare' moniker

10. Asked and answered: China’s strategy of political warfare (Seth Jones interview)

12. Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

13. A Deferential, Partisan Public and the Future of Democratic Civil-Military Relations

14. How Ukraine is exploiting Biden’s cluster bomb gamble

15. The Smartphone Game That Ukrainian Soldiers Play on the Front Line

16. China's Constant Spying On Australian Drills From Space A Sign Of Shifting Orbital Balance

17. China hoped Fiji would be a template for the Pacific. Its plan backfired.

18. Ukraine Situation Report: Spy Agency Takes Credit For Strikes On Russian Airbases

19. Annals of Chinese Transparency

20. The Case for American-Led Peace in Ukraine

21. Threats against public officials on the rise as 2024 nears

22. The 'new' Ukrainian mine detection

23. How to get through Special Forces selection? Don't be the ‘Grey Man’

24. You Fought for Democracy Overseas. You Have a Duty to Do It Again at Home.

25. 'Woke' Pentagon Spending at Center of Upcoming Government Shutdown Fight

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 21, 2023

Maps.graphics/citations: https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-21-2023

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in and east of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 20-21 while continuing counteroffensive operations on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border and in eastern Ukraine.
Russian milbloggers continue to indicate that Russian forces lack equipment and suffer from low morale along the entire frontline.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is creating new military formations possibly to allow more combat effective units currently defending in Kherson Oblast to redeploy to more critical sectors of the front.
Russian insider sources indicated that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov may have decisively won Russian President Vladimir’s Putin favor following the June 24 Wagner Group rebellion.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin may be attempting to re-establish Wagner in Africa, and some Russian sources are portraying this reported effort as necessary for Wagner’s survival.
Some Russian sources are likely running an information operation to exaggerate the degree to which Wagner is struggling to survive, possibly in support of the Russian MoD effort to destroy Prigozhin’s reputation and the whole Wagner Group.
Russian sources made and walked back claims about significant Russian advances in the Kupyansk direction amid continued offensive actions on August 21.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and advanced near Bakhmut.
The Russian government continues to introduce mandatory nationalistic and militaristic courses into high school curriculum to promote military service among Russian youth.
Belarusian authorities reportedly exposed forcibly deported Ukrainian children to pro-Kremlin propaganda in Belarus.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 21, 2023

Aug 21, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 21, 2023

Kateryna Stepanenko, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Christina Harward, and Frederick W. Kagan

August 21, 2023, 8:30pm 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 cut-off for this product was 1:00pm ET on August 21. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the August 22 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in and east of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 20-21 while continuing counteroffensive operations on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border and in eastern Ukraine. Geolocated footage published on August 20 and August 21 indicates that Ukrainian forces reached the central part of Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and broke through some Russian defenses south of Mala Tokmachka (9km southeast of Orikhiv).[1] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces succeeded in the direction southeast of Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka, and that Russian forces unsuccessfully counterattacked east of Robotyne.[2] Malyar and Russian sources stated that fighting is ongoing in Robotyne.[3] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces captured some positions in a part of the Russian forward defensive lines after intensifying attacks on the Robotyne-Verbove (21km southeast of Orikhiv) line.[4] Some Russian sources reported that Russian forces retreated from some positions near Verbove as part of their elastic defense, likely in response to a Ukrainian advance south of Mala Tokmachka.[5] ISW previously assessed that Ukrainian attacks on Robotyne are tactically significant because a Ukrainian advance in the area may allow Ukrainian forces to begin operating past the densest Russian minefields.[6] Ukrainian advances across fields in this area likely confirm this assessment. Persistent Ukrainian advances in the Robotyne area also likely aim to degrade Russian forces that have committed significant effort, resources, and personnel to hold positions around Robotyne.

Ukrainian forces also reportedly advanced in the Bakhmut and Kreminna directions over the past week and continue counteroffensive operations south and southeast of Velyka Novosilka in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts.[7] Malyar stated that Ukrainian forces recaptured three square kilometers around Bakhmut over the past week and 43 square kilometers in total since Wagner Group forces captured Bakhmut in May 2023.[8] Ukrainian Severodonetsk City Administration Head Andriy Vlasenko reported that Ukrainian forces achieved some unspecified successes south of Kreminna while conducting active mobile defenses in the area.[9]

Russian milbloggers continue to indicate that Russian forces lack equipment and suffer from low morale along the entire frontline. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces – especially the 20th Combined Arms Army (Western Military District) and 2nd Combined Arms Army (Central Military District), both operating in eastern Ukraine – lack light transportation vehicles, which inhibits them from using equipment and operating effectively and reduces their morale.[10] The milblogger claimed that Russian personnel must register their privately-owned vehicles with the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD), after which their vehicles disappear or get transferred elsewhere.[11] The milblogger claimed that Russian commanders regularly punish servicemen who keep their vehicles for minor administrative violations and that Russian personnel feel that they are “at war” with their commanders.[12] A Russian milblogger claimed on August 21 that Russian authorities have not provided Russian forces operating in the Kherson direction with boats and have ignored milbloggers’ ongoing appeals since July 2.[13] “Vostok” Battalion commander Alexander Khodakovsky claimed that Russian forces continue to face problems with counterbattery operations after Russian forces began experiencing artillery systems shortages and claimed that Russian forces began to receive “outdated” D-20 towed gun-howitzers.[14] Khodakovsky claimed that the “outdated” D-20 howitzers are not suitable for counterbattery combat, possibly referring to barrel wear from constant use that makes tube artillery less accurate over time.[15] Multiple milbloggers have claimed that Russian forces lack adequate counterbattery capabilities, especially since Commander of the 58th Combined Arms Army Major General Ivan Popov’s dismissal in early July.[16] Another Russian milblogger, however, claimed that Russian forces are improving artillery tactics and that artillery units have become far more accurate than they were a year ago.[17] The milblogger may be suggesting that mobilized personnel who did not have prior military experience have learned to accurately strike targets. Ongoing complaints from Russian personnel suggest that the Russian MoD is unwilling or unable to address persistent equipment shortages and problems with low morale. Russian forces may be improving tactics and learning from previous mistakes as the war continues, however. The protraction of the conflict resulting in part from delays in the provision of Western aid to Ukraine gives Russian forces time to improve and to learn from their mistakes.

The Russian MoD is creating new military formations possibly to allow more combat effective units currently defending in Kherson Oblast to redeploy to more critical sectors of the front. The United Kingdom Ministry of Defense (UK MoD) reported on August 21 that the Russian military is highly likely forming the new 18th Combined Arms Army (CAA) from other units currently operating in Kherson Oblast, including the 22nd Army Corps.[18] The UK MoD reported that the new army will consist mostly of mobilized personnel and will focus on defensive operations in southern Ukraine.[19] Russian authorities in Dalnegorsk, Primorsky Krai stated on June 5 that the newly created 25th CAA (Southern Military District), for which the Russian MoD has been recruiting volunteers from the Russian Far East since mid-May, will deploy to Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts in December 2023.[20] The Russian MoD previously formed the 3rd Army Corps (Western Military District) in the summer of 2022 from mostly volunteer battalions which were then largely destroyed in Kharkiv Oblast and Bakhmut.[21] The formation and reported future deployment of the new 18th and 25th CAAs to southern Ukraine are likely meant to allow more effective standing formations such as the 49th CAA (Southern Military District) currently operating in Kherson Oblast to redeploy to more critical sectors of the front possibly to reinforce combat-weary Russian forces degraded defensive lines.[22]

Russian insider sources indicated that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov may have decisively won Russian President Vladimir’s Putin favor following the June 24 Wagner Group rebellion. A Russian insider source claimed that Putin postponed a meeting with Alexey Dyumin, former Putin bodyguard and current Tula Oblast governor, and forced Dyumin to publicly escort Shoigu at the recent Army-2023 Forum in Moscow.[23] The insider source claimed that the Kremlin wants to portray Shoigu and Dyumin as having positive relations and to gauge public reactions.[24] The Kremlin, however, likely aimed to publicly subordinate Dyumin to Shoigu. Dyumin and Shoigu have notably had a tense relationship, and Russian milbloggers recently floated Dyumin as a replacement for Shoigu immediately after the Wagner Group’s rebellion on June 24.[25] A Wagner-affiliated source claimed that the Russian General Staff now has “carte blanche” and has purged all proteges of Army General Sergey Surovikin, a former deputy theater commander and Wagner affiliate who was reportedly ousted and placed under house arrest.[26] The source also claimed that unspecified aspects of the Putin-Wagner deal collapsed for unknown reasons, which could indicate increased Putin favor for Shoigu and Gerasimov if true. Putin also recently publicly met with Gerasimov in Rostov-on-Don for the first time since the Wagner rebellion, which further indicates that Putin has fully aligned himself with Shoigu and Gerasimov despite their military failure and inability to stop the rebellion.[27]

Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin may be attempting to re-establish Wagner in Africa, and some Russian sources are portraying this reported effort as necessary for Wagner’s survival. A Wagner-affiliated source claimed that Wagner representatives and possibly Prigozhin himself arrived in Mali on August 19 possibly to discuss the regional security situation or cooperation with Niger.[28] Another prominent Wagner-affiliated source published footage of Prigozhin on August 21 in which Prigozhin claims to be in Africa and claims that Wagner is increasing its presence in Africa.[29] A Russian insider source claimed that Prigozhin began a media campaign to portray Nigeriens as begging for Wagner’s intervention in order to help Wagner secure a contract with Niger and thereby save Wagner.[30] The source claimed that Wagner has struggled with significant personnel and financial issues from funding cuts following the June 24 rebellion and the recent claimed (but unconfirmed) withdrawal from Belarus.[31] Wagner likely has thousands of personnel to dedicate to operations in Africa if Wagner is able to both secure a contract and deploy personnel from Russia and Belarus, actions that Prigozhin may see as Wagner’s final option to maintain its independence from the Russian MoD.

Some Russian sources are likely running an information operation to exaggerate the degree to which Wagner is struggling to survive, possibly in support of the Russian MoD effort to destroy Prigozhin’s reputation and the whole Wagner Group. Russian insider sources are increasingly portraying Shoigu and Gerasimov as having Putin’s full support and ousting insubordinate commanders while painting Wagner as a private military company increasingly struggling to survive.[32] ISW has observed indicators that the Wagner Group is struggling to maintain coherence, including recent reports of conflict within the Wagner high-level representatives.[33] These Russian sources may be exaggerating the degree to which Wagner is struggling, however, especially if reports of Prigozhin’s travel to Africa are accurate and his reported efforts to secure contracts for Wagner are successful. Shoigu likely seeks to deal a final blow to Wagner but may struggle to make that blow decisive. A Russian milblogger noted that the Russian MoD may struggle to replace Wagner in Africa as Russian forces need time to train before deploying, have not established the connections with locals that Wagner has, and may destabilize conflicts rather than quell them.[34] If Wagner is able to secure contracts in Africa and deploy its personnel before the Russian MoD can deploy personnel, then Prigozhin and Wagner may retain at least some ability to operate independently in Africa contrary to the MoD’s efforts to eliminate Wagner.

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian forces made tactically significant gains in and east of Robotyne in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 20-21 while continuing counteroffensive operations on the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast administrative border and in eastern Ukraine.
Russian milbloggers continue to indicate that Russian forces lack equipment and suffer from low morale along the entire frontline.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) is creating new military formations possibly to allow more combat effective units currently defending in Kherson Oblast to redeploy to more critical sectors of the front.
Russian insider sources indicated that Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Army General Valery Gerasimov may have decisively won Russian President Vladimir’s Putin favor following the June 24 Wagner Group rebellion.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin may be attempting to re-establish Wagner in Africa, and some Russian sources are portraying this reported effort as necessary for Wagner’s survival.
Some Russian sources are likely running an information operation to exaggerate the degree to which Wagner is struggling to survive, possibly in support of the Russian MoD effort to destroy Prigozhin’s reputation and the whole Wagner Group.
Russian sources made and walked back claims about significant Russian advances in the Kupyansk direction amid continued offensive actions on August 21.
Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Kreminna, Bakhmut, and along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line and advanced near Bakhmut.
The Russian government continues to introduce mandatory nationalistic and militaristic courses into high school curriculum to promote military service among Russian youth.
Belarusian authorities reportedly exposed forcibly deported Ukrainian children to pro-Kremlin propaganda in Belarus.

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 sources made and walked back claims about significant Russian advances in the Kupyansk direction amid continued offensive actions on August 21. Kharkiv Oblast occupation head Vitaly Ganchev claimed that Russian forces have seized Synkivka (9km northeast of Kupyansk), and Russian milbloggers widely amplified this claim by circulating footage of Russian forces allegedly operating in the center of Synkivka.[35] The milbloggers later denounced the footage as “fake” and walked back these claims, stating that Ukrainian forces still control Synkivka and are fiercely defending the area.[36] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that some parts of Synkivka remain contested, however.[37] Russian milbloggers also amplified footage of an explosion at an unspecified bridge across the Oskil River and initially claimed that Ukrainian forces mined the bridge, but later concluded that Russian forces conducted an airstrike against the bridge instead.[38] Prior to the clarification, one milblogger claimed that the footage indicated that Ukrainian forces do not intend to defend areas on the east bank of the Oskil River.[39] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces captured unspecified heights in the Kupyansk direction, near Synkivka, and near Petropavlivka (6km east of Kupyansk).[40]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Kreminna area and reportedly advanced on August 21. Ukrainian officials reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Kreminna, Bilohorivka (12km southwest of Kreminna), and the Serebrianske forest area (11km south of Kreminna).[41]

Ukrainian forces reportedly continued offensive operations on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on August 21 and reportedly made minor advances. Ukrainian Severodonetsk City Administration Head Roman Vlasenko stated that Ukrainian forces had unspecified successes in the Kreminna area.[42] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces made tactical gains near Novoselivske (16km northwest of Svatove) and in the Serebrianske forest area near Dibrova (7km southwest of Kreminna).[43] Russian officials claimed that Russian forces repelled Ukrainian attacks near Dibrova, Torske, and the Serebrianske forest area.[44]

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

Russian forces conducted offensive operations near Bakhmut on August 21 and advanced on Bakhmut’s southern flank. Geolocated footage published on August 20 indicates that Russian forces advanced northwest of Klishchiivka (7km southwest of Bakhmut).[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Klishchiivka and Kurdyumivka (13km southwest of Bakhmut).[46] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Russian forces are attempting to restore lost positions on Bakhmut’s northern flank near Zaliznyanske (12km north of Bakhmut), Vasylivka (20km northwest of Bakhmut), and Bohdanivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut) and that fighting continues on Bakhmut’s southern flank in central Klishchiivka, north and west of Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut), and north of Kurdyumivka.[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces maintain their positions northwest of Bakhmut and along the Klishchiivka-Andriivka-Kurdyumivka line (up to 13km southwest of Bakhmut) and that Russian forces control Klishchiivka.[48] Another Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Klishchiivka and Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[49]

Ukrainian forces reportedly made limited territorial gains near Bakhmut over the past week. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces have liberated three square kilometers in the Bakhmut direction in the past week and that Ukrainian forces hold the dominant heights on the northern flank of Bakhmut, trapping Russian forces.[50]

Russian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line but did not make any claimed or confirmed advances on August 21. Malyar and the Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to advance in the Avdiivka direction as well as near Marinka (on the western outskirts of Donetsk City) and Novomykhailivka (10km southwest of Donetsk City).[51] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces probed Ukrainian positions in the Avdiivka direction from Kruta Balka (4km northwest of Avdiivka) and did not advance.[52]

The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces conducted offensive operations along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on August 21. The Russian MoD claimed that Ukrainian forces unsuccessfully attacked near Krasnohorivka (either directly west of Donetsk City or 8km northwest of Avdiivka) and Nevelske (14km southwest of Avdiivka).[53]

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

Ukrainian forces continued counteroffensive operations in western Donetsk and eastern Zaporizhia oblasts but did not advance on August 21. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian artillery and air units repelled a Ukrainian attack in the Urozhaine (9km south of Velyka Novosilka) direction and that Russian forces stopped two Ukrainian reconnaissance groups south of Chervone (14km southeast of Hulyaipole).[54] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing reconnaissance operations in the direction of Zavitne Bazhnnya (12km south of Velyka Novosilka).[55] The Russian “Vostok” Battalion claimed that Ukrainian forces are continuing to attack Russian positions east of Urozhaine.[56]

Ukrainian forces advanced to central Robotyne (10km south of Orikhiv) and east of the settlement in western Zaporizhia Oblast on August 21. Geolocated footage posted on August 21 showed Ukrainian forces operating in central Robotyne, while other geolocated footage posted on August 20 showed that Ukrainian forces made another advance about three kilometers east of Robotyne (south of Mala Tokmachka).[57] The advances in and east of Robotyne likely indicate that Ukrainian forces overcame Russian fortifications in the area. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that Ukrainian forces conducted successful operations in the direction southeast of Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka.[58] Malyar added that Russian forces unsuccessfully attempted to regain lost positions east of Robotyne and that combat operations are ongoing in Robotyne. Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces intensified attacks on the Robotyne-Verbove (21km southeast of Orikhiv) line and are engaged in heavy battles in central Robotyne with elements of the Russian 810th Guards Naval Infantry Brigade (Black Sea Fleet) and 503rd Motorized Rifle Regiment (19th Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District [SMD]).[59] The 503rd MRR had been stationed in Nesteryanka (12km northwest of Robotyne) and elements of it likely redeployed to Robotyne relatively recently to reinforce failing Russian defenses in the area.[60] A Kremlin-affiliated milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced on the Robotyne-Verbove line and control part of the Russian forward defensive lines.[61] Some Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces left several positions in the Verbove area as part of the elastic defense, although it is not clear how abandoning positions around Verbove would be part of an elastic defense unless Ukrainian forces are further forward than ISW currently assesses them to be.[62] Zaporizhia Oblast occupation head Yevgeny Balitsky claimed that three Ukrainian assault groups tried to break through Russian defenses near Verbove but were unsuccessful.[63]

Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces continued to carry out raids on the islands in the Dnipro River delta and on the east (left) bank Kherson Oblast.[64] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian assault groups engaged in small arms combat with Ukrainian forces near the Antonivsky Bridge.[65]

Russian forces continue to face challenges with logistics, and Russian officials are intensifying security measures in Crimea that are likely slowing Russian logistics in southern Ukraine. Ukrainian-Crimean partisan movement “Atesh” reported that Crimean railway stations such as the Simferopol-Hruzove train station are holding many trains carrying fuel and lubricants likely intended for Russian military equipment operating in Ukraine.[66] “Atesh” noted that these trains are not scheduled to depart in the near future due to logistics problems outside of Crimea. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Captain First Rank Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces strengthened security measures near the Kerch Strait Bridge and created a buffer zone to inspect ships.[67] Humenyuk stated that there are currently 30 to 40 ships awaiting inspection in the buffer zone and noted that Russian Black Sea Fleet and Border Guards Service vessels maneuver alongside civilian vessels.

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

The Russian government continues to introduce mandatory nationalistic and militaristic courses into high school curricula to promote military service among the Russian youth. The Russian Ministry of Education approved a new high school military training curriculum for grades 10 and 11 that includes reconnaissance drone operations.[68] The curriculum also includes training in tactics, small arms fire, battlefield first aid, engineering, and other topics. The Russian Ministry of Education and Ministry of Defense announced in June that military training for students in 10th grade would be mandatory.[69] The Russian government may be promoting reconnaissance drone operation training among high school students in order to advertise drone operation positions in the Russian military among other purposes.

Russian Commander-in-Chief of the Ground Forces Oleg Salyukov and Iranian Artesh Ground Forces Commander Brigadier General Kiomars Heydari met in Moscow on August 21 to discuss Russian-Iranian military cooperation.[70] Information about this meeting can be found in the August 21 Iran Update.

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

Belarusian authorities reportedly exposed forcibly deported Ukrainian children to pro-Kremlin propaganda in Belarus. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on August 21, citing public Belarusian government documents and leaked documents from Russian Railways and Belarusian company Belaruskali, that Belarusian authorities have forcibly removed over 2,000 children from occupied Ukraine to Belarus.[71] Footage and images from the camp reportedly show children training with small arms, meeting with Russian Orthodox priests, and watching shows glorifying Russian President Vladimir Putin.[72] The WSJ reported that Belaruskali has spent millions of dollars to bring seven groups of 310 children each to the “Dubrava” children’s camp since spring of 2022.[73]

Russian National Monitoring Center for Assistance to Missing and Injured Children Head Elena Milskaya has reportedly been involved with the forced deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to Russia since 2018. Russian opposition news outlets reported on August 21 that the National Monitoring Center for Assistance to Missing and Injured Children helped facilitate the forced removal of children from occupied Kherson Oblast to Crimea and then to Krasnodar Krai in October 2022.[74] A Russian opposition news outlet Proekt reported that Milskaya served as the Director of the St. Vasily the Great Foundation from 2018 to 2019, which Ukraine sanctioned for deporting children from Simferopol in occupied Crimea to Moscow in 2018.[75]

Russian occupation authorities continue to forcibly deport Ukrainian civilians in occupied Ukraine to Russia under the guise of medical treatment. The Ukrainian Resistance Center reported that Russian doctors in occupied Ukraine conduct forced examinations of Ukrainian locals and then send them to Russia for “treatment.”[76] The Ukrainian Resistance Center also reported that doctors from Kabardino-Balkaria Republic recently arrived in Skadovsk in occupied Kherson Oblast and that Russian authorities incentivize Russian doctors to go to Ukraine by offering them higher salaries for traveling to Ukraine than their salaries in Russia.[77]

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).

Belarusian maneuver elements continue conducting exercises in Belarus. The Belarusian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated that elements of the 103rd Vitebsk Separate Guards Airborne Brigade conducted parachute jump training at the Kukovyachino airfield in Belarus.[78]

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarussian 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. Opinion: Stop Listening to ‘Ukraine Experts’ Who Don’t Know Ukrainians

But we have created so many Ukrainian experts since February 2022.

Opinion: Stop Listening to ‘Ukraine Experts’ Who Don’t Know Ukrainians

The world is now teeming with so-called Ukraine experts who have no clue about Ukrainians. Their theoretical approach to this war is a recipe for miscalculation, if not disaster.

By Stash Luczkiw

August 21, 2023, 4:28 pm | Comments (5)

kyivpost.com · by Stash Luczkiw

In the past nine years, and especially since 2022, the world has become awash with experts on Ukraine. Politicians, professors, think-tankers, TV talking heads, journalists, and combinations thereof, have been vying with each other in democratic capitals, far from the missiles, to influence policy and public opinion.

At this point – admittedly at the risk of gross oversimplification – the best of these Ukraine experts can be lumped into one of two categories: those who have studied Ukraine through books and interacted with Ukrainian elites; and those who have spent a fair amount of time in Ukraine with ordinary folks.

Virtual experts vs. raw elbow experts

In general, the first category – we’ll call them “virtual experts” – have been wildly off the mark from the beginning. These were the people who in January 2022 assumed Ukraine would be overrun by Russian forces “in days”.

They look at studies, numbers, analyses. They focus on “objective facts” and their commonplaces. They lift their noses from their papers and say, “No way.” These are those who insisted that Zelensky should set up a government in exile, negotiate some sort of face-saving modus vivendi with Moscow.

You find a lot these people in Washington DC where, in order carve out a career, one needs to jump through a series of hoops that include advanced degrees from prestigious universities, interning with the “right people,” and schmoozing the necessary contacts in order to climb up the corporate pyramid of government or university bureaucracy.

Failed Coup in Moscow Precipitated Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence

Ironically, a botched attempt by Moscow hardliners 32 years ago to preserve the faltering Soviet empire enabled Ukraine finally to break free and declare independence.

Then there’s the second category of “Ukraine expert.” For better or worse, these types tend not consider themselves experts. They are the ones who have spent time in Ukraine, among Ukrainians. Many of them have married into Ukrainian families. Some have come to Ukraine to work, others to train or fight with Ukrainian soldiers. Many have been volunteers seduced by that unquantifiable Ukrainian spirit you hear foreigners talking about throughout the country.

We’ll call these people “raw elbow experts” because they have done their fair share of rubbing elbows with ordinary Ukrainians. Through osmosis, they have come to understand and appreciate the contradictions and peculiarities of Ukraine.

Most importantly, when they learn about the blood-soaked history of the land, it sheds light on their intuitive appreciation for the people, it explains what they have already come to feel.

This is in stark contrast to the virtual experts, who have already expatiated on the history and geopolitical configurations of the land. These people tend to meet with intellectual and political elites at conferences and to gravitate toward those who have already staked out a similar position to their own.

Such virtual experts try not to feel anything that doesn’t give added value to their already formulated theses – lest it skew their objectivity.

To make matters worse, they tend to have studied Ukraine from within thoroughly Russo-centric Slavic departments within universities, which is a whole other problem that won’t be addressed here.

Ideally, the raw elbow expert is the type of person a competent intelligence agency should hire – someone who speaks four or five languages and has backpacked across the planet in his youth.

Unfortunately, at least in the case of the US intelligence communities, such people would be hard pressed to gain security clearance. Much better to have A-grade students who spent their youth studying in graduate schools and interned with all the “right people.”

Let us now name illustrious names

So which Ukraine experts should we listen to?

It goes without saying that Ukrainians themselves know their country better than foreigners. But for those wary of indigenous bias, there are any number of non-Ukrainian public figures who understand Ukraine, Ukrainians, their history and its struggle for independence from Moscow – an existential struggle with clear genocidal overtones.

There are, however, a few cases of overlap: virtual experts who have rubbed plenty of elbows, people with intellectual credentials and contacts with elites, in addition to a broad understanding of Ukrainian culture, language and people.

Among public intellectuals, Timothy Snyder towers above his peers. For anyone who has not seen his publicly available history course at Yale University, “The Making of Modern Ukraine,” it is available on YouTube; and it is worthwhile not only for those unfamiliar with the complexities of Ukrainian history, but even for knowledgeable scholars who want to look at certain developments from an original perspective.

Another overlapping intellectual is Snyder’s former professor at Oxford, Timothy Garton Ash, who regularly visits Ukraine and met with dissidents against Communist regimes well before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Among military analysts who double as TV talking heads, one needs to refer to those who have either trained with Ukrainian and/or Russian militaries. Retired Generals Ben Hodges and Mark Hertling both understood from the outset that Ukrainians would fight hard and with surprising success. That’s because they had long been interacting with Ukrainian or Russian officers and soldiers. They saw firsthand the defense preparations made over the years since the invasion of Crimea in 2014.

Dr. Phillip Karber, a military scholar and former US Marine, has also spent a lot of time at the front over the past nine years and offers the kind of insight that comes from rubbing elbows.

As for the virtual specialists, there is one group that has reportedly been tasked by US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan – the consummate A-student with stellar resume – to engage in back-channel negotiations with the Kremlin. The trio consists of Richard Haass, Thomas Graham, and Charles Kupchan, all former US government advisors and think-tank denizens who tend toward the “grand bargains forged by great powers” school of political science.

Suffice it to say that Kupchan has been consistently wrong about Ukraine since the full-scale invasion and has gone to great efforts to intellectually hedge his utter lack of knowledge with respect to Ukrainians by couching it in the language of academic realpolitik.

Another figure is William Burns, the director of the CIA. Burns is actually one of those rare Americans who is supposed to understand Russia, speak Russian, and know his way through the shark-infested waters of Kremlin power struggles in Moscow, where he had served as ambassador from 2005 to 2008.

But Burns’ view of Ukraine has long been filtered through his deep contacts with Russian elites. In order for him to understand Ukrainians at this stage of his career, he would need to “unlearn” everything and renounce the Kissinger-inspired pose that brought him to his current illustrious position as one of the world’s most powerful men. It won’t happen.

And then there’s the pesky moral question

Largely ignored among the experts is the basic question of what’s the right thing to do – as if it had no bearing on the pragmatic outcome.

Understandably, political advisors in powerful countries work on the assumption that they must serve the interests of their own governments and people. Yet the intellectual and epistemological process that enables their rise to the status of advisor often obviates their ability to feel reality on a more subjective level. Worse, the process tends to disregard moral factors that might complicate their pragmatic procedural flow charts.

In other words: “Let’s not introduce the question of what’s right and wrong and just focus on what’s doable and in our interest.”

But that’s exactly why they have been so wildly off the mark. Anyone now in Ukraine and anyone who has been there and participated in the process of its three-decades-long (some would argue three centuries) independence movement knows. It’s a knowledge that in many ways supersedes what you can glean from graduate school or think-tank conferences, or even experience as a cog in the wheel of some foreign ministry bureaucracy.

What’s happening in Ukraine is real, not virtual. It affects the entire world. You can feel it from the Carpathian Mountains to the Sea of Azov. Just talk to those who know what it is they’re feeling: namely, that Ukrainians will not retreat on their path after 32 years of progress as an independent nation.

The simple reason is because Ukrainians know that the only way Vladimir Putin, or any other Russian potentate, can stop their resistance is to go into full-Stalin mode – kill as many Ukrainians as possible to crush the Ukrainian spirit. In other words, genocide. Therefore, Ukrainians have no choice but to fight.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

kyivpost.com · by Stash Luczkiw

3. As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up

So does this mean we cannot build the iron mountain?

As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up

Washington has sent Kyiv millions of munitions, but restocking the arsenal and building new production lines remains a problem

By Missy Ryan, Alex Horton and Karen DeYoung

Updated August 21, 2023 at 8:06 a.m. EDT|Published August 19, 2023 at 3:14 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · August 19, 2023

The Biden administration’s sprint to supply Ukraine with weapons central to its military success against Russia has yielded a promising acceleration of arms production, including the standard NATO artillery round, output of which is expected soon to reach double its prewar U.S. rate of 14,000 a month.

The stakes in the U.S. effort to shake up a sclerotic defense acquisition system are particularly high as Kyiv tries to claw back territory from Russian control in a slow-moving counteroffensive whose fate, U.S. officials now say, hinges on the West’s ability to satisfy Ukraine’s astonishing hunger for artillery ammunition.

But industry experts warn of major challenges in sustaining an elevated output of arms and equipment needed not just to aid Ukraine but to ensure the United States’ own security in potential conflicts with Russia or China. Those include overcoming scarcity of key inputs including TNT and maintaining expanded capacity amid fluctuating budgets and uncertainty about future military needs.

“Whether you think it’s going well or it’s going poorly is whether you’re a glass-half-full person or glass-half-empty,” Cynthia Cook, a defense industry expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said of the attempt to ramp up arms manufacturing swiftly. “But also, it’s how much you work in defense acquisition.”

The war in Ukraine has brought a boom for American defense firms, which are racing to expand production and factory capacity. It also has meant a bureaucratic scramble at the Pentagon to get needed equipment in time.

A year and a half after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, production deals are only gradually being cemented. Of the $44.5 billion the United States has appropriated for manufacturing arms destined for Ukraine or replenishing donated U.S. stocks, the Defense Department to date has finalized contracts to produce weapons costing roughly $18.2 billion, or 40.8 percent of that total.

To Cook and other industry experts, that ratio, as modest as it appears, is an achievement for the military’s often slow, unwieldy acquisitions system, in which concluding a major contract often takes up to 16 months — let alone manufacturing a piece of complex equipment for use in battle.

Pentagon officials say the eventual value of Ukraine-related contracts concluded through Aug. 18 will be substantially higher than the $18.2 billion figure, largely because it doesn’t account for contracts that give companies about half the expected value up front, with additional costs finalized later.

Experts say the United States, as it invests in expanding the production of munitions, drones, air-defense missiles and other arms that Ukraine needs, also must ensure that it can sustain expanded capacity as requirements evolve. After grueling counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Pentagon has looked to fund the capacity to win, or deter, future conflicts that could require a very different set of capabilities and weapons systems — particularly against the threat posed by China’s burgeoning military. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine laid bare a NATO-wide munitions crunch, highlighting important vulnerabilities in fighting the war of the present. “The question is making sure that this problem, which is illuminated now, isn’t swept under the rug in future compromises,” Cook said.

Defense and industry officials spoke about the race to accelerate arms production on the condition of anonymity to provide a candid assessment of the evolving effort.

The administration has focused largely on expanding output of the 155mm artillery round, which has been a mainstay of the West’s conventional arsenal for decades and proved critical for Ukraine in the ongoing counteroffensive. Despite Ukrainian forces receiving U.S. training on modern combined-arms maneuvers over the winter, the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky has largely jettisoned these tactics, instead embracing an attritional, artillery-heavy approach as it seeks to breach Russian minefields and fiercely defended lines of trenches.

U.S. officials now say that the tactical shift made by Ukraine will require sustaining the country with a robust supply of artillery shells. While Ukrainian forces have created a munitions advantage on the battle’s southern front by using extended-range missiles from France and Britain to strike Russian ammunition depots behind the front lines, they say those blows will prove consequential only if Ukraine also can penetrate Russian defenses.

Since February 2022, the Pentagon has concluded $2.26 billion of manufacturing contracts for the 155mm round, helping to increase U.S. output from 14,000 units a month before Russia’s invasion to around 24,000 per month today. Production is slated soon to reach 28,000 a month, with the goal of producing 1 million shells a year by fall 2025. Officials declined to say what share of that would go to Ukraine vs. being held in reserve in the United States.

A host of companies have different roles in manufacturing the shells, including forging steel projectiles and assembling them for battle. The Defense Department also is investing in expanding production lines.

The pace of the munitions ramp-up could have long-lasting effects for civilians in Ukraine after the Biden administration’s decision this summer to provide controversial cluster munitions, which White House officials described as a “bridge” solution until output of conventional artillery shells increases.

U.S. officials hope the cluster munitions, which consist of large pods that release hundreds of bomblets — some of which fail to detonate upon impact and can pose a danger to civilians for decades — can help Ukraine maintain momentum until more conventional shells are made. In the near term, the mix of artillery ammunition being sent to Ukraine will become heavier on cluster munitions, they said.

Officials in the U.S. Army, which is responsible for procuring the 155mm artillery rounds, are moving “as fast as humanly possible” to speed up production, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said this month.

“We’re going to be able to continue to provide the Ukrainians with munitions, I think, for a long time,” she told reporters. “I think they’re probably going to continue using [the cluster munitions] for a while as well.”

Although Ukraine’s summer counteroffensive is just months old, defense officials are already looking toward winter, when a potential lull in fighting could, as one official described, permit U.S. and allied production “to catch up and help sustain them.” But Moscow will not be static, either: A break could allow Russian forces also to rearm and harden their defensive lines.

The war has been a wake-up call for Ukraine’s backers across the West, where officials see an urgent need to augment their own munitions stockpiles. NATO officials have wondered how long the Western alliance could sustain a major conventional war. “No one had really asked themselves the question, well, what if ‘day one, night one’ becomes ‘week two, week three, week four?’” British Defense Minister Ben Wallace said last month.

Wormuth, without providing details, said the United States would aim also to set its artillery reserves as a higher level. “One of the lessons learned out of the Ukrainian experience is we need to go back and revisit those minimum standards. And we may have underestimated,” she told reporters this month.

Officials note that some contracts signed to replenish U.S. supplies or produce specific weapons for Ukraine have been finalized in 30 days or less, including deals to make Switchblade and Phoenix Ghost loitering drones and NASAM air defense systems. They also are employing, for the first time, multiyear contracts for munitions.

Restocking the U.S. arsenal will require finding basic weapons-making materials, experts say, a problem complicated by a global scarcity of chemicals and explosives. The United States no longer produces TNT and has since moved to a substitute called IMX, an explosive that provides power with less risk of accidental detonation.

But the dramatic increase in shell production has pushed the United States to seek out new global suppliers of TNT. Poland has been a primary U.S. source, but the Pentagon is working with its allies and partners to increase its supplies, potentially including from Japan.

The United States has healthy stockpiles of explosive fill, officials said. But as factories churn out more shells, “we know we’ll need additional production of both those propellants and those explosives,” another defense official said.

The war has cut the United States off from one source of TNT, as Russian forces now control an area of eastern Ukraine where an explosives company called Zarya agreed in 2020 to a multiyear deal to procure TNT for a U.S. contractor. The conflict disrupted the supply from Zarya, but officials said the company never was intended to be a major supplier to the United States.

The availability of propellant, a combustible charge that sends the artillery round through the barrel, is another constraint to sustaining increased U.S. and European production.

Martin Vencl, a spokesman for the state-owned Czech company Explosia, which makes propellant charges, noted the scarcity of related raw materials, such as nitroglycerin and nitrocellulose. The company is running at full capacity to make propellant for 155mm rounds, but long-term investment is needed to double its output, which the company hopes to achieve by 2026, Vencl said.

Camille Grand, who served as NATO’s assistant secretary general for defense investment from 2016 to 2022, noted that the recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq did not consume artillery at anywhere close to the rapid pace as the war in Ukraine has, meaning that suppliers were not forced to tap so deeply into their stocks.

“We’re all relearning what it means to do mass production of ammunition, which had become a ... nonstarter” for many NATO members, Grand said.

Grand attributed some European countries’ paltry ammunition stockpiles to the preference for funneling limited defense funds to big-ticket items such as jets and main battle tanks.

“No defense minister would put on a T-shirt saying ‘I bought stockpiles and spare parts,’” Grand said. “They all want to be the guy who said, ‘I bought the last fighter aircraft.’”

European nations are trying to remedy that problem. This summer, the European Union approved a three-track plan ultimately to produce 650,000 rounds of large-caliber ammunition a year and committed itself to delivering 1 million rounds of artillery ammunition for Ukraine in a joint effort within the next 12 months.

Grand said the biggest obstacle is the timeline. “It’s good and nice to know that five years from now, we’ll be able to ramp up production and refill stockpiles,” he said. “But in the meantime, Ukraine is running short, and we’re going to be in trouble.”

Experts say it is important to avoid what one defense official called a “boom and bust” cycle by ensuring that Western militaries continue effectively to signal a demand for these weapons. Failure to do so could result in factory lines going cold, as occurred with Stinger missiles, with the manufacturer of the shoulder-fired missiles having to enlist retirees to help get production going again.

The challenge goes beyond accelerating near-term production. The Pentagon needs to “continue to procure at that level over a longer period of time so that we have not just healthy stocks, but a healthy production and industrial base that’s able to meet them,” the second defense official said.

“We want to make sure that we’re able to maintain focus across the government, and really across allies and partners on the need of maintaining just consistent high demand for these weapons,” the official said.

A senior industry official familiar with the Pentagon acquisition process, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid assessment, said the bureaucracy continues to struggle with articulating evolving needs, sometimes leaving defense companies to make hiring and investment decisions with incomplete information.

“The Defense Department does not have a very good track record of communicating requirements,” the official said. While it’s clear that producing artillery rounds is a priority within the agency right now, the official said, “the question becomes how strong the commitment is over fiscal years, over presidential administrations, and the administrations of other countries.”

Continued high levels of U.S. funding for Ukraine, which has enjoyed generally strong bipartisan support, may face increased opposition as a small but vocal minority of Republican legislators questions the wisdom of the commitment to the current fight. The Biden administration last week requested an additional $20 billion of security, economic and humanitarian aid for Ukraine.

So far, Republican leaders have managed to defeat attempts to curtail aid by critics within the party, including Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). “The Biden administration is sleepwalking our great country into a world war,” he said on the House floor last month.

correction

A previous version of this article said that U.S. production of 155mm artillery rounds is now around 20,000 a month. It is around 24,000 a month. The article has been corrected.

The Washington Post · by Missy Ryan · August 19, 2023

4. Women in Army SOF sidelined by ‘benevolent sexism,’ study finds

Troubling yes. But you cannot fix problems if you do not understand them. And you have to be willing to address them.

But this also begs the question as many continue to ask whether women should be operators on SF teams? (or SEAL platoons).

But why do I support women in SF? If you are going to support a resistance you can be damn sure women will be part of the resistance. It should be obvious that having women advising and assisting a resistance force would make sense. Just take a look at Ukraine.

Then there are others who will remind us of people like Virginia Hall in the OSS and others like her. But even in the OSS there were no women assigned to the Operational Groups or Jedburghs, but a number did serve behind enemy lines with distinction.

The "Glorious Amateurs" of OSS: A Sisterhood of Spies

https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/glorious-amateurs-of-oss-sisterhood-of-spies/

Early in the creation of the OSS, General William Donovan saw the potential of adding female spies to his growing pool of talent. Of the 13,000 personnel that made up the OSS, more than 4,000 officers were women, and they created propaganda, interrogated German prisoners, decoded intelligence, stole secrets, provided analysis, and engaged in counterintelligence. And they did all this while putting themselves in harm’s way–in every theater of World War II.

The Women of the OSS: On The Pioneering American Spies of WWII

https://crimereads.com/the-women-of-the-oss-on-the-pioneering-american-spies-of-wwii/

The OSS employed over 13,000 personnel at its peak, 35% of them women. 7,500 of these men and women served overseas—however the number of women who served overseas as spies was a very small, elite group—and the exact number remains classified. What is certain is the very first American female spies, pioneers like Elizabeth McIntosh, Doris Bohrer and the others I’ve highlighted here, left an enormous legacy and blazed the trail for the American women who work in counterintelligence today.

Women in Army SOF sidelined by ‘benevolent sexism,’ study finds

armytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 21, 2023

In the “most masculine community on earth,” not only do servicewomen contend with undue interest from their male counterparts, they also encounter hostility from jealous spouses and “benevolent sexism” that can keep them off of deployments and training ops due to perceived fragility. Female soldiers, still an extreme minority in the special operations community, report that they’re called out and excluded due to their status as parents; their perception as too stern or too friendly; and even their decision to wear yoga pants, a ubiquitous activewear staple for millions of women. Those are some of the key findings from an internal study by U.S. Army Special Operations Command on barriers to service for women in the ranks.

Completed in 2021 and released this month to Military Times through a public records request, the 106-page study illustrates the obstacles that persist as female soldiers seek equal standing in USASOC, from obtaining gear that fits properly to being recognized as full members of the teams they serve with.

The study also represents a thorough and clear-eyed effort — a first of its scope within U.S. Special Operations Command — to grapple with and understand the hidden factors that keep women from being accepted by their peers in that community. Acting “without external provocation,” outgoing USASOC Commander Maj. Gen. Francis Beaudette directed the study be undertaken, with oversight from an organizational psychologist, in early 2021. Over the course of the year, 5,000 USASOC members, including 1,000 women, took a 41-question survey identifying barriers to service. This was followed by 48 women-only focus group sessions held at 14 bases, and 25 command-team interviews throughout USASOC at the group, battalion and company level. Of the 42 recommendations the study generated, all of which USASOC says it’s acting on in some form, 18 emphasized increased education and awareness.

Other obstacles to service addressed by the study included access to female-specific health care; pregnancy and miscarriage support; access to child care; and safety concerns in lodging due to poor lighting and lax security.

Of note, nearly all of the women who participated in the research held support rules within USASOC; at the time of the report’s completion, there were only three female “18-series,” or Green Beret, soldiers within the entire command. (Today, USASOC spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Burns said, there are more than three but fewer than 10 female Green Berets.) This, study leaders indicate, was a driving factor for the project.

“Although disappointed by some of the findings and comments in the study, we are committed to addressing these issues with candor and transparency. I’m encouraged by the report stating that 72% of women would support their daughters serving in an ARSOF formation,” Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC’s current commander, said in a letter introducing the study. “I’m confident the incredible men and women in this formation are making USASOC a better place to work every day for our sons and daughters alike.”

Benevolent sexism

While sexual assault and harassment are addressed in the study — 30% of female soldiers surveyed reported sexual harassment as a challenge, and focus group participants agreed the figure should really be closer to 95% — women said they were also harmed or limited by male colleagues and leaders who acted out of a desire to protect them. In one case, a junior noncommissioned officer said she was taken off a deployment roster and replaced with a man because “I wasn’t tactically proficient enough for the mission;” however, she added, the pre-mission training had not even begun yet and her leaders didn’t have the necessary information to make that call.

Another junior NCO reported that on her last deployment, all the men in her unit had jointly decided it was “too risky” to allow women to leave the wire, dramatically limiting their ability to contribute to the mission. Another woman who described a similar scenario vented her exasperation to investigators: “I had a she-wee, I can wipe my own ass, and I went to SERE school where I slept right next to all the guys.”

The Shewee is a brand-name funnel-like device that allows women to urinate discreetly in a field environment.

The common practice of having separate living quarters for women in training and deployed environments, which offers privacy and staves off “spousal distrust” concerns back home, also has a major downside, respondents said: multiple women reported being left behind on missions because of planning changes in after-hours sessions that took place without them.

Among female officers in particular, the study found, jealousy from spouses and significant others was a major barrier to equality and camaraderie within units. Women in focus groups described being excluded from casual and social events for this reason. One officer said she was only referred to by her last name to hide the fact that she was a woman.

“I went to a hail and farewell,” a company-grade officer told researchers. “Two spouses approached me and told me not to talk or text [their] husband[s] outside of duty hours.”

Because of these isolating factors, loneliness also emerged as a concern. While an encouraging 69% of women said they had mentors and felt comfortable asking men and women alike for career guidance, female soldiers said they struggled to develop real friendships in their units. While some respondents reported unprofessional attention from male colleagues that forced them to hide their social media profiles or avoid social interactions, comfortable camaraderie often appeared to be missing. Of note, the study pointed out that all these sensitivities and barriers to cohesion were lessened in units where women have been present and fully integrated for years.

“The decision to separately house female soldiers was often described as a leaders’ attempt to maintain good order and discipline by avoiding perceptions of unprofessional relationships or infidelity; however, most women view it as career preservation for those leaders,” the study found.

Ranger panties and yoga pants

Even PT gear could be a source of angst and exclusion. During workouts and other occasions where casual civilian attire was allowed, women in USASOC reportedly would get “called out” for wearing yoga pants or leggings as too form-fitting or revealing. This particularly rankled because the men habitually wore “Ranger panties,” or tight, scanty shorts, with impunity.

“Most women do not have a problem with ranger panties, they simply loathe the double standard,” the study found.

To address problems related to gender bias, both implicit and overt, the report called for the creation of an internal newsletter addressing issues faced by women in Army special operations, which launched in 2022 with an overview of the study featured in its first issue. It also recommended integrating study findings and the work of the newly launched Women in ARSOF Initiative into the pre-command course and onboarding processes within Army special operations’ premier training center, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Liberty, North Carolina. This recommendation remains in progress, according to the study.

The 106-page study was based on input from 5,000 USASOC members, include 1,000 women. (Spc. ShaTyra Reed/Army)

Lt. Col. Rachel Cepis, director of the initiative, told Military Times that she and study leader Dr. Monica Moore have been briefing onboarding classes at the training center and speaking to civil affairs classes at brown-bag lunches over the last year to help build awareness at the outset of cultural challenges facing women and the need to communicate and listen well. While it’s still too early to gauge the impact of these briefs, Moore and Cepis said they’re planning a three-year review to assess cultural progress.

“What better way to say what is ARSOF culture than by showing what the culture is in the schoolhouse, and saying this is how we treat our teammates,” Cepis said, “So they understand, this is a culture I’m walking into [rather than] trying to change a culture later on, which is a little bit more difficult.”

The survey did uncover a proportion of Special Forces soldiers openly opposed to women in their ranks. The 871 single-spaced pages of write-in comments returned with the survey included declarations from multiple male soldiers in senior enlisted ranks that they’d rather retire before welcoming women into Army Special Forces. Others questioned the motives of women who wanted to go to SOF units.

“The men that choose to lay down their lives and do missions that only great men can do are warriors … women like warriors,” one male soldier wrote. “These are the facts.”

No bad days

The everyday challenges cited by many women in the study, however, pointed instead to a broader uncertainty among male soldiers about how to treat their female counterparts, and a hesitancy to have the candid conversations required to achieve greater understanding.

As a visible minority, women in USASOC said they felt they “cannot have a bad day” because they were constantly being observed and having to prove their competency and value. While male soldiers are believed to be capable until they prove otherwise, the opposite is true for women, focus groups reported. Even demeanor provokes scrutiny: one NCO said if she smiled, she was perceived as too friendly, but her neutral demeanor was called “resting b—- face.”

“Men can be neutral, but I can’t,” she said.

Surveyed women stressed, though, that they didn’t want any special placement or opportunities just because they were female, and that worries over whether they were selected to a position just for their gender or that standards were lowered for them in some way contributed to feelings of insecurity and lack of belonging.

One solution the study identified in several places was simple: to listen more to women, include them in decisions that involve them, and “have the hard conversations,” whether with spouses about living arrangements, or between soldiers about exclusionary behaviors and unmet needs from lodging safety to proper gear. These conversations will become increasingly critical, the study added, as the population of women grows and deployments that include women in Special Forces specialties become commonplace.

“A couple of years from now, what I want to see is that just it’s become just second nature,” Cepis said. “I’ve been in ARSOF for a long time. And I’ve always felt like I’ve been part of the team, but I understand that that’s not everybody’s experience. What I want and what I hope is that that becomes everybody’s experience.”

5. Women in Army SOF resorted to buying their own armor, study finds

While there is no excuse for not properly supporting all soldiers, what this says to me is that there are women who are highly motivated to serve and will do what it takes to do so.

Women in Army SOF resorted to buying their own armor, study finds

armytimes.com · by Hope Hodge Seck · August 21, 2023

Nearly half of the women in U.S. Army Special Operations Command have problems with the way their issued gear fits, and some resort to buying their own — or borrowing a spouse’s — to ensure they can operate in comfort and safety. That’s according to a wide-ranging internal study on barriers to service for women in special operations, obtained by Military Times through a public records request.

In the study, which included a survey of 5,000 USASOC members and small focus-group meetings with 198 women throughout the command, access to properly fitting gear, and even inexpensive devices allowing for urination in field environments, emerged as a major concern. Two years later, many of the recommended solutions remain works in progress as the Army completes wear experiments and fit tests. For some issues, though, officials say the solution comes down to better education and awareness about how to adjust gear or request needed items.

The 106-page study found that 44% — dealt with equipment fit problems that hindered their ability to perform their essential soldier skills, “consequently creating adverse effects on overall lethality and survivability.” These issues ranged from body armor designed for men that didn’t fit against a woman’s body, leaving coverage gaps; MOLLE packs that rubbed shorter women raw; helmets that couldn’t be adjusted over hair buns and left soldiers unable to see in front of them; and a lack of bladder relief systems that forced soldiers to hold their urine until they developed urinary tract infections or to resort to the dangerous practice of “tactical dehydration.”

Having available gear that fits and meets the needs of female soldiers is more than a practical consideration, the study noted; it’s also about acknowledging women as full members of units and teams.

“Over the course of this study it became evident that gender bias is deeply embedded into staff processes and equipping, at all echelons, thus creating additional barriers. The majority of these biases are a result of preconceived beliefs that female service members should not receive gender-specific ‘accommodations,’” the study found. “A mentality change is necessary to modify the archaic attitude that supplying tools to female service members is an act of accommodation versus simply providing our warfighters with the right tools for the job.”

Across “all ranks and demographics,” the study found, women in USASOC are taking matters into their own hands to acquire body armor they can move safely in. That’s despite a U.S. Special Operations Command policy requiring SOF forces to wear only body armor that has been approved by the command. One senior enlisted woman said her husband gave her a set of body armor for their anniversary; an officer bought her own “because I need it to fit,” she said.

“In addition to mobility issues associated with poor fitting body armor, many women reported not being issued side plates due to lack of inventory and very limited availability of extra-small and small sizes,” the study reported.

When the results of the study were published at the end of 2021, the Army was in the process of fielding the Modular Scalable Vest, a lighter and more adjustable armored plate carrier that promised to address major fit complaints for women as well as shorter men. Fit tests with the MSV continue, and women in USASOC are set to get the vest at an undetermined date following fielding to the Army’s close combat forces, said Lt. Col. Rachel Cepis, the head of USASOC’s year-old Women in ARSOF initiative.

In addition, she said, the command was evaluating a “wedge” armor add-on prototype recently purchased for SOCOM that can be worn with existing plate carriers to improve fit and fill gaps between body and vest.

“It’s not going to be just specific to females; it would be specific to different body types,” Cepis said.

Fittings with the wedge system are expected in early 2024, Cepis said.

While problems with how the Advanced Combat Helmet fit over a hair bun were addressed in part by an Army regulation allowing for ponytails and braids, the study brings up certain activities critical to special operations, including static-line airborne operations and military free fall, in which unsecured hair might be a danger or liability.

Cepis said another gear concept likely to enter testing in February 2024 is an adjustable strap for the ACH that can better accommodate hair in a bun without forcing the helmet up and obstructing vision.

For the MOLLE ruck system, which can irritate and injure soldiers with a smaller stature because of its large frame, Cepis said one solution is better education about how to adjust packs for a better fit. The Women in ARSOF initiative, she said, is working on video tutorials that demonstrate correct adjustment. For instances where the pack can’t be adjusted to spec, she’s encouraging soldiers to photograph the issues they’re encountering so she can deliver the evidence to developers for better solutions.

“When the individual is saying, ‘my equipment doesn’t fit,’ that doesn’t help someone that’s doing the engineering,” Cepis said. “They need to know, where are you having hot spots? Where is it rubbing? Where is it causing muscle tension, all those types of things.”

Lack of information also proved a hindrance when it came to devices allowing women to urinate in the field without undressing. The Army remains in a lengthy process of designing a new device that can make the process even easier and more discreet — Cepis said one user assessment involved an in-uniform system that would allow users to relieve themselves literally on the run. This improved system is expected to be provided to aviators as well as ground combat troops once evaluation is complete.

In the meantime, Cepis said, USASOC does have a stock of funnel-like Field Urinary Diversion Devices, which women can request. But the study demonstrated that this is not well known; multiple respondents said they purchased their own commercially available devices, or suffered in silence.

“If you’ve never asked a question about a urinary device, as a junior soldier, then probably no one’s told you,” Cepis said. “Part of it is creating that kind of awareness and knowledge of the things that do exist.”

6. With China and Russia on the Warpath, It’s the Wrong Time to Reinvent a Triad (i.e., the Space, Cyber, SOF Triad)

Graphic at the link.

Bob makes a good point, words matter. He acknowledges the Space, Cyber, SOF triad was not intended to replace the nuclear triad.

Excerpts:

Lt. Gen. Jon Braga, commander of the Army’s Special Operations Command, said that the “new modern day cyber space and [special operations] triad concept is not meant to replace the nuclear triad, but to actually enhance integrated deterrence.”

On its face, all this sounds good—but there is little detail on how integration will be accomplished, what the specific roles and functions of these efforts will be, or how the new triad will actually contribute to integrated deterrence. Additionally, the notion of a “new triad” suggests the old one is now irrelevant or outdated.

Bob's argument is why I chose to describe SOF having two "trinities" rather than triads (though I do get into trouble with comparisons to other trinities from Clausewitz to Christianity).

The SOF trinities:

NO 1:

Irregular Warfare

Unconventional Warfare

Support to Political Warfare

NO 2:

Influence

Governance

Support to indigenous forces and populations.

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/two-special-operations-trinities

With China and Russia on the Warpath, It’s the Wrong Time to Reinvent a Triad

By Robert Peters

August 21, 2023

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2023/08/21/with_china_and_russia_on_the_warpath_its_the_wrong_time_to_reinvent_a_triad_974153.html

This month, senior U.S. Army officers proposed establishing a “new triad” comprised of cyber, special operations and space and missile defense. The stated goal: to integrate these capabilities to “conceptualize more complex and effective battlefield strategies for modern warfare.”

Such a combination certainly has potential to help deter and defeat America’s enemies but calling it a “triad” is a mistake—one that risks confusion with the existing set of capabilities that has kept America safe from strategic attack for over seven decades.

The term “triad” was coined during the Cold War to explain how the nuclear arsenal deters America’s adversaries. It refers to a specific set of platforms, each of which has particular roles and deterrence functions: nuclear-capable bombers for flexibility and to signal intent; nuclear ballistic missile submarines providing a survivable second-strike capability; and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) offering promptness, escalation control, and the ability to complicate our adversaries’ targeting efforts.

The Army’s new triad concept, by contrast, was presented as a data-gathering function that will better deter an adversary, defend critical cyber infrastructure, and create information warfare cells. Gen. James Dickson, commander of U.S. Space Command, pitched the promise of the concept like this: “The fusion of traditional space-based capabilities with cyber and [special operations] can generate new and responsive deterrent options.”

Although some have tried to articulate how Space, SOF, and Cyber will form a new triad, the details remain fuzzy and do not elucidate what problem the new triad seeks to address.

Yes, it is refreshing to hear that the Army seeks to leverage emerging capabilities to better deter our adversaries. But the proposal for a new triad sounds like a concept in search of a mission or an identity.

This is not the first time that the Defense Department has attempted to redefine the triad. The 2002 Nuclear Posture Review recast the triad into a “New Triad” of strike capabilities, responsive infrastructures, and various defenses.

This construct quickly fell into disuse and obscurity, however, as most in the Defense community failed to differentiate the New Triad from the existing nuclear triad (or, as seen in the below figure, triads within triads) and how the disparate capabilities interacted to achieve strategic effect. In short, the 2002 New Triad was a source of more confusion than clarity.

The 2002 “New Triad” from the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review

Words matter. With China and Russia on the warpath, actively expanding their nuclear arsenals, and engaging in nuclear coercion, now is the time for clarity in our terminology. The Defense Department must focus on revitalizing the existing nuclear triad of ballistic missile submarines, nuclear capable bombers, and ICBMs. Hijacking existing terms and applying them to ill-defined and emerging missions and experimental constructs will only confuse Congressional appropriators and authorizers, defense strategists, and policy makers at a time in which confusion is highly undesirable, if not outright dangerous.

The Army would be better served to use different terms to describe the strategic effects of the confluence of Space, Cyber, and Special Operations capabilities, rather than appropriate a term that describes the strategic arsenal that has deterred our adversaries for over seven decades.

A better approach might be to incorporate these efforts into the Army’s “multi-domain operations” construct, which it unveiled last summer. Or, if a new nomenclature truly is required, “integrated strategic operations” or “integrated enabling operations” might fit the bill. Any of these approaches would better serve national requirements than poaching on decades-long established strategic concepts such as “the triad.”

Robert Peters is a Research Fellow for Nuclear Deterrence and Missile Defense in Heritage’s Center for National Defense.

7. Female soldiers in Army special operations face rampant sexism and harassment, military report says

A little different headline spinning the report that was frost reported in the Army Times.

Female soldiers in Army special operations face rampant sexism and harassment, military report says

BY LOLITA C. BALDOR

Updated 2:20 PM EDT, August 21, 2023

AP · August 21, 2023

WASHINGTON (AP) — Female soldiers face rampant sexism, harassment and other gender-related challenges in male dominated Army special operations units, according to a report Monday, eight years after the Pentagon opened all combat jobs to women.

U.S. Army Special Operations Command, in a lengthy study, reported a wide range of “overtly sexist” comments from male soldiers, including a broad aversion to females serving in commando units. The comments, it said, are “not outliers” but represent a common sentiment that women don’t belong on special operations teams.

“The idea that women are equally as physically, mentally and emotionally capable to perform majority of jobs is quite frankly ridiculous,” said one male commenter. Others said they’d quit before serving on a team with a female, and that serving in such a situation it would create problems and jealousy among their wives.

The blunt and sometimes crass comments ring familiar to many who have watched the difficult transition as women moved into the military’s front line combat jobs. And they paint a disturbing, challenging picture for leaders.

The exhaustive report surveyed more than 5,000 people assigned to Army special operations forces units, including 837 female troops, 3,238 male troops and the rest defense civilians.

It revealed that “the vast majority” of the negative attitudes toward women serving in special operations “unfortunately did come from senior noncommissioned officers. So it does seem to indicate that it is generational,” Command Sgt. Maj. JoAnn Naumann, the most senior enlisted soldier in the command, said in a call with reporters Monday about the findings.

However the negative sentiments revealed the 2023 report echo sharp opposition voiced by special operations troops across the services in 2015, when surveyed on whether women should serve in the dangerous commando jobs. Later that year, in a landmark decision, then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter ordered all combat jobs open to women.

That change followed three years of study and debate, and reflected a formal recognition that thousands of women had served — and many were wounded or killed — on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then, women have made significant strides throughout the military, gaining high level command posts, but the report underscores that significant biases remain.

“I think people’s perspectives change when they interact and see the awesome soldiers that are out there,” said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, USASOC commander. “I’m talking about personal interactions that I’ve had with female special operations aviators that have performed some of the most daring denied-area-of-penetration rotary wing insertions in history,” Braga said, referring to how special operations pilots carry forces into areas where they are under fire or under threat.

“I don’t think anyone in the back of this helicopter is like, ’Man, I wish there was a male pilot. No, they want them to be an awesome pilot.”

Two years ago, Army special operations leaders ordered a study to identify and eliminate barriers to females serving in their force. USASOC is the first to do this type of study of its specialized force. It’s unclear if other services will do similar reviews.

The Army study focused on women serving in operational roles such as Green Berets, Ranger Regiment, aviation and psychological and civil affairs teams. The study and meetings, however, also included women in a wide array of support jobs such as engineers, mechanics, fuelers and communications and intelligence personnel who work with or sometimes accompany commandos on missions. The recommended changes are designed to benefit all females in the command.

The report, which is only now being released, identified a number of major issues, as female soldiers complained of sexism, isolation, poor-fitting and inadequate equipment, and lack of child care and health care, particularly involving pregnancy. They also expressed an overwhelming belief that they are passed over for jobs that are then given to less qualified men and that they have to do more and be perfect to get respect.

“I have to work hard to prove my excellence, while men have to work hard to prove their mediocrity,” one female soldier said.

Many male soldiers said female soldiers are respected and have the same chance for promotions as men. But the numbers dip when asked if woman have equal skills.

One male soldier dismissed any idea that women were pursuing career goals, saying women asking for special operations assignments “are looking for a husband, boyfriend or attention.” But there also were some who countered that men with negative opinions hadn’t worked with women, and that once they did they would realize their value.

All together there are roughly 2,200 female soldiers in USASOC — or nearly 8% of the 29,000 active duty soldiers. There also are 427 female civilians. Of the 2,200, a bit more than 250 are in what would be considered operational jobs with the Green Berets, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the Ranger Regiment and psychological and civil affairs teams.

Four women have passed the grueling course to become Green Berets, and several are serving in those jobs. Seven females are serving in the Ranger Regiment, which totals about 3,000 soldiers.

The report made 42 recommendations. Several involving increased training and messages to the force to expand awareness of sexual harassment, mentorship, health care and other issues, have been done. Other changes are in progress.

Overall, the report said that gender bias is “deeply embedded” in staffing and equipping the special operations force.

And, it reflected confusion. While there is solid agreement that standards cannot be lowered for females, many interpret that as prohibiting any gender-specific accommodations.

“Women may require different tools than men to perform the same task,” the report said. “A mentality change is necessary to modify the archaic attitude that supplying tools to female service members is an act of accommodation versus simply providing our warfighters with the right tools for the job.”

Key examples are body armor, helmets and rucksacks that are often too big for female soldiers and small-stature men. The Army has been struggling for years to address the body armor problems, and two years ago began distributing short and longer small-sized protective vests and combat shirts designed to better fit women.

The new report, however, said that USASOC has too few of those scalable vests, and efforts to address the helmets and rucksacks are ongoing.

Sexual harassment is a common, but complicated complaint.

While nearly every woman in focus groups said she had experienced sexual harassment, only 30% called it a challenge and very few were willing to report or publicly acknowledge it. According to the report, 25 sexual harassment complaints were filed by female special operations command soldiers between 2016 to 2020.

Women said they fear reprisal and don’t trust commanders to take action because of a “good ol’ boys club.” And female officers said they’re told to develop a “thick skin” so they can survive in a man’s world.

In contrast, male soldiers said that sexual harassment training has made them fear interaction with women because a joke or comment could end their careers.

___

AP writer Tara Copp contributed to this report

AP · August 21, 2023

8. Special Operations News Update - August 21, 2023 | SOF News

Special Operations News Update - August 21, 2023 | SOF News

sof.news · by SOF News · August 21, 2023

Curated news, analysis, and commentary about special operations, national security, and conflicts around the world.

Photo / Image: CSM Paul Langley during a ceremony where he assumed the position of Senior Enlisted Leader (SEL) for Special Operations Command Korea (SOCKOR) in August 2023.

Do you receive our daily newsletter? If not, you can sign up here and enjoy it five (almost) days a week with your morning coffee (or afternoon tea depending on where in the world you are).

SOF News

New SEL for SOCKOR. CSM Paul Langley is the new Senior Enlisted Leader for Special Operations Command Korea. He steps into this role after serving as the Commandant at the Army Special Operations NCO Academy at Fort Liberty (FBNC), North Carolina.

AFSOC Changes Up Training. On the chopping block is dive training for three special warfare fields. The Air Force Special Operations Command is looking at cutting the five-week combat dive qualification course from the initial training pipeline for special tactics officers and enlisted combat control and special reconnaissance airmen. “Air Force considers training changes across all special ops jobs”, Air Force Times, August 14, 2023.

NSW WOs Eligible for Bonus. The Navy’s Critical Skills Accession Bonus is offering those with a 7151 or 7171 special warfare designator a hefty bonus. Some CWOs are eligible for a lump sum payment in phases once signing a contract extension. “Special warfare chief warrant officers eligible for $90,000 bonus”, Navy Times, August 18, 2023.

CA and SEALs Conduct MEDCAP in Philippines. Members of a Naval Special Warfare (NSW) unit and the U.S. Army Civil Affairs hosted a medical civic action program (MEDCAP) with the local government of El Nido in Palawan, Philippines, from July 29-30, 2023. The team worked with medical professionals from local hospitals, the provincial health unit, the Palawan dental chapter, and local volunteers to serve hundreds of patients in various medical and dental services. “U.S. Civil Affairs, Navy SEALs Host Medical Civic Action Program in the Philippines”, PACOM.mil, August 16, 2023.

SF SGM Now Army’s Senior Enlisted. A former member of Delta Force and former SEL for USASOC is now the Sergeant Major of the Army. “A Delta Force Operator is Now Sergeant Major of the Army: Meet Mike Weimer”, SOFREP, August 5, 2023.

AFSOC Conference. The Air Force Special Operations Command held the 2023 Weapons and Tactics Conference at Hurlburt Field on August 2-11, 2023. Weapons and tactics experts from across the AFSOC enterprise gathered to participate in mission focused working groups to produce warfighter driven solutions to tactical problems. Working groups during the conference included focus areas such as precision strike, irregular warfare, specialized mobility, information warfare, and small unmanned aerial systems tactics. “AFSOC hosts 2023 Weapons and Tactics Conference”, AFSOC, August 14, 2023.

International SOF

‘Dnipro Devils’ of Ukraine. The Ukrainian special forces troops that are now launching daring raids across the Dnipro River and are wreaking havoc on Russian positions were trained by UK Royal Marines. “Dnipro Devils Drilled by British Special Forces”, Kyiv Post, August 14, 2023.

Russian PMCs. Independent Russian news outlets reported that the State Duma was pushing through an amendment to allow Russian regions to form their own private military companies (PMCs) on June 25, 2023. These PMCs are employable during mobilization, military emergencies or wartime to aid security forces against internal security threats. “Russian Regional Private Military Companies: Key Implications”, Grey Dynamics, August 21, 2023. (subscription)

SOF History

The Carlos Ghosn Affair. In 2019 a former Special Forces soldier, Mike Taylor, and his acquaintances helped a high-level executive with Lebanese origins facing imprisonment escape Japan – in a custom-made music box. He was put into a box, loaded onto a private plane, and flown to Turkey. Lebanon has no extradition policy. Unfortunately, Mike Taylor and his son (who assisted in the escape) were extradited to Japan and spent a few years imprisoned. “We smuggled an incarcerated US business tycoon out of Japan in a 3-foot box – then he stiffed us $1m”, New York Post, August 18, 2023.

Marine Recon Battalions. There are three active-duty Recon Battalions and one reserve battalion. Read about the history, organization, training, and more in “Marine Recon Battalion 101”, SOFREP, August 5, 2019.

Disastrous Day for Green Berets. On August 23, 1968, a large North Vietnamese Army force attacked MAC-V SOG FOB 4 and mission launch site on Marble Mountain in Da Nang. Most of the attacking NVA died in the three-hour attack, but they killed over two dozen Americans and over 40 Montagnards who manned the Recon Teams or the Hatchet Force alongside Americans. Seventeen Green Berets were killed in the battle. Read an account of the attack by John S. Meyer (former SOG member).

Ukraine Conflict

Long, Slow Campaign. The hopes that Ukraine would make a rapid strike deep into Russian held territory and possibly take the logistics node of Melitopol (Google Maps) have been dashed. The Russians have extensive dug-in positions and the probing attacks on multiple fronts by Ukrainian troops have yielded only slow progress. The Ukrainians strategy of advancing cautiously has succeeded in degrading Russian forces – the result which could create opportunities for a strategic breakthrough to the Sea of Azov. This would cut the land route between Russian and Crimea.

F-16s for Ukraine. President Biden has given the go-ahead for the Netherlands and Denmark to transfer advanced aircraft to Ukraine. But first the pilot training has to be completed . . . so it is still several months away from happening. Kyiv has been asking for the warplanes since early 2022 but the U.S. has stalled on the request. The F-16s are not likely to be used in 2023.

CRS Report – DoS funding for Ukraine. The Congressional Research Service has published a 13-page document entitled Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs (SFOPS) Supplemental Funding for Ukraine: In Brief. The United States Congress has, in total, appropriated about $113 billion for supplemental funding for Ukraine in FY2022 and FY2023. This funds a wide range of activities for the Department of State, Department of Defense, foreign assistance programs, weapons transfers, and more. On August 10, 2023, the Biden Administration submitted a request for almost $24 billion in FY2024 emergency supplemental funding for Ukraine and other international needs related to the conflict. This report details, if approved, where some of the money would go. (PDF, August 2023). https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47275

U.S Security Assistance. The Defense Department has updated its Fact Sheet on security assistance to Ukraine. It describes the several categories of material, weapons, and equipment provided. These include ground maneuver, aircraft, UASs, small arms, anti-armor, maritime, and other capabilities. (DoD, August 14, 2023, PDF, 3 pages).

Legal Status for Ukrainians in the U.S. The Biden administration has announced an extension and expansion of temporary legal status for Ukrainians who are in the United States.

CRS Report – Moldova: An Overview. The post-Soviet state lies on the western border of Ukraine. While it seeks greater integration with the West it also is constrained by Russian territorial occupation in the Transnistria region (located along the Ukraine border). CRS IF10894, updated August 14, 2023, PDF, 3 pages. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10894

National Security

IW Strategy. Paul Burton presents his perspective that the role of policy makers have in implementing irregular warfare campaigns over the long term. “Irregular Warfare Strategy Policy Friction: Perpetual Disruption Is Not Victory, or Is It?”, Small Wars Journal, August 16, 2023.

NATO Increases Advisory Mission in Iraq. Following a request from the Iraqi authorities and a decision by the North Atlantic Council, the scope of NATO Mission Iraq will now include support of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and Federal Police Command. The NATO Mission Iraq was established in 2018. “NATO Mission Iraq takes on additional advisory and capacity-building tasks”, NATO, August 17, 2023.

Proxy Wars. Vladimir Rauta reflects on the thinking behind the thinking about proxy wars while discussing a recently published publication on the topic. “How to Think about Proxy Wars in the Twenty-first Century”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, August 15, 2023.

MAVNI Recruitment Program. Hope Hodge Seck provides details about the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program. She presents the argument that the program should be reinstituted to bring back cultural and language fluency to the U.S. military forces. “For More Effective Irregular Warfare, Bring Back the MAVNI Recruitment Program”, Irregular Warfare Initiative, August 4, 2023.

Border Crisis. The number of immigrants encountered by U.S. authorities while attempting to enter from Mexico illegally soared in July. “Biden dealt massive border blow as illegal crossings spike 33%”, Washington Examiner, August 19, 2023.

Afghanistan: More Docs to Congress. Congressional leaders have received a batch of 300 documents related to the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan from the Department of State. House Republicans are continuing their probe of the chaotic military retreat from the country in the summer of 2021. The documents are situational reports and memos from the Afghanistan Task Force, which was created to coordinate efforts on evacuations and bring Afghans with special immigrant visas (SIVs) to the United States. “State Department Sends More Afghanistan Documents to Congress”, The Hill, August 17, 2023.

Help Special Operations Forces (SOF) personnel with spine injuries receive the healthcare options, education, and care they need.

Coup in Niger – Is a NEO About to Happen?

Another NEO – now Niger? The United States has, in the past few years, received quite a bit of experience in conducting non-combatant evacuation operations (NEOs). Recent NEOs include Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Sudan. The U.S. military is drawing up plans for a potential withdrawal of its 1,100 troops from Niger, a counterterrorism ally in West Africa that is in the throes of a coup, the commander of U.S. air forces in Europe and Africa said Friday. There are no immediate plans for military personnel to evacuate the country and abandon the two drone bases operated by U.S. forces in Niger’s northern desert, said Air Force Gen. James Hecker. But he said preparations are underway in case troops are ordered to leave. “US military in Niger drawing up evacuation plans amid coup, air force general says”, Stars and Stripes, August 18, 2023.

Niger – Is it a Coup or Not a Coup? The Pentagon and State Department refuse to call the overthrow of the government of Niger a coup. If it did, then it would force decisions about military assistance, a U.S. drone base in Niger, and the presence of about 1,100 U.S. troops. There are legal prohibitions (Section 7008 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act) on providing security assistance to juntas; however, Niger has been a key ally in the fight against jihadism in the Sahel and western Africa. A large $110 million U.S. airbase hosts special operations forces, MQ-9 Reapers, and SOF aviation. “When is a coup not a coup? When the U.S. says so.”, The Intercept, August 19, 2023. The U.S. Department of State is actively pursuing efforts to resolve the political crisis in Niamey. A senior diplomat, Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon, has been dispatched to Niger (arriving Saturday, August 19, 2023) for discussions with the coup leaders and other stakeholders. She was nominated to be ambassador to Niger in the later part of August.

SOF Training Coup Leaders. Senior SOF leaders are disappointed that the leader junta leaders of Niger are former trainees of U.S. special operations forces. “It’s like a bad monster movie: U.S. officials who helped train Nigerien troops reel from coup“, Politico Defense, August 15, 2023.

“It is hard to not be disappointed. Backsliding on democratic values is never a good thing”.

Retired Gen. Joseph Votel, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

“He’s the kind of guy that gives you hope for the future of the country, so that makes this doubly disappointing”.

Retired Maj. Gen. J. Marcus Hicks, former commander of U.S. Special Operations Forces Africa.

West Africa – Region in Crisis. A series of coups have replaced governments in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger in recent years – eroding a trend towards democratic rule. In addition, violent extremism has escalated across the Sahel and West Africa. European nations are being asked to reduce their military forces that are fighting jihadism and Russia is making advances in the region (Wagner Group is instrumental in this effort). Much of this instability is exacerbated by ethnic, religious, and economic pressures. The deteriorating situation deserves another look by the international community for a new approach for a broad regional strategy. “West Africa’s Grim Trajectory”, Just Security, August 11, 2023.

Blacksmith Publishing is a media partner of SOF News. They are a book publishing firm, sell ‘Pinelander Swag’, have a weekly podcast called The Pinelander.

Upcoming Events

September 18-23, 2023

5th Special Forces Group Reunion

September 24-28, 2023

Combat Diver Competition

Special Forces Underwater Operations School

October 3, 2023

2023 Virtual MOG Mile

Three Rangers Foundation

October 16-20, 2023

SOAR XLVII

Special Operations Association

Books, Pubs, and Reports

CRS Report – Navy Columbia (SSBN-826) Class Ballistic Missile Submarine Program. CRS R41129, Congressional Research Service, updated August 16, 2023, PDF, 55 pages. The Navy has three types of submarines – the SSBN is the only one that carries submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that are large, long-range missiles armed with multiple nuclear warheads. The SSBNs provide the United States with an assured second-strike capability to carry out a retaliatory nuclear attack.

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R41129

IWC Spotlight. The August 2023 newsletter of the Irregular Warfare Center is now posted online.

https://irregularwarfarecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2023-8-IWC-Spotlight.pdf

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Video – New SEAL Mini-Sub. Watch a short video about the Navy SEALs new mini-sub that allows them to stay dry while moving underwater. (at the 2:15 minute mark). Military Times, YouTube, Aug 13, 2023.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJPF2YelQq8

Podcasts

SOFCAST. United States Special Operations Command

https://linktr.ee/sofcast

The Pinelander. Blacksmith Publishing

https://www.thepinelander.com/

The Indigenous Approach. 1st Special Forces Command

https://open.spotify.com/show/3n3I7g9LSmd143GYCy7pPA

Irregular Warfare Initiative

https://irregularwarfare.org/category/podcasts/

Irregular Warfare Podcast. Modern War Institute at West Point

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/irregular-warfare-podcast/id1514636385

sof.news · by SOF News · August 21, 2023

9. Army further distancing itself from 'information warfare' moniker

I am sure the Army doctrine experts have sound reasoning for this (some of which is in the article - e.g., IW is what the enemy is doing to us).

Excerpts:

Last year, the Joint Staff published a revision to its information doctrine, Joint Publication 3-04, Information in Joint Operations. Following suit, the Marine Corps revised its approach and doctrine on information to be more in line with joint doctrine and lexicon. The Air Force also published an information warfare strategy and implementation plan last year, opting to place five functional areas under the IW umbrella.

The Army is planning on publishing Doctrinal Publication 3-13, Information Advantage, in October, Agnello said during a presentation at TechNet.

The Army is the outlier among the joint forces as the only service to not adopt information as a joint warfighting function.

Army further distancing itself from 'information warfare' moniker

In forthcoming doctrine, the Army has evolved prior thinking as it applies to what the service calls information advantage.

MARK POMERLEAU

AUGUST 16, 2023

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 16, 2023

AUGUSTA, Ga. — The Army has evolved its thinking with regard to the pillars of forthcoming doctrine focused on the information sphere, avoiding references to “conducting information warfare” and opting instead for the term “attack.”

For several years, the Army has been charting down a path of information advantage that will outline how the service will fight and win in this realm.

It first unveiled five pillars for information advantage in mid-2021: enable decision-making, protect friendly information, inform and educate domestic audiences, inform and influence international audiences, and conduct information warfare.

Now, the pillars are: enable, protect, inform, influence and attack.

The change in terminology from “information warfare” to “attack” was done to account more for physical destruction caused by military operations, Col. John Agnello, director of the Army program office for information advantage at the Cyber Center of Excellence, said Wednesday during a presentation at the TechNet Augusta conference.

“We’re using the term ‘attack,’ because the other thing that we incorporate in attack is physical destruction. You drop a bomb on someone’s house, you’re definitely going to influence them somehow. Doing things in the physical dimension also has an information advantage,” he said. “Thinking of that holistically.”

The service had been charting down a path of information warfare since the 2018-2019 time period. However, bureaucratic bottlenecks and competing desires led the Army to adopt “information advantage” as its doctrinal term of art.

Since those discussions, the Army has continued to evolve and further separate itself from the information warfare nomenclature.

“The big thing with attack, when we first looked at this, we started to use the term ‘information warfare’ … [but] we’ve kind of gotten away from the concept of information warfare, because the U.S. as a whole, when we think information warfare, we use those terms towards our adversaries,” Agnello said. “The Chinese conduct information warfare, the Russians conduct information warfare. [We’re] not wanting to use that type of phrase.”

The Army, which does not have a definition for “information warfare,” has loosely articulated what it consists of, mainly through the lens of what the enemy is doing to friendly forces.

The Army’s field manual for operations, published in late 2022, notes: “Adversaries often employ cyberspace capabilities and information warfare to destroy or disrupt infrastructure, interfere with government processes, and conduct activities in a way that does not cause the United States and its allies to respond with force.”

IW “refers to a threat’s orchestrated use of information activities (such as cyberspace operations, electronic warfare, and psychological operations) to achieve objectives. Operating under a different set of ethics and laws than the United States, and under the cloak of anonymity, peer threats conduct information warfare aggressively and continuously to influence populations and decision makers,” the document states. “They can also use information warfare to create destructive effects during competition and crisis. During armed conflict, peer threats use information warfare in conjunction with other methods to achieve strategic and operational objectives.”

Adversaries over the last decade have recognized the importance the information sphere plays in being able to seize narratives and win without firing a shot by denying and degrading capabilities while also sowing confusion. In recent years, top U.S. competitors such as Russia and China have reorganized their military forces, centrally placing IW capabilities under a single entity.

These capabilities consist mostly of cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, deception, psychological operations, space and intelligence.

The Pentagon has realized this and begun to do the same, in one way or another. While some observers have said the reorganization is too slow, some progress has been made. However, there is still no Defense Department-wide definition for “information warfare.”

Congress has taken notice of the lack of common language within the DOD, and in a defense policy bill sought to limit funds within the department until the secretary provides joint lexicon for terms related to information ops.

Last year, the Joint Staff published a revision to its information doctrine, Joint Publication 3-04, Information in Joint Operations. Following suit, the Marine Corps revised its approach and doctrine on information to be more in line with joint doctrine and lexicon. The Air Force also published an information warfare strategy and implementation plan last year, opting to place five functional areas under the IW umbrella.

The Army is planning on publishing Doctrinal Publication 3-13, Information Advantage, in October, Agnello said during a presentation at TechNet.

The Army is the outlier among the joint forces as the only service to not adopt information as a joint warfighting function.

“We refer to the ‘information dimension’ of the operating environment, and the joint world refers to the ‘information environment.’ We adamantly believe in the Army that there’s one operational environment — and information is the dimension therein,” Maj. Gen. Paul Stanton, commander of the Army Cyber Center of Excellence, has previously told DefenseScoop. “We think that that’s important because we need commanders to think about the totality of their operating environment and not ignore information — they can’t because it is a dimension within which they have purview and responsibility.”

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · August 16, 2023

10. Asked and answered: China’s strategy of political warfare (Seth Jones interview)

Asked and answered: China’s strategy of political warfare - APDR

asiapacificdefencereporter.com · by APDR Staff · August 21, 2023

Competing without Fighting: China’s Strategy of Political Warfare is a new report by the CSIS Transnational Threats Project focusing on Chinese influence strategies below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. Seth Jones, director of the CSIS International Security Program, sat down to discuss the report, including the importance of examining these tactics and how policymakers can counter them.

This interview, conducted by Lauren Adler, has been edited for brevity and clarity.

LA: This report provides one of the most comprehensive analyses to date on this issue. Why is this so important, and more specifically, why is it so important right now?

SGJ: There is almost every day a front-page story about Chinese activity in and around the U.S. homeland. But most of these stories are very compartmentalised and focus on only a piece of the broader issue. Some of these stories are about cyber, some of them are about espionage, and some are about Chinese police stations in cities like New York. We felt it was important to pull all of those different threads together into one study, and to examine the breadth of Chinese action.

It is important to do this now because in our interviews with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), they said from a counterintelligence perspective, this is the most aggressive period they have ever seen of Chinese activity. One official said to us, “The system is blinking red right now.”

LA: What is political warfare, and how is China using it?

SGJ: The term “political warfare” comes from the former U.S. State Department diplomat and Cold War historian George Kennan, and it refers to activities below the threshold of armed conflict. Political warfare includes cyber operations. It includes information and disinformation campaigns. It includes united front work, which involves efforts to expand influence in academic institutions and other locations. It also includes economic coercion, intelligence operations, and other activities. And these activities are largely designed to expand Chinese power, weaken the United States as part of balance of power competition, and, perhaps most importantly, preserve the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

LA: In the report, you note that the U.S. homeland is the primary target of China’s political warfare. What tactics is China likely to use against the U.S. homeland specifically?

SGJ: The interesting thing about Chinese tactics is they are so widespread. We identified nearly a dozen separate Chinese agencies, in addition to non-state actors—hacktivist organizations, for example—involved in conducting cyberattacks, human intelligence collection, influence, and disinformation and misinformation on social media platforms. There is influence on universities and within companies; we have seen, for example, extensive efforts to control the messages coming out of companies like the National Basketball Association, or what movie studios are producing in Hollywood.

LA: How has the United States failed to counter those tactics?

SGJ: There are a couple of things. First, there is not really a systematic U.S. interagency process or organization for countering these activities. The U.S. response spans multiple different U.S. organizations and is not well coordinated. Second, the United States is under resourced. Organizations that we spoke to that are dealing with much of this, such as the FBI, are entirely swamped right now. They do not have enough agents or intelligence analysts to deal with a growing Chinese counterintelligence campaign—in addition to Russian, Iranian, and other counterintelligence activity in the United States. So those are the kinds of things that we identified as critical. Third, there is also substantial influence—some of it illegal influence—involving foreign agents with links to China. There are significant attempts by individuals associated with China to influence what is going on either on Capitol Hill or in research institutions. That concern is pretty extensive across the United States.

LA: How should policymakers be thinking about this issue to effectively counter those tactics?

SGJ: At the federal level, we looked at the need for increasing counterintelligence resources among federal agencies, primarily the Department of Justice, including the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. But it is not just the federal government. We also looked at expanding state and local counterintelligence resources. There are a number of states, such as New Jersey, that are making an extraordinary effort to build counterintelligence capabilities against China. But these efforts need to be more widespread across U.S. states.

In addition, the United States needs to strengthen its Foreign Agent Registration Act, or FARA, and related efforts, including the Lobbying Disclosure Act and the Department of Education’s section 117 disclosures. These efforts are really to counter Chinese and other foreign influence. We have some suggestions about providing additional civil investigative demand authority to the Department of Justice as it looks at these issues, increasing the penalties for noncompliance with FARA, as well as repealing or modifying exemptions for FARA.

Those are mostly defensive measures. In addition, we outlined a series of offensive measures. One is, much like the United States did to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, looking at ways to weaken China’s Great Firewall, which attempts to control China’s message inside and outside the country in ways that benefit the CCP. The United States was quite effective during the Cold War with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty of getting information into those locations. There are similar efforts that could be done today inside and outside of China. In addition, the United States needs to deepen its partnerships with Australia, South Korea, Japan, and other partners, including in areas like pushing back against Chinese economic coercion. And finally, one last area on offense is increasing U.S. private sector competitiveness in emerging technology in the Global South, where the Chinese are making a very specific, aggressive effort in what they call the Digital Silk Road. This would be a much more significant public-private partnership with such companies as Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others so that they can compete more effectively with Chinese companies.

Seth G. Jones is senior vice president, Harold Brown Chair, and director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C. Lauren Adler is content coordinator with CSIS External Relations.

11. Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

Does Musk think he should be ruling the world?

Conclusion:

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.

By Ronan Farrow

The New Yorker · by Ronan Farrow · August 21, 2023

Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials from the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. A senior defense official told me that Kahl was surprised by whom he was about to contact: “He was, like, ‘Why am I calling Elon Musk?’ ”

The reason soon became apparent. “Even though Musk is not technically a diplomat or statesman, I felt it was important to treat him as such, given the influence he had on this issue,” Kahl told me. SpaceX, Musk’s space-exploration company, had for months been providing Internet access across Ukraine, allowing the country’s forces to plan attacks and to defend themselves. But, in recent days, the forces had found their connectivity severed as they entered territory contested by Russia. More alarmingly, SpaceX had recently given the Pentagon an ultimatum: if it didn’t assume the cost of providing service in Ukraine, which the company calculated at some four hundred million dollars annually, it would cut off access. “We started to get a little panicked,” the senior defense official, one of four who described the standoff to me, recalled. Musk “could turn it off at any given moment. And that would have real operational impact for the Ukrainians.”

Musk had become involved in the war in Ukraine soon after Russia invaded, in February, 2022. Along with conventional assaults, the Kremlin was conducting cyberattacks against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. Ukrainian officials and a loose coalition of expatriates in the tech sector, brainstorming in group chats on WhatsApp and Signal, found a potential solution: SpaceX, which manufactures a line of mobile Internet terminals called Starlink. The tripod-mounted dishes, each about the size of a computer display and clad in white plastic reminiscent of the sleek design sensibility of Musk’s Tesla electric cars, connect with a network of satellites. The units have limited range, but in this situation that was an advantage: although a nationwide network of dishes was required, it would be difficult for Russia to completely dismantle Ukrainian connectivity. Of course, Musk could do so. Three people involved in bringing Starlink to Ukraine, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they worried that Musk, if upset, could withdraw his services, told me that they originally overlooked the significance of his personal control. “Nobody thought about it back then,” one of them, a Ukrainian tech executive, told me. “It was all about ‘Let’s fucking go, people are dying.’ ”

In the ensuing months, fund-raising in Silicon Valley’s Ukrainian community, contracts with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with European governments, and pro-bono contributions from SpaceX facilitated the transfer of thousands of Starlink units to Ukraine. A soldier in Ukraine’s signal corps who was responsible for maintaining Starlink access on the front lines, and who asked to be identified only by his first name, Mykola, told me, “It’s the essential backbone of communication on the battlefield.”

Initially, Musk showed unreserved support for the Ukrainian cause, responding encouragingly as Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian minister for digital transformation, tweeted pictures of equipment in the field. But, as the war ground on, SpaceX began to balk at the cost. “We are not in a position to further donate terminals to Ukraine, or fund the existing terminals for an indefinite period of time,” SpaceX’s director of government sales told the Pentagon in a letter, last September. (CNBC recently valued SpaceX at nearly a hundred and fifty billion dollars. Forbes estimated Musk’s personal net worth at two hundred and twenty billion dollars, making him the world’s richest man.)

Musk was also growing increasingly uneasy with the fact that his technology was being used for warfare. That month, at a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, Musk even appeared to express support for Vladimir Putin. “He was onstage, and he said, ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace—we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’ ” Reid Hoffman, who helped start PayPal with Musk, recalled. Musk seemed, he said, to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker.” A week later, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, which called for new referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine, and granted Russia control of Crimea, the semi-autonomous peninsula recognized by most nations, including the United States, as Ukrainian territory. In later tweets, Musk portrayed as inevitable an outcome favoring Russia and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia.” Musk also polled his Twitter followers about the plan. Millions responded, with about sixty per cent rejecting the proposal. (Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s President, tweeted his own poll, asking users whether they preferred the Elon Musk who supported Ukraine or the one who now seemed to back Russia. The former won, though Zelensky’s poll had a smaller turnout: Musk has more than twenty times as many followers.)

By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.” The consequences were immediate. “Communications became dead, units were isolated. When you’re on offense, especially for commanders, you need a constant stream of information from battalions. Commanders had to drive to the battlefield to be in radio range, risking themselves,” Mykola said. “It was chaos.” Ukrainian expats who had raised funds for the Starlink units began receiving frantic calls. The tech executive recalls a Ukrainian military official telling him, “We need Elon now.” “How now?” he replied. “Like fucking now,” the official said. “People are dying.” Another Ukrainian involved told me that he was “awoken by a dozen calls saying they’d lost connectivity and had to retreat.” The Financial Times reported that outages affected units in Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Kharkiv, Donetsk, and Luhansk. American and Ukrainian officials told me they believed that SpaceX had cut the connectivity via geofencing, cordoning off areas of access.

The senior defense official said, “We had a whole series of meetings internal to the department to try to figure out what we could do about this.” Musk’s singular role presented unfamiliar challenges, as did the government’s role as intermediary. “It wasn’t like we could hold him in breach of contract or something,” the official continued. The Pentagon would need to reach a contractual arrangement with SpaceX so that, at the very least, Musk “couldn’t wake up one morning and just decide, like, he didn’t want to do this anymore.” Kahl added, “It was kind of a way for us to lock in services across Ukraine. It could at least prevent Musk from turning off the switch altogether.”

Typically, such a negotiation would be handled by the Pentagon’s acquisitions department. But Musk had become more than just a vender like Boeing, Lockheed, or other defense-industry behemoths. On the phone with Musk from Paris, Kahl was deferential. According to unclassified talking points for the call, he thanked Musk for his efforts in Ukraine, acknowledged the steep costs he’d incurred, and pleaded for even a few weeks to devise a contract. “If you cut this off, it doesn’t end the war,” Kahl recalled telling Musk.

Musk wasn’t immediately convinced. “My inference was that he was getting nervous that Starlink’s involvement was increasingly seen in Russia as enabling the Ukrainian war effort, and was looking for a way to placate Russian concerns,” Kahl told me. To the dismay of Pentagon officials, Musk volunteered that he had spoken with Putin personally. Another individual told me that Musk had made the same assertion in the weeks before he tweeted his pro-Russia peace plan, and had said that his consultations with the Kremlin were regular. (Musk later denied having spoken with Putin about Ukraine.) On the phone, Musk said that he was looking at his laptop and could see “the entire war unfolding” through a map of Starlink activity. “This was, like, three minutes before he said, ‘Well, I had this great conversation with Putin,’ ” the senior defense official told me. “And we were, like, ‘Oh, dear, this is not good.’ ” Musk told Kahl that the vivid illustration of how technology he had designed for peaceful ends was being used to wage war gave him pause.

After a fifteen-minute call, Musk agreed to give the Pentagon more time. He also, after public blowback and with evident annoyance, walked back his threats to cut off service. “The hell with it,” he tweeted. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.” This June, the Department of Defense announced that it had reached a deal with SpaceX.

The meddling of oligarchs and other monied interests in the fate of nations is not new. During the First World War, J. P. Morgan lent vast sums to the Allied powers; afterward, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., poured money into the fledgling League of Nations. The investor George Soros’s Open Society Foundations underwrote civil-society reform in post-Soviet Europe, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson funded right-wing media in Israel, as part of his support of Benjamin Netanyahu.

But Musk’s influence is more brazen and expansive. There is little precedent for a civilian’s becoming the arbiter of a war between nations in such a granular way, or for the degree of dependency that the U.S. now has on Musk in a variety of fields, from the future of energy and transportation to the exploration of space. SpaceX is currently the sole means by which NASA transports crew from U.S. soil into space, a situation that will persist for at least another year. The government’s plan to move the auto industry toward electric cars requires increasing access to charging stations along America’s highways. But this rests on the actions of another Musk enterprise, Tesla. The automaker has seeded so much of the country with its proprietary charging stations that the Biden Administration relaxed an early push for a universal charging standard disliked by Musk. His stations are eligible for billions of dollars in subsidies, so long as Tesla makes them compatible with the other charging standard.

In the past twenty years, against a backdrop of crumbling infrastructure and declining trust in institutions, Musk has sought out business opportunities in crucial areas where, after decades of privatization, the state has receded. The government is now reliant on him, but struggles to respond to his risk-taking, brinkmanship, and caprice. Current and former officials from NASA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration told me that Musk’s influence had become inescapable in their work, and several of them said that they now treat him like a sort of unelected official. One Pentagon spokesman said that he was keeping Musk apprised of my inquiries about his role in Ukraine and would grant an interview with an official about the matter only with Musk’s permission. “We’ll talk to you if Elon wants us to,” he told me. In a podcast interview last year, Musk was asked whether he has more influence than the American government. He replied immediately, “In some ways.” Reid Hoffman told me that Musk’s attitude is “like Louis XIV: ‘L’état, c’est moi.’ ”

Musk’s power continues to grow. His takeover of Twitter, which he has rebranded “X,” gives him a critical forum for political discourse ahead of the next Presidential election. He recently launched an artificial-intelligence company, a move that follows years of involvement in the technology. Musk has become a hyper-exposed pop-culture figure, and his sharp turns from altruistic to vainglorious, strategic to impulsive, have been the subject of innumerable articles and at least seven major books, including a forthcoming biography by Walter Isaacson. But the nature and the scope of his power are less widely understood.

More than thirty of Musk’s current and former colleagues in various industries and a dozen individuals in his personal life spoke to me about their experiences with him. Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, with whom Musk has both worked and sparred, told me, “Elon desperately wants the world to be saved. But only if he can be the one to save it.”

The terms of the Starlink deal have not been made public. Ukrainian officials say that they have not faced further service interruptions. But Musk has continued to express ambivalence about how the technology is being used, and where it can be deployed. In February, he tweeted, “We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.” He said, as he had told Kahl, that he was sincerely attempting to navigate the moral dilemmas of his role: “We’re trying hard to do the right thing, where the ‘right thing’ is an extremely difficult moral question.”

Musk’s hesitation aligns with his pragmatic interests. A facility in Shanghai produces half of all Tesla cars, and Musk depends on the good will of officials in China, which has lent support to Russia in the conflict. Musk recently acknowledged to the Financial Times that Beijing disapproves of his decision to provide Internet service to Ukraine and has sought assurances that he would not deploy similar technology in China. In the same interview, he responded to questions about China’s efforts to assert control over Taiwan by floating another peace plan. Taiwan, he suggested, could become a jointly controlled administrative zone, an outcome that Taiwanese leaders see as ending the country’s independence. During a trip to Beijing this spring, Musk was welcomed with what Reuters summarized as “flattery and feasts.” He met with senior officials, including China’s foreign minister, and posed for the kinds of awkwardly smiling formal photos that are more typical of world leaders.

National-security officials I spoke with had a range of views on the government’s balance of power with Musk. He maintains good relationships with some of them, including General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the two men met, several years ago, when Milley was the chief of staff of the Army, they have discussed “technology applications to warfare—artificial intelligence, electric vehicles, and autonomous machines,” Milley told me. “He has insight that helped shape my thoughts on the fundamental change in the character of war and the modernization of the U.S. military.” During the Starlink controversy, Musk called him for advice. But other officials expressed profound misgivings. “Living in the world we live in, in which Elon runs this company and it is a private business under his control, we are living off his good graces,” a Pentagon official told me. “That sucks.”

One summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, Musk and his friend Theo Taoushiani took Taoushiani’s father’s car for an illicit drive. Musk and Taoushiani were both in their mid-teens, and lived about a mile apart in a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa. Neither had a driver’s license, or permission from Taoushiani’s father. But they were passionate Dungeons & Dragons fans, and a new module—a fresh scenario in the game—had just been released. Taoushiani took the wheel for the twenty-minute drive to the Sandton City mall. “Elon was my co-pilot,” Taoushiani told me. “We went under the cover of darkness.” At the mall, they found that they didn’t have enough money. But Musk promised a salesperson that they would return the next day with the rest, and dropped the name of a well-known Greek restaurant owned by Taoushiani’s family. “Elon had the gift of the gab,” Taoushiani said. “He’s very persuasive, and he’s quite dogged in his determination.” The two went home with the module.

Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital, and he and his younger brother, Kimbal, and his younger sister, Tosca, grew up under apartheid. Musk’s mother, Maye, a Canadian model and dietitian, and his father, Errol, an engineer, divorced when he was young, and the children initially stayed with Maye. She has said that Errol was physically abusive toward her. “He would hit me when the kids were around,” she wrote in her memoir. “I remember that Tosca and Kimbal, who were two and four, respectively, would cry in the corner, and Elon, who was five, would hit him on the backs of his knees to try to stop him.” By the mid-eighties, Musk had moved in with his father—a decision that he has said was motivated by concern for his father’s loneliness, and which he came to regret. Musk, usually impassive in interviews, cried openly when he told Rolling Stone about the years that followed, in which, he said, his father psychologically tortured him, in ways that he declined to specify. “You have no idea about how bad,” he said. “Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” Taoushiani recalled witnessing Errol “chastise Elon a lot. Maybe belittle him.” (Errol Musk has denied allegations that he was abusive to Maye or to his children.) Musk has also said that he was violently bullied at school. Though he is now six feet one, with a broad-shouldered build, he was “much, much smaller back in school,” Taoushiani told me. “He wasn’t very social.”

Musk has said that he has Asperger’s syndrome, a form of what is now known as autism-spectrum disorder, which is characterized by difficulty with social interactions. As a child, he would sometimes fall into trancelike states of deep thought, during which he was so unresponsive that his mother eventually took him to a doctor to check his hearing. Musk’s quiet side persists—in my own interactions with him, I have found him to be thoughtful and measured. (Musk declined to answer questions for this story.) He can also be, as he joked during a stilted “Saturday Night Live” monologue, “pretty good at running human, in emulation mode.”

Musk escaped into science fiction and video games. “One of the reasons I got into technology, maybe the reason, was video games,” he said at a gaming-industry convention several years ago. In his early teens, Musk coded an eight-bit shooter game in the style of Space Invaders called Blastar, whose title screen, in a novelistic flourish, credits him as “E. R. Musk.” The premise was basic: “MISSION: DESTROY ALIEN FREIGHTER CARRYING DEADLY HYDROGEN BOMBS AND STATUS BEAM MACHINES.” But it won recognition from a South African trade magazine, which published the game’s hundred and sixty-seven lines of code and paid Musk a small sum.

Musk often talks about his science-fiction influences. Some have manifested in straightforward ways: he has connected his love of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” novels, whose characters grapple with a mathematically precise prediction of their civilization’s collapse, to his obsession with insuring human survival beyond Earth. But some of Musk’s touchstones present ironies. He has said that his hero is Douglas Adams, the writer who skewered both the hyper-rich and the progress-at-any-cost ethos that Musk has come to embody. In the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” novels and radio plays, the latter of which were broadcast in South Africa during Musk’s childhood, a narcissistic playboy becomes the president of the galaxy, and Earth is demolished to make way for a space transit route. Musk is also an avowed fan of Deus Ex, a role-playing first-person-shooter video game that he has brought up when discussing his company Neuralink, which aspires to invent ability-enhancing body modifications like those featured in the game. During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace Covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the protagonist of the game, which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.

In 1999, Musk stood outside his Bay Area home to accept the delivery of a million-dollar McLaren F1 sports car. He was in his late twenties, and wearing an oversized brown blazer. “Some could interpret purchasing this car as behavior characteristic of an imperialist brat,” he told a CNN news crew. Then he beamed, saying that there were only about sixty such cars in the world. “My values may have changed,” he added, “but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.” Musk’s fiancée, a Canadian writer named Justine Wilson, seemed more aware. “It’s a million-dollar car. It’s decadent,” she said. “My fear is that we become spoiled brats. That we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.” The McLaren, she observed, was “the perfect car for Silicon Valley.”

Musk had moved to Canada when he was in his late teens, and met Wilson when they both attended Queen’s University, in Ontario. He later transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, the early days of the World Wide Web, he and Kimbal founded a company that came to be called Zip2, an online city directory that they sold to newspapers. Musk has often described the company’s humble origins, saying that he and his brother lived and worked in a small studio apartment, showering at a nearby Y.M.C.A. and eating at Jack in the Box. (Errol at one point gave his sons twenty-eight thousand dollars. Musk, who has a tendency to fuss over questions of credit, has stated that his father’s contribution came “much later,” in a round of funding that “would’ve happened anyway.”) At Zip2, Musk developed what he describes as his “hard-core” work style; even after he had his own apartment, he often slept on a beanbag at the office. But, in the end, the company’s investors stripped him of his leadership role and installed a more experienced chief executive. Musk believed that the startup should have been targeting not just newspapers but consumers. Investors pursued a more modest vision instead. In 1999, Zip2 was sold to Compaq for three hundred and seven million dollars, earning Musk more than twenty million dollars.

Justine and Musk married the following year. After their first child died at ten weeks, from sudden infant death syndrome, the couple dealt with the tragedy in very different ways. Justine, by her account, grieved openly; Musk later told one of his biographers, Ashlee Vance, that “wallowing in sadness does no good for anyone around you.” After pursuing I.V.F. treatment, the couple had twins, then triplets. (Musk now has at least nine children with three different women, and has said that he is doing his part to address one of his pet issues, the risk of population collapse; demographers are skeptical about the matter.) Justine wrote in an essay for Marie Claire that their relationship eventually buckled under the weight of Musk’s obsession with work and his controlling tendencies, which began with him insisting, as they danced at their wedding, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” A messy divorce ensued, leading to a legal dispute over their postnuptial financial agreement, which was settled years later. “He had grown up in the male-dominated culture of South Africa,” Justine wrote. “The will to compete and dominate that made him so successful in business did not magically shut off when he came home.” (Musk wrote a response to Justine’s account in Business Insider, discussing the financial dispute, but he did not address Justine’s characterizations of his behavior.)

After Musk left Zip2, he poured some twelve million dollars, a majority of his wealth, into another startup, an online bank called X.com. It was the first instance of his obsession with the letter “X,” which has now appeared in the names of his companies, his products, and his son with the artist Grimes: X Æ A-12. The bank also marked the beginning of a long and so far unfulfilled quest—recently revived in his effort to reinvent Twitter—to create an “everything app,” incorporating a payment system. In 2000, X.com merged with a competing online-payments startup, Confinity, co-founded by the entrepreneur Peter Thiel. In events that have since become Silicon Valley lore, Musk and Thiel battled for control of the company. Various accounts apportion blame differently. Hoffman told me, citing the story as an example of Musk’s disingenuousness, that Musk had pushed for the merger by highlighting the leadership of his company’s seasoned executive, only to force out the executive and place himself in the top role. “A merger like this, you’re doing a marriage,” Hoffman said. “And it’s, like, ‘I was lying to you intensely while we were dating. Now that we’re married, let me tell you about the herpes.’ ” People who have worked with Musk often describe him as controlling. One said, “In the areas he wants to compete in, he has a very hard time sharing the spotlight, or not being the center of attention.” In the fall of 2000, another coup, executed while Musk was on a long-delayed honeymoon with Justine, overthrew Musk and installed Thiel as the company’s head. Two years later, eBay acquired the company, by then called PayPal, for $1.5 billion, making Musk, who remained the largest shareholder, fabulously wealthy.

Perhaps the most revealing moment in the PayPal saga happened at its outset. In March, 2000, as the merger was under way, Musk was driving his new McLaren, with Thiel in the passenger seat. The two were on Sand Hill Road, an artery that cuts through Silicon Valley. Thiel asked Musk, “So what can this do?” Musk replied, “Watch this,” then floored the gas pedal, hit an embankment, and sent the car airborne and spinning before it slammed back onto the pavement, blowing out its suspension and its windows. “This isn’t insured,” Musk told Thiel. Musk’s critics have used the story to illustrate his reckless showboating, but it also underscores how often Musk has been rewarded for that behavior: he repaired the McLaren, drove it for several more years, then reportedly sold it at a profit. Musk delights in telling the story, lingering on the risk to his life. In one interview, asked whether there were parallels with his approach to building companies, Musk said, “I hope not.” Appearing to consider the idea, he added, “Watch this. Yeah, that could be awkward with a rocket launch.”

Of all Musk’s enterprises, SpaceX may be the one that most fundamentally reflects his appetite for risk. Staff at SpaceX’s Starship facility, in Boca Chica, Texas, spent December of 2020 preparing for the launch of a rocket known as SN8, then the newest prototype in the company’s Starship program, which it hopes will eventually transport humans to orbit, to the moon, and, in the mission Musk speaks about with the most passion, to Mars. The F.A.A. had approved an initial launch date for the rocket. But an engine issue forced SpaceX to delay by a day. By then, the weather had shifted. On the new day, the F.A.A. told SpaceX that, according to its model of the wind’s speed and direction, if the rocket exploded it could create a blast wave that risked damaging the windows of nearby houses. A series of tense meetings followed, with SpaceX presenting its own modelling to establish that the launch was safe, and the F.A.A. refusing to grant permission. Wayne Monteith, then the head of the agency’s space division, was leaving an event at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when he received a frustrated call from Musk. “Look, you cannot launch,” Monteith told him. “You’re not cleared to launch.” Musk acknowledged the order.

Musk was on site in Boca Chica when SpaceX launched anyway. The rocket achieved liftoff and successfully performed several maneuvers intended to rehearse those of an eventual manned Starship. But, on landing, the SN8 came in too fast, and exploded on impact. (No windows were damaged.) The next day, Musk visited the crash site. In a picture taken that day, Musk stands next to the twisted steel of the rocket, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, looking determined, his arms crossed and his eyes narrowed. His tweets about the explosion were celebratory, not apologetic. “He has a long history of launching and blowing up rockets. And then he puts out videos of all the rockets that he’s blown up. And like half of America thinks it’s really cool,” the former NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told me. “He has a different set of rules.”

Hans Koenigsmann, then SpaceX’s vice-president for flight reliability, started working on a customary report to the F.A.A. about the launch. Koenigsmann told me that he felt pressure to minimize focus on the launch process and Musk’s role in it. “I sensed that he wanted it taken out,” Koenigsmann said. “I disagreed, and in the end we wound up with a very different version from what was originally intended.” Eventually, Koenigsmann was told not to write a report at all, and a letter was sent to the F.A.A. instead. The agency, meanwhile, opened its own investigation. Monteith told me that he agreed with Musk that the F.A.A. had been conservative about a situation that presented little statistical risk of casualties, but he was nevertheless troubled. “We had safety folks who were very upset about it,” Monteith recalled. In a series of letters to SpaceX, Monteith accused the company of relying on data “hastily developed to meet a launch window,” launching “based on ‘impressions’ and ‘assumptions,’ ” and exhibiting “a concerning lack of operational control and process discipline that is inconsistent with a strong safety culture.” In its responses, SpaceX proposed various safety reforms, but also pushed back, complaining that the F.A.A.’s weather model was unreliable and suggesting that the agency had been resistant to discussions about improving it. (SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

The following March, Steve Dickson, then the F.A.A.’s administrator, called Musk. The two men spoke for thirty minutes. Like Kahl, Dickson was deferential, thanking Musk for his role in transforming the commercial space sector and acknowledging that SpaceX was taking steps to make its launches less risky. But Dickson, an F.A.A. spokesperson said in a statement, “made it clear that the FAA expects SpaceX to develop and foster a robust safety culture that stresses adherence to FAA rules.” Dickson had navigated such conversations before, including with Boeing after two 737 max aircraft crashed. But this situation presented a thornier challenge. “It’s not every day that the F.A.A. administrator releases a statement about a phone call that they have with the C.E.O. or the head of an aerospace company,” an official at the agency told me. “That kind of gets into the soft pressure, public pressure that you don’t do unless you are trying to change the incentive structure.”

The F.A.A. issued no fine, though it grounded SpaceX for two months. “I didn’t see that a fine would make any difference,” Monteith told me. “He could pull that out of his pocket. However, not allowing launches, that would get the attention of a company that prides itself on being able to iterate and go fast.” Musk has continued to complain about the agency. After it postponed another launch, he tweeted, “The FAA space division has a fundamentally broken regulatory structure.” He added, “Under those rules, humanity will never get to Mars.”

Musk has been fixated on space since his childhood. The idea for SpaceX came about after his exile from PayPal. “I went to the NASA website so I could see the schedule of when we’re supposed to go” to Mars, Musk told Wired, in 2012. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place! Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing.” In 2001, he connected with space-exploration enthusiasts, and even travelled to Russia in an unsuccessful bid to buy missiles to use as rockets. The next year, he moved to Los Angeles, closer to California’s aerospace industry, and ultimately he pulled together a team of engineers and entrepreneurs and founded SpaceX, to make his own rockets. Private rocket launches date back to the eighties, but no one had attempted anything on the scale that Musk envisioned, and it proved to be more difficult and expensive than he had anticipated. Musk has said that, by 2008, the company was nearly bankrupt, and that, after putting much of his wealth into SpaceX and Tesla, he wasn’t far behind. “That was definitely the worst year of my life,” he said in an interview on “60 Minutes.” SpaceX’s first three launches had failed, and there was no budget for another. “I had no more money left,” Musk told Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, years later. “We managed to put together enough spare parts to do a fourth launch.” Had that failed, he added, “SpaceX would have died.” The launch was successful, and NASA soon awarded SpaceX a $1.6-billion contract to resupply the International Space Station. In 2020, the company flew its first manned mission there—ending nearly a decade of American reliance on Russian craft for the task. SpaceX now launches more satellites than any other private company, with four thousand five hundred and nineteen in orbit as of July, occupying many of Earth’s orbital routes. “Once the carrying capacity of an orbit is maxed out, you’ve basically blocked everyone from trying to compete in that market,” Bridenstine told me.

There are competitors in the field, including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, but none yet rival SpaceX. The new space race has the potential to shape the global balance of power. Satellites enable the navigation of drones and missiles and generate imagery used for intelligence, and they are mostly under the control of private companies. “The U.S. government is in massive catch-up to build a more resilient space architecture,” Kahl, the former Pentagon Under-Secretary, told me. “And that only works if you can leverage the explosion of commercial space.” Several officials told me that they were alarmed by NASA’s reliance on SpaceX for essential services. “There is only one thing worse than a government monopoly. And that is a private monopoly that the government is dependent on,” Bridenstine said. “I do worry that we have put all of our eggs into one basket, and it’s the SpaceX basket.”

Even Musk’s critics concede that his tendency to push against constraints has helped catalyze SpaceX’s success. A number of officials suggested to me that, despite the tensions related to the company, it has made government bureaucracies nimbler. “When SpaceX and NASA work together, we work closer to optimal speed,” Kenneth Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, told me. Still, some figures in the aerospace world, even ones who think that Musk’s rockets are basically safe, fear that concentrating so much power in private companies, with so few restraints, invites tragedy. “At some point, with new competitors emerging, progress will be thwarted when there’s an accident, and people won’t be confident in the capabilities commercial companies have,” Bridenstine said. “I mean, we just saw this submersible going down to visit the Titanic implode. I think we have to think about the non-regulatory environment as sometimes hurting the industry more than the regulatory environment.”

In early 2022, Steven Cliff, then the deputy administrator of the Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, learned that potentially tens of thousands of Tesla vehicles had a feature that he found concerning. For years, Tesla has been working to create a totally self-driving car, a long-standing ambition of Musk’s. Now Cliff was told that a version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software, an experimental feature that lets the cars navigate with little intervention from a driver, permitted cars to roll through stop signs, at up to about six miles an hour. This was clearly illegal. Cliff’s enforcement team contacted Tesla, and, in several meetings, a surprising conversation about safety and artificial intelligence played out. Representatives for Tesla seemed confused. Their response, as Cliff recalled, was “That’s what humans do all the time. Show us the data, why it’s unsafe.” N.H.T.S.A. officials told Tesla that, regardless of human compliance, “you should not be able to program a computer to break the law for you.” They demanded that Tesla update all the affected cars, removing the feature—a recall, in industry terms, albeit a digital one. “There was a lot of back-and-forth,” Cliff told me. “Like, at midnight on the very last day, they blinked and ended up recalling the rolling-stop feature.” (Tesla did not respond to requests for comment.)

Musk joined Tesla as an investor in 2004, a year after it was incorporated. (He has spent years defending the formative nature of his role and was eventually, in a legal settlement, one of several people granted permission to use the term “co-founder.”) Musk was again entering a market bound by entrenched private interests and stringent regulation, which opened him up to more clashes with regulators. Some of the skirmishes were trivial. Tesla for a time included in its vehicles the ability to replace the humming noises that electric cars must emit—since their engines make little sound—with goat bleats, farting, or a sound of the owner’s choice. “We’re, like, ‘No, that’s not compliant with the regulations, don’t be stupid,’ ” Cliff told me. Tesla argued with regulators for more than a year, according to an N.H.T.S.A. safety report. Nine days after the rolling-stop recall, the company pulled the noises, too. On Twitter, Musk wrote, “The fun police made us do it (sigh).”

“It’s a little like Mom and Dad and children. Like, How far can I push Mom and Dad until they push back?” Cliff said. “And that’s not a recipe for a strong safety culture.”

The fart debate had low stakes; the over-all safety of the cars is a far greater matter. Tesla has repeatedly said that Autopilot, a more limited technology than Full Self-Driving, is safer than a human driver. Last year, Musk added that he would be “shocked” if Full Self-Driving didn’t become safer than human drivers by the end of the year. But he has never made public the data needed to fully corroborate those claims. In recent months, new crash numbers from the N.H.T.S.A., which were first reported by the Washington Post, have shown an uptick in accidents—and fatalities—involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. Tesla has been secretive about the specifics. A person at the N.H.T.S.A. told me that the company instructed the agency to redact specifics about whether driver-assistance software was in use during crashes. (By law, regulators must abide by such requests for confidentiality, unless they decide to contest them in court.) Pete Buttigieg, the Secretary of Transportation, recently said that there were “concerns” about the marketing of Autopilot. Cliff told me he had seen data that showed Teslas were involved in “a disproportionate number of crashes involving emergency vehicles,” though he said that the agency had not yet determined whether the technology or the human drivers was the cause. In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency said, “Multiple investigations remain open.”

Officials who have worked at OSHA and at an equivalent California agency told me that Musk’s influence, and his attitude about regulation, had made their jobs difficult. The Biden Administration, which is urgently trying to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, has concluded that it needs to work with Musk, because of his dominant position in the electric-car market. And Musk’s personal wealth dwarfs the entire budget of OSHA, which is tasked with monitoring the conditions in his workplaces. “You add on the fact that he considers himself to be a master of the universe and these rules just don’t apply to people like him,” Jordan Barab, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Labor at OSHA, told me. “There’s a lot of underreporting in industry in general. And Elon Musk kind of seems to raise that to an art form.” Garrett Brown, a former field-compliance inspector at California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health, added, “We have a bad health-and-safety situation throughout the country. And it’s worse in companies run by people like Elon Musk, who was ideologically opposed to the idea of government enforcement of public-health regulations.”

In March, 2020, as pandemic lockdowns began, Musk e-mailed Tesla employees, telling them that he intended to violate orders and show up at work, and downplaying the significance of COVID-19. Soon after, he lost an initial fight to keep a factory in Alameda County—Tesla’s most productive in the U.S.—open. That April, after county officials extended shelter-in-place orders, Musk was on a conference call with outside financial analysts. His rhetoric became nakedly political, to an extent that would have been uncharacteristic just a few years earlier. “I would call it forcibly imprisoning people in their homes against all of their constitutional rights,” he told the analysts, speaking of the lockdowns. “What the fuck?” he added. “It’s an outrage. An outrage. . . . This is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddam freedom.” The pandemic seems to have sparked a pronounced shift in Musk. The lockdowns represented an example of what Hoffman told me Musk considered to be a cardinal sin: “getting in the way of the mission.”

The following month, Musk sent a series of vitriolic tweets, threatening to file suit against Alameda County, to move Tesla’s headquarters, and to flout the rules and reopen his factory, all of which he eventually did. The county essentially rubber-stamped the reopening soon afterward—a far cry from what Musk had invited. “I will be on the line with everyone else,” he had tweeted, at the height of his frustration. “If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.”

Musk has, for much of his public life, presented himself as a centrist. “I’m socially very liberal,” he told the technology reporter Kara Swisher in 2020. “And then economically right of center, maybe, or center.” He has said that he donated to Hillary Clinton, and voted for both her and Joe Biden. But, in recent years, the more radical perspective that characterized his diatribes about Covid has come to the fore. In March, 2022, Twitter restricted the account of the satirical Web site the Babylon Bee, after the site misgendered a government official. The next day, in texts later disclosed during the Twitter-acquisition process, Musk’s contact “TJ” (identified by Bloomberg as his ex-wife Talulah Riley) expressed frustration with the development and urged him to purchase Twitter to “fight woke-ism.” The following week, Musk polled his followers about whether Twitter respected free speech and, in a phone call to the Babylon Bee’s C.E.O., joked about buying the platform. Finally, in April, 2022, he offered forty-four billion dollars for the company. Almost immediately, he tried to back out of the deal, prompting Twitter to sue. After months of legal proceedings, Musk resumed the acquisition process, and in October he assumed control of the company.

“Given unprovoked attacks by leading Democrats against me & a very cold shoulder to Tesla & SpaceX, I intend to vote Republican in November,” he tweeted last year. By the time he bought Twitter, he was urging his followers to vote along similar lines, and appearing to back Ron DeSantis, whose candidacy he helped launch in a technically disastrous Twitter live event. Although Musk’s teen-age daughter, Vivian, has come out as trans, he has embraced anti-trans sentiment, saying that he would lobby to criminalize “irreversible” gender-affirming care for children. (Vivian recently changed her last name, saying in a legal filing, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”) Musk started spreading misinformation on the platform: he shared theories that the physical attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of the former Speaker of the House, had followed a meeting with a male prostitute, and retweeted suggestions that reports accurately identifying a mass shooter as a white supremacist were a “psyop.” Some people who know Musk well still struggle to make sense of his political shift. “There was nothing political about him ever,” a close associate told me. “I’ve been around him for a long time, and had lots of deep conversations with the man, at all hours of the day—never heard a fucking word about this.”

When Musk arrived at Twitter, he immediately gutted the company’s staff, reducing the number of employees by about fifty per cent. One person who kept his job was Yoel Roth, the company’s head of trust and safety. Roth, who is in his mid-thirties, is gay, Jewish, and liberal. His department was responsible for determining Twitter’s rules; during the Trump Administration, he became embroiled in the culture wars. After the company began rolling out a new fact-checking policy that labelled two of Trump’s tweets as misinformation, Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s aide, went on “Fox & Friends” and read out Roth’s full name and spelled his username, adding, “He’s about to get more followers.” Trump then held up a New York Post cover mocking Roth, and Twitter users began recirculating tweets that Roth had written criticizing conservative candidates.

But when Musk took over he resisted calls to fire Roth. “We’ve all made some questionable tweets, me more than most, but I want to be clear that I support Yoel,” he tweeted in October, 2022. “My sense is that he has high integrity, and we are all entitled to our political beliefs.” That evening, Roth messaged Musk on Signal, thanking him. Musk responded, “You have my full support,” and, the next day, he followed up with a screenshot of a tweet from Roth that described Mitch McConnell as “a bag of farts.” Musk added, “Haha, I totally agree.”

But the cuts that Musk had instituted quickly took a toll on the company. Employees had been informed of their termination via brusque, impersonal e-mails—Musk is now being sued for hundreds of millions of dollars by employees who say that they are owed additional severance pay—and the remaining staffers were abruptly ordered to return to work in person. Twitter’s business model was also in question, since Musk had alienated advertisers and invited a flood of fake accounts by reinventing the platform’s verification process. On November 10th, Roth sent a brief resignation e-mail. When his departure became public, Musk texted, asking to talk. “I[t] would mean a lot if you would consider remaining at Twitter,” he wrote. The two spoke that night, and Roth declined to return. Days later, he published an Op-Ed in the Times, questioning the future of user safety on the platform. (Twitter did not respond to requests for comment.)

Soon afterward, Musk replied to a Twitter user surfacing a 2010 tweet from Roth, in which he’d shared a link to a Salon article about a teacher’s being charged with having sex with an eighteen-year-old student and asked, “Can high school students ever meaningfully consent to sex with their teachers?”

“That explains a lot,” Musk tweeted in reply. Minutes later, he posted an image showing a portion of Roth’s doctoral dissertation, which focussed on the gay-hookup app Grindr and its user data. In the excerpt, Roth argued that such platforms will inevitably be used by people under eighteen, so they should do more to keep those individuals safe. “Looks like Yoel is in favor of children being able to access adult internet services,” Musk wrote.

The attack fit a pattern: Musk’s trolling has increasingly taken on the vernacular of hard-right social media, in which grooming, pedophilia, and human trafficking are associated with liberalism. In 2018, when a Thai youth soccer team was trapped in a cave, Musk travelled to Thailand to offer a custom-made miniature submarine to rescuers. The head of the rescue operation declined, and Musk lashed out on Twitter, questioning the expertise of the rescuers. After one of them, Vernon Unsworth, referred to the offer as a “P.R. stunt,” Musk called him a “pedo guy.” (Unsworth sued Musk for defamation, characterizing the harassment he received from Musk’s followers as “a life sentence without parole.” A judge ruled in favor of Musk, who argued that he hadn’t been accusing Unsworth of actual pedophilia, just trying to insult him.)

Musk’s tweet about Roth got nearly seventeen thousand quote tweets and retweets. “The moment that it went from being a moderation conversation to being a Pizzagate conversation, the risk level changed,” Roth told me. “I spent my career looking at the absolute worst things that the Internet could do to people. Certainly, worse things have happened to people. But this is probably up there.” Roth and his husband were forced to flee their house, a two-bedroom in El Cerrito, California, that they’d purchased just two years earlier. “And then as we are, like, packing our stuff and leaving and getting the dog loaded into the car and whatever, like, the Daily Mail publishes an article that gives people more or less a map to my house,” Roth said. “At that point, we’re, like, ‘Oh, we’re leaving this house potentially for the last time.’ ”

This summer, Twitter’s cheerful blue bird logo came down from the roof of the company’s headquarters, in San Francisco, and was replaced with a strobing “X.” The new entity is a marriage between two parts of Musk. There’s his career-long quest to create an everything app—integrating services ranging from communication to banking and shopping, and emulating products, like WeChat, that are popular in Asia. Sitting alongside that pragmatic goal is a newer, more confusing side of Musk, embodied by his desire to take back the town square from what he sees as woke discourse. Twitter has become a private company, so it’s difficult to assess its finances, but numerous prominent advertisers have departed, and Meta recently launched Threads, a competitor that shamelessly emulates the old Twitter, and broke records for downloads. Musk threatened to sue, then challenged Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and C.E.O., to a cage match, pledging to live-stream it and donate the proceeds to charity. (Zuckerberg has accepted. Musk has delayed committing to a date, citing a back injury.) The illuminated sign atop X’s headquarters, after complaints to the Department of Building Inspection, came down as quickly as it had gone up.

Some of Musk’s associates connected his erratic behavior to efforts to self-medicate. Musk, who says he now spends much of his time in a modest house in the wetlands of South Texas, near a SpaceX facility, confessed, in an interview last year, “I feel quite lonely.” He has said that his career consists of “great highs, terrible lows and unrelenting stress.” One close colleague told me, “His life just sucks. It’s so stressful. He’s just so dedicated to these companies. He goes to sleep and wakes up answering e-mails. Ninety-nine per cent of people will never know someone that obsessed, and with that high a tolerance for sacrifice in their personal life.”

In 2018, the Times reported that members of the Tesla board had grown concerned about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep aid Ambien, which can cause hallucinations. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that he uses ketamine, which has gained popularity both as a depression treatment and as a party drug, and several people familiar with his habits have confirmed this. Musk, who smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast, prompting a NASA safety review of SpaceX, has, perhaps understandably, declined to comment on the reporting that he uses ketamine, but he has not disputed it. “Zombifying people with SSRIs for sure happens way too much,” he tweeted, referring to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, another category of depression treatment. “From what I’ve seen with friends, ketamine taken occasionally is a better option.” Associates suggested that Musk’s use has escalated in recent years, and that the drug, alongside his isolation and his increasingly embattled relationship with the press, might contribute to his tendency to make chaotic and impulsive statements and decisions. Amit Anand, a leading ketamine researcher, told me that it can contribute to unpredictable behavior. “A little bit of ketamine has an effect similar to alcohol. It can cause disinhibition, where you do and say things you otherwise would not,” he said. “At higher doses, it has another effect, which is dissociation: you feel detached from your body and surroundings.” He added, “You can feel grandiose and like you have special powers or special talents. People do impulsive things, they could do inadvisable things at work. The impact depends on the kind of work. For a librarian, there’s less risk. If you’re a pilot, it can cause big problems.”

On July 12th, Musk announced xAI, his entry into a field that promises to alter much about life as we know it. He tweeted an image of the new company’s Web site, featuring a characteristically theatrical mission statement: the firm’s goal, he said, was “to understand the true nature of the universe.” In the image, Musk highlighted the date and explained its significance. “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” the text read. “42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” It was a reference to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In the series, an immensely complex artificial intelligence is asked to answer that question and, after computing for millions of years, answers with Adams’s most famous punch line: 42. “I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is,” the computer says. Earth itself, and all the organisms on it, are ultimately revealed to be a still larger computer, built to clarify the question. Adams does not portray this satirical vision as positive. Musk’s announcement suggested more optimism: “Once you know the right question to ask, the answer is often the easy part.”

Musk has been involved in artificial intelligence for years. In 2015, he was one of a handful of tech leaders, including Hoffman and Thiel, who funded OpenAI, then a nonprofit initiative. (It now has a for-profit subsidiary.) OpenAI had a less grandiose and more cautious mission statement than xAI’s: to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity.” In the first few years of OpenAI, Musk grew unhappy with the company. He said that his efforts at Tesla to incorporate A.I. created a conflict of interest, and several people involved told me that this was true. However, they also said that Musk was frustrated by his lack of control and, as Semafor reported earlier this year, that he had attempted to take over OpenAI. Musk still defends his centrality to the company’s origins, stressing his financial contributions in its fledgling days. (The exact figures are unclear: Musk has given estimates that range from fifty million to a hundred million dollars.) Throughout his involvement, Musk seemed preoccupied with control, credit, and rivalries. He made incendiary remarks about Demis Hassabis, the head of Google’s DeepMind A.I. initiative, and, later, about Microsoft’s competing effort. He thought that OpenAI wasn’t sufficiently competitive, at one point telling colleagues that it had a “0%” chance of “being relevant.” Musk left the company in 2018, reneging on a commitment to further fund OpenAI, one of the individuals involved told me. “Basically, he goes, ‘You’re all a bunch of jackasses,’ and he leaves,” Hoffman said. The withdrawal was devastating. “It was very tough,” Altman, the head of OpenAI, said. “I had to reorient a lot of my life and time to make sure we had enough funding.” OpenAI went on to become a leader in the field, introducing ChatGPT last year. Musk has made a habit of trashing the company, wondering repeatedly, in public interviews, why he hasn’t received a return on his investment, given the company’s for-profit arm. “If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” he tweeted recently.

It is difficult to say whether Musk’s interest in A.I. is driven by scientific wonder and altruism or by a desire to dominate a new and potentially powerful industry. Several entrepreneurs who have co-founded businesses with Musk suggested that the arrival of Google and Microsoft in the field had made it a new brass ring, as space and electric vehicles had been earlier. Musk has maintained that he is motivated by his fear of the technology’s destructive potential. In a podcast earlier this year, Ari Emanuel, the head of the Hollywood agency W.M.E., recalled Musk joking about an A.I.-dominated future. “Ari, do you have dogs?” Musk asked him. “Well, here’s what A.I. is to you. You’re the dog.” In March, Musk, along with dozens of tech leaders, signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in the development of advanced A.I. technology. “Contemporary AI systems are now becoming human-competitive at general tasks, and we must ask ourselves: Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth?” the letter said. “Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones? Should we develop nonhuman minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?”

Yet in the period during which Musk endorsed a pause, he was working to build xAI, recruiting from major competitors, including OpenAI, and even, according to someone with knowledge of the conversation, contacting leadership at Nvidia, the dominant maker of chips used in A.I. The month the letter was distributed, Musk completed the registrations for xAI. He has said little about how the company will differ from preëxisting A.I. initiatives, but generally has framed it in terms of competition. “I will create a third option, although starting very late in the game of course,” he told the Washington Post. “That third option hopefully does more good than harm.” Through A.I. research and development already under way at Tesla, and the trove of data he now commands through Twitter (which he recently barred OpenAI from scraping in order to train its chatbots), he may have some advantage, as he applies his sensibilities and his world view to that race. Hoffman told me, “His whole approach to A.I. is: A.I. can only be saved if I deliver, if I build it.” As humanity creates A.I. in its own image, Hoffman argued, the principles and priorities of the leaders in the field will matter: “We want the construction of this to be not people with Messiah complexes.”

At one point in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” Adams introduces the architects of the Earth supercomputer. They’re powerful beings who have been living among us, disguised as mice. At first, they were motivated by simple curiosity. But seeking the question made them famous, and they began considering talk-show and lecture deals. In the end, Earth is demolished in the name of commerce, and their path to existential clarity along with it. The mice greet this with a shrug, mouth vague platitudes, and go on the talk-show circuit anyway. Musk isn’t peddling pabulum. His initiatives have real substance. But he also wants to be on the show—or, better yet, to be the show himself.

In the open letter, alongside questions about the apocalyptic potential of artificial intelligence was one that reflects on the sectors of government and industry that Musk has come to shape. “Should we risk loss of control of our civilization?” he and his fellow-entrepreneurs wrote. “Such decisions must not be delegated to unelected tech leaders.”

The New Yorker · by Ronan Farrow · August 21, 2023

12. A Deferential, Partisan Public and the Future of Democratic Civil-Military Relations

Excerpts:

Democratic theory demands that decision-makers be accountable to the people. As a result, while military officers have a responsibility to advise civilian politicians and officials, their judgment should not replace that of elected leaders and their appointed representatives. Policymakers, military officers, pundits, and scholars have numerous legitimate disagreements over how to ensure appropriate democratic civil-military relations, but this core principle is not in dispute. Civilians’ “right to be wrong” means further that military officers should express their views to decision-makers only behind closed doors and should not seek to shape policy by going public.

While decades of polling confirm that Americans have substantial confidence in their military, this confidence does not necessarily translate into public support for democratic civil-military norms. This state of affairs might be acceptable if democratic civil-military relations were just an elite pact—as classic scholarly work often implies. But democratic civil-military relations are not sustainable as an elite game alone. Public commitment to democratic civil-military relations keeps military officers in line and elected politicians from politicizing the military or enlisting the armed forces in domestic political disputes. Threats to democratic civil-military relations abound if the public has not bought in.

...

If our recommendations seem a bit hortatory, it’s with good reason. If we have learned anything in recent years, it is that institutions and laws are important, but they are no match for individuals determined to overthrow the system. What the federal judge Learned Hand said in 1944 about liberty applies equally to democratic civil-military relations: it “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there[,] it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

A Deferential, Partisan Public and the Future of Democratic Civil-Military Relations - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ronald R. Krebs, Robert Ralston · August 21, 2023

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

Editor’s note: This is the latest article in “Rethinking Civ-Mil,” a series that endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding civil-military relations in the United States. Read all articles in the series here.

Special thanks to MWI’s research director, Dr. Max Margulies, and MWI research fellow Dr. Carrie A. Lee for their work as series editors.

Americans do not subscribe to consensus norms of democratic civil-military relations. When it comes to basic decisions regarding the use of force, they are often inclined to defer to the judgment of military officers. The problem has worsened over the last two decades, even as the US public has increasingly come to view civil-military relations through a partisan lens. The lack of popular support for this basic democratic principle is disturbing on its own terms. This is also worrisome because the lack of support also poses dangers for America’s capacity to design strategy and mobilize and apply military power. We recommend that leaders push back against the deeply entrenched culture of militarism in the United States, that civics education at all age levels highlight proper civil-military relations, and that military leaders resist pressure to erode the military’s apolitical standing.

What is Democratic Civil-Military Relations?

Democratic theory demands that decision-makers be accountable to the people. As a result, while military officers have a responsibility to advise civilian politicians and officials, their judgment should not replace that of elected leaders and their appointed representatives. Policymakers, military officers, pundits, and scholars have numerous legitimate disagreements over how to ensure appropriate democratic civil-military relations, but this core principle is not in dispute. Civilians’ “right to be wrong” means further that military officers should express their views to decision-makers only behind closed doors and should not seek to shape policy by going public.

While decades of polling confirm that Americans have substantial confidence in their military, this confidence does not necessarily translate into public support for democratic civil-military norms. This state of affairs might be acceptable if democratic civil-military relations were just an elite pact—as classic scholarly work often implies. But democratic civil-military relations are not sustainable as an elite game alone. Public commitment to democratic civil-military relations keeps military officers in line and elected politicians from politicizing the military or enlisting the armed forces in domestic political disputes. Threats to democratic civil-military relations abound if the public has not bought in.

Nor, we believe, is it too much to ask citizens to grasp these norms. Every schoolchild knows the folk theory of democracy to which Lincoln gave voice in the Gettysburg Address—that democracy is, and should be, government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Democratic civil-military relations derive directly from that folk theory.

A Deferential Public—and More So Over Time

The consensus tenets currently command far less adherence from Americans than they should. As we previously reported, in June 2019 and June and July 2021, we surveyed nationally representative samples of US residents, and found that the American public is remarkably out of step with these norms. About half of Americans believe that military objections to a proposed mission should always override the president’s judgment about the utility of the operation. A significant majority of Americans are also remarkably comfortable with military involvement in public debates over military operations and policies.

The problem has gotten worse over the past two decades. In 1998–1999, the Triangle Institute for Security Studies asked Americans whether “in general, high-ranking civilian officials rather than high-ranking military officers should have the final say on whether or not to use military force.” At that time, a majority—53 percent—of respondents agreed. In 2021, just 43 percent of US respondents upheld this basic principle of civilian control of the military. In short, many Americans, and sometimes a majority, do not believe that the will of the people, through their elected representatives, should reign supreme over military preferences.

Partisan Politics at the Root

Perhaps we should not be surprised. After all, Americans’ support for democracy is more fragile than many once thought. Liberal democracy rests on the premise that the process is more important than the outcome: the system’s legitimacy derives from its procedures’ intrinsic fairness. Candidates accept defeat at the polls today in exchange for the possibility of victory tomorrow. But recent events suggest that many Americans attribute or deny legitimacy to the procedures based on the results they generate. The faith of many Americans, on both sides of the political aisle, in democracy appears to depend on whether their candidate wins the White House.

It is not surprising that these same tribal politics also govern people’s attitudes toward civil-military relations. In our 2019 survey, those who strongly disapproved of then President Donald Trump, who also tended to be strong liberals and to most distrust military officers, were oddly the most deferential to the armed forces, and those who strongly approved of the president were the least deferential. Why? Because, we argue, Trump loyalists feared that the military’s policy preferences did not align with those of Trump, and they wanted him to have free rein. Trump’s detractors were skeptical of the military, but they had even less trust in the president.

As expected, when Joseph Biden entered the Oval Office in 2021, Democrats became much less deferential to the military. However, to our surprise, Republicans became only slightly more deferential—for partisan reasons. Repeated waves of attacks against military leaders by right-wing politicians and pundits, in the wake of the 2020 George Floyd protests and election fallout, left Republicans doubtful that the military was on their side. As a result, even with Biden in the Oval Office, a plurality of strong Republicans opposed policy advocacy by senior military officers. Democrats, meanwhile, became increasingly confident that senior military officers shared their policy preferences, and so they became surprisingly happy for the brass to speak out.

Ultimately, for partisans across the spectrum, the military in general, and especially the top brass, have become a central actor in domestic political strife, as an ally or adversary. Among the small minority that expressed distrust in the armed forces, a large majority of Republicans (64.6 percent) said it was because the military is political—compared with just 35.8 percent of Republicans who felt that way in 2019. Notwithstanding widespread reports that Americans’ trust in the military has recently fallen, it remains impressively high by historical standards. The greater danger is that the US military may become, in the eyes of the public, a political actor just like any other in Washington.

Implications and Dangers

Both the veneration and vilification of senior military officers harm the United States’ capacity to design strategy and mobilize and apply military power. We foresee four dangers at the intersection of growing partisanship and civil-military relations.

First, a public inclined to defer to the military impedes the nation’s capacity to devise and sustain a coherent national security policy. Public deference to the military not only undercuts democratic accountability—which is normatively valuable on its own terms—but it also bolsters the military’s capacity to drive foreign and security policy, at the expense of other policy tools and government agencies. Rosa Brooks has recorded in memorable detail how, after 9/11, “everything became war and the military became everything.” Even as the Global War on Terror waned, the uniformed military’s power and prominence did not. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates’s warning in 2007 that US statecraft had become dangerously skewed toward “the guns and steel of the military” and his clarion call for “a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security” stand out—not just because they were strikingly rare, but also because they were strikingly futile. From a budgetary standpoint, very little has changed—notwithstanding which party controls Congress or the White House. The FY23 US defense budget weighs in at nearly $800 billion, compared to just $66 billion in FY22 for the Department of State and other international programs. So too, public deference sustained America’s longest war, in Afghanistan. It dragged on for years, whether Democrats or Republicans were in charge, in part because, as the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers highlight, military leaders presented rosy prognoses in public that often went unchallenged and in part because the top brass remained committed to the war and used its unique advantages to restrain civilians whom they saw as fickle.

Second, good policymaking rests on respect for, and critical engagement with, military officers’ expertise when it comes to the use of force. While it would be a mistake to defer to officers’ judgment, and outsource military policy to them, it would be equally foolish to design military policy without, or discounting, the input of military officers. When the military comes to be seen as just another political actor, policymakers may be inclined to welcome or dismiss officers’ professional judgment based on their perceived politics. Indeed, if the military is viewed as just another political actor in a divided and polarized Washington, candid discussion over the use of force will be a casualty. Reportedly, on various occasions, Trump belittled the military’s top brass—calling them, among other things, “losers” or “babies and dopes”—which reflected the low esteem in which he held their professional advice and which perhaps discouraged senior military officers from giving the president frank guidance. In fall 2020, Trump publicly questioned the senior military’s integrity, accusing them of corruption. It was a declaration that it was open season in right-wing circles on General Mark Milley and others, questioning not only their politics and alleged “wokeness,” but their competence.

Third, conceiving of the military as a political actor invites partisans to treat it as a valuable political resource. If this seems far-fetched, it is because the US tradition of civil-military relations has, since the late nineteenth century, allowed the military to govern itself according to its own norms. But staffing bureaucracies—military or otherwise—with partisan compatriots is tried-and-true, and across the world it is a regular occurrence. Militaries whose staffing and promotion are based on merit—rather than political considerations—perform better on the battlefield. Russia’s abysmal battlefield performance in Ukraine reflects in part how badly corrupt and politicized militaries fight. A competent military, reinforced by strong norms of meritocratic rather than political advancement, leads to more trust in the institution from those within and outside the corridors of power.

Fourth, belief that the military has been, or even may be, captured by partisan interests can harm recruitment. If partisans come to believe that the officers setting military policy are the enemy of Americans like them, they will be hesitant to send their children into that institution’s ranks. Even the fear of political intrusion at regular intervals, along with shifting power balances in Washington, would likely dissuade people from signing up for a military career. Such self-selection deprives the military of talent, and undermines the diversity of the force. Likewise, conceiving of the military as a partisan actor may damage retention, if service members doubt they will advance on their merits. So far, the evidence is meager that right-wing attacks on the officer corps’s “wokeness” has much affected enlistment. The current recruitment crisis is probably much more the result of a historically tight US labor market. But right-wing vilification of the top brass seems likely over time to depress enlistment among the most “propensed” recruits and their “influencers.” If other forces continue to pull potential recruits away from military service, politicization heaps gasoline on an already burning fire.

What Is to Be Done?

To address the problem, we must properly diagnose what ails the public’s views of the military. A national culture of militarism has long glorified the nation’s soldiers and officers as the best and the brightest, as the most noble of citizens, as heroes and as self-sacrificing patriots. Politicians have often led this veneration. Their recent turn to vilifying senior military leaders is equally dangerous. But politicians cannot bear all the blame for making the military a political football. The active duty military has, in various ways, subverted democratic control and contributed to public confusion about the military’s role, from openly disparaging presidents to threatening resignation to making public statements on policy. Retired generals have regularly traded on their military credentials and embraced an active role in politics and punditry. If the public is confused, it is partly because military officers have confused them.

There is no panacea for these deeply rooted ills, but we can make progress.

First, civil-military relations should be an essential element of Americans’ civics education, and that education needs to be lifelong. The Department of Education, in collaboration with the service academics, should develop a national curriculum for civil-military relations in high schools. Required university courses on US politics or history rarely spend any time on civil-military relations—but they should. For a mere fraction of the military’s budget, experts in civilian universities, service academies, and professional military education institutions could develop these courses. A slightly larger fraction of the budget could support building and promoting free online course content to engage American adults outside of institutions of higher education. And, of course, those Americans who serve in the military, at all levels, need more regular training in democratic civil-military relations, so that they resist the urge to overstep their bounds. They also need more detailed, scenario-driven instruction, so they are well positioned to respond appropriately when civilians do not.

Second, both civilian and military leaders need to push back against the country’s culture of militarism. Rather than reflexively thanking soldiers for serving heroically, politicians should thank them for serving democratically—that is, for obeying the will of the people and their elected representatives. Rather than reproduce the mythology of the citizen-soldier, politicians should speak more honestly about what drives soldiers and officers, about their foibles as well as their strengths, about the nature of modern soldiering as a kind of dangerous work. Today’s professional soldiers are not the citizen-soldiers of yore, but that does not make them less worthy of our respect or our skepticism. The Pentagon needs to stop actively sponsoring militarist mythmaking at our nation’s sporting events and movies. Civilian and military officials should both be encouraged to talk more frequently, and more openly, about the fragility of America’s civil-military compact. These are admittedly small steps, but culture changes gradually.

Third, politicians, as well as all active duty, reserve, former-serving, and retired service members regardless of their seniority, need to work together to restore the military’s apolitical standing. Politicians routinely make the military into a political prop. In this environment, any action officers take—whether performing their duty or resisting—can give the appearance that they are playing politics. Retired generals who claim a right to speak based on their new civilian status while simultaneously trading on their military credentials also blur the image of the military as apolitical. Informal measures bolstering norms can be critically important. Everyone—civilians and military, including junior service members—has a part to play. Intense public criticism, from both sides of the aisle, should follow when politicians give political speeches to uniformed military, or with them in the background, or when politicians choose to announce major foreign policy initiatives at military bases or academies. But there may be a place for more formal measures too. For instance, the military could develop regulations limiting how retired officers can play on their credentials—and hold their pensions hostage.

If our recommendations seem a bit hortatory, it’s with good reason. If we have learned anything in recent years, it is that institutions and laws are important, but they are no match for individuals determined to overthrow the system. What the federal judge Learned Hand said in 1944 about liberty applies equally to democratic civil-military relations: it “lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there[,] it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Ronald R. Krebs is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. He is also the editor-in-chief of Security Studies.

Robert Ralston is a lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Lisa Ferdinando, DoD

Share on LinkedIn

Send email

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Ronald R. Krebs, Robert Ralston · August 21, 2023

14. How Ukraine is exploiting Biden’s cluster bomb gamble

Excerpts:

But the deployment of the weapon has caused little hesitation inside Ukraine’s government and military, which provided The Washington Post rare access to the equipment and soldiers using the notoriously imprecise munitions. Military officials, however, would not allow the cluster bombs to be photographed.

“It’s a positive thing. It helps us to significantly increase Russian losses in equipment and in lives,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in an interview.

Cluster bombs explode in the air over a target, releasing dozens to hundreds of bomblets across an area as wide as several football fields. The bomblets then explode into metal fragments that can tear off limbs and inflict fatal injuries. Children are particularly vulnerable, because the submunitions can fail to explode until they are picked up, even years after a conflict has ended.

To reassure the public, Ukraine’s defense minister said U.S. cluster munitions “will be used to break through the enemy defense lines” — a reference to the maze of Russian trenches and minefields that have slowed Ukraine’s counteroffensive. But in practice, soldiers said, the utility of cluster munitions is more complicated.

The munitions cannot penetrate Russian troops hiding in foxholes, but they are a menace to exposed infantrymen advancing on Ukrainian territory, soldiers said.

“The main benefit is that the enemy is now very scared to go on assault,” said Stanislav, who, like other soldiers, spoke on the condition that only his first name or call sign be used because of security concerns in discussing sensitive military matters.

How Ukraine is exploiting Biden’s cluster bomb gamble

By John Hudson and Anastacia Galouchka

August 21, 2023 at 1:00 a.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · August 21, 2023

KHARKIV REGION, Ukraine — A few feet away from a pile of U.S.-made cluster bombs, an earsplitting boom goes off 50 times a day, marking the latest volley from a Ukrainian artillery crew seeking to hold back advancing Russian forces.

“When we start firing the cluster munitions, the Russians disappear under hard cover. They won’t even poke their noses out,” said Stanislav, a Ukrainian military official standing a few miles from the front line in a blackened forest still smoldering from Russian shelling.

The artillery crew first received U.S.-made cluster munitions a few weeks ago following President Biden’s decision to send the weapon in the most controversial arms transfer of his presidency. The bombs are outlawed in more than 120 countries under a 2008 international treaty, but not in the United States, Russia and Ukraine.

Human Rights Watch called Biden’s decision “profoundly troubling.” Germany, France, Canada, the Netherlands and several other NATO allies publicly opposed the move, citing the potential for civilian casualties. Forty-nine House Democrats, alongside 98 Republicans, voted in favor of a defense bill amendment that would have sought to block the transfer.

But the deployment of the weapon has caused little hesitation inside Ukraine’s government and military, which provided The Washington Post rare access to the equipment and soldiers using the notoriously imprecise munitions. Military officials, however, would not allow the cluster bombs to be photographed.

“It’s a positive thing. It helps us to significantly increase Russian losses in equipment and in lives,” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said in an interview.

Cluster bombs explode in the air over a target, releasing dozens to hundreds of bomblets across an area as wide as several football fields. The bomblets then explode into metal fragments that can tear off limbs and inflict fatal injuries. Children are particularly vulnerable, because the submunitions can fail to explode until they are picked up, even years after a conflict has ended.

To reassure the public, Ukraine’s defense minister said U.S. cluster munitions “will be used to break through the enemy defense lines” — a reference to the maze of Russian trenches and minefields that have slowed Ukraine’s counteroffensive. But in practice, soldiers said, the utility of cluster munitions is more complicated.

The munitions cannot penetrate Russian troops hiding in foxholes, but they are a menace to exposed infantrymen advancing on Ukrainian territory, soldiers said.

“The main benefit is that the enemy is now very scared to go on assault,” said Stanislav, who, like other soldiers, spoke on the condition that only his first name or call sign be used because of security concerns in discussing sensitive military matters.

Russian units advancing with armored vehicles and unmounted infantry halt their forward movement to allow troops to seek cover from the ricocheting shrapnel, soldiers said. “They even recognize the cluster bombs by the whistle they make when headed their way,” said Stanislav, a member of Ukraine’s 14th Mechanized Brigade.

The capability is particularly important in light of Russia’s offensive push near the towns of Lyman in the eastern region of Donetsk and Kupyansk in the Kharkiv region to the north. The Kremlin is forcing Ukraine to defend those cities at a time when Kyiv needs soldiers focused on its counteroffensive in the south. Having a weapon that slows the Russian advance allows Ukraine to preserve force strength.

Stanislav’s crew fires cluster munitions from a hulking M109 Paladin nestled under the cover of severed pine branches and tall trees. The U.S.-made self-propelled howitzer can fire a cluster munition a distance of more than 15 miles and can adjust the width of bomblet spray across several football fields or a narrower range depending on the operator’s preference, Stanislav said. The crew is also armed with cluster munitions that scatter mines on the ground.

In the south and east, near Ukrainian cities like Vuhledar, Ukrainian artillery crews also use U.S. cluster munitions, firing them from Paladins or M777 howitzers, military officials said.

When it comes to offensive operations, Ukraine uses the munitions to fire into dense forests when the precise location of Russian forces is unknown, to hit unarmored vehicles, and to spray bomblets over infantry to keep them burrowed in foxholes and unable to return fire.

Members of the artillery crew in northeastern Ukraine described an incident in late July in which they fired upon a Russian convoy of three vehicles — two armored and one unarmored — after spotting them with a surveillance drone. The U.S. cluster munitions bounced harmlessly off the armored vehicles but immediately pierced the unprotected one, causing “panic” and a retreat of the vehicles in “different directions,” one soldier said.

Ukrainian soldiers said cluster munitions also allow their advancing forces to get closer to fortified Russian positions because enemy infantry stay burrowed in their bunkers. “They don’t stick their heads out when cluster fire is happening,” another soldier said.

Another tactic is to flush out Russian infantry from their foxholes using more powerful artillery and then switching to cluster munitions once they have surfaced. “It just depends on the objective,” a Ukrainian soldier said.

While the cluster bombs bring a qualitative military benefit, they also provide quantitative advantage at a time when Ukraine needs more ammunition to extend the scope of the counteroffensive. The start of the latest campaign in early June saw a dramatic increase in Ukrainian artillery fire, to 8,000 rounds per day from approximately 3,000 to 5,000, military analysts said.

Without the influx of cluster munitions from the United States and other artillery from South Korea, Kyiv probably would be unable to sustain its counteroffensive long enough to retake significant territory.

“Ukraine is firing more ammunition than normal,” said Rob Lee, a military analyst with the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “A big question is how long can they do that before they run low on ammunition and have to scale back operations.”

Military analysts have questioned the wisdom of using cluster munitions in areas where Ukrainian soldiers plan to maneuver given the threat unexploded ordnance poses to their troops. But in interviews, soldiers and government officials shrugged off the threat, arguing that troops already have to tiptoe through a gantlet of mines and tripwires. Unexploded submunitions add only a marginal risk, they said.

“Cleaning up unexploded ordnance is going to require a huge effort — not because of U.S. cluster munitions but because of the incredible amount of mines planted by the enemy,” Andriy Besedin, the head of the Kupyansk city military administration, said in an interview.

The Biden administration, which is committing $91.5 million in demining assistance to Ukraine, views the problem similarly. “Regardless of whether Ukraine fires these munitions, these areas will require significant remediation post-conflict, and we will provide assistance to support future Ukrainian demining efforts,” said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military matter.

U.S. production of cluster bombs ended in 2016 amid outrage over Saudi Arabia’s use of U.S.-made CBU-105 munitions in multiple civilian areas in Yemen. The controversy spurred the Obama administration to place a hold on transfers of the munitions to the kingdom, a decision that cut into the industry’s profits and resulted in the last U.S. manufacturer of cluster bombs, Textron Systems, to halt production in August of that year, citing “regulatory challenges.”

The cluster munitions the Biden administration is sending to Ukraine are much older, and pose an even greater threat to civilians. The bomb is called the dual-purpose improved conventional munition, or DPICM, and production of it ended in the 1990s. The longer the munition stays in storage, the higher the “dud rate” — the share of bomblets that remain unexploded after a cluster bomb is fired. Biden’s decision to send the munitions — a choice he described as “difficult” — bypassed a U.S. law prohibiting the transfer of cluster munitions with a dud rate of more than 1 percent.

In welcoming the U.S. decision to send the munitions, Ukraine’s Defense Ministry said Kyiv will keep a “strict record of the use of these weapons and the local zones where they will be used.” But when asked about how the documentation process works, Stanislav suggested that there was none. A public affairs officer later contradicted him, saying that every time the M109 shoots a round, the crew writes down what type of munition was fired and in what direction.

The Biden administration says Ukraine provided the United States with assurances that it will closely track the use of the munitions. Since the delivery of the cluster bombs last month, a senior U.S. official said that Washington is satisfied with Kyiv’s follow-through, which includes “regular updates on the Ukrainian military’s DPICM expenditures and use, including location of use.”

Many details surrounding the U.S. supply of the cluster bombs, however, remain unknown to the public, prompting human rights groups to call for greater transparency. “We haven’t been told the quantity of cluster munitions being transferred and for how long this will be done,” said Mary Wareham, an arms specialist at Human Rights Watch. “We also don’t know the dud rates of these particular munitions.”

Wareham and other advocates worry that the U.S. decision to transfer the munitions undermines efforts to establish an international norm banning the controversial weapon.

Evidence that Ukraine used its own supply of cluster munitions to liberate the city of Izyum in 2022, causing civilian casualties among Ukrainians, has also been cited by critics of Biden’s decision to transfer the weapon. (Ukraine denies using the munitions to recapture Izyum.)

Ukrainians are highly aware of the threat posed by cluster munitions. Russian forces have used the weapon extensively since the war began and at least 24 times in populated areas in Ukraine, according to the United Nations. An attack on a busy train station in Kramatorsk in April 2022 killed 50 Ukrainians and injured more than 100, according to Human Rights Watch.

Russian President Vladimir Putin threatened to step up use of the cluster munitions following Biden’s decision to send the weapons. “If they are used against us, we reserve the right to mirror actions,” he told a pro-Kremlin journalist last month.

Since his comments, there have been several reports of Russian cluster bomb attacks across Ukraine, including an assault on a Ukrainian training ground near Druzhkivka that killed one soldier and injured a team of journalists from the German news outlet Deutsche Welle. “I thought I was going to die,” said Kyrylo, a local employee of Deutsche Welle, whose leg was pierced by shrapnel in the attack. “You just start hearing explosions everywhere.”

That same week, a Russian journalist for the state-controlled RIA news agency was killed and three other Russian journalists were injured in a Ukrainian artillery attack in the Zaporizhzhia region that Moscow said involved U.S. cluster munitions. Ukraine denied the allegation.

Injuries from a cluster munition attack are gruesome. The exploding shrapnel can cause multiple blast or fragment wounds, damaging internal organs and often resulting in the loss of eyes, hands and feet.

“The wounds are very bloody,” said Alina Mykhailova, the head of a medical unit operating near Kupyansk. “The shrapnel pieces are very small and there are a lot of them. If it hits you in the throat, you probably won’t survive.”

Despite the grisly nature of the weapon, Mykhailova, whose fiancé died in combat near Bakhmut earlier this year, said Ukraine had every right to use it against invading Russian forces — a common refrain in this battle-hardened country.

“It’s probably not humane,” she said, “but it’s still the most effective.”

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · August 21, 2023

15. The Smartphone Game That Ukrainian Soldiers Play on the Front Line

The Smartphone Game That Ukrainian Soldiers Play on the Front Line

By Thomas Gibbons-Neff

Reporting from Ukraine’s front line

Aug. 21, 2023

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · August 22, 2023

Ukraine Dispatch

The urge to play a violent video game in the midst of the most brutal land war in Europe since World War II may seem baffling. But it’s a way to cope.

Ukrainian soldiers playing World of Tanks Blitz and other games after training outside the eastern city of Bakhmut in June.Credit...Thomas Gibbons-Neff/The New York Times

Aug. 21, 2023

In a war of tanks, there’s World of Tanks.

Somewhere along the several hundred miles of front line in Ukraine, a Ukrainian soldier is probably playing World of Tanks — the video game. A war hero recently admitted to gaming although he had to open a new account when he lost his login information. During training in June, border guards outside Bakhmut, where one of the war’s bloodiest battles was fought, were found playing. And a tank crew seen grabbing a quick lunch last year had slapped a World of Tanks logo on the hull of its T-80 main battle tank.

“I’m playing from time to time, when I have a bit of free time,” said Lt. Nazar Vernyhora, who last year gained public attention for his command of a real tank that destroyed armored personnel carriers and damaged a Russian tank during a battle outside of Kyiv.

Starlink satellite internet is prevalent on Ukraine’s battlefields, and soldiers have smartphones. The draw of mobile video games is obvious. War is often marked by long stretches of boredom, so why turn to the enduring favorite pastime of soldiers — throwing small rocks at bigger rocks — when there’s World of Tanks?

The urge to play a violent video game in the midst of the most brutal land war in Europe since World War II may seem baffling, but it represents an important way soldiers cope with the bloodshed around them: disassociation.

A T-64BV tank coming off the front line for repairs last summer in Bakhmut, Ukraine.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

But the multiplayer game — with its two teams of tanks and other killing machines destroying each other on a virtual battlefield — is an eerie echo of the actual war unfolding around its uniformed player base. Ukrainian tanks, and other armored vehicles, can sometimes find themselves locked in bloody duels that their crews are also experiencing virtually.

There are two entries in the World of Tanks universe available to players in Ukraine: World of Tanks and World of Tanks Blitz. Both require an internet connection, but the latter is available to play on mobile devices. It is hard to state precisely how popular the game is on the Ukrainian battlefield, and broadly across Ukraine, given the different platforms for the games: PCs, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo and Mac computers.

Still, in visits across Ukraine’s front lines by The New York Times, the game was often seen and talked about. Discussions with Ukrainian soldiers about their World of Tanks hobby yielded various explanations for the game’s draw.

The soldiers in one drone unit, though, outside the embattled eastern town of Siversk, Ukraine, recoiled at the idea of playing such a violent game given the circumstances.

“Why would we play World of Tanks when it’s right here?” one soldier asked, referring to the real war. Instead they play FIFA, another soldier added, a nod to a popular soccer video game.

Many Ukrainian soldiers seem to feel differently. During a recent visit to his frontline position, Anton, a commander of a Ukrainian tank company entrenched outside the embattled city of Avdiivka, showed footage of a recent battle on his computer. His favorite clip was of a Russian tank getting destroyed, its hull bursting into flames and the turret ejecting into the air.

When he minimized the video, there on the corner of his screen was the program icon for World of Tanks.

“I love World of Tanks,” he said with a shrug.

Sgt. Silver, a Ukrainian soldier in an artillery unit near the eastern town of Siversk who, like most, goes by his call sign or first name for safety reasons, knew of the game’s popularity among the ranks. But he figured it was a pastime that started for many before the war and had simply carried over.

“On the other hand, it is kind of an addiction,” he said, as he walked back from a yard where a Russian kamikaze drone had nearly destroyed one of the brigade’s rocket artillery trucks some weeks earlier.

A Ukrainian T-80 tank with a World of Tanks sticker on its hull in Bakhmut in June 2022.Credit...Thomas Gibbons-Neff/The New York Times

Wargaming Group, the company that created World of Tanks, had half of its servers supporting its Russian region, with the rest spread in the United States, Europe, Australia and China. The top two highest-earning World of Tanks players in e-sports competition from 2011 to 2021 were Kirill Ponomarev, a Russian, and Dmytro Frishman, a Ukrainian. The two men were once on the same World of Tanks e-sports team.

World of Tanks Blitz saw a peak in users in mid-December 2021, with more than 50,000 people playing concurrently, according to SteamDB, a publicly available service that tracks video game users using the Steam application to play. A week after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that number dropped to around 31,000.

Mr. Frishman, 27, who now runs a game club in Kharkiv, Ukraine, said the game most likely dropped in popularity because Wargaming Group was originally from Belarus and therefore was pro-Russian. After the invasion last year, Wargaming Group, located in Cyprus since 2011, announced that it would shutter its studio in Minsk, Belarus, and transfer operations there and in Russia to a separate company.

Part of Mr. Frishman’s customer base at the game club quickly became wounded soldiers recovering away from the front, playing violent games like PUBG, Counter-Strike and, of course, World of Tanks.

“It was really hard for me to understand why they were playing these games,” Mr. Frishman said Wednesday. “But then I realized they were relaxing, they were playing with their friends.”

Roughly 120 miles from the club, outside the eastern city of Bakhmut, the crinkly sound of digital explosions and tank treads emanated from a tree line. There, crouched among the undergrowth, was Honey, a border guard turned infantry soldier, and his comrade. They were both playing World of Tanks on their phones. Their unit had just finished training after coming off the front line.

When approached, they acted like two raccoons caught in a trash can, putting down their phones sheepishly. Yes, some troops play World of Tanks near the front too, they said.

Asked about the similarities between war and World of Tanks, Honey said both relied on teamwork.

Elsewhere on the eastern front, Lieutenant Vernyhora, who was 21 when his tank was captured on video last year fighting a Russian foe that far outnumbered him, echoed Honey’s view.

“You are kind of learning to work in a team and developing tactics in the game,” he said.

“I’m trying to use the same maneuvers as in real life,” Lieutenant Vernyhora added, sitting on top of one of his unit’s T-72 tanks, hidden under a thicket of dense trees.

Destroyed and abandoned Russian armored vehicles and tanks last year at the scene of a failed pontoon crossing.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

His World of Tanks habit was thwarted when he lost his login information and, with it, access to his account. He also lost all the tanks he had unlocked in the game. Running into a well-armed Russian platoon had been pretty bad, but his setback in the game, he joked, “was a disaster.”

Much of World of Tanks’ strategy relies on piloting a tank around battlefields that look handpicked out of World War II and other conflicts. Players rely on how fast, strong and well-armed their tanks are compared with other players’, and, as in actual tank battles, can use terrain to mask and protect their armored sprites.

But even devotees of the game like Honey will point out that in real life — especially in the shell-raked trenches of Ukraine’s eastern front — they have a different strategy: survival.

The closer you get to the shelling, Honey said, “even if there is internet, you don’t really want to play.”

Natalia Yermak, Dimitry Yatsenko and Dzvinka Pinchuk contributed reporting from the front line.

A correction was made on

Aug. 21, 2023

An earlier version of this article, relying on outdated information from the Wargaming website, misstated the company’s operations in Russia. While the company once operated servers in Russia, it no longer does.

How we handle corrections

Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a Ukraine correspondent and a former Marine infantryman. More about Thomas Gibbons-Neff

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: To Escape War, Kyiv’s Soldiers Play a War-Based Video Game

The New York Times · by Thomas Gibbons-Neff · August 22, 2023

16. China's Constant Spying On Australian Drills From Space A Sign Of Shifting Orbital Balance

Excerpts:

If China were to pursue large distributed constellations, like SpaceX's Starlink and the ones the U.S. military is working on now including to support missile defense, it could make countering its growing capabilities in orbit even more difficult. Publicly available PLA-tied research has already highlighted the potential threats that distributed networks of space-based assets could present to Chinese forces.

With that in mind, even as China's own satellite capabilities have expanded, the PLA has continued with the development of a number of anti-satellite weapons. Other countries around the world, most notably Russia, are still investing significantly in various counter-space capabilities, in no small part to make up for their shortfalls in space-based assets. As the Chinese government's satellite fleets grow, so will its need to protect them.

All told, as has been made clear by ABC News' recent report, the era of the United States and its major allies enjoying unmatched abilities to monitor their opponents from space is coming to an end.

China's Constant Spying On Australian Drills From Space A Sign Of Shifting Orbital Balance

Chinese space-based surveillance of exercises in Australia highlights how the West’s spy satellite advantage is rapidly degrading.

JOSEPH TREVITHICK

UPDATED AUG 21, 2023 5:37 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 21, 2023

An Australian defense contractor that provides commercial satellite tracking services says it has monitored hundreds of Chinese space-based surveillance assets making thousands of passes over the country and surrounding areas in recent months. The company's data indicates that the Chinese satellites have been gathering intelligence about major multi-national military exercises hosted by Australia.

Really, this should not come as a surprise and underscores the fact that the United States, and by extension very close allies like Australia, no longer enjoys an extreme degree of dominance when it comes to space-based surveillance, intelligence, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities it once did.

Australia's ABC News was the first to report on the space-tracking data that Canberra-based EOS' Space Systems division says it has collected about Chinese satellites appearing to monitor the 2023 iterations of the Talisman Sabre exercise last month, which had air, land, and sea components, as well as the recently concluded maritime-centric Malabar exercise. Both of these are major international training events that the United States and other countries participate in. This year's Talisman Sabre was the largest to date.

"We've been collecting optical surveillance data on Earth observing Chinese satellites during the Talisman Sabre and Malabar exercises and what that's showing is quite a lot of activity surveying the ground during those events," EOS Space Systems' James Bennett told ABC News.

"We've seen over 300 satellites surveying ground-based activities and the number of overflights is over 3,000 since the start of the Malabar exercise centered around the Sydney Harbor bay area," he added.

In addition, "in July... EOS Space Systems tracked three Chinese geostationary orbit satellites maneuvering into position below the equator to monitor the Talisman Sabre war games across northern Australia," according to ABC News.

This data definitely points to major Chinese interest in what has been happening at these exercises. That, of course, makes good sense as both training events typically showcase higher-end capabilities that Australia, the United States, and their allies and partners possess.

More importantly, the Chinese government has the means to conduct satellite surveillance on this scale now. This is a direct result of years-long efforts on the part of authorities in that country to try to attain a level of space-based capabilities previously only enjoyed by the United States.

"At the end of 2021, China's ISR satellite fleet contained more than 260 systems – a quantity second only to the United States, and nearly doubling China's in-orbit systems since 2018," according to the 2022 edition of the Pentagon's annual unclassified report on China's military and security capabilities, which was released last November. "The PLA owns and operates about half of the world's [space-based] ISR systems."

There are some questions about the exact counting of Chinese-spaced ISR assets from that report. Another unclassified report that the U.S. Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) published in 2018 said that China had 122 ISR satellites, while the United States had 353, Russia had 23, and the rest of the world combined had 168. Even if all of those other figures had stayed the same, 260 Chinese systems in 2021 would not equate to half of the global total.

Global satellite totals as of 2018, according to an unclassified report from the US Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center. The color-coded breakdowns on the right-hand side are subtotals for the United States (blue), China (yellow), Russia (red), and the rest of the world (purple). USAF

The 2018 NASIC report also explicitly says that its totals do "not include countries or multinational organizations without indigenous satellites that use space services secured via commercial agreements, governmental partnerships, or non-traditional means." The U.S. government makes heavy use of satellite imagery from commercial providers to supplement its own organic capabilities. The Chinese government is increasingly doing the same.

"There are a number of civil and commercial applications for remote sensing data, such as environmental monitoring, urban planning, and disaster response. High demand for this data and falling costs for capable technology have spurred the rapid growth and proliferation of these satellites," NASIC's 2018 report notes. "A decade ago, foreign remote sensing satellites numbered nearly 100 – by mid-2018, that number reached over 300."

"U.S. commercial satellite imagery companies are bound by a variety of regulatory mechanisms. Foreign commercial imagery companies, some of which are wholly or partially state-owned, are under different regulations," that same report added. "Some foreign satellite imagery companies may sell images or information about U.S. or allied national security interests to hostile non-state actors or foreign powers."

Any discrepancies in accounting notwithstanding, it is clear that the Chinese government has amassed a huge number of ISR satellites and is now the second-largest national operator of such systems behind the United States. On top of that, by all indications, China's total ISR satellite fleet absolutely dwarfs those belonging to all other countries on Earth, with the exception of the United States. That Russia only had a paltry 23 space-based ISR assets in 2018 underscores the massive advantages the U.S. government had enjoyed in this regard for decades even over near-peer competitors.

"Recent improvements to China's space-based ISR capabilities emphasize the development, procurement, and use of increasingly capable satellites with digital camera technology as well as space-based radar for all-weather, 24-hour coverage. These improvements increase China's monitoring capabilities – including observation of U.S. aircraft carriers, expeditionary strike groups, and deployed air wings," the Pentagon's 2022 China report added. "Space capabilities will enhance potential PLA military operations farther from the Chinese coast. These capabilities are being augmented with electronic reconnaissance satellites that monitor radar and radio transmissions."

An annotated commercial satellite photo showing the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning and possible escorts in the Philippine Sea last year. Purpose-built spy satellites, including those that China operates now in large numbers, are generally assumed to provide much higher-resolution imagery. PHOTO © 2022 PLANET LABS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION / @detresfa_

Furthermore, Chinese ISR satellites "could support monitoring, tracking, and targeting of U.S. and allied forces worldwide, especially throughout the Indo-Pacific region," the Pentagon's annual review had noted. "These satellites also allow the PLA [People's Liberation Army] to monitor potential regional flashpoints, including the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, [the] Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea."

It's important to point out here that a host of threats, especially China's growing arsenal of cruise, ballistic, and now hypersonic missiles, has already prompted the U.S. military to focus on new concepts of operations centered heavily on distributed basing and rapid deployment and redeployment of forces to reduce vulnerability to these systems. The more remote sensing capabilities a force like the PLA has at its disposal will lessen the effectiveness of those operating concepts, especially if they cannot be effectively denied or mitigated during a conflict. With more surveillance coverage available, including fast revisits to key areas, targeting cycles can be condensed and the windows of vulnerability to assets on the surface tighten.

This is all entirely in line with what EOS Space Systems has now told ABC News that it has been observing with regard to China's space-based monitoring of Talisman Sabre and Malabar.

The potential impacts of the Chinese government's now-expansive satellite ISR capacity go well beyond just surveilling exercises. As the Pentagon's 2022 China report highlighted, these satellites enable the PLA to conduct extremely valuable space-based intelligence gathering and more general surveillance of various potential hotspots in the Pacific, including military activities in and around Taiwan and in the heavily disputed South China Sea, on a more persistent basis.

A US Department of Defense map showing island outposts belonging to China and other countries, as well as the boundaries are various competing territorial claims, just in the Spratly Islands chain at the southern end of the South China Sea. DOD

The intelligence and general situational awareness that Chinese ISR satellites provide could contribute to the targeting of enemy forces, including high-value assets like American aircraft carrier strike groups, during an actual major conflict. This could be an important addition to the PLA's already expansive anti-access and area denial capabilities in places like the South China Sea.

The PLA's expansive array of space-based ISR could of course be used to support current and future operations that have to do with much more than China's territorial claims, something last year's Pentagon China report also highlighted. The Chinese government's clear focus on expanding these capabilities is well in line with other efforts, including an expanding number of overseas bases, that are clearly intended to help the PLA move beyond being a regional military powerhouse to a global one.

It is of course worth noting that many countries, including the United States and Australia, have significant numbers of ground and space-based assets dedicated to tracking enemy satellites and other potential threats in space, in part to help mitigate the impacts of any snooping.

"The ADF [Australian Defense Forces] takes prudent measures to safeguard the information security of Australian and participating forces," a spokesperson for the Australian Department of Defense told ABC News in response to questions about EOS' data. "Defense tracks satellite movements as part of broader space domain awareness efforts."

A spokesperson for the Australian DoD declined, not surprisingly, to elaborate on what those "prudent measures" entail.

That being said, China's space-based ISR capabilities, which only look set to continue to grow in scope and scale for the foreseeable future, are clearly worrisome on an entirely new level given their sheer magnitude. This can only prompt questions about whether existing "space domain awareness" capabilities that countries like the United States and Australia possess are truly sufficient to meet the challenges that Chinese satellites already present.

A ground-based Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) in Australia that the US military operates in cooperation with that country's armed forces. US Space Force

If China were to pursue large distributed constellations, like SpaceX's Starlink and the ones the U.S. military is working on now including to support missile defense, it could make countering its growing capabilities in orbit even more difficult. Publicly available PLA-tied research has already highlighted the potential threats that distributed networks of space-based assets could present to Chinese forces.

With that in mind, even as China's own satellite capabilities have expanded, the PLA has continued with the development of a number of anti-satellite weapons. Other countries around the world, most notably Russia, are still investing significantly in various counter-space capabilities, in no small part to make up for their shortfalls in space-based assets. As the Chinese government's satellite fleets grow, so will its need to protect them.

All told, as has been made clear by ABC News' recent report, the era of the United States and its major allies enjoying unmatched abilities to monitor their opponents from space is coming to an end.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

thedrive.com · by Joseph Trevithick · August 21, 2023

17. China hoped Fiji would be a template for the Pacific. Its plan backfired.

Maps/graphic at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/china-fiji-police-mou-pacific-islands/?itid=hp-top-table-main_p001_f002

China hoped Fiji would be a template for the Pacific. Its plan backfired.

By Michael E. Miller and

Matthew Abbott

Aug. 21 at 5:00 p.m.

The Washington Post · by Michael E. Miller · August 21, 2023

SUVA, Fiji — When four Chinese detectives breezed into police headquarters here in the middle of 2017, it quickly became apparent they weren’t in Fiji’s capital merely to help with an inquiry. Instead, the officers planned to carry out the investigation — into Chinese nationals suspected of running internet scams from the South Pacific island — pretty much as if they were back in China.

“Everything was done by them,” said a former Fijian police officer who was in the Suva headquarters at the time, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “Fiji police was only there to assist in the arrest, nothing else. All the statements, recordings and the uplifting of all exhibits was done by the Chinese.”

The case was a harbinger of China’s ambitions in the wider Pacific as well as its willingness to conduct investigations and project its police powers overseas, sometimes with little regard for local authorities. But the case also became a catalyst for Fiji to stand up to Beijing and assert its sovereignty.

China’s Global Leap

At every point of the compass, China is quietly laying the foundations of its new international order.

Weeks after the initial four landed in Fiji, scores more Chinese police officers arrived on the island, and 77 suspects, many of them young women, were marched in handcuffs and hoods across the tarmac at a local airport before being flown to China. None was given an extradition hearing. There was no proper documentation, no Interpol involvement, the former Fijian officer said.

“They just came in and did what they wanted,” added another, more senior former officer.

China’s domineering role in the investigation, followed by arrests that human rights activists and Fijian opposition leaders likened to a mass kidnapping, was the culmination of Beijing’s most extensive security partnership in the Pacific, one based on a secretive memorandum of understanding on police cooperation between Beijing and the government of then-Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama.

Globe locating Fiji in the Pacific Ocean

It was also a moment that began to sour some Fijians on the growing activities of Chinese officials in Fiji, an example of how Beijing can overreach as it attempts to build its global influence.

“We didn’t even know there was an agreement,” Aman Ravindra-Singh, a lawyer who was one of the few public figures in Fiji to speak out against the arrests at the time, said of the memorandum. “The next thing we knew, there were knocks on people’s doors in [the city of] Nadi and there were Chinese people in full uniform arresting people. It was unheard of. It’s almost like we were invaded.”

The police cooperation between China and Fiji that began in 2011 with the six-page MOU would continue for more than a decade. More than 100 Fijian police officers would train or study in cities across China. Almost two dozen Chinese officers would make the opposite journey, embedding in the Fijian police force for months at a time.

The police agreement provided a blueprint for China to grow its security presence 5,600 miles away in Fiji — from the soft power of people-to-people exchanges to the hard power of arrests, extrajudicial deportations and the transfer of high-tech equipment such as closed-circuit cameras, surveillance gear and drones.

The MOU would also serve as a template for other Chinese efforts in the Pacific. Beijing last year tried — but failed — to forge a sweeping security pact with 10 Pacific island nations.

It has had more success in the Solomon Islands, where China has ramped up police assistance recently, despite objections from Australia and New Zealand. Last year, a security agreement between Beijing and the Solomon Islands inflamed fears that China wants to establish a military base in the strategically important archipelago and, more broadly, become the overarching political power in the region.

At the same time, China has been stepping up its security presence in other countries, including establishing unofficial police stations across North America and Europe to keep tabs on Chinese nationals.

But its actions have been particularly noticeable in this part of the world.

“China is seeking to create an alternative security network across the Pacific,” said Anna Powles, a Pacific expert at New Zealand’s Massey University, noting that in a part of the world where few countries have militaries, the police are a key avenue of influence. “In that respect, the early MOU signed with Fiji in 2011 laid the groundwork.”

A police officer trains new recruits at the Suva Police Academy. Under the security agreement, many police officers also trained in China.

Recruits at the academy. China gave Fiji several million dollars’ worth of police equipment under the agreement, including uniforms, vehicles and surveillance tools.

China’s push into the region — it is interested in these tiny, underdeveloped Pacific countries not only for their votes at the United Nations but also for their large territorial waters — appears to have taken the United States by surprise, leading to a sudden spurt of engagement by Washington.

The United States and its close ally Australia are boosting aid and diplomacy — as well as promoting their own security agreements — in the Pacific.

“China is seeking to create an alternative security network across the Pacific. In that respect, the early MOU signed with Fiji in 2011 laid the groundwork.”— Anna Powles, a Pacific expert at Massey University in New Zealand

President Biden, who hosted Pacific island leaders at the White House last year, abruptly canceled what would have been a historic trip to the region in May to deal with debt ceiling talks, but has scheduled a second summit in Washington this fall.

The moment may be opportune as some Pacific islanders question the nature of their relations with Beijing.

The police agreement in Fiji, in particular, had coincided with increasingly harsh rule by the Bainimarama government.

In December elections, however, Bainimarama lost the prime minister’s office to Sitiveni Rabuka, a longtime rival who ran a campaign critical of China. And in January, in one of his first acts, Rabuka announced he intended to terminate the police agreement with Beijing.

In an interview here, Rabuka said he made the decision because he feared that the MOU risked “treading on people’s personal rights.” He also suggested that his predecessor’s close ties to China had undermined Fijian sovereignty and increased corruption.

“We were so weak, we wanted to befriend them so badly,” he said, “that we turned a blind eye to a lot of the bad things going on.”

When Fisi Nasario was offered the chance to study in China, the Fijian police officer felt he couldn’t refuse. Nasario normally couldn’t afford to do a master’s degree in Fiji, let alone abroad. But Beijing was offering to pay for his travel, tuition and expenses for two years. He would return home to a promotion and a raise. It was all the result of the policing agreement with China.

Fiji was an international outcast when it inked the MOU in April 2011. The United States, Australia and New Zealand had imposed sanctions after Bainimarama staged an armed takeover five years earlier.

Isolated by traditional allies, Bainimarama turned to a country that didn’t care about his coup: China. (Rabuka also seized power in a coup in 1987, for which he later apologized.)

“We were so weak, we wanted to befriend them so badly that we turned a blind eye to a lot of the bad things going on.”— Sitiveni Rabuka, Fijian prime minister

Today Suva bears the hallmarks of Beijing’s influence. Bainimarama’s “Look North” policy brought in almost $300 million in Chinese aid between 2011 and 2018, though much of it was concessional loans that saddled the island nation with debt. By the time China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, visited Suva in 2014, Fiji was fully aboard what Xi called “China’s express train of development.”

China built a hulking embassy and a Confucius Institute at the university to teach Chinese language and culture. It renovated Suva’s civic center and constructed what was supposed to be a state-of-the-art hospital. On a single day in 2018, Beijing unveiled not one but two major bridges in the capital.

Navua Hospital, which Beijing spent $6 million to build in 2014, is already in disrepair. Water and electricity often fail and the morgue is overcrowded.

A patient is wheeled out of Navua Hospital. Said one official there: “Every day I come to work, I pray to God that I don’t lose anyone because of all these issues. This hospital is a ticking time bomb.”

But the memorandum made few headlines in 2011 when it was penned by China’s powerful Ministry of Public Security and Fiji’s Ministry of Defense, National Security and Immigration. Only a preliminary, Chinese-language version appears to have been posted online.

A final, English-language copy obtained by The Washington Post, however, shows that the agreement was more detailed than many of China’s other MOUs with developing countries, most of them in Africa.

Chinese and Fijian officials agreed to cooperate in seven areas including the “arrest of fugitives and recovery of illicit money and goods” and the “prevention of and crackdown on” economic crimes, cybercrimes, terrorism and human trafficking. The two nations also agreed to exchange intelligence, visits, training and equipment. The MOU even lists hotline phone and fax numbers in both countries.

Memorandum of understanding between China and Fiji

Beijing and Suva signed a policing accord in 2011, agreeing to cooperate in seven areas including the “arrest of fugitives and recovery of illicit money and goods” and the “prevention of and crackdown on” economic crimes, cybercrimes, terrorism and human trafficking. They also agreed to exchange intelligence, visits, training and equipment, according to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post.

By 2013, pairs of Chinese officers had begun to embed in the Fijian police force for three to six months at a time, and Fijian officers like Nasario were traveling in the opposite direction.

In August 2017, just as Chinese police were scooping up the 77 suspects in Fiji, Nasario found himself in China, studying alongside officers from across the Pacific and Southeast Asia at Yunnan Police College. There, they learned some basic Chinese and attended lectures on narcotics, forensics and interrogation techniques.

The experience appeared designed not only to educate but also to impress. The international students toured modern Chinese police command centers and marveled at the force’s high-tech drones. They visited tourist destinations like the Great Wall near Beijing and Shanghai Disneyland.

“It was not the China I had in mind before I left,” Nasario, now the Fiji force’s director of police prosecutions, told The Post.

For almost a decade, dozens of Fijian officers would head to China to train or study each year. The exchanges would stop only during the coronavirus pandemic, when China closed its borders. Even then, Beijing sent a special police liaison officer to Suva to continue the collaboration.

“It was the most established police-to-police relationship that China had in the Pacific,” said Peter Connolly, a former Australian army officer who has conducted extensive research on Chinese interests in the region.

“There was a level of exchange and relationship not replicated anywhere else,” he said, adding, however, that the relationship soon could be surpassed by Beijing’s growing security sway in the Solomon Islands.

Frank Bainimarama, then Fiji's prime minister, and wife Maria with Chinese President Xi Jinping and wife Peng Liyuan at a 2017 Belt and Road Forum in Beijing. The Fiji security agreement was initiated under Bainimarama. (Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images)

The arrangement provided public relations boosts for both countries. Fijian officials — many of whom had trained in Australia or New Zealand — now praised Chinese policing as second to none.

For Fiji, the photo ops in China helped distract from human rights abuses at home.

“Under the Bainimarama government, we saw a dramatic increase in arbitrary arrests, torture cases and abuse of process,” said Kate Schuetze, Pacific researcher at Amnesty International.

The issues worsened with the appointment of a former Fiji military commander, Sitiveni Qiliho, as police commissioner in 2015, as the line between police and military became increasingly blurred, she added. It’s unclear whether Chinese training contributed, but it didn’t help, human rights activists said.

Why we’re tracking China’s global influence

The Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to forge new economic and diplomatic alliances, including through its Belt and Road infrastructure initiative, are now well known. Also, at every point of the compass, Beijing is quietly laying the foundations of its new international order and shaping places and institutions outside its borders in its image.

Where we went and why

We looked for places where China’s efforts had gone relatively unnoticed. We sought to show the breadth of China’s ambitions — from infrastructure and policing to media representation and training workers.

How we reported this series

Our team fanned out across the world, reporting from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Central America and Europe.

Shibani Mahtani reported on Chinese influence in Singaporean media and vocational education in Indonesia.

Michael Miller traveled to Fiji, detailing the fallout from China’s policing agreement.

We are continuing to document Beijing’s reach.

1/3

End of carousel

Still, Schuetze was shocked in 2017 when photos emerged of the 77 Chinese suspects being loaded onto a plane.

Ravindra-Singh, the lawyer, who fled Fiji last year after he was sentenced to 10 months in prison for criticizing Bainimarama and other officials on Facebook, said it was unclear what happened to those arrested or if they had done anything wrong.

Fiji police denied that the MOU led to any abuses, or that there was anything improper about the 2017 mass arrests. The Chinese Embassy in Suva similarly defended the relationship as “professional, open and transparent.”

It declined to provide information on those arrested, including the charges and outcomes. Instead, it said the 2017 operation was a “good example” of international police cooperation and “in full accordance with relevant domestic and international laws.”

China provided Fiji with several million dollars’ worth of equipment during the lifetime of the MOU, including police cars and motorcycles, uniforms and marching band instruments.

When, in 2014, Bainimarama prepared to hold an election he hoped would legitimize his rule, China provided Fijian police with “surveillance and anti-riot equipment” that the Chinese Embassy later said had a “great impact on the success of the election.” Bainimarama won in a landslide.

The technology wowed Nasario, a self-described “island boy.” When he visited a police command center in Kunming, Chinese officers typed a bus’s information into a computer and pulled up live closed-circuit footage from inside, he recalled. Chinese police showed him how they had solved a theft using high-resolution footage from inside a nightclub. And he was blown away by the advanced drones some Chinese police cadets were learning to pilot.

“You see drones everywhere and you think, ‘I wish Fiji could have this,’” he recalled.

He would soon get his wish.

By 2021, two years after Nasario returned home, the Chinese technology on offer had increased in sophistication. That year, China provided Fiji with $700,000 in equipment, including surveillance drones, closed-circuit cameras, and servers enabling police to monitor the footage, according to local news stories and government news releases.

Nasario said Fijian police now use drones to identify illegal marijuana farms in remote areas.

Blake Johnson, an analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the Fiji-China MOU had started small but grown over time into something serious enough to trouble Australian officials.

“Pretty much from the start, Fiji was interested in not just getting vehicles, which is very common in the Pacific, but also communications, surveillance equipment, anti-riot equipment, and that kept evolving,” he said.

The drones and closed-circuit equipment were particularly concerning, he said, “because of how China uses that technology against its own population, raising questions about whether they are encouraging other countries to do the same.”

Fiji's cabinet under Prime Minister Rabuka gathers for a meeting. Rabuka told The Post he decided to end the security agreement because he feared it risked “treading on people’s personal rights.”

Lawmakers leave the Parliament chamber in Suva. In response to China's push in the Pacific, the United States and close ally Australia are boosting aid and diplomacy in the region.

Inia Seruiratu, who was Fiji’s minister for defense, national security and policing from 2018 to 2022 and is now the opposition leader, denied that Chinese equipment had been used to spy on Fijians.

“Surveillance? They were providing us with musical instruments,” he scoffed, calling suggestions otherwise a “conspiracy theory.”

The specter of Chinese surveillance resurfaced last year when Beijing pushed a sweeping pact with 10 Pacific island nations that would have given China influence over policing, customs, cybersecurity, communications, deep-sea mining and more.

“It was what I would describe as a grand strategic proposal, seeking to integrate political, economic and security initiatives across a key group of Pacific islands,” said Connolly, the Australian analyst.

But the pact fell apart after David Panuelo, then the president of the Federated States of Micronesia, penned a letter to fellow Pacific leaders warning that the agreement was a “smokescreen” for China taking “control.”

“When you go into an agreement like that, you basically give up your sovereignty,” he told The Post in February, a month before losing reelection.

Panuelo later said he’d been followed around Suva by two men from the Chinese Embassy during a summit last year.

Rabuka said that showed he’d been right to stop the police agreement.

“Who else are they surveilling?” asked Pio Tikoduadua, Fiji’s home affairs minister, who oversees the nation’s police and army. “When I meet the Chinese ambassador, I’m going to tell him, ‘Are you looking at me, too?’”

Rabuka’s Jan. 26 announcement scrapping the MOU came as a surprise, even to U.S. officials who welcomed it as a sign of a pro-American inclination. The new prime minister had hinted at the move on the campaign trail but few expected him to act after only a month in office.

For China, the decision was a humiliating setback — one Beijing is trying to reverse. It has publicly warned it might slash aid to Fiji in response, after privately urging the prime minister not to rip up the policing agreement.

But it comes amid a broader shift, in Fiji and beyond.

“There is a sense in which China has overplayed its hand over the last 12 months,” said James Batley, who served as Australia’s top diplomat in Fiji and the Solomon Islands. “What we are seeing now are various indicators of pushback.”

For Rabuka, canning the MOU was partly aimed at tapping into growing discontent about Beijing’s actions in the South Pacific nation, experts said — not just in policing, but in development, too.

While some Beijing-backed construction projects are popular, others have begun to fall apart or were never completed. Accusations of kickbacks and cut corners abound.

“There is a sense in which China has overplayed its hand over the last 12 months. What we are seeing now are various indicators of pushback.”— James Batley, former Australian High Commissioner in Fiji

The skeleton of the WG Friendship Plaza looms high above Suva. The Chinese skyscraper was supposed to be the tallest building in the South Pacific. Instead, it remains unfinished after questions about construction standards, the death of a worker and a legal dispute.

Twenty miles away, a medical center Beijing spent $6 million to build in 2014 is already in disrepair.

“Every day I come to work, I pray to God that I don’t lose anyone because of all these issues,” said Doreen Mani, acting senior divisional medical officer at Navua Hospital, where the water and electricity often fail and staff members sometimes have to squeeze two bodies into a single morgue refrigerator. “This hospital is a ticking time bomb.”

The Chinese company that built the hospital recently finished two police stations in Fiji.

Work on the WG Friendship Plaza, built by WG International Real Estate, a locally registered Chinese company, was suspended after questions about construction standards and other issues.

The WG Friendship Plaza overshadows Holy Trinity Anglican School in Suva. The Chinese skyscraper was supposed to be the tallest building in the South Pacific.

Last year, Fiji signed on to the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity, Washington’s answer to Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. Yet, the island nation is still reliant on Chinese development assistance, and the decision to scrap the police agreement has put that at risk.

Rabuka has appeared to walk back his decision at times, saying the MOU is merely on ice as his government reviews it. He told The Post that if the review finds that policing has suffered, he could even sign a new agreement with China.

But Rabuka and Tikoduadua, the home affairs minister, said they preferred to work with the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Australia has been shoring up its own security ties to Pacific island nations in recent months, striking a status-of-forces agreement with Fiji, a security deal with Vanuatu and closer ties to Kiribati. Negotiations continue on a security deal with Papua New Guinea, with which the United States recently struck a similar agreement.

The Australian Federal Police agency is reportedly expanding its presence in the region. New Zealand recently signed its own defense agreement with Fiji.

The contest shows little sign of easing. Two weeks after Rabuka’s announcement, officials from the U.S. Embassy visited the Fiji police force to offer training.

“There’s a whole lot of interest now in the Pacific,” said Tikoduadua. “It’s like the new space to conquer. We were all asleep, then all of a sudden these people are parked in our neighborhood.”

Fijian workers employed by China Railway Group build a road near the Chinese Embassy in Suva.

Theodora Yu in Hong Kong contributed to this report.

About this story

Story by Michael E. Miller. Photos by Matthew Abbott. Story editing by Anna Fifield. Project editing by Courtney Kan. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Design and development by Kat Rudell-Brooks and Yutao Chen. Design editing by Joe Moore. Map by Laris Karklis and Samuel Granados. Copy editing by Paula Kelso and Martha Murdock.

The Washington Post · by Michael E. Miller · August 21, 2023

18. Ukraine Situation Report: Spy Agency Takes Credit For Strikes On Russian Airbases

Ukraine Situation Report: Spy Agency Takes Credit For Strikes On Russian Airbases

For the second time in three days, Ukraine attacked an airbase inside Russia housing Tu-23M Backfire bombers.

HOWARD ALTMAN

PUBLISHED AUG 21, 2023 6:49 PM EDT

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · August 21, 2023

Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) is taking credit for two drone attacks on Russian airbases over the past three days, telling The War Zone that it recruited people to attack the Soltsy-2 and Shaykovka airbases from inside the country.

“People recruited by the GUR came from central Russia, did their work and went back to their place,” GUR spokesman Andrii Yusov told The War Zone Monday. “GUR continues operations in Russia. In the border regions, in the deep rear and in Moscow.”

Yusov offered no proof and no imagery has yet emerged from what Russian sources are also saying was a Ukrainian drone attack on Shaykovka Monday. The base is located about 130 miles north of the Ukrainian border. However, Yusov said at least one aircraft was damaged at that base, home to Russian Tu-22M Backfire bombers from the 52nd Heavy Bomber Aviation Regiment. He did not specify what kind of aircraft was damaged Monday, but he told us that one Tu-22M Backfire bomber was destroyed Saturday in an attack on the Soltsy-2 airbase and two others were damaged. Unlike Monday's attack, vivid photos emerged on social media of a Backfire bomber at Soltsy-2 engulfed in flames. You can read more about that attack in our original story here.

Russian media on Monday confirmed a drone attack on Shaykovka, but there were conflicting reports about resulting damage.

Kaluga Oblast Gov. Vladyslav Shapsha said there was no damage after an attempted drone attack in the district where Shaykovka is located.

“This morning, despite difficult meteorological conditions, a UAV attack was repelled on the territory of the Kirovsky district,” Shapsha said on his Telegram channel Monday. “There were no injuries or damage to infrastructure.”

Russian media confirmed a Ukrainian drone attack on the Shaykovka airfield in Kaluga Oblast. (Google Earth image)

MASH said the airfield itself was attacked.

“A Ukrainian UAV fell on the territory of the airfield today at about eight o'clock in the morning,” MASH reported on its Telegram channel Monday. “

The drone was spotted early and shot down, MASH reported.

“A crater formed at the site of the drone crash and a fire broke out, which was extinguished by people on the spot, without the involvement of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. Previously, there were no casualties or destruction.”

Baza had a different take.

“A kamikaze drone fell on the territory of the airfield on the morning of Aug. 21,” Baza reported on its Telegram channel Monday. “According to preliminary information, an unused aircraft located at the airfield was damaged as a result of the fall. However, this information has not been officially confirmed.”

Baza did not specify what kind of aircraft was damaged.

This makes the second Ukrainian drone attack on Shaykovka in just under a year. The airbase was also attacked last October and a Ukrainian source at the time told us that two Russian Backfire bombers were destroyed. Russian officials pushed back against that claim and satellite imagery did not support it, but we could not see the entire base. You can read more about here.

As we noted yesterday, the Soviet-era Tu-22Ms, which launch supersonic Kh-22 and newer Kh-32 cruise missiles, have been a major problem for Ukraine since not long after Russia's all-out invasion of the country.

Tu-22M3 with a Kh-22/32 under its wing. (Dmitriy Pichugin via Wikicommons)

The drone used in Monday’s attack was “a civilian copter, retrofitted with IEDs and a reinforced battery,” MASH reported. The Russian Defense Ministry, as we reported on Sunday, said Soltsy-2 was attacked by “a copter-type UAV.”

Those descriptions fit with our suggestion on Sunday that these attacks could be launched from inside Russia as opposed to from Ukraine and lends additional credence to the GUR claims. Ukraine has long proven it has the ability conduct long-range drone strikes on Russian airfields. There have also been sabotage attacks on Russian airfields far from Ukraine as well as other locally-conducted small drone attacks on Russian aviation assets in the past.

This latest series of drone attacks on Russian military installations seem to live up to a promise made last month by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that such strikes will only continue.

Before we head into the latest news from Ukraine, The War Zone readers can catch up on our previous rolling coverage of the war here.

The Latest

On the battlefield, Ukraine claims it has made further advances near the town of Robotyne in Zaporizhzhia Oblast.

“Our units were successful in the direction of southeastern Robotyne and south of Mala Tokmachka of Zaporizhzhia Oblast,” Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said Monday on her Telegram channel. “The enemy tried to regain lost positions east of Robotyne. But unsuccessfully. Planned combat work is currently underway in Robotyne.”

The Russians, meanwhile, continue to press their attack toward Kupiansk in Kharkiv Oblast, she said.

“In the Kupiansk direction, the enemy is storming and shelling. Our troops repel attacks, hold the border and prevent the enemy from advancing,” she said. “In particular, the defense forces repelled enemy attacks in the Pershotravneve, Synkivka, Petropavlivka districts of the Kharkiv region.”

The Russian Defense Ministry (MoD) on Monday said its forces are achieving success around Kupiansk.

“Units of the Zapad Group of Forces, supported by Operational-Tactical Aviation and artillery, improved the situation along the front line,” the Russian MoD said Monday on its Telegram Channel. There were “four attacks by units of 25th airborne, 95th airborne assault and 14th mechanized brigades of the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] that have been repelled close to Sinkovka (Kharkiv Oblast) and Novosyolovskoye (Luhansk Oblast).”

The increased Russian shelling of Kupiansk led to local officials ordering a civilian evacuation earlier this month.

Speaking of the battle for Kupiansk, Ukraine’s frontline troops say that the U.S.-provided cluster munitions they’ve received are having a devastating effect on Russian forces trying to advance on that city.

“When we start firing the cluster munitions, the Russians disappear under hard cover. They won’t even poke their noses out,” Stanislav, a Ukrainian military official standing a few miles from the front line in a blackened forest still smoldering from Russian shelling, told The Washington Post.

The Pentagon last month announced it was sending Ukraine "hundreds of thousands" of rounds of cluster munitions known as Dual-Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICMs).

“The main benefit is that the enemy is now very scared to go on assault,” said Stanislav, who spoke on the condition that only his first name or call sign be used because of security concerns in discussing sensitive military matters.

Russian units advancing with armored vehicles and unmounted infantry halt their forward movement to allow troops to seek cover from the ricocheting shrapnel, soldiers told the Post. “They even recognize the cluster bombs by the whistle they make when headed their way,” said Stanislav, a member of Ukraine’s 14th Mechanized Brigade.

“Stanislav’s crew fires cluster munitions from a hulking M109 Paladin nestled under the cover of severed pine branches and tall trees,” the Post reported. “The U.S.-made self-propelled howitzer can fire a cluster munition a distance of more than 15 miles and can adjust the width of bomblet spray across several football fields or a narrower range depending on the operator’s preference, Stanislav said. The crew is also armed with cluster munitions that scatter mines on the ground.”

You can read more about DPICMs, how they work and why they are controversial, in our story here.

A day after the Netherlands and Denmark pledged to provide Ukraine with dozens of F-16 Vipers, the Ukrainian Air Force spokesman said that many more are needed.

In an interview with Radio Svaboda Monday, Ukrainian Air Force Col. Yuri Ignat said that “128 fighters are needed by Ukraine in order to replace the old aviation fleet of equipment, such a number is prescribed in the vision of the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Ignat, however, said that figure was adjustable.

“...more than 100 aircraft really need to be deployed at different airfields so that they respond to various challenges and strike at different targets. And on planes, and on ground and on the rear of the enemy, in particular,” he said.

Ignat also told Ukrainian TV that dozens of Ukrainian pilots, engineers and others will be trained to use F-16 fighter jets in Denmark. He added that another group of Ukrainian pilots will receive long-term military flight training in the United Kingdom that could last “up to two years.”

Meanwhile, Greece on Monday joined the coalition of nations agreeing to train Ukrainian pilots on F-16s.

“Greece will participate in training of our pilots for F-16. I am grateful for this proposal," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said during a joint press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Athens, Reuters reported.

As a backup, that training could also take place in the U.S. if European nations don’t have the capacity, Deputy Pentagon Spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters Monday morning at the Pentagon.

He's baaack.

In only his second video since his aborted munity at the end of June, Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin claimed he was in Africa, helping fight jihadi groups there. He also put out the word that he is recruiting for additional fighters there, as the group looks to expand Russian influence on the continent. In addition to fighting in Ukraine, Wagner has played a big role in Africa, where it has come to the aid of new juntas in places like Mali. The continent was recently roiled by a coup in Niger, where there are concerns that Wagner could increase its influence as well. You can read more about that in our story here.

While Russia has big plans to build thousands of Iranian-designed drones domestically over the coming years, it may already be constructing them using components from its other weapons systems, Popular Mechanics is reporting.

The publication noted that on August 11, Conflict Armament Research (CAR), an organization investigating weaponry in conflict zones, published a report on two crashed kamikaze drones recovered in July. According to their report, while previously recovered ‘Geran-2s’ were confirmed to be of Iranian origin, those that crashed in July were different.

Geran, Russian for geranium, is how Moscow refers to the Shahed-136 drones.

CAR reported that the Russian-built version of those drones relies primarily on components sourced from China, Switzerland, and the United States. However, four components are uniquely made in Russia that weren’t on the original Iranian-built drones.

“The skin of the new Geran-2 itself is different: while the Iranian drones incorporate a honey-comb pattern material between skin surfaces, the new Russian ones use fiber-glass over carbon fiber,” Popular Mechanics reported, citing the CAR investigation. “The changes are more than skin-deep, though. The Geran-2’s satellite navigation, flight control and starter systems belong to the same, novel production set, with parts coded respectively B-105, B-101, and B-103. These streamline the original model’s more complicated Iranian architecture.”

Investigators, for instance, found that the B-105 satellite navigation unit was using a Kometa GNSS -system already identified in Russian-built Orlan-10 and Forpost surveillance drones and satellite-guided bombs, replacing the original’s multi-component system.

"The internal units documented by CAR in the Geran-2 UAVs indicate that the Russian Federation has distilled the principles of the Shahed series UAV, while simplifying its functioning by combining new solutions with existing ones like the Kometa, which have been battle-tested in other weapon systems," CAR reported. "As a result, the Russian Federation will likely be able to produce more Geran-2 UAVs quickly to sustain its campaign in Ukraine."

An Iranian military delegation arrived in Moscow Monday “to discuss issues of bilateral military cooperation in the field of land forces,” the Russian MoD reported on its Telegram channel.

“The official part of the bilateral talks took place at the Command of Land Forces, where the sides discussed issues of military cooperation and interaction aimed at implementing projects, the goals of which were improvement of the combat readiness of the armed forces of both countries,” the Russian MoD said.

“Iran is considered by the Russian Federation as one of the key states in the Middle East - it is Russia's strategic partner, and constant intensive political dialogue is a characteristic feature of the current stage of our partnership,” said Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Armed Forces' Land Forces General of the Army Oleg Salyukov.

An Iranian delegation visited Russia's Command of Land Forces today. (Russian MoD photo)

In a piece on the mood of Ukrainians after 18 months of war and a counteroffensive that is slower than anticipated, The Economist found trouble may be on the horizon for President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“The public mood is somber,” the publication wrote on Sunday. “Criticism of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president, has increased, and the reasons for the dissatisfaction are clear. Having once promised a march to Crimea, occupied and annexed by Russia since 2014, the political leadership in Kyiv now emphasizes more realistic expectations.”

“We have no right to criticize the military sitting here in Kyiv,” Serhiy Leshchenko, a spokesman in the presidential office, told The Economist. He likened frustration with the speed of the counter-offensive to impatient customers waiting for their iced lattes in the capital’s many hipster cafes. “This isn’t a horse you can whip to go faster. Every meter forward has its price in blood.”

Ukraine’s leadership is particularly frustrated that Western equipment has not yet arrived in its promised numbers. It is “upsetting…and demotivating,” Leshchenko said.

“Equivocation among allies about the supply of newer weapons, and the prospect of America re-electing Donald Trump next year, have added to Ukrainian anxieties. A source in the general staff says that Ukraine has received just 60 Leopard tanks, despite the promise of hundreds. Demining vehicles are particularly scarce.”

“We simply don’t have the resources to do the frontal attacks that the West is imploring us to do,” says the source.

The 15th Kara-Dag Brigade of the Ukrainian National Guard released new video showing its troops assaulting a Russian trench position in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. The video shows the Ukrainians approaching in an armor column, then dismounting and attacking with rifles and hand grenades.

A building reportedly occupied by Russian forces in occupied Donetsk City was destroyed by a purported Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). The Mark 80 series bombs have an add-on kit that uses inertial and GPS guidance to hit their static targets, becoming true fire-and-forget weapons. In this video below, the JDAM apparently strikes the top right section of the building's roof, collapsing that section. The rest of the building crumbles as the blast waves spread.

Daytime maneuvers across crater-pocked fields is not just a challenge for Ukraine. A Russian mechanized assault south of Bakhmut was stopped by Ukrainian artillery, which destroyed a number of vehicles in the column.

Seven people were killed and nearly 150 injured Saturday by a Russian missile attack on Chernihiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Saturday on his Telegram channel.

Ukraine last Friday released this absolutely wild video showing one of its First Person Video (FPV) drones approaching, then flying into a building in occupied Energodar in Zaporizhzhia Oblast. The building was reportedly hosting a meeting of occupation police, many of who were said to have been injured in the attack.

A Ukrainian FPV drone was also used to reportedly destroy a Russian Pole-21 electronic warfare system designed to jam signals from satellites.

And finally, given that there is a full-on war taking place, the celebration of Ukraine's 32nd Independence Day on Aug. 24 will obviously be muted. But Kyiv will hold a parade of destroyed Russian equipment in the capital's central Khreshchatyk Street.

That's it for now. We'll update this story when there's more news to report about Ukraine.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

thedrive.com · by Howard Altman · August 21, 2023

19. Annals of Chinese Transparency

Excerpts:

Mr. Phillips wrote that “for some suppliers, public records and questionnaires may be sufficient; for others, independent verification, on-the-ground investigation and interviews with industry sources may be called for.” The article “has since been removed” from Mintz’s website, Reuters noted.

The lesson: Invest in China at your own political and economic risk.

Annals of Chinese Transparency

Beijing targets the Mintz Group, a Western due-diligence firm, over its research.

By The Editorial Board

Aug. 21, 2023 6:35 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mintz-group-china-beijing-randal-phillips-mao-ning-49260e9d?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

PHOTO: QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG NEWS

China’s economy is struggling, and the Communist Party’s response is to shoot the messenger. Behold the punishment for the Mintz Group, a Western due-diligence firm that advised foreign firms about how to abide by sanctions while operating in China.

The Journal reported Monday that China imposed some $1.5 million in financial penalties on Mintz for unauthorized investigations. At issue are 37 research projects conducted from March 2019 to July 2022, according to a ruling from the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics that cited evidence provided by a “public-security department.”

These financial penalties come after police raided Mintz’s Beijing office in March and detained five of the firm’s Chinese national employees. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the firm was “suspected of illegal business operations.” Mintz didn’t respond to our query on Monday.

But in May the firm told us that “we believe we have operated transparently, ethically and in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.” It added that it had closed its office in Beijing, requested the release of its detained employees, and retained “legal counsel to engage with the authorities and support our people and their families.”

On July 1, an amended counterespionage law took effect in China that defines espionage to include any attempts to “collude, to steal, pry into, purchase or illegally provide state secrets, intelligence, and other documents, data, materials or items related to national security or interests.” State secrets can include information about China’s “security and interests in the fields of politics, economy, national defense, and diplomacy.”

Information brokers are especially at risk if they’re probing a politically sensitive topic. In May Reuters reported that Randal Phillips, then Mintz’s Asia chief, had “co-authored an article carried on the firm’s website last year on ‘sanctions due diligence’” under a U.S. law that prohibits the import of products made with forced labor in Xinjiang Province.

Mr. Phillips wrote that “for some suppliers, public records and questionnaires may be sufficient; for others, independent verification, on-the-ground investigation and interviews with industry sources may be called for.” The article “has since been removed” from Mintz’s website, Reuters noted.

The lesson: Invest in China at your own political and economic risk.

20. The Case for American-Led Peace in Ukraine

The Case for American-Led Peace in Ukraine

With Ukraine’s counteroffensive all but halted, the time has come for Washington to push for peace—particularly given that Russia might launch a new offensive in 2024.

The National Interest · by Alex Burilkov · August 21, 2023

Ukraine’s much-anticipated summer counteroffensive has all but ground to a halt. The dozen new brigades trained by NATO have sustained huge casualties without ever reaching the first line of fixed Russian defenses in strength. Russian forces, fighting a textbook implementation of Soviet maneuver defense, frequently enjoy air superiority and are augmented by increasing numbers of cheap and effective weapon systems such as the Lancet drone. Every passing day draws closer to autumn and the dreaded rasputista—the rain and mud season that impedes maneuver warfare. By all accounts, the Ukrainian counteroffensive is on the clock and unlikely to achieve its major objectives.

Western arms deliveries offer little relief. Most of the pledged main battle tanks are already in the theater, and there is limited prospect for further deliveries. Reaching for antiques like the German Leopard 1, first introduced in 1965, won’t be a gamechanger. The “fighter jet coalition” has pledged F-16s, but it’s unclear when and where these will be deployed. In any case, they would be outmatched against an increasingly active and confident Russian Air Force and Russia’s formidable integrated air defense. Stocks of precision weapons are shrinking, which clearly plays a role in the Biden administration’s refusal to provide ATACMS missiles, vital for American security in the Pacific.

Given this grim outlook, is a “Korea Scenario” the most likely outcome? This means that by the time the Ukrainian counteroffensive culminates sometime in late August or early September, the conflict freezes at territorial borders roughly corresponding to the frontline. In effect, Ukraine trades significant parts of the four regions annexed by Russia in 2022 for robust Western (American) security guarantees.

This certainly wouldn’t be the worst outcome from an American perspective. Washington would be able to gradually defuse tensions with Moscow and reestablish a dialogue on the future trajectory of the European security architecture. Crucially, the United States will finally be able to focus once again on the Pacific. Ultimately, China is the true peer rival to the United States, and has been playing an aggressive diplomatic game in degrading American influence since 2022, in no small part due to the imposition of harsh sanctions on Russia.

The problem with the “Korea Scenario,” however, is that it assumes that the Russian leadership is desperate for a ceasefire and negotiations. There is scant evidence of this. Not only have the Russians fought the Ukrainians to a standstill in the south, but they launched their own offensive in the north, aimed at capturing the full extent of the Luhansk region, where Russian troops are steadily advancing. Russian society and the economy remain relatively stable, suggesting Prigozhin’s mutiny was indeed an aberration—and his criticism of the war always was that it wasn’t fought hard enough.

In fact, the Kremlin might be eager for victory, rather than desperate for negotiations. Andrey Gurulev, former commander of the Central Military District and currently a nationalist Duma deputy, stated that Russia’s rapidly expanding military production was sufficient for the needs of the “special military operation” and the 150,000 new contract soldiers that joined the military since, but that production can be scaled to the needs of a new partial mobilization. Andrey Kartapolov, former commander of the Western Military District and chair of the defense committee in the Duma, made illuminating statements during the parliamentary procedure that increased the conscription age to thirty. Noting that this would increase the pool of trained reserves that could be mobilized, he argued that this amendment to the 1997 law is written for “a big war” and “general mobilization” which while not necessary in the immediate, would be fundamental for the future. Critically, an additional amendment introduces a travel ban, coming into force in October, on anyone whose name appears on the register of both conscripts and reservists. This gives Russian authorities a legal mechanism to prevent an exodus like that of October 2022, where up to 600,000 Russian men fled the country.

The Russian leadership has repeatedly stated that the goals of the special military operation have not changed and will be achieved by military means. Moscow views the partition of Ukraine as a key objective, including Odessa—oft-referenced by Vladimir Putin—but also the rest of the Black Sea coast and potentially all the territory east of the Dnieper. Is it possible that the Kremlin is contemplating a second partial mobilization?

Victories in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions late last year are what gave Ukraine sufficient political capital to request vastly expanded military assistance from the West. But this mechanism works both ways. The failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive will grant Putin a significant boost in domestic legitimacy and political capital. Russian nationalist spaces note the similarities between Ukraine’s telegraphed offensive in Zaporizhzhia and the 1943 battle of Kursk, and smugly note that German failure in Kursk was followed by massive Soviet offensives (and victories) in Operation Bagration.

Putin could decide to roll the iron dice and spend his domestic political capital on a second round of partial mobilization in October. Putting these men on an accelerated half-year training schedule means that the Russian military enters the 2024 spring campaign season with upwards of an additional 300,000 fresh troops, while Ukrainian forces are gradually attritted during the winter by Russian firepower.

The Russian dash to Kiev in 2022 largely failed due to an over-emphasis on mechanized forces over the infantry. A Russian military that enters spring 2024 after two rounds of mobilization will no longer face this constraint. Achieving sufficient mass over an exhausted Ukrainian adversary means the possibility of breakthroughs and the return of maneuver warfare. If Russian forces can drive deep into Ukrainian territory and capture the regions Moscow has identified as its objectives, then the war ends in a significant Russian victory, and crucially one reached by force of arms alone, not a peace settlement mediated by the United States.

A Russian victory on these terms is a significant setback for the United States. The reputational damage to American competence and the NATO alliance would be colossal, as the best of NATO hardware and training has already gone into the Ukrainian military, and Russia would be able to make the claim that it stood alone against the West—and won. The Sino-Russian relationship would also strengthen. Finally, the cheap and effective weapons Russia uses to win the war, such as the Lancet, will flow to every regime opposed to American leadership around the world.

Therefore, it is imperative that the idea of a peace settlement amenable to all parties in the conflict—including Russia—takes hold and is seriously pursued in Washington. Influential American figures are already engaged in Track 1.5 diplomacy with their counterparts in Russia. These efforts should be encouraged, expanded, and form the basis for sustained engagement in peace negotiations. Only then will the United States be able to focus entirely on containing China, which is of paramount importance to American security and prosperity.

Dr. Alex Burilkov is a researcher focusing on Russia and the post-Soviet space at the Centre for the Study of Democracy at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in Germany. Alex obtained his Ph.D. on the maritime strategy of emerging powers from the University of Hamburg.

Wesley Satterwhite is a U.S. Department of State consultant and a military intelligence officer in the U.S. Army Reserves. He holds a master’s in security studies from Georgetown University and a bachelor’s in diplomacy and international Relations from Seton Hall University. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of any U.S. government entity.

Image: Shutterstock.

The National Interest · by Alex Burilkov · August 21, 2023

21. Threats against public officials on the rise as 2024 nears

Obviously this is not good. But how can anyone condone this or turn a blind eye to it?

Threats against public officials on the rise as 2024 nears

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/4163284-threats-against-public-officials-on-the-rise-as-2024-nears/?utm_campaign=dfn-ebb&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sailthru&SToverlay=2002c2d9-c344-4bbb-8610-e5794efcfa7d

BY ELLA LEE - 08/22/23 6:00 AM ET

New data suggests that threats against public officials is on the rise and experts say they’re concerned the trends will only continue to worsen.

With 2024 rapidly nearing – where an already-heated presidential election is set to be coupled with multiple trials of former President Trump, who is also a candidate – the risk of menacing talk escalating into action could increase due to inflamed political rhetoric and increased media coverage, they said.

Data shows that since 2013, some 501 threats against public officials have resulted in federal charges, according to a report by University of Nebraska-Omaha’s National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE). Nearly 80% of those cases ended in convictions.

The threats sharply went up in 2017 and 2021, both years following pivotal U.S. elections. The COVID-19 pandemic and immigration policy changes also served as catalysts for increases in threats against public officials.

According to the report, threats against law enforcement and military – including judges and prosecutors – were the most common among public officials, but recently the targets have spanned multiple political offices including in the White House.

Earlier this month, a Utah man was shot and killed during an FBI raid linked to threats against President Biden and other Democratic officials.

A Massachusetts man pleaded guilty to sending a bomb threat to an election official in the Arizona Secretary of State’s office, and an Indiana man was charged with sending threats to a Michigan election worker.

An Illinois woman was accused of threatening to kill former President Trump and his teenage son, Barron, while a Michigan mother was charged with making false statements when purchasing firearms later found with her son – who is accused of threatening Biden and other Democrats.

And the judges and grand jurors tied to Trump’s legal matters in Georgia and D.C. have faced increasing threats as those cases progressed – including as targets on Trump’s own social media account.

“Threats to public officials are increasingly becoming a strategy or a tactic that’s relied on,” Chapman University sociologist Pete Simi, the study’s principal investigator, told The Hill. “As people develop grievances about various things, the idea of threatening a public official is becoming increasingly normalized.”

Katherine Keneally, a senior research manager at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, said that it’s very common for judges, public defenders and prosecutors to face threats from people involved in a case, like a defendant’s family member or a gang member during a gang-related case.

But more recently – especially following Trump’s indictments in four criminal cases – threats by unrelated actors are increasing.

“What’s separate with what we’re seeing now is that people are threatening judges, prosecutors – because those individuals are now being perceived as being representative of a very politicized government,” Keneally said.

Last week, a Texas woman was charged with threatening to kill U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing Trump’s 2020 election case in Washington, D.C. She called Chutkan’s chambers five days after Trump was indicted, called her a racial slur and threatened to kill anyone who comes after Trump.

In the Georgia case, grand jurors who voted to indict Trump faced threats and a torrent of racist comments online. Their purported addresses were also posted on right-wing forums.

Most individuals menacing public officials have a criminal history and align with anti-government or racist ideologies, the report says.

Though the report found that phone calls are still the most likely method for communicating threats, social media has played a large role in making it harder for law enforcement to determine whether threats could result in real-world violence, according to Alex Friedfeld, an investigative researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism.

“When you have lots of people in a space engaging this type of rhetoric, it becomes very hard to discern who is the real threat, which creates possibilities that someone slips through,” Friedfeld said.

Justice Department prosecutors must find ample evidence before charging Americans for making threats because of the thin line between threats and protected speech, Keneally said.

“Because of the First Amendment, it’s very difficult to charge someone for these threats,” she said. “I hope that we continue to see more charges, but I do not envy (the DOJ’s) position.”

Still, an increase in federal charges for making threats against public figures has accompanied the rise in threats itself, the report found.

“My concern is a lone individual who is in these spaces reading day in and day out that what has happened in this country is a threat to not just himself, but his family, his community and the country he loves,” Friedfeld said.

“He is watching people talk about this in ways that normalize violence – hang them, shoot them, kill the traitors, whatever it may be – and starts to internalize that, rationalize this rhetoric and start to believe that this is what is necessary,” he continued. “And, that that lone individual decides to act.”

The Justice Department and FBI did not respond to The Hill’s requests for comment about increasing threats against public officials.

Politicians who amplify violent or hateful rhetoric online could also increase the likelihood of a bad actor taking their threats offline.

As COVID surge continues, is the booster still working against new variants?

5 ‘surprising’ areas where wildfire risk is rising

“Powerful individuals are helping push these extremist beliefs into the mainstream and reaching a broader audience that they likely would not have previously,” Keneally said. “They’re validating their causes, which is extremely dangerous.”

But whether threats are acted upon at all doesn’t diminish the harm they cause to America’s greater system of democracy, Simi said.

“Sometimes we forget that the threats themselves – especially as their volume increases – have a very corrosive and damaging impact on our system of governance and society more broadly,” he said. “And that’s something I think we really need to consider more carefully and seriously.”

22. The 'new' Ukrainian mine detection

Necessity is the mother of invention.

The 'new' Ukrainian mine detection

wearethemighty.com · by Logan Nye · August 21, 2023

Ukraine-aligned accounts on social media are hyping an innovative way that Ukrainians are finding Russian mines. Attacking troops are using infrared imagers, especially mounted on drones, to detect Russian mines as they glow in the early evening. The tactic is effective, even if it isn't quite as new or innovative as some of the hype.

The tactic and how the mine detection works

Russian defensive belts are the biggest difference between Ukraine's slow progress in its counteroffensive vs. the lightning progress of the Kherson and Kharkiv counteroffensives. These belts rely on trenches, defenders, artillery, and a massive number of mines and boobytraps.

Russians improvised some, like the reported "bouquets" of grenades bundled together. But Russia also deployed thousands upon thousands of mines using vehicles. Many of these mines are sitting on or near the surface, hidden by grass or a small amount of dirt.

But the materials used in mines, like the metal or plastic casings and the explosives inside, take longer to absorb and release heat than the surrounding air and surface soil do. And that's what creates an opening for infrared detection.

In the evenings, as the air rapidly cools off, the mines will need hours to get as cool as the air and ground. During that time, the mines glow through infrared imagers, releasing much more heat than anything else.

In the morning, the opposite is true, as the mines take longer to heat up and so appear more dark than surrounding territory. The morning images are not as effective as at night, but are still much better than attempting to detect mines without assistance.

Once an operator finds a likely minefield, they can call in artillery, explosive charges, or other systems to try and detonate the mines. Or explosive ordnance disposal teams can clean a route up close and personal.

DONETSK, UKRAINE - Ukrainian army's 35th Marine Brigade members conduct mine clearance work at a field in Donetsk, Ukraine on July 11, 2023. (Photo by Ercin Erturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

The history of infrared detection

While this tactic is described in some videos as completely new, even CNN discusses it like it's a novel approach discovered by Ukraine, American and allied forces used similar tactics to find IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Homemade explosives often don't light up as dramatically as a military mine, especially if they're buried instead of on the surface, they're still quite visible. And in the relatively light foliage of Iraq and Afghanistan, it was easier to get a good look at the terrain and scan it for heat discrepancies.

In act, some researchers worked on automated processes and claimed success rates as high as 92 percent.

A similar tactic explored the possibility of using thermal imagery to find "energized" IED components. You know how your computer or phone gets hot if you use it nonstop for an hour or two? That is partially because batteries heat up as they charge or discharge electricity. This technique allowed an operator to see the heat of a battery or sensor as electricity moved through it.

America has continued its research and published new methods, including the 2018 experiment by the Army Research Labs and University of Delaware that looked at mounting sensors high above a vehicle to allow for better energy detection.

New Ukrainian innovations

While the infrared tactic isn't as novel as it is sometimes described, it is much safer for soldiers. Better, Ukrainians work daily on how to improve mine detection. One promising tech coming from students and organizations is airborne metal detection.

A drone flies above the ground for minutes to hours with a metal detector suspended underneath it. Similar to sub-hunting airplanes, the craft detects changes in an electromagnetic field caused by the metal mass underneath. When it detects a potential mine, it marks the spot and alerts an operator.

New designs of these drones map all their potential finds with high accuracy, usually without the need for a human pilot. Mine clearing units can then start planning safe lanes for attack and clear only what is necessary for success. Or they can settle in for the long, hard work of clearing the landscape.

Long-term, it will likely take many years and billions of dollars to render Ukraine safe. But new tech and old techniques will allow the current counteroffensive to continue despite the threat.

wearethemighty.com · by Logan Nye · August 21, 2023

23. How to get through Special Forces selection? Don't be the ‘Grey Man’

For those who want to give it a try.

Photos at the link: https://www.sandboxx.us/news/dont-be-the-grey-man-be-yourself-at-special-forces-selection/?mc_cid=789541c388&mc_eid=70bf478f36

How to get through Special Forces selection? Don't be the ‘Grey Man’

sandboxx.us · by Steve Balestrieri · August 21, 2023

When talking about the dos and don’ts of taking on the Special Operations Assessment and Selection courses that the military has to offer, there are a ton of opinions out there, and I feel, a lot of misconceptions as well. This is particularly true when it comes to being the “Grey Man,’ which is a common name people use to describe an operator who can blend seamlessly into their environment.

I’ve been asked about this countless times in emails. One of the more common questions I receive from prospective candidates is always about trying to blend in at Assessment and Selection – being the Grey Man. I spoke with someone just in the past few weeks about this very subject.

There is no shortage of people who will tell you being the Grey Man is important, some of them will be Special Operations Selection cadre members. So, respectively, I’ll disagree. Overall, unless you’re an intelligence professional trained at blending in and being invisible, I will stick with my original advice and say in the majority of instances, it isn’t a smart thing to do. I will explain why below, but first, my caveat:

Yes, there are times when you absolutely, positively need to be the guy people standing in front of you are going to look right past while giving their attention to someone else.

The first one is if you are in SERE School (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape). The last thing you want at SERE is to stand out in any way. Standing out to the guard force in the POW camp usually means you’re going to withstand some “corrective measures.”

(U.S. Air Force photo/Airman 1st Class Elizabeth Baker)

Being the biggest member of the prisoners or the most senior guy in the SERE Class is not a good way to be the grey man. The SRO (Senior Ranking Officer) is always singled out for real or perceived rules infractions –you get the idea. Once you get through the Selection process and into the training pipeline, you’ll get to experience SERE up close and personal and all of your questions will be answered.

The second example of when it’s a good time to be a “grey man” is when you are doing some kind of undercover intelligence work. Then you want to blend into your surroundings. If someone saw you walking down a busy street in an urban environment, you don’t want to raise an alarm among surveillance operatives watching for that type of operation.

This has a lot to do with demeanor, dress, mannerisms, and movement. Special Forces have a training program that teaches all of this and much more. But the course and the acronym associated with it will come after your training is complete and you move on to the operational units and get some experience under your belt.

(Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jacob Connor/U.S. Army)

So, we’re back to the 800-lb gorilla in the room, and the question is why not be the grey man during Selection? You will see blog posts from people, message boards, and social media posts all telling candidates to the grey man or something remotely similar. I see it all the time. So why is it actually a bad idea?

As a former Selection cadre member, I’ll let you in on my perceptions: Trying to be the Grey Man just may put a huge bulls-eye on your forehead.

As I mentioned above, most people aren’t trained properly to be a grey man. And if it appears to the Selection cadre that you are trying to blend into the background, that isn’t a good thing. To the cadre members, it appears like you are trying to “ghost” through events (as we called it during my time there). And if a guy is going to ghost during Selection, then he certainly will on a team.

If you’re “ghosting,” you aren’t carrying your weight within the team. (U.S. Army photo)

Back in the day, when I had the night duty during a course, one of the other cadre members and I would wander around the candidates’ barracks at night with no berets, just being the grey men of the cadre. We wanted to hear the chatter of the class and see how well or not so well they were holding up.

These conversations would sometimes be quite telling, especially during team week. More than once, we heard candidates who passed their patrol (the criteria have since changed, thank you LTC Brian Decker) talk about coasting through the last few events to make it through the long-range movement. Bad idea.

Then there were the others, guys who passed their patrol and were volunteering to help out the next day’s guys who would be in the barrel and under the microscope. More than once we heard conversations similar to this:

“Hey bud, whatever happens, tomorrow, put me on lashings, I’m really good at that, and that’s one thing you won’t have to worry about.”

That’s the guy I want on my team. He is not done yet, he is looking out for his teammates. He is going to get high marks on his peer reports.

Candidates during Special Forces Assessment and Selection (U.S. Army photo)

Special Operations isn’t looking for cookie-cutter robots. We understand that everyone is different and there are certainly guys who are characters. You’ll undoubtedly have some in your class.

That is why my advice is always to be yourself. When I was there, our cadre was made up of the most eclectic group of people that I’ve ever worked with. There was never a dull moment and every NCO, although vastly different, respected who each one of us was. And we all got along because we had the humility to understand that every person brings some unique element to the table.

If you are a rah-rah type of guy, then be that guy. If you are a quiet, lead-by-example type of guy, that’s fine…be him. Don’t try to be something you are not. Sometimes the characters of the class would lift everyone around him. All of the cadre members had those types of guys in their own classes, and they know how valuable they are to keeping up class morale, and for team-building.

My own class in the SFQC (Special Forces Qualification Course) had a tremendous NCO who we called CPT Camouflage during Land Navigation. He would wear some outlandish get-up: PT Shorts hiked way too high, jungle boots, with a poncho pulled over his head like a cape with eye holes cut out. He’d run through the woodline offering the craziest encouragement to “lost Land Nav students everywhere.” As dumb as it sounds, our class loved it. And after a day or so, the cadre would ask if Captain Camouflage had any words for the class after we’d return from the day’s or night’s navigation practice.

A couple of years ago, I had a podcast interview with Mike Sarraille, a Navy SEAL officer who has written a book on Special Operations leadership and how civilian companies should incorporate the lessons of Selection and Assessment into their hiring process.

Mike was a successful Marine NCO with Recon before becoming an officer. During BUDs, the other members of his class naturally gravitated toward Mike because of his experience, military bearing, and demeanor. That is who he is. If he tried to blend into the background, the SEAL instructors would have seen right through that and he would have never passed or gone on to become the officer he was.

Special Forces candidates (U.S. Army)

Of course, “be yourself” has to be tempered with a bit of common sense. Don’t be overly argumentative with the cadre, even if you know that you may be right when receiving a critique. That will have the exact opposite effect. Don’t be a “Spotlight Ranger” either – those types never last long as they’ll get peered out quickly (failed by peer reviews). And please spare your war stories about leading an attack with the 18th Mess Kit Repair Unit in Iraq or someplace else. Nobody cares about that or is interested.

Remember you are always being evaluated and assessed. This is a time for the cadre to see if you have the core attributes that make Special Operations troops the best in the world. Selection is the time when you begin building the reputation that will follow throughout your Special Operations career. And as big as it has grown, it is still a small community. Selection is the first step in the process of showing you belong in the Regiment.

Trying to do so by blending in the background isn’t the way to do it. Be yourself, try to excel at everything, and remember, some of your fellow candidates may be better at some things than you are. That won’t change once you get to an operational unit.

Do the best you can. (Yes you’ll hear that again.)

Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in March 2022. It has been edited for republication.

You Fought for Democracy Overseas. You Have a Duty to Do It Again at Home.

military.com · by 21 Aug 2023 Military.com | By We the Veterans · August 21, 2023

The opinions expressed in this op-ed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Military.com. If you would like to submit your own commentary, please send your article to opinions@military.com for consideration.

We often hear a great deal of conversation about our rights as American citizens.

Turn on any news channel, and you'll hear pundits exhausting themselves vigorously discussing everything from our freedom of speech to freedom of religion to our right to keep and bear arms and more.

But with this robust conversation about our rights, what's missing is a commensurate conversation about our responsibilities as citizens.

Every veteran who's ever served in our nation's military once took an oath to support and defend the Constitution -- an oath that the vast majority of us took very seriously.

Many consider that oath to remain in effect even after we take off the uniform for the last time and transition to the civilian world.

A fundamental American right enshrined in the Constitution is our right to vote -- to choose the members of the executive branch of government, decide who will fill our legislatures and create our laws, and determine who will administer justice sitting behind the benches in our courts.

Generations of American servicemen and women, supported by their families at home, have shed their blood on foreign battlefields to defend that fundamental right.

While every veteran can stand proud of their service in the defense of our nation, we each have a crucial role in championing democracy here at home.

We often say that freedom isn't free. That's true. And democracy isn't free either.

While state and county election officials administer our electoral system, hundreds of thousands of volunteers who serve as election poll workers put it into practice every election.

These patriotic men and women are the unsung heroes of our democracy.

They wake up before dawn each election; gather in community centers, schools and fire station halls; and set up election polling stations.

When they open the doors, they welcome voters, ensure they are eligible to vote, provide instructions and assistance, and count every ballot.

They also ensure all election rules are followed and provide two-person integrity around every ballot counting machine.

And they stay late into the night to ensure proper tabulation of votes, pack up the voting booths and ballot counting machines, and report the results to their local board of elections.

These patriotic Americans, most of whom are over the age of 60, are the backbone of our democracy. Without them, there would be no elections.

And here's the problem: Election officials struggle to find enough volunteers to appropriately staff polling stations every year.

The COVID-19 pandemic and threats of political violence in recent elections have significantly diminished volunteerism, especially among our oldest election poll workers.

In June 2022, We the Veterans and Military Families assembled a coalition of more than 30 veteran and civic groups, in partnership with the National Football League, to spearhead a nationwide public awareness and recruitment campaign called Vet the Vote to close the gap on America's deficit of 130,000 election poll workers.

By November, more than 63,500 veterans and their families answered the call to serve once more in response to this crisis.

Because of their selfless service and dedication to our democracy, more communities had fully staffed election polling sites, and more American voters exercised their right to vote.

This past June, we launched Vet the Vote 2024 to establish the new norm of broad veteran and military family member participation as election poll workers.

The need for election volunteers is ever-present, and we encourage every veteran and their family members to contact their county board of elections and volunteer to be a poll worker --because if not you, then who will answer the call? If not now, then when?

American democracy remains a beacon for the rest of the world, and it is our duty to uphold it. One of the best ways to do this is by volunteering to be an election poll worker.

We invite you to uphold your oath and support and defend our Constitution again. Find out more at www.VetThe.Vote.

-- Joe Plenzler, Marine Corps veteran and board member, We the Veterans

-- Ellen Gustafson, Navy family member and executive director, We the Veterans

-- Jeremy Butler, Navy veteran and chief growth officer, We the Veterans

-- Ben Keiser, Marine Corps veteran and executive chairman, We the Veterans

-- Luke Baumgartner, Army veteran and program manager, We the Veterans

-- Ingrid Sundlee, Army family member and chief of staff, We the Veterans

-- Anil Nathan, Air Force veteran and board chair, We the Veterans

We the Veterans and Military Families is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization created by veterans and military family members, working to support democracy in America. In 2022, it launched Vet the Vote, a national campaign to recruit veterans and military family members to serve as the next generation of poll workers.

military.com · by 21 Aug 2023 Military.com | By We the Veterans · August 21, 2023

25. 'Woke' Pentagon Spending at Center of Upcoming Government Shutdown Fight

We have met the enemy and he is us. These culture wars are potentially more destructive to our military than actual enemy attacks.

'Woke' Pentagon Spending at Center of Upcoming Government Shutdown Fight

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · August 21, 2023

Risk of a government shutdown this fall is rising after a powerful bloc of House conservatives vowed to oppose any stopgap spending measure that does not roll back Pentagon policies they consider "woke."

In a statement Monday, the House Freedom Caucus said it would not support a "clean" continuing resolution, or CR, that would keep the government open beyond when current government funding expires after Sept. 30 by extending existing funding levels with no change.

Instead of a CR that essentially puts the government on autopilot, the Freedom Caucus is demanding several policy riders, including one to "end the left's cancerous woke policies in the Pentagon undermining our military's core warfighting mission."

"We refuse to support any such measure that continues Democrats' bloated COVID-era spending and simultaneously fails to force the Biden administration to follow the law and fulfill its most basic responsibilities," the statement said.

Getting a deal to fund the government by Sept. 30 was already expected to be difficult given the quick deadline after lawmakers return to Washington, D.C., from their summer break and the partisan divide between the House and Senate. But the Freedom Caucus, which has already shown its ability to grind the House to a stop several times this year, taking an official, albeit not unexpected, stance against a clean CR raises the stakes.

While defense officials often express annoyance at CRs since the stopgap measures do not allow the military to start new programs, the Pentagon has gotten used to operating under them as nearly every fiscal year for the last two decades has started with one.

A CR is also much more preferable to the Pentagon than the alternative -- a government shutdown. In a shutdown, active-duty troops have to continue working without getting paid unless separate legislation is passed to keep paychecks flowing; most civilian Pentagon employees face being furloughed; and permanent change of station moves are limited, among a shutdown's disruptive effects.

In recent weeks, congressional leaders have indicated they will pursue a short-term funding patch to keep the government open past Sept. 30, acknowledging the reality that the GOP-controlled House and Democratic-controlled Senate are still far from agreeing on a more comprehensive funding plan. The Senate is on recess until Sept. 5, and the House is gone until Sept. 12, leaving just three weeks when both chambers are in session before current funding runs out.

"I spoke with [House] Speaker [Kevin] McCarthy [R-Calif.] at the end of July, and I thought it was a good thing that he recognized that we need a CR in September," Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told reporters last week. "A CR until early December provides time for consideration of these bipartisan bills."

While it would not be unusual for a CR to include policy riders, the specific demands of the Freedom Caucus are nonstarters for Senate Democrats and the White House. In addition to the elimination of "woke" Pentagon policies, the group is demanding that a CR include hard-line immigration policies and cuts to the Justice Department and FBI.

"If the House decides to go in a partisan direction, it will lead to a Republican-caused shutdown," Schumer said in a statement to NBC News and The Washington Post on Monday.

Monday's Freedom Caucus statement does not define what Pentagon policies they are targeting, but conservatives use the "woke" label to deride any policy aimed at making the military more welcoming to minorities, women and LGBTQ+ people. In posts Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, some Republicans singled out Pentagon abortion policies, diversity programs and preparations for climate change.

Because of Republicans' slim majority in the House, a small number of motivated lawmakers can have an outsized influence, as members of the Freedom Caucus and other far-right lawmakers demonstrated with January's prolonged speakership fight and a standoff in June that paralyzed the House for days to rebuke McCarthy for reaching a debt-limit deal with the White House.

Concern that conservatives could hold up the annual defense policy bill in a similar manner led to the House's version of the bill including GOP-backed provisions to reverse the Pentagon policy covering travel and leave for service members getting abortions, ban gender-affirming health care for transgender troops, and end diversity programs at the Pentagon.

The Freedom Caucus on Monday also vowed to oppose "any blank check" for Ukraine. The White House has requested Congress approve $13 billion more for weapons and other military support for Ukraine with the expectation that the funding could be considered alongside a CR. While most lawmakers in both parties continue to support American aid to Ukraine, approving more funding was already expected to be an uphill climb after 70 House Republicans -- or about one-third of the conference -- voted last month to cut off U.S. funding to the country.

-- Rebecca Kheel can be reached at rebecca.kheel@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @reporterkheel.

military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · August 21, 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

Company Name | Website

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, AUGUST 21, 2023

Opinion: Stop Listening to ‘Ukraine Experts’ Who Don’t Know Ukrainians

Failed Coup in Moscow Precipitated Ukraine’s Declaration of Independence

As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up

Washington has sent Kyiv millions of munitions, but restocking the arsenal and building new production lines remains a problem

Women in Army SOF sidelined by ‘benevolent sexism,’ study finds

Benevolent sexism

Ranger panties and yoga pants

No bad days

Women in Army SOF resorted to buying their own armor, study finds

With China and Russia on the Warpath, It’s the Wrong Time to Reinvent a Triad

Female soldiers in Army special operations face rampant sexism and harassment, military report says

___

Special Operations News Update - August 21, 2023 | SOF News

SOF News

International SOF

SOF History

Ukraine Conflict

National Security

Coup in Niger – Is a NEO About to Happen?

Upcoming Events

Books, Pubs, and Reports

Podcasts, Videos, and Movies

Podcasts

Army further distancing itself from 'information warfare' moniker

Asked and answered: China’s strategy of political warfare - APDR

Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule

A Deferential, Partisan Public and the Future of Democratic Civil-Military Relations - Modern War Institute

How Ukraine is exploiting Biden’s cluster bomb gamble

The Smartphone Game That Ukrainian Soldiers Play on the Front Line

China's Constant Spying On Australian Drills From Space A Sign Of Shifting Orbital Balance

China hoped Fiji would be a template for the Pacific. Its plan backfired.

Ukraine Situation Report: Spy Agency Takes Credit For Strikes On Russian Airbases

The Latest

Annals of Chinese Transparency

Beijing targets the Mintz Group, a Western due-diligence firm, over its research.

The Case for American-Led Peace in Ukraine

Threats against public officials on the rise as 2024 nears

The 'new' Ukrainian mine detection

The tactic and how the mine detection works

The history of infrared detection

New Ukrainian innovations

How to get through Special Forces selection? Don't be the ‘Grey Man’

Read more from Sandboxx News

You Fought for Democracy Overseas. You Have a Duty to Do It Again at Home.

'Woke' Pentagon Spending at Center of Upcoming Government Shutdown Fight