Quotes of the Day:

“Free men cannot start a war, but once it is started, they can fight on in defeat. Herd men, followers of a leader, cannot do that, and so it is always the herd men who win battles and the free men who win wars.”

- John Steinbeck, The Moon Is Down

"The public as a mass does not think, will not defend what it believes, and will not analyze the propaganda which is constantly in circulation against any public man who refuses to play along with the gang."

- Manly Palmer Hall

“The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers, which bread and circuses can never appease.”

-Marcus Tullius Cicero

1. ISW Statement on the Start of Ukrainian Counteroffensive Operations: The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 8, 2023

3. Army Retention on Track, Even as Recruiting Struggles

4.  Researchers Say Military Service Is the 'Single Strongest' Predictor of Violent Extremism

5. Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs

6. The end of Western naivety about China

7. Here are the key theories on what caused Ukraine's catastrophic dam collapse

8. Navy destroyer practices electronic warfare with allied ships after Taiwan Strait incident

9. Naval Mines Have a Place in Great Power Conflict

10. US Sends 2,000 Guard Troops, 100 Aircraft to Unprecedented NATO Exercise Aimed to Deter Russia

11. Blinken’s long-delayed Beijing trip now in planning for next week

12. Pentagon dismisses WSJ report on China spy station in Cuba

13. Kherson is hit by Russian shelling hours after a Zelensky visit.

14. Bad for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: Drone Attacks in Russia Underscore Broader Risks

15. Cuba Spy Station Brings China Rivalry to America’s Doorstep

16.  China Sets Up a Spy Shop in Cuba

17. Drone footage of collapsed Ukrainian dam counters Russian narrative

18. Why Are We in Ukraine?

19. Green Berets Have Struggled for Years with Recruiting, Internal Data Shows

20. The Fake News about Fake News - Boston Review

21. The US Army is facing excessive risk. Here’s how to mitigate that.

1. ISW Statement on the Start of Ukrainian Counteroffensive Operations: The Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

Please go to this link to view the interactive map: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/36a7f6a6f5a9448496de641cf64bd375

ISW Statement on the Start of Ukrainian Counteroffensive Operations

Donate to Help ISW Report on UkraineThe Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun. Activity throughout Ukraine is consistent with a variety of indicators that Ukrainian counteroffensive operations are underway across the theater. 

Here is what we are seeing and how to evaluate this activity:

Ukrainian officials have long signaled that there will not be an announcement that the counteroffensive has begun. The counteroffensive won’t likely unfold as a single grand operation. It will likely consist of many undertakings at numerous locations of varying size and intensity over many weeks.

The initial counteroffensive operations may be the most difficult and slowest, as they involve penetrating prepared defensive positions. Initial setbacks are to be expected. This phase may also see the highest Ukrainian losses. Militaries have long identified the penetration phase of a mechanized offensive as the most dangerous and costly. The success or failure of this phase may not be apparent for some time.

Ukrainian forces are continuing to try to surprise the Russians about where the main effort will be. ISW will not offer assessments about the weighting of Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in real-time.

Ukrainian officials yesterday announced that Ukrainian troops have moved onto the offensive in Bakhmut. Ukrainian military officials announced yesterday that Ukrainian troops advanced 200m-1km deep in unspecified sectors of the Bakhmut area. Russian sources are concerned about Ukrainian attacks on the southwestern/northwestern/northeastern outskirts of the city. Along with official declarations of Ukrainian offensive intent in Bakhmut, ISW has observed a general uptick in military activity across the entire frontline, not all of it part of the Ukrainian counter-offensive effort.

Russian forces are attacking, and Ukrainian forces are counterattacking in limited sectors of the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast frontline. Russian sources have claimed limited success in areas northeast of Kupyansk over the past few days.

Ukrainian forces have conducted localized attacks in the western Donetsk-eastern Zaporizhia oblast border area over the past few days. Russian sources have reported that some critical settlements in this sector are still contested. Ukrainian forces appear to be conducting ground attacks in western Zaporizhia Oblast in the area south/southwest of Orikhiv on June 7–8. Russian milbloggers have been the most concerned about this area since early 2023.

Russian sources are claiming that Ukrainian forces have committed Leopard tanks and other Western kit to these attacks, which some Western sources have confirmed.

Defining any one of these sets of tactical actions as “the counteroffensive” is inappropriate. Ukrainian forces are conducting a variety of operations across the front, and the counteroffensive operation will unfold over time.

ISW will provide additional updates on the situation on the ground in Ukraine in today’s Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

2. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 8, 2023

Maps/graphics/citations:  https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-8-2023

Key Takeaways

• Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive operations with differential outcomes in at least three sectors of the front as part of wider counteroffensive efforts that have been unfolding since Sunday, June 4.
• Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) responded to the Ukrainian attack with an uncharacteristic degree of coherency and praised Southern Military District elements for repelling the attack and regaining lost positions.
• Russian sources provided explanations for claimed Russian successes during the June 8 attacks, praising Russian forces’ effective use of electronic warfare (EW) systems, air support, and landmines against Ukrainian forces.
• Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks southwest of Orikhiv.
• Ukrainian attacks in western Zaporizhia on June 8 do not represent the full extent of Ukrainian capabilities in the current counteroffensive.
• It is additionally noteworthy that the Russian Southern Military District Forces deployed in this particular area are likely to be a higher quality force grouping than Russia has elsewhere in theater, and their defensive performance is unlikely to be reflective of defensive capabilities of Russian groupings elsewhere on the front.
• Russian forces and occupation authorities continue to exacerbate the humanitarian ramifications of the flooding resulting from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam break.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly postponed his annual press conference from June 2023 until November or December 2023.
• Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove line and around Kreminna.
• Ukrainian forces made limited gains around Bakhmut, and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• The Russian MoD continues to posture itself as a firm authority over the defense industrial base (DIB) through emphasizing its ability to transport new equipment to the front.
• Russian occupation authorities are reportedly resorting to punitive measures against civilian populations in occupied Ukraine due to Russian occupation authorities’ decreasing influence over civilians.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, JUNE 8, 2023

Jun 8, 2023 - Press ISW

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 8, 2023

Karolina Hird, George Barros, Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov,

Mason Clark, and Fredrick W. Kagan

June 8, 2023, 7:30pm 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 cutoff for this product was 2pm ET on June 8. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the June 9 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive operations with differential outcomes in at least three sectors of the front as part of wider counteroffensive efforts that have been unfolding since Sunday, June 4. Ukrainian officials signaled that Ukrainian forces have transitioned from defensive to offensive operations in the Bakhmut sector and are making gains of between 200 meters and nearly two kilometers on the flanks of the city.[1] Ukrainian forces have made tactical gains during limited localized counterattacks in western Donetsk Oblast near the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border since June 4.[2] Ukrainian forces additionally conducted an attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8 but do not appear to have made gains as part of this attack as of the time of this publication.

Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8. Russian sources began reporting late at night on June 7 that elements of Ukrainian brigades that have recently been equipped with Western kit launched an attack southwest of Orikhiv in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[3] Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces attacked along the Mala Tokmachka-Polohy line with the aim of breaking through the Russian defensive line between Robotyne and Verbove (both about 15km southeast of Orikhiv).[4] Russian sources acknowledged that Ukrainian forces broke through the first line of defense in this area, held by elements of the 291st and 70th Motorized Rifle Regiments (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) and the 22nd and 45th Separate Guards Special Purpose (GRU) Brigades, but reported that these Russian elements succeeded in counterattacking and eventually pushing Ukrainian forces back to their original positions.[5] Available geolocated combat footage suggests that limited Ukrainian forces crossed the N08 Polohy-Voskresenka highway, but Russian sourcing indicates that Russian forces likely pushed Ukrainians back in the Orikhiv direction towards the frontline and regained the lost positions.[6]

Ukrainian forces also reportedly lost Western-provided vehicles on June 8.[7] Losses are inevitable during any military undertaking. Ukrainian forces will suffer losses, including of both Western and Soviet equipment, during any offensive operations. Western equipment is not impervious to damage any more than the equipment that the Ukrainians have been using and losing since February 2022. The loss of equipment — including Western equipment — early on in the counteroffensive is not an indicator of the future progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. It is important not to exaggerate the impact of initial losses of Western or any other equipment, particularly in penetration battles against prepared defensive positions.

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) responded to the Ukrainian attack with an uncharacteristic degree of coherency and praised Southern Military District elements for repelling the attack and regaining lost positions. The Russian MoD published a video statement by the commander of the Russian grouping in the Zaporizhia direction, Colonel General Alexander Romanchuk, wherein Romanchuk reported that Ukrainian forces started attacking around 0200 local time June 8 and that Russian forces, particularly those of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Division, succeeded in repelling the attack.[8] Romanchuk claimed that Ukrainian forces telegraphed the ground attack with extensive artillery preparation of the battlefield.[9] The Russian MoD also released a statement by 58th Combined Arms Army Commander Major General Ivan Popov, who credited elements of the 58th Combined Arms Army with effectively laying mines to impede Ukrainian advances.[10] The overall Russian response to the attack, both among various milbloggers and the Russian MoD, was notably coherent and relatively consistent with the available visual evidence, which may suggest that Russian forces were not surprised and reacted in a controlled and militarily sound manner. As ISW has previously assessed, the Russian information space reacts with a high degree of chaos and incoherence when taken by surprise by battlefield developments that do not allow the propaganda apparatus to develop a clear line.[11] By contrast, the Russian responses to this attack suggest that Russian forces defended in the way that they had prepared to, thus giving Russian sources a rhetorical line to coalesce around.

Russian sources provided explanations for claimed Russian successes during the June 8 attacks, praising Russian forces’ effective use of electronic warfare (EW) systems, air support, and landmines against Ukrainian forces. Multiple Russian sources reported that Russian EW severely interfered with Ukrainian command and control signals, GPS-enabled devices, UAV controls.[12] Russian sources reported that Ukrainian forces had insufficient air defense in the Orikhiv sector, that Russian forces operated with an “unprecedented” amount of rotary wing air support, and that Russian aviation was able to return to a high level of activity after not actively engaging in combat operations since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022.[13] Continuous Russian missile and drone attacks against Kyiv and critical Ukrainian infrastructure may have fixed Ukraine’s more advanced air defense systems away from the frontline, although ISW cannot assess which systems would be effective against the kinds of air support missions Russian aircraft were flying. ISW’s previous assessments that Russian air and missile attacks were not setting conditions to defend against the Ukrainian counter-offensive may thus have been inaccurate. Russian sources also praised at length their claimed defensive success using layered field fortifications and landmines, with Major General Popov stating that Russian minefields played a “very important role” in defeating the initial Ukrainian advance in the early hours of June 8.[14] CNN additionally reported that an anonymous US official said that Russian landmines degraded Ukrainian armored vehicles.[15]

Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks southwest of Orikhiv. Russian doctrine for a defending motorized rifle battalion calls for a first echelon of troops to repel or slow attacking forces with minefields, fortifications, and strongpoints, with a second echelon of forces counterattacking against an enemy breakthrough.[16] Russian forces apparently operated in this fashion in this sector – Ukrainian forces penetrated the initial defensive lines; Russian forces pulled back to a second line of fortifications; and Russian reserves subsequently counterattacked to retake the initial line of defenses.[17] This maneuver is a regular feature of defensive operations and has been executed by both Ukrainian and Russian forces throughout the war. Early control of terrain changes day to day should thus not be misconstrued as the overall result of a wider attack.

Ukrainian attacks in western Zaporizhia on June 8 do not represent the full extent of Ukrainian capabilities in the current counteroffensive. Ukraine previously demonstrated the ability to conduct a coordinated and effective offensive operation using multiple mechanized brigades as early as September 2022 during the liberation of Kharkiv Oblast. Ukrainian forces possessed this capability – in terms of both available forces and the capacity to coordinate complex attacks – before the provision of Western kit for offensive brigades and additional training from NATO partners. Ukraine’s counteroffensive will likely consist of many undertakings of varied size, including more localized attacks as observed in this sector on June 8, and the smaller efforts do not represent the maximum capacity of Ukrainian numbers or effectiveness. Ukraine reportedly formed 12 dedicated counteroffensive brigades, nine equipped with Western kit and three with existing equipment, and these units will almost certainly be joined by experienced Ukrainian units already online.[18] Ukraine appears to have committed only a portion of the large reserve of forces available for counteroffensive operations, and observers should avoid counting down reported Ukrainian brigades committed or reportedly damaged Western kit as the measure of the remaining effective combat power of Ukrainian forces.

It is additionally noteworthy that the Russian Southern Military District Forces deployed in this particular area are likely to be a higher quality force grouping than Russia has elsewhere in theater, and their defensive performance is unlikely to be reflective of defensive capabilities of Russian groupings elsewhere on the front. Elements of the 58th Combined Arms Army have been deployed in a doctrinally consistent manner to the Orikhiv area and have been conducting defensive preparations in this sector of the front for several months.[19] The 291st and 70th Motorized Rifle Regiments in particular have reportedly gained experience in defending against limited Ukrainian reconnaissance-in-force efforts this area over the past months and have had time to commit to and prepare for defensive operations and familiarize themselves with the terrain.[20] The 58th Combined Arms Army elements in this sector, therefore, are likely generally fresher and more experienced than elements in other areas of the front. The Russian defense of this sector should not be taken as indicative of overall Russian defensive capabilities as Ukraine continues counteroffensive operations. Russian forces defending in other sectors have indeed performed much more poorly. Ukraine, having recently regained the battlefield initiative across the theater, will be able to choose exactly where in to continue attacking based on observed defensive capabilities of various Russian groupings along the frontline among other factors.

Russian forces and occupation authorities continue to exacerbate the humanitarian ramifications of the flooding resulting from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam break. The Ukrainian General Staff reported on June 8 that Russian forces are hiding amongst civilians who are evacuating from flooded settlements on the east (left) bank of the Dnipro River and that occupation authorities are housing evacuated residents in boarding houses and recreation centers where Russian troops and equipment are located.[21] Several Ukrainian and Western sources additionally reported that Russian troops shelled a flooded evacuation site in Kherson City, killing one civilian and injuring nine.[22] Russian occupation authorities claimed that Ukrainian forces shelled evacuation efforts on the east bank but did not provide visual evidence commensurate with these allegations.[23]

Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly postponed his annual press conference from June 2023 until November or December 2023.[24] Russian news outlet Kommersant claimed on June 8, citing sources within the Kremlin, that Putin is postponing his annual “Direct Line” live journalistic forum until the Russian military situation is more stable, which the sources characterized as likely in November or December. Kommersant’s source reportedly stated that these dates are preliminary, and that Putin aims to hold the “Direct Line” before the March 2024 presidential elections.[25] ISW has previously assessed that Putin would likely hold the “Direct Line” in early June 2023 after Russian forces captured Bakhmut, and pushing back the forum indicates that the Kremlin may perceive the capture Bakhmut as an insufficient informational victory to compensate for the overall unstable Russian military situation in Ukraine.[26] Delaying the “Direct Line” forum further illustrates Putin’s decline from a seemingly involved and strong leader to one more often portrayed as minutely involved in small infrastructure projects, as ISW has previously noted.[27]

Key Takeaways

• Ukraine has conducted counteroffensive operations with differential outcomes in at least three sectors of the front as part of wider counteroffensive efforts that have been unfolding since Sunday, June 4.
• Ukrainian forces conducted a limited but still significant attack in western Zaporizhia Oblast on the night of June 7 to 8. Russian forces apparently defended against this attack in a doctrinally sound manner and had reportedly regained their initial positions as of June 8.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) responded to the Ukrainian attack with an uncharacteristic degree of coherency and praised Southern Military District elements for repelling the attack and regaining lost positions.
• Russian sources provided explanations for claimed Russian successes during the June 8 attacks, praising Russian forces’ effective use of electronic warfare (EW) systems, air support, and landmines against Ukrainian forces.
• Russian forces appear to have executed their formal tactical defensive doctrine in response to the Ukrainian attacks southwest of Orikhiv.
• Ukrainian attacks in western Zaporizhia on June 8 do not represent the full extent of Ukrainian capabilities in the current counteroffensive.
• It is additionally noteworthy that the Russian Southern Military District Forces deployed in this particular area are likely to be a higher quality force grouping than Russia has elsewhere in theater, and their defensive performance is unlikely to be reflective of defensive capabilities of Russian groupings elsewhere on the front.
• Russian forces and occupation authorities continue to exacerbate the humanitarian ramifications of the flooding resulting from the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam break.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin has reportedly postponed his annual press conference from June 2023 until November or December 2023.
• Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove line and around Kreminna.
• Ukrainian forces made limited gains around Bakhmut, and Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line.
• Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts.
• The Russian MoD continues to posture itself as a firm authority over the defense industrial base (DIB) through emphasizing its ability to transport new equipment to the front.
• Russian occupation authorities are reportedly resorting to punitive measures against civilian populations in occupied Ukraine due to Russian occupation authorities’ decreasing influence over civilians.

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

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

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Russian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the Kupyansk-Svatove line and around Kreminna on June 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Vesele (32km south of Kreminna).[28] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces conducted ground attacks near Bilohorivka (10km south of Kreminna) and Berestove (30km south of Kreminna).[29] A Russian source claimed that positional battles continued near Masyutivka (12km northeast of Kupyansk) and that Russian forces destroyed three Ukrainian sabotage and reconnaissance groups near Novoselivske (13km northeast of Svatove) on June 7.[30] Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that Russian forces in the Kupyansk direction are conducting air and artillery strikes.[31]

Ukrainian forces continue to strike rear areas in occupied Luhansk Oblast. Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) Head Leonid Pasechnik claimed on June 8 that Ukrainian forces struck Luhansk City, and geolocated footage shows a large smoke plume rising from the city.[32]

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

Click here to read ISW’s retrospective analysis on the Battle for Bakhmut.

Ukrainian forces made limited gains around Bakhmut on June 8. Geolocated footage published on June 7 indicates that Ukrainian forces made limited advances near Berkhivka (6km northwest of Bakhmut).[33] Ukrainian and Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces made advances 1.8km wide and 1.2km deep along the western bank of the Siverskyi Donetsk Canal west of Andriivka (10km southwest of Bakhmut) and forced elements of the Russian 57th Motorized Infantry Brigade (5th Combined Arms Army, Eastern Military District) and convict servicemen of the “Storm-Z” unit out of their positions.[34] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Orikhovo-Vasylivka (11km northwest of Bakhmut), Ivanivske (6km west of Bakhmut), and Pivnichne (20km southwest of Bakhmut).[35] Ukrainian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that Ukrainian forces are advancing in the Bakhmut direction.[36] Ukrainian Eastern Group of Forces Spokesperson Colonel Serhiy Cherevaty also stated at least 81,000 Wagner servicemen have been killed or wounded in the fighting around Bakhmut since July 2022.[37]

Russian forces conducted limited ground attacks along the Avdiivka-Donetsk City line on June 8. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted unsuccessful offensive operations near Avdiivka, Opytne (3km southwest of Avdiivka), Sieverne (6km west of Avdiivka), and Pervomaiske (11km southwest of Avdiivka) and that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian attacks on Marinka.[38] A Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces advanced near Vodyane (7km southwest of Avdiivka).[39] Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov posted footage on June 8 showing Akhmat Special Forces (Spetsnaz) Commander Major General Apty Alaudinov claiming that Akhmat Spetsnaz units and elements of the 150th Motorized Rifle Division (8th Combined Arms Army, Southern Military District) are repelling Ukrainian attacks in Marinka.[40] Geolocated footage published on June 8 shows artillery elements of the 39th Separate Motorized Rifle Brigade (68th Army Corps, Eastern Military District) operating near Marinka.[41]

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

Ukrainian forces continued to conduct limited ground attacks on the administrative border between Donetsk and Zaporizhia oblasts on June 8. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar stated that fighting in the Velyka Novosilka direction continues.[42] Ukrainian Brigadier General Oleksandr Tarnavskyi stated that Ukrainian offensive operations in southern Ukraine are successful and that Russian forces are on the defensive.[43] The Russian Eastern Group of Forces (Eastern Military District) Spokesperson Oleg Chekhov claimed that Russian forces conducted air and artillery strikes against attacking Ukrainian forces in western Donetsk Oblast and against rear positions near Vremivka (immediately west of Velyka Novosilka) and Novodonetske (11km southeast of Velyka Novosilka).[44] Geolocated footage shows that Ukrainian forces struck Russian howitzer positions east of Staromlynivka (14km south of Velyka Novosilka) and destroyed a TOS-1A thermobaric artillery system just north of Zavitne Bazhannia (12km south of Velyka Novosilka).[45]

Ukrainian forces continue to strike rear areas of occupied southern Zaporizhia Oblast. Russian and Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces struck Tokmak on June 7 and 8.[46] Russian and Ukrainian sources also reported explosions in Berdyansk on June 8, and geolocated footage shows a large smoke plume rising in the city.[47]

Flooding from the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Power Plant (KHPP) dam has reportedly forced Russian forces to withdraw further to rear areas in eastern Kherson Oblast and inflicted some manpower and equipment losses. Ukrainian Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Nataliya Humenyuk reported that Russian forces withdrew between five and 15 kilometers from the front line on the Dnipro River due to flooding of their frontline positions.[48] Russian forces likely no longer occupy Oleshky as of June 8 due to extensive flooding there.[49] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces suffered manpower and equipment losses from the flooding, especially within the 7th Airborne (VDV) Division (Southern Military District) and 22nd Army Corps (Black Sea Fleet, Southern Military District).[50] The southern branch of the Ukrainian governmental organization “Forests of Ukraine” reported that flooding completely cut off the Kinburn Spit from mainland Ukraine as of the evening of June 7.[51] Russian forces previously established fortified positions on the Kinburn Spit, and it is unclear whether or not any Russian forces remain on the spit following the flooding. The Ukrainian Kherson Oblast Administration reported that the average level of flooding in Kherson Oblast is 5.61 meters, and that 32 percent of the flooding is concentrated in the west (right) bank, where20 settlements flooded, while 68 percent is concentrated in the east (left) bank.[52]

Decreasing water levels in the Kakhovka Reservoir do not currently threaten the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP)’s cooling operations as of June 8.[53] International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi stated on June 8 that the ZNPP is still drawing water from the Kakhovka Reservoir to cool its nuclear reactors even though the water level has dipped to levels below which experts previously estimated that the ZNPP’s water pumps could no longer operate. Grossi stated that the Kakhovka Reservoir water level has dropped from 16.8 meters to 12.7 meters and that the ZNPP can likely sustain cooling operations if the water level drops to 11 meters. Grossi stated that the water level is currently decreasing at a rate of four to seven centimeters per hour. Ukrainian nuclear energy operator Energoatom also stated that the water level in the ZNPP’s cooling pond is stable as of June 8.[54]

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

The Russian MoD continues to posture itself as a firm authority over the defense industrial base (DIB) through emphasizing its ability to transport new equipment to the front. The Russian MoD published footage on June 8 showing Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu visiting troops in the Western Military District and inspecting weapons and equipment bound for Ukraine.[55] Shoigu emphasized the importance of installing additional protection on armored vehicles before transport to Ukraine and of decreasing the time between Russian forces receiving new equipment and sending it to combat areas.

The Kremlin is continuing crypto-mobilization efforts through introducing incentives and coercive measures aimed at promoting military service. Russian opposition outlet SOTA reported that the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) drafted a bill that would deprive individuals of their driver's license if they fail to appear at a military registration and enlistment office after 20 days of receiving the summons.[56] Russian opposition outlet Mobilization News reported that Russian authorities are advertising Russian MoD contracts to work in signals and medical fields to women under 47 years old.[57] The Russian MoD is reportedly offering these recruits a 125,000-to-350,000-ruble (about $1,500 to $4,250) monthly salary, and an unspecified organization is offering a one-time bonus of 500,000 rubles (about $6,100).[58] The Russian MoD also claimed that the new Suvorov Military School in Irkutsk in Irkutsk Oblast will accept its first students starting in the 2023 academic year.[59]

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

Russian occupation authorities are reportedly resorting to punitive measures against civilian populations in occupied Ukraine due to Russian occupation authorities’ decreasing influence over civilians. Ukrainian Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar reported that populations in occupied Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts are disregarding the occupation administrations’ orders.[60] Malyar also reported that Russian forces are using punitive measures to counter these trends including cordoning off Kyrylivka in occupied Zaporizhia Oblast to subject its residents to filtration measures, including searching residents’ homes, and detaining and interrogating residents.[61]

Significant activity in Belarus (ISW assesses that a Russian or Belarusian attack into northern Ukraine is extraordinarily unlikely).

ISW will continue to report daily observed Russian and Belarusian military activity in Belarus, but these are not indicators that Russian and Belarusian forces are preparing for an imminent attack on Ukraine from Belarus. ISW will revise this text and its assessment if it observes any unambiguous indicators that Russia or Belarus is preparing to attack northern Ukraine.

Nothing significant to report.

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.

3. Army Retention on Track, Even as Recruiting Struggles

If we cannot give our younger generations the value proposition that appeals to them (and not to us old folks) then we are going to have long term problems.

Army Retention on Track, Even as Recruiting Struggles

Even the busiest of units are seeing high retention as Army programs seek to smooth out the stress of service life.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

When Tobey Whitney joined the Army at 32 after 9/11, he expected to serve just four years. But after two decades and three deployments to Iraq, Sgt. Maj. Whitney is still in uniform, part of a broader trend of soldiers choosing to stay in the Army even as the service struggles to bring in new recruits.

Whitney is far from an anomaly. The Army is on track to meet its goal of retaining 55,100 soldiers this year, according to Congressional testimony by Army Undersecretary Gabe Camarillo. The Army also met its retention goals in 2022 and 2021: just .06 percent of soldiers who were eligible to leave actually quit, Camarillo said.

Retention numbers are “historically high,” said Agnes Schaefer, assistant Army secretary for manpower & reserve affairs, at an event Tuesday hosted by the Center for a New American Security. And even parts of the service that are under high stress are seeing good retention.

Air defense forces are deployed at twice the rate of the overall Army because of threats in Europe, China, and the Middle East, Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, told Congress in April. The resulting stress was eating away at soldiers’ “readiness and family well-being,” he said.

The trend is not new: in August 2020, crews for Patriot anti-air missiles batteries deployed more often than Army Special Forces.

But in 2022, the Army’s quick-deployment air defense forces, run by 32nd Army Air and Missile Defense Command, had a 109.7 percent mission retention rate, Karbler testified.

Retention stands in stark contrast to the Army’s recruiting crisis. The service’s numbers are better this year than last, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said at a D-Day commemorative event on June 5, but the service is still set to fall short of its 65,000 recruit target, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said in May.

Whitney, now the Army’s senior career counselor, joined the 82nd Airborne in 2003 after serving 10 years as a police officer. He had long wanted to serve in the military, but deferred after having a child at 18. But September 11 pushed him into service. “I knew that I had missed my calling before, and I wasn't gonna miss it again,” he said.

Joining up at the start of the Iraq war, Whitney faced mortar fire on his first day in the country.

He stayed in the Army, despite the risks, for what it had to offer his family. His son went to college on his tuition assistance, and his healthcare costs were covered by the Army without any premiums. “My quality of life as a soldier was better than it was as a police officer,” Whitney told Defense One.

Army officials haven’t cited one single factor as contributing to high retention, but have emphasized non-monetary factors—most notably soldiers’ ability to choose where to serve.

“We try to provide soldiers with a wide variety of options,” Whitney said, calling out programs that allow soldiers to stay at a favored base longer, change their career field, or move to new locations.

Extra money is also helpful, Whitney said, but noted the Army pays less than half of soldiers a reenlistment bonus. Instead, he said, he sees many soldiers motivated by the ability to control where they’re living, either to stay where they are or go closer to family

The Army’s busy deployment schedule, which Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston has called an “enormous strain” so far isn’t hurting retention, Whitney added. In fact, units that deploy more frequently have “great” retention, he said.

While he didn’t have specific data to point to, the four-times-deployed soldier pointed to the unifying effect a deployment can have, as well as the satisfaction that comes with “actually doing what you came in to do,” he said.

Nor was the Army’s recent emphasis on diversity a problem for retention, which Whitney called a “non-issue.”

The Army is also doing studies to see if economic pressures are key at keeping the soldiers in, Whitney added, amid an U.S. economy that has been buffeted by inflationary pressures.

Schaefer, the Army’s manpower chief,, flagged similar reasons for high retention rates. “Quality of life is a huge issue for us,” Schaefer said, noting benefits like child care, spousal employment, and barracks improvements.

In a nod to the importance of choosing an Army base over cash, she noted that letting people choose their station led to better staffing results than offering a bonus for moving there.

“Some people want to go to remote and isolated places,” she said, noting the popularity of Alaska among certain soldiers. “But that’s different when you're forced to go.”

The Army is also seeking new ways to boost retention. Whitney said that a study of younger service members aims to identify participants' most favored incentives for staying.

On Whitney’s initiative, the Army and other branches also meet quarterly to share best practices related to recruiting. Thanks to this work, the Army may introduce a Navy practice of having a central repository of guidance counselor advice, thus allowing guidance counselors at a soldiers’ new stations to see previous advice given to the soldier.

Schafer, meanwhile, has been pushing for even more flexibility for soldiers’ careers. “I worry that the incredibly siloed system that we have right now is outdated,” she said. “We need to move more towards a jungle gym type of a system where people can move around depending on life circumstances.”

Without retaining soldiers, she added, the Army is “just a tin can.”

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

4. Researchers Say Military Service Is the 'Single Strongest' Predictor of Violent Extremism

Is that so? See the next massage with a RAND report that provides a different view.

Excerpt:

The study also found that almost 80% of the offenses happened after the person left the armed forces, with nearly half having been out of the military for a decade or more. Just under one-third received something other than an honorable discharge -- researchers noted that was a significantly higher percentage when compared to an estimated 16% of other-than-honorable discharges among all vets.

In response to the findings, the report recommends that the military step up data collection on incidents to help with future analysis and to add more civic education during a service member's initial training; as part of their professional military education; and as a central feature of the Transition Assistance Program, or TAP, the mandatory training given before separation from service.

The report argues that there need to be stronger "efforts to combat the recruitment of service members and veterans into violent extremism by implementing inoculation training and providing service members the tools they need to identify and effectively resist extremists' manipulation tactics."

Researchers Say Military Service Is the 'Single Strongest' Predictor of Violent Extremism

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · June 7, 2023

A new study has found that a history of military service is a common characteristic among perpetrators of mass casualty attacks in the U.S. -- and veterans involved in those attacks are far more likely to be successful.

The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, known as START, -- a research group at the University of Maryland -- analyzed a database of thousands of extremist crimes going back to 1990 and discovered that, in that group, people with military backgrounds "are 2.41 times more likely to be classified as mass casualty offenders than individuals who did not serve in the armed forces."

While around three out of four plots that were noted in the database were foiled, "the rate of successful mass fatality crimes involving perpetrators with military backgrounds is nearly two times higher" when compared to civilians.

Veterans and service members aren't more likely to radicalize to the point of violence compared to civilians but, when they do, "they are more likely to plan for, or commit, mass casualty crimes, thus having an outsized impact on public safety," according to the START researchers.

Military experience "is the single strongest individual-level predictor" of whether a person will commit a mass casualty event.

The new analysis comes as the Pentagon and the services try to grapple with the idea of extremism within the ranks. Following the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and the subsequent arrests, the extent of the military's problem with extremism became much more visible than ever before.

Just months after the insurrection, the first active-duty service member -- a Marine officer -- was arrested by federal investigators for his role in the day's destruction.

Since then, however, more active-duty, reservist and National Guard service members, as well as scores of veterans, have been arrested, charged and convicted with crimes ranging from trespassing all the way to seditious conspiracy.

The START researchers did not include data from Jan. 6 in their analysis, however, because of the "variation in the extent of the offenders' premeditation and their criminal behaviors."

However, they say that their data shows that, between 1990 and 2022, 170 people with military backgrounds plotted 144 unique mass casualty terrorist attacks in the U.S.

Diving into that group, the researchers found that the leading two ideologies among the group were anti-government militias and white supremacists.

In fact, more than 70% of those were linked to far-right domestic extremist groups and movements, including anti-government groups and militias such as the Boogaloo movement and the Oath Keepers. Only 15% were considered to be connected to Islamist extremism.

The study also found that almost 80% of the offenses happened after the person left the armed forces, with nearly half having been out of the military for a decade or more. Just under one-third received something other than an honorable discharge -- researchers noted that was a significantly higher percentage when compared to an estimated 16% of other-than-honorable discharges among all vets.

In response to the findings, the report recommends that the military step up data collection on incidents to help with future analysis and to add more civic education during a service member's initial training; as part of their professional military education; and as a central feature of the Transition Assistance Program, or TAP, the mandatory training given before separation from service.

The report argues that there need to be stronger "efforts to combat the recruitment of service members and veterans into violent extremism by implementing inoculation training and providing service members the tools they need to identify and effectively resist extremists' manipulation tactics."

-- Konstantin Toropin can be reached at konstantin.toropin@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @ktoropin.

military.com · by Konstantin Toropin · June 7, 2023

5. Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs

The entire 26 page report can be downloaded here: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1000/RRA1071-2/RAND_RRA1071-2.pdf

Excerpts from Key Findings:

• Support for extremist groups — including white supremacism, Proud Boys, black nationalism, and Antifa — ranged from 1 percent (White supremacists) to 5.5 percent (Antifa) and was generally lower than rates derived from previous representative surveys of the general population.
• The authors also examined support for political violence, QAnon, and the Great Replacement theory. While support for QAnon (13.5 percent) appeared relatively low compared with general surveys, support for political violence (17.7 percent) and the racist Great Replacement theory (28.8 percent) appeared similar to that of the general population.

Prevalence of Veteran Support for Extremist Groups and Extremist Beliefs

Results from a Nationally Representative Survey of the U.S. Veteran Community

by Todd C. Helmus, Ryan Andrew Brown, Rajeev Ramchand

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1071-2.html

Policymakers and researchers are increasingly concerned that the U.S. veteran community is at increased risk of radicalization to violent extremism. Although subsequently revised downward, early reports suggested that as many as one in five Capitol Hill attackers was currently or had previously been affiliated with the U.S. military. Extremist groups actively target military members and veterans for recruitment targets because of their training and operational, logistic, and leadership skills. The unique and often lonely experience of leaving the military has been hypothesized to make veterans susceptible to such recruitment.

To help address these concerns, the authors conducted a nationally representative survey of veterans to examine the prevalence of support for specific extremist groups and ideologies, including support for political violence. The authors compared their results with those from surveys of the general population. Among other findings, the veteran community, as a whole, did not manifest higher support than the general population. Interestingly, the majority of those who supported political violence were not also supporters of specific groups.

Research Questions

1. Do U.S. military veterans support such extremist groups as Antifa, the Proud Boys, Black nationalists, and White supremacists?
2. Do veterans endorse beliefs associated with extremist groups, such as QAnon and the Great Replacement theory?
3. Do veterans support political violence in support of such groups and beliefs?

Key Findings

• The authors conducted a representative survey of nearly 1,000 veterans in the United States to assess the prevalence of support for violent extremist groups and causes.
• There was no evidence to support the notion that the veteran community, as a whole, manifests higher rates of support for violent extremist groups or extremist beliefs than the American public.
• Support for extremist groups — including white supremacism, Proud Boys, black nationalism, and Antifa — ranged from 1 percent (White supremacists) to 5.5 percent (Antifa) and was generally lower than rates derived from previous representative surveys of the general population.
• The authors also examined support for political violence, QAnon, and the Great Replacement theory. While support for QAnon (13.5 percent) appeared relatively low compared with general surveys, support for political violence (17.7 percent) and the racist Great Replacement theory (28.8 percent) appeared similar to that of the general population.
• A majority of veterans who expressed support for extremist groups did not endorse political violence. While this may be comforting, it also suggests that the majority of those who supported political violence (18 percent of the total sample) may also be vulnerable to recruitment for new or emerging extremist groups.
• Veterans of the Marine Corps expressed the highest support for extremist groups and beliefs among the different branches of service.

6. The end of Western naivety about China

Conclusion:

Chinese leaders detect the confidence gap, and try to widen it. A Chinese speaker at this month’s Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian security forum, told Europeans the “best thing” they could offer Asia was to stay away and “do nothing”. A similar logic underpins the growing risks taken by Chinese warships and fighter jets, as they intercept American and allied naval vessels and planes in international skies and seas near China. The aim is not to win friends, but to make America’s partners take fright so that they urge Mr Biden to back down. Mr Xi’s assertive words and deeds leave ever less room for Western naivety. But if foreign credulity is replaced with despair, China will take that for a win.

The end of Western naivety about China

A new China debate pits optimists against fatalists

Jun 8th 2023

The Economist

Among Western democratic governments, this is a moment of unhappy clarity about China. Their bleak consensus follows years of naivety and wilful self-delusion about the nature of Xi Jinping’s regime. A changed mood—one of shared, durable gloom—was on display at the latest Stockholm China Forum. This is a gathering of American and European officials, scholars and business types that Chaguan has attended, on and off, since 2008 (Chinese diplomats and scholars attend some sessions).

Listen to this story.

Enjoy more audio and podcasts on iOS or Android.

The war in Ukraine hung over the latest forum, jointly hosted by Sweden’s foreign ministry and the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank. There was no happy talk about China being an ideal peace-broker, as some European leaders had suggested in the early months of the conflict. Instead, participants talked of Chinese envoys touring European capitals to recommend that Ukraine lay down its arms and sue for peace, while casting Vladimir Putin as a ruler acting in self-defence. One speaker called China’s “collusion” with Russia an “electroshock” for Western governments. China is expected to play a role in the conflict’s end-game and in post-war reconstruction, not least because Ukraine’s government wants Mr Xi at the table. But there was shared horror in Stockholm at any notion of China helping to design a future security architecture for Europe. That distrust is born of hearing Chinese officials blaming the NATO defence alliance for war in Ukraine, and promoting a world order in which individual countries seek security via shifting, values-free calculations of their interests.

There is transatlantic convergence, too, about the need to de-risk commercial ties with China. That is an ugly term for an idea with usefully broad appeal. American, European and other Western governments and businesses want to avoid excessive dependencies on Chinese suppliers of critical commodities and products, and to ensure that exchanges with China are consistent with their “interests, values and security concerns”, to quote Sweden’s prime minister, Ulf Kristersson, in on-the-record remarks that opened the forum.

Chinese officials, backed by some foreign business bosses, accuse Western governments of planning wholesale economic decoupling, a ruinously disruptive and costly outcome. In truth, talk of decoupling is a straw man. On each shore of the Atlantic, insiders say, there is agreement that perhaps two-thirds of trade with China involves no strategic implications, and should be encouraged. At the same time, governments are aligned on the need to scrutinise a few sectors and deals much more closely. Europeans are warier than Americans about export controls to stop China building advanced weapons or tools of repression with Western technologies. But most Western capitals are in lockstep on the need for new, defensive tools against Chinese economic coercion.

Foreign businessmen and officials share notes about Mr Xi’s ever-sterner emphasis on security. A new counter-espionage law could make it perilous to collect soil samples to check for toxic residues before building an expensive new factory in China, the forum heard, or dangerous to obtain data about weather patterns in the Taiwan Strait before investing in a coastal wind farm.

Western governments face shared challenges to their domestic politics as China becomes dominant in such sectors as electric vehicles. While China has every right to compete in industries of the future, the forum was invited to contemplate the politics of a world in which millions of car-plant workers blame Chinese imports, backed by vast state subsidies, for taking their jobs. German car companies, which once made huge profits in China, now face a fight to survive in that country’s market, a speaker reported.

Yet if the West is now united in anxiety about China, a different divide could be heard in this gathering of transatlantic officials and scholars. Under President Joe Biden, America leads a camp of optimists which hopes that with enough political will, economic resources, military might and diplomatic skill, the West can out-compete China. A second camp is much more fatalistic.

The groupings have fuzzy boundaries. Some European countries, such as France, share the Biden administration’s faith in industrial policies to protect manufacturing jobs. But France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, is called “deeply pessimistic” about geopolitics by those who have briefed him about China. Though Mr Macron does not dispute dark assessments of Mr Xi’s regime, he has little confidence that America can be relied on as a security partner, especially after its presidential election in 2024. That fatalism helps to explain why Mr Macron delighted his Chinese hosts earlier this year by suggesting, in an interview with Les Echos on his plane home, that Europe should beware of being dragged by America into clashes in Asia, including over Taiwan.

Other countries fret about rising protectionism, and worry about Mr Biden unleashing subsidy contests that leave all players worse off. But some of the same governments argue that the war in Ukraine has proved, once again, that America is the West’s indispensable security partner. In return for American support in Europe, they urge the EU to see security and political interests in the fate of Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific.

Divide and rule

Chinese leaders detect the confidence gap, and try to widen it. A Chinese speaker at this month’s Shangri-La Dialogue, an Asian security forum, told Europeans the “best thing” they could offer Asia was to stay away and “do nothing”. A similar logic underpins the growing risks taken by Chinese warships and fighter jets, as they intercept American and allied naval vessels and planes in international skies and seas near China. The aim is not to win friends, but to make America’s partners take fright so that they urge Mr Biden to back down. Mr Xi’s assertive words and deeds leave ever less room for Western naivety. But if foreign credulity is replaced with despair, China will take that for a win. ■

Read more from Chaguan, our columnist on China:

Why the Communist Party fears gay rights (May 25th)

China learns to manage decline (May 11th)

Also: How the Chaguan column got its name

The Economist

7. Here are the key theories on what caused Ukraine's catastrophic dam collapse

​Excerpts:

Did Russia do it?

Could it have been a missile attack by Ukraine?

Structural failure?

​

Here are the key theories on what caused Ukraine's catastrophic dam collapse | CNN

CNN · by Ivana Kottasová,Gianluca Mezzofiore · June 8, 2023

CNN —

The collapse of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine is one of the biggest industrial and ecological disasters in Europe for decades. The catastrophe has destroyed entire villages, flooded farmland, deprived tens of thousands of people of power and clean water, and caused massive environmental damage.

It’s still impossible to say whether the dam collapsed because it was deliberately targeted or if the breach could have been caused by structural failure. The dam and hydroelectric power plant are under Russian control and therefore inaccessible to independent investigators, leaving experts around the world trying to piece together what happened based on limited visual evidence.

Several Western officials have blamed Russia for the disaster, either directly accusing Moscow of targeting the dam or saying that Russia is responsible simply because it is the aggressor in the war on Ukraine.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres described the destruction as “another devastating consequence of the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” but added that the UN doesn’t have access to information to independently verify the cause.

A NATO military official told CNN that, while it will take some time before they know for certain who was responsible for the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in Ukraine, they believe Russia was likely behind it. The official added that Russia stood the most to gain by the move, which could potentially slow down an anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, if it were to take place in that part of the country.

Satellite images of the Nova Kakhovka dam before its collapse (left, on June 5) and after the disaster (right, on June 7).

Maxar Technologies/Reuters

A number of civil engineering experts have suggested that an explosion inside the structure is the most likely cause of the dam breach, although it’s not the only possible explanation.

Here are the three main theories on what caused the collapse – and what experts and officials say about each:

Did Russia do it?

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, his government and the country’s military were quick to blame Moscow for the disaster. They said Russian forces blew up the reservoir from inside, with Zelensky quoting a report by Ukrainian intelligence last year that claimed occupying troops had mined the dam.

The Ukrainians point out that the facility has been under Russian control for the past year, making it easy for Russian forces to plant explosives.

Social media posts indicate that people in the area heard the sound of explosions around the time the dam was thought to have been damaged.

The wider timing of the incident is not insignificant. While Moscow and Kyiv have previously accused each other of plotting to blow up the Soviet-era dam, this collapse coincided with Ukrainian forces gearing up for their widely expected summer counter-offensive.

Ukrainian soldiers and first responders search for survivors on the streets of Kherson in a boat, after the destruction of the nearby Nova Kakhovka dam flooded large parts of the city.

CNN

'Everything is drowning.' Nova Kakhovka dam collapse brings added danger to frontline city of Kherson

The dam spans the Dnipro River, a major waterway that has become a front line in the conflict and the scene of heavy fighting in this part of southern Ukraine. The city of Kherson, which sits on the west bank of the Dnipro river, was liberated by the Ukrainian military in November after eight months of Russian occupation. But much of the east bank of the river south of the Nova Kakhovka dam remains under Russian control.

Ukraine’s forces have increasingly taken the battle to Russia’s entrenched front lines in the south and east, and Kyiv has accused Russia of blowing up the dam “in panic.”

Mykhailo Podolyak, a senior aide to Zelensky, said “the terrorists’ goal is obvious – to create obstacles for the offensive actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.”

“This once again confirms that the Kremlin is not thinking strategically, but rather in terms of short-term situational advantages. But the consequences are already catastrophic,” he told CNN.

The damage is also affecting the area north of the reservoir, where water levels are falling. The collapse has left 94% of irrigation systems in Kherson, 74% in Zaporizhzhia and 30% in Dnipro regions “without a source of water,” according to the Ukrainian Agricultural Ministry.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant also lies upstream from the destroyed dam. The reservoir supplies cooling water to the plant, Europe’s largest nuclear power station, and is crucial for its safety. The plant is under Russian control, which has been a major source of anxiety for the Ukrainians, still scared by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Could it have been a missile attack by Ukraine?

Russia has denied any involvement in the disaster and in turn accused Ukraine of destroying the dam, without providing evidence.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov claimed the attack was “planned and carried out by order received from Kyiv, from the Kyiv regime,” aiming to “deprive Crimea of water” and to distract from the battlefield. Ukraine has denied the accusations.

The reservoir supplies water to large swaths of southern Ukraine, including to the Crimean peninsula which Russia illegally annexed in 2014.

Crimea has experienced water issues ever since Ukraine cut its supply shortly after the annexation. Russian forces captured the North Crimea Canal – which is fed by the Kakhovka reservoir – and began restoring the water supply in the first days of their invasion in 2022.

While the flooding will likely affect any counteroffensive by Ukraine, it’s also impacting Russian forces. Some of the areas worst hit by the disaster are under Russia’s control and have in the past served as staging grounds for Moscow’s military.

The Ukrainian city of Korsunka seen in a satellite image on June 7 after flooding caused by the collapsed dam.

Maxar Technologies/AP

There are also suggestions that the dam collapse took at least some Russian forces by surprise.

An officer in Ukraine’s armed forces told CNN that his men witnessed Russian soldiers being swept up in flood waters and fleeing the east bank of the Dnipro River. Capt. Andrei Pidlisnyi told CNN in a telephone interview that when the dam burst in the early hours of Tuesday morning, “no one on the Russian side was able to get away. All the regiments the Russians had on that side were flooded.” CNN cannot independently verify his account.

Russia has accused Ukraine of launching “mass artillery attacks” on the dam, but some experts question whether it would even be possible to cause destruction on this scale from the outside.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks during a joint press conference in Kyiv, on June 2.

Sergei Supinsky/AFP/Getty Images/FILE

Russians shooting at rescuers in flooded areas following dam collapse, Zelensky says

Several experts said an internal explosion was a more likely explanation.

“Shelling by Ukraine is highly unlikely as it would need to get massive explosives close to the foundations,” Chris Binnie, a visiting professor at University of Exeter and the chair of Tidal Engineering and Environmental Services, told the UK Science Media Centre.

Craig Goff, the technical director and lead of the Dams and Reservoirs team at HR Wallingford, a civil engineering and environmental hydraulics consultancy, said inflicting enough damage on the dam would require a very precise strike.

“Back in the Second World War, there were the [Royal Air Force] Dambusters attacks on German dams and they had to spend a lot of time working out exactly where to place explosives on the dam in order to cause enough damage to cause it to breach,” he told CNN.

“It wasn’t a simple thing. You had to get the explosives right down on the upstream side of the dam at a deep depth. If it was just the top off the dam then it would probably still survive. You’d lose a bit of water but it would survive,” Goff said.

Structural failure?

The Nova Kakhovka dam – the largest reservoir in Ukraine in terms of volume – is also the furthest downstream of a cascade of six Soviet-era dams on the Dnipro River. The fact that the facility has been operating for many decades has prompted speculation around a possible technical failure.

“The section of dam that we’re looking at is a concrete gravity dam, 35 meters high and 85 meters long (115 feet high and 279 feet long). This is a very common type of dam all around the world. They’ve been built for hundreds of years and if they were designed and built well and are maintained adequately, then the chance of a failure is very, very low. It would be extremely unusual for this type of dam to fail with no warning,” Goff said.

However it is unclear how well the dam has been maintained under Russian occupation. The surrounding area has been one of the most heavily contested regions since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the dam has sustained some prior damage.

Sections of the northern part of the dam and some sluice gates were also impacted in an explosion in November as the Russian military retreated from the west bank of the Dnipro and Kherson was liberated by Ukrainian troops.

A CNN analysis of satellite imagery from Maxar shows the road above the dam was damaged just days before the structural collapse. The satellite images show the bridge was intact on May 28 but imagery from June 5 shows a section of the same bridge missing. Analysis of lower resolution satellite imagery suggests the loss of the bridge section took place between June 1 and 2.

Meanwhile, data shows water levels in the reservoir behind the dam were at record highs last month, according to the Hydroweb information service.

“The images I have seen show two breaches, either side of a structure. Were the breach to be caused by excess upstream water level there would only be one. Thus natural causes are highly unlikely,” Binnie said.

Olena stands next to the entrance to her house on a flooded street, after the Nova Kakhovka dam breached, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, in Kherson, Ukraine June 6, 2023. REUTERS/Alina Smutko

Alina Smutko/Reuters

Collapse of Ukraine's Nova Kakhovka dam an 'ecological catastrophe'

“The design of the dam will take into account these very high water levels, even extreme, biblical type flooding and there will be spillways to allow the water to go over. So again, the dam shouldn’t fail just because of high water levels,” Goff added.

Experts are also considering whether a failure inside the power plant could have caused the collapse. Goff pointed to the 2009 explosion at the Sayano-Shushenskaya station, the largest hydroelectric plant in Russia. “In that particular case, there was a problem with one of the turbines. It vibrated and eventually the turbine exploded. And that killed people inside the power house, but it didn’t affect the dam on that in that instance, because of the way the dam was built,” he said.

“It is possible that if the hydropower station was at a critical point inside the dam and that something bad happened in that power house that possibly could have caused an explosion inside that would damage the dam,” Goff said. He added, however, that it would be “extremely unlikely” for such an accident to happen without advance warning.

“You would know how to operate the dam safely and you would know that the turbines shouldn’t be vibrating that much… so if it was being looked after properly, you can probably rule that one out,” he said.

But as the plant had been under Russian control for over a year, no one can be sure what was happening inside during that time, and it’s far from certain if those who operated it knew what they were doing.

CNN’s Vasco Cotovio, Allegra Goodwin, Sebastian Shukla, Sam Kiley, Natasha Bertrand, Alex Marquardt, Jim Sciutto and Jennifer Hansler contributed reporting.

CNN · by Ivana Kottasová,Gianluca Mezzofiore · June 8, 2023

8. Navy destroyer practices electronic warfare with allied ships after Taiwan Strait incident

It seems to me that EW is one of the most important military capabilities necessary for future warfare.

Navy destroyer practices electronic warfare with allied ships after Taiwan Strait incident

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · June 7, 2023

The guided-missile destroyer USS Chung-Hoon, top, sails in the South China Sea alongside the Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal, May 30, 2023. (Andre Richard/U.S. Navy)

A U.S. Navy guided-missile destroyer joined forces with Japanese, Australian and Canadian warships for a three-day exercise that began the same day it encountered an aggressive Chinese vessel in the Taiwan Strait.

The USS Chung-Hoon — alongside the Canadian frigate HMCS Montreal, Japanese destroyer Shiranui and Australian frigate HMAS Anzac — kicked off Exercise Noble Wolf on Saturday in the East China Sea, north of the strait, according to a Tuesday news release from the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force.

Earlier that day, the Chung-Hoon and the Montreal carried out a “freedom-of-navigation operation” in the Taiwan Strait, according to the Navy. During the trip, a Chinese guided-missile destroyer overtook the allied ships and cut across the Chung-Hoon’s path in an “unsafe manner,” according to a U.S. 7th Fleet video posted Sunday.

The transit was not part of Noble Wolf, according to Task Force 71 spokesman Lt. Joseph Keiley.

"USS Chung-Hoon sailing alongside maritime forces from Australia, Canada, and Japan was a great success in providing the opportunity to increase interoperability and work towards common goals,” he told Stars and Stripes by email Wednesday. The military uses “interoperability” to describe the ability to use another country’s training methods and military equipment.

Noble Wolf included surface surveillance, coordination and electronic warfare drills to “strengthen skills in maritime operations,” Keiley said, and the exercise was “part of the range of joint and multinational events taking place during Large-Scale Global Exercise 2023.”

The Chung-Hoon’s transit of the Taiwan Strait also coincided with the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, where Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Washington would not “flinch in the face of bullying or coercion” from China and would continue to operate in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.

“Our policy is constant and firm. It has held true across U.S. administrations. And we will continue to categorically oppose unilateral changes to the status quo from either side,” he said. “I’d also highlight that conflict is neither imminent or inevitable. Deterrence is strong today — and it’s our job to keep it that way.”

A spokesman for China’s Eastern Theater Command, Army Senior Col. Shi Yi, “slammed” the two ships’ transit and said their respective countries have been “maliciously undermining regional peace and stability and sending wrong signals to the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces,” according to a Saturday news release from the official China Military Online website.

China considers Taiwan, a functionally independent democracy, a breakaway territory that must be reunified with the mainland, by force if necessary. Beijing routinely condemns the U.S. and its allies for operations within the 110-mile-wide strait that separates the two.

On Tuesday, a day after Noble Wolf concluded, China and Russia conducted a scheduled “joint air strategic patrol” of the East China Sea and Sea of Japan, according to a Tuesday news release from China’s Defense Ministry.

Details of the operation were not discussed in the release.

Japan and South Korea, however, scrambled fighter jets in response to Chinese fighter jets and bombers operating in the region as part of the exercise, Reuters reported Wednesday.

Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson covers the U.S. Navy and other services from Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Originally from Knoxville, Tenn., he holds a journalism degree from the University of North Florida. He previously covered crime and the military in Key West, Fla., and business in Jacksonville, Fla.

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · June 7, 2023

9. Naval Mines Have a Place in Great Power Conflict

​Excerpt:

The war in Ukraine and the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the impact a motivated and resourceful resistance can have against a modern occupier—particularly if supported by an outside power. Naval mines and mine warfare have application in resistance operations, and U.S. naval forces should develop a strategy for their employment by resistance elements fighting near-peer adversaries such as Russia or China. Furthermore, additive manufacturing may allow indigenous forces to potentially manufacture naval mines in occupied territories to use against aggressors. Moreover, the use of naval mines by resistance elements should be considered as a means to engage in maritime trade warfare on a global scale, particularly against Chinese commercial maritime assets to degrade the communist state’s ability to compete against the U.S. and its allies in a long-running major war. Finally, U.S. naval lawyers should clarify any unresolved issues regarding the conduct of mine warfare by irregular forces. Naval mines are some of the oldest weapons still in use, but with modern technology and doctrine, they have continued relevance and utility for irregular forces in great power conflict.​

Naval Mines Have a Place in Great Power Conflict

Naval Mine Warfare Essay Contest—Third Prize

Sponsored by the Mine Warfare Association

By Christopher Booth

June 2023 Proceedings Vol. 149/6/1,444

usni.org · June 8, 2023

Ukrainian resistance cells are demonstrating the value irregular warfare operations can have even in modern high-intensity conflict. Stories of heroic guerrilla actions are coming to light as Vladimir Putin’s forces have withdrawn from occupied territories. Watermen, pensioners, and even a wealthy couple on a yacht stranded by the war served a vital function in liberating the port city of Kherson on the Black Sea Coast. In a future conflict, allied resistance cells could be used to emplace mines to blunt enemy amphibious operations, limit logistical resupply, and target enemy commerce.

Arithmetic on the Frontier

Insurgents count on Rudyard Kipling’s “Arithmetic on the Frontier”—“Two thousand pounds of education // Drops to a ten-rupee jezail”—to establish a loss exchange ratio that the aggressor find unsustainable. The sinking of Russia’s flagship Moskva was not only the loss of a $750 million warship and much of her crew, but also a blow to Moscow’s morale and prestige. The two Neptune missiles that sunk her cost orders of magnitude less than the cruiser. In 1988, the USS Samuel B. Roberts (FFG-58) struck an Iranian mine and suffered catastrophic damage, with repair costs exceeding $90 million. Three years later, the USS Tripoli (LPH-10) and Princeton (CG-59) were severely damaged on the same day during the Gulf War. The Tripoli lay dead in the water for hours, a hole blasted in her hull by a $500 contact mine.

The war in Ukraine demonstrates that the application of modern technology by resolute defenders can lead to drawn-out attritional warfare. Naval mines can not only deny an enemy access and discourage amphibious operations, but also support resistance strategies such as the “indigestible hedgehog”—in which frontline hedgehog states demonstrate their own defensive capabilities as “part of an active information campaign and as a policy tool,” demonstrating that the prospective costs of occupation outweigh any gains an aggressor might hope to achieve. This model could have utility for the Baltics, Scandinavia, and Taiwan, for example. Mines could play an offensive role in a strategy focused on maritime trade warfare in the event of conflict with China. China is dependent on overseas shipborne transport for energy, food, and critical minerals, and these supplies could be threatened by naval mines.

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps should prepare for the use of mines in great power conflict. First, they should develop plans to assist allied countries develop resistance cells and irregular forces in employing mines, as part of the larger Resistance Operating Concept developed by U.S. Special Operations Command. Second, the Sea Services should invest in infrastructure and equipment which could be forward deployed, to allow fabricating of mines in wartime through additive manufacturing. Finally, the U.S. should develop doctrine for the offensive use of mines by allied forces in irregular warfare; and as a tool to conduct Maritime Trade Warfare to deny adversaries access to critical overseas resources in a global great power conflict.

Resistance Planning

U.S. special operations forces are at the vanguard of helping partner nations develop irregular warfare capabilities as set out in the Resistance Operating Concept (ROC). Some of the partisan units now fighting in Ukraine organized spontaneously, but others were set up by Ukrainian special forces or intelligence services subsequent to the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea—in part based on training provided by U.S. forces. Undoubtedly, Naval Special Warfare and Marine Special Operations Command units will be part of the effort. However, conventional Marines and sailors can play a role in developing partner capabilities by providing equipment and training on the employment of naval mines.

Improvised explosive devices were the default tool of the Taliban, Iraqi Shi’a militia, and the Islamic State fighting forces. Two of these insurgencies benefited from state sponsorship: The Taliban were aided by the military/intelligence services of Iran, Pakistan, Russia, and China; and Iraqi militants remain funded and advised by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—Qods Force (IRGC-QF). The IRGC-QF provided particularly lethal assistance to anti-coalition forces using explosively formed penetrators, which they continue to stockpile for use by Shi’a insurgent cells in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Turnabout is fair play, and naval mines could be used by resistance forces in the littorals against Chinese, Russian, Iranian, or other hostile actors.

A notable historic example of a sea-based insurgent element of a larger resistance organization is the Sea Tigers—the maritime arm of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which fought for an independent Tamil state in Sri Lanka from 1976 to 2009. The Sea Tigers invested significant effort in developing attack capabilities and munitions—including mines constructed from household goods—to deploy against government forces. Nation-states can also adopt a naval insurgency approach. For example, some scholars recommend that South Korea focus on “sea insurgency” both offensively and defensively to counter potential North Korean asymmetric naval warfare.

The United States needs to plan for supporting resistance efforts ranging from assisting Taiwan in countering a Chinese invasion to aiding the Baltic States in a future conflict with Russia or multiple allied countries in a broader Pacific conflict. Mines emplaced by local resistance elements could help blunt enemy amphibious landings, and choke seaborne supply-lines supporting an enemy offensive. Naval mines should play a role in these efforts.

Additive Manufacturing

One criticism of the ROC is that it does not take into account the need for “purpose-built equipment and weapons.” Modern insurgents need weapons that can easily be produced near the front, as resupply in high-intensity conflict may become extremely challenging. The United States could preposition mines, but this would require significant warehouse space with attendant security and hardened facilities, and these could become known sites for the enemy to target.

Additive manufacturing presents an alternative. The democratization of this type of equipment has changed it from a tool for large industry to an affordable system for consumers. Additive manufacturing could provide a production capability and allow for a smaller footprint in the event that war becomes inevitable or once underway. Logistics are likely to be contested in any great power conflict, and new methods such as pre-staged, covert “sleeper cell logistics” could become common. The U.S. Army has already developed a mobile expeditionary production system that fits five 3D printers in a small trailer. Mines are not particularly complex and could be constructed by relying largely on 3D printing. While it is not yet possible to 3D print explosives, research is ongoing. Storing explosive cores would require less room than entire mines. American-provided explosive materials could be cached. In addition, allies might issue military-grade explosives, or guerrillas could fabricate them locally.

U.S. forces need not be the ones producing naval mines in theater. The continued proliferation of 3D printing may allow civilian resistance groups to fabricate their own. Ukrainians using 3D printers have already manufactured parts that allow them to drop explosives on Russian forces from commercial drones; plans circulate online for home-made “ghost guns” such as the FGC-9 using 3D fabrication; and retired U.S. Army Major John Spencer published the widely disseminated “Mini Manual for the Urban Defender” as a primer for civilians after Putin’s invasion. Similarly, U.S. forces could consider judicious sharing of design files for the fabrication of mines electronically at the outset of a future conflict.

Finally, additive manufacturing may be a particularly useful method for constructing naval mines, as non-metallic mines have become increasingly common. It was two Italian-made Manta mines (a nonmetallic mine made with a glass-reinforced plastic case) that crippled the Princeton in 1991. Iran is also currently producing “nonmagnetic, free floating, and remote-controlled mines.”

Offensive Mining for Maritime Trade Warfare

In a protracted global conflict, the United States may have to pursue a strategy of exhausting its enemy and reducing its ability to continue to wage war. Economic warfare would therefore likely become an important means of war. World War II is instructive in this regard. As part of the war in the Pacific, the Navy pursued a maritime trade warfare campaign, starving the Japanese war machine at home and choking off supplies to many of its Pacific outposts. All major combatants in World War II used naval mines to restrict access to sea as well as blockade seaports. Mines accounted for the sinking of 650 Allied vessels and 1,100 Axis ships, while damaging hundreds more—sinking or damaging more shipping than any other weapon.

China is highly dependent on the importation of natural resources—it is now the world’s largest importer of oil and gas—frequently transported by unarmed merchant ships from Africa, Latin America, and the Persian Gulf. Rand Corporation analysts predict that a war between the United States and China would be lengthy, and China’s dependence on overseas trade, especially energy resources, would represent a center of gravity. Military strategist and retired Marine Colonel T. X. Hammes writes that great power conflicts over the past 200 years have lasted years rather than months. As a result, he has proposed a strategy of “Offshore Control” to strangle Chinese exports as well as interdicting its imports to lead to economic exhaustion, allowing the communist leadership to end the conflict while saving face by being able to state that they did not lose militarily.

The U.S. Sea Services could rely on foreign proxies (or even auxiliary troops) as force multipliers, using mines offensively against the adversary’s commerce. Resistance forces in a global conflict could strike wherever and whenever they had capabilities. Not only could resistance units blockade harbors, but in some cases, they also could sabotage specific enemy vessels, port facilities, and infrastructure.

The Tamil Sea Tigers carried out such an approach in their long-running independence struggle. Sea Tiger engineers designed and built mines that were employed against government naval vessels and that damaged Sri Lankan maritime commerce. Similarly, in a little remembered incident during the Vietnam War in May 1964, Viet Cong saboteurs attached explosives to the USNS Card (CVE-11) as she lay anchored in Saigon harbor. In an early morning attack, the bombs detonated and sank the escort carrier—the last U.S. carrier lost to enemy action.

Legal Framework

The use of mines by resistance forces is lawful. It is generally accepted that naval warfare is governed by the 1907 Hague Conventions and the 1995 San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea—which allow the use of naval mines subject to certain restrictions. Allied military forces conducting resistance operations would be subject to this legal framework. There is extensive debate regarding whether irregular forces are lawful combatants, though noted maritime scholar and mine warfare expert Scott Truver suggests that mining by nonstate actors during armed conflict is permissible.

U.S. Navy lawyers should clarify aspects of the recently revised The Commander’s Handbook on the Law of Naval Operations (NWP 1-14M), which states that mines cannot be set solely to intercept commercial shipping, but that they can be used for strategic blockade. NWP 1-14M also allows the targeting of enemy commercial shipping if engaged in a “war sustaining or war supporting role.”

For offensive and defensive lawfare purposes, JAGs should develop guidance for U.S. forces advising and supporting irregular forces in employing naval mines.

Looking Forward

The war in Ukraine and the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the impact a motivated and resourceful resistance can have against a modern occupier—particularly if supported by an outside power. Naval mines and mine warfare have application in resistance operations, and U.S. naval forces should develop a strategy for their employment by resistance elements fighting near-peer adversaries such as Russia or China. Furthermore, additive manufacturing may allow indigenous forces to potentially manufacture naval mines in occupied territories to use against aggressors. Moreover, the use of naval mines by resistance elements should be considered as a means to engage in maritime trade warfare on a global scale, particularly against Chinese commercial maritime assets to degrade the communist state’s ability to compete against the U.S. and its allies in a long-running major war. Finally, U.S. naval lawyers should clarify any unresolved issues regarding the conduct of mine warfare by irregular forces. Naval mines are some of the oldest weapons still in use, but with modern technology and doctrine, they have continued relevance and utility for irregular forces in great power conflict.

usni.org · June 8, 2023

10. US Sends 2,000 Guard Troops, 100 Aircraft to Unprecedented NATO Exercise Aimed to Deter Russia

Excerpts:

“This is an exercise that would be absolutely impressive to anybody who’s watching, and we don’t make anybody watch it,” U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann said.

“It will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the agility and the swiftness of our allied force in NATO as a first responder,” she told reporters in Berlin.

“I would be pretty surprised if any world leader was not taking note of what this shows in terms of the spirit of this alliance, which means the strength of this alliance," Gutmann said.

US Sends 2,000 Guard Troops, 100 Aircraft to Unprecedented NATO Exercise Aimed to Deter Russia

www-military-com.cdn.ampproject.org

BERLIN — Germany is preparing to host the biggest air deployment exercise in NATO's history, a show of force intended to impress allies and potential adversaries such as Russia, German and American officials said Wednesday.

The Air Defender 23 exercise starting next week will see 10,000 participants and 250 aircraft from 25 nations respond to a simulated attack on a NATO member country. The United States alone is sending 2,000 U.S. Air National Guard personnel and about 100 aircraft to take part in the June 12-23 training maneuvers.

“This is an exercise that would be absolutely impressive to anybody who’s watching, and we don’t make anybody watch it,” U.S. Ambassador to Germany Amy Gutmann said.

“It will demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt the agility and the swiftness of our allied force in NATO as a first responder,” she told reporters in Berlin.

“I would be pretty surprised if any world leader was not taking note of what this shows in terms of the spirit of this alliance, which means the strength of this alliance," Gutmann said.

"And that includes Mr. Putin,” she added, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While the drill was planned for several years, Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 ear has jolted NATO into preparing in earnest for the possibility of an attack on its territory. Sweden, which is hoping to join the alliance, and Japan are also taking part in the exercise.

“We are showing that NATO territory is our red line, that we are prepared to defend every centimeter of this territory,” said Lt. Gen. Ingo Gerhartz of the German air force, which is coordinating the exercise. “But we won't, for example, conduct any flights toward Kalinigrad. So this is intended to be defensive.”

Kalinigrad is a Russian exclave located on the Baltic Sea between Poland and Lithuania.

Lt. Gen. Michael A. Loh, director of the U.S. Air National Guard, said the exercise goes beyond deterrence.

“It's about the readiness of our force. It’s about coordination, not just within NATO, but with our other allies and partners outside of NATO,” he said.

Loh said the exercise would be an opportunity for younger U.S. airmen, many of whom have mainly gotten experience serving in the Middle East, to build relationships with allies in Europe and prepare for a different military scenario.

“So this is about now establishing what it means to go against a great power, in a great power competition,” he said.

Authorities have said the drill will cause some disruption to civilian flights in Europe during the period.

www-military-com.cdn.ampproject.org

11. Blinken’s long-delayed Beijing trip now in planning for next week

Excerpts:

One of the goals of a trip to Beijing earlier this week by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and National Security Council senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran “was to make sure the lines of communication remain open and to talk about the potential for future visits, higher-level visits,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Tuesday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have publicly rebuffed Biden administration outreach in recent weeks citing everything from U.S. export restrictions on high tech semiconductors, ongoing arms sales to Taiwan and the Biden administration’s rallying G-7 member countries last month to work on “de-risking and diversifying” their economies to rely less on China.

Blinken’s long-delayed Beijing trip now in planning for next week

By PHELIM KINE and DOUG PALMER

06/08/2023 06:52 PM EDT

Politico

Blinken’s visit coincides with uproar over reports of Beijing’s push to establish a spy base in Cuba.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is on track to arrive in Beijing following his current trip to the Middle East. | Ahmed Yosri/AP Photo

06/08/2023 06:52 PM EDT

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is planning to travel to Beijing as soon as next week, two people familiar with the scheduling told POLITICO.

The trip — for which the State Department is still finalizing details — will mark the highest-level visit of a U.S. official to China since that of then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in 2018.

Blinken is on track to arrive in Beijing following his current trip to the Middle East, one of the two people said. Both were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about sensitive diplomatic travel.

The Secretary of State is in Saudi Arabia this week for multiple meetings, including a gathering of countries battling the Islamic State terrorist group.

Asked for comment about the China plans, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said we “don’t have any travel to announce for the Secretary.” The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not confirm Blinken’s upcoming China visit. Spokesperson Liu Pengyu said only, “China is open to having dialogue with the United States.”

Blinken can expect sharp criticism from GOP lawmakers for traveling to China in the wake of reports on Thursday that Beijing is in talks with Cuba to establish a foothold there to spy on the United States. Both the U.S and Cuban governments have denied those allegations.

The Biden administration has been working to renew high-level diplomatic and military communication following a near breakdown over the Chinese spy balloon incident in February. Blinken had originally been scheduled to visit China few days later and postponed because of the rancor over the balloon.

One of the goals of a trip to Beijing earlier this week by Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and National Security Council senior director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran “was to make sure the lines of communication remain open and to talk about the potential for future visits, higher-level visits,” National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said on Tuesday.

Chinese Foreign Ministry officials have publicly rebuffed Biden administration outreach in recent weeks citing everything from U.S. export restrictions on high tech semiconductors, ongoing arms sales to Taiwan and the Biden administration’s rallying G-7 member countries last month to work on “de-risking and diversifying” their economies to rely less on China.

Last month, President Joe Biden predicted a “thaw” in U.S.-China relations. Within days, Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao had flown to the U.S. for meetings with Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. But Beijing’s denial of a request by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with his counterpart Li Shangfu at the Shangri La Dialogue defense summit in Singapore suggested that bilateral ties remained tenuous.

Nahal Toosi contributed to this report.

POLITICO

Politico

12. Pentagon dismisses WSJ report on China spy station in Cuba

Reading the excerpt between the lines: So what kind of facility is China building there so we can rule it out as a "spy station?"

Excerpt:

"I can tell you based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate, that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing a new type of spy station," said Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder.

Pentagon dismisses WSJ report on China spy station in Cuba

Reuters · by Reuters

WASHINGTON, June 8 (Reuters) - The Pentagon on Thursday dismissed a report in the Wall Street Journal about Chinese plans to set up an electronic eavesdropping facility in Cuba, saying it was not aware of any such effort and characterizing the report as "inaccurate."

"I can tell you based on the information that we have, that that is not accurate, that we are not aware of China and Cuba developing a new type of spy station," said Pentagon spokesperson Brigadier General Patrick Ryder.

"In terms of that particular report, no, it's not accurate."

Reporting by Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Reuters · by Reuters

13. Kherson is hit by Russian shelling hours after a Zelensky visit.

​No coincidence here.​

Kherson is hit by Russian shelling hours after a Zelensky visit.

Marc SantoraMaria Varenikova

By Marc Santora and Maria Varenikova

Published June 8, 2023

Updated June 9, 2023, 4:50 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Maria Varenikova · June 8, 2023

LIVE See more updates: Russia-Ukraine War

June 8, 2023, 12:00 p.m. ET

Ukraine’s interior ministry said that eight people were injured in an attack near an evacuation point where medics, emergency workers and rescue teams have been gathering.

An explosion in a flooded area of Kherson, Ukraine, on Thursday. Ukrainian officials accused Russian forces of shelling several locations in the city.Credit...Reuters

By Marc Santora and

• June 8, 2023, 11:11 a.m. ET

Russian forces shelled the flood-stricken city of Kherson on Thursday, striking close to an evacuation point, only hours after President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the city to witness the aftermath of the destruction of a dam on the Dnipro River earlier this week.

Hundreds of people who were gathered near an evacuation point at Ship Square, in the heart of the city, scrambled for cover when explosions rang out, witnesses said, describing multiple strikes in and around the square.

Volunteers, medics, emergency workers and rescue teams involved in coordinating aid efforts have been meeting on higher ground near the square, which is itself flooded but is being used as an evacuation point because it is a known landmark.

Ukraine’s Interior Ministry said that eight people were injured in the shelling near Ship Square, including two employees of the State Emergency Service and a police officer. “Information about the dead has not yet been received,” it added.

The explosions hit at around 2 p.m. local time. “Leave, leave,” one man shouted, according to a witness, and people tried to find shelter. A young man held a bandage on the wounded head of an elderly man, blood dripping down his arm as he tried to offer words of comfort, witnesses said.

Serhiy Ludensky, a volunteer from an animal care center, was on a boat near Ship Square when the shelling hit a building close by, he said. He said he could hear people screaming. “There was nowhere to hide,” he said. The people on the boat managed to break down the door of a flooded dormitory to wait for the explosions to stop.

It was one of several areas in the city of Kherson targeted by the Russian forces on Thursday, according to Ukrainian officials and witnesses.

A New York Times photographer was on a boat in the flooded Korabel neighborhood of the city when he saw at least two waves of shelling hit nearby, around 10 minutes apart. The second attack hit a barge near a bridge that links the island neighborhood with the mainland.

Russia and Ukraine have accused each other’s forces of shelling areas in the Kherson region as rescue efforts entered a third day on Thursday.

Evacuees jumped behind a wall for cover after shelling hit a nearby location in Kherson, Ukraine, on Thursday.Credit...Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

Brendan Hoffman contributed reporting.

Marc Santora has been reporting from Ukraine since the beginning of the war with Russia. He was previously based in London as an international news editor focused on breaking news events and earlier the bureau chief for East and Central Europe, based in Warsaw. He has also reported extensively from Iraq and Africa. @MarcSantoraNYT

The New York Times · by Maria Varenikova · June 8, 2023

14. Bad for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: Drone Attacks in Russia Underscore Broader Risks

Ukraine must maintain the moral high ground.

Conclusion:

While it may be uncomfortable to question belligerents fighting a just war in self-defense – particularly when Ukrainian soldiers have shown a far greater respect for the law than their Russian counterparts – failing to do so risks letting such conduct slide into more egregious behavior.

Bad for the Goose, Bad for the Gander: Drone Attacks in Russia Underscore Broader Risks

justsecurity.org · by Brianna Rosen · June 8, 2023

June 8, 2023

“What do ordinary people do when drones with explosives crash into their windows?”

This is the question that civil society groups have been asking for decades, pointing to civilian harm resulting from U.S. drone strikes in the Middle East. It is also the question now posed by Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the U.S.-sanctioned paramilitary Wagner Group, about Ukrainian drone strikes in Moscow.

Drones have been used by both sides throughout the Russia-Ukraine War, representing an uptick in drone use in conventional conflicts. In May, Russia accused Ukraine of launching a series of drone strikes in its territory, including attacks targeting President Vladimir Putin’s residence and apartment buildings in a neighborhood in Moscow. The latter strikes, which occurred on May 30, reportedly targeted the homes of senior Russian intelligence officials for the first time in the war.

Ukraine has denied any direct involvement in the attacks. As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow. We fight on our territory. We are defending our villages and cities.”

But as Kyiv’s Spring counteroffensive begins, recent reports suggest a network of pro-Ukrainian agents and sympathizers may be responsible for the attacks inside Russia, raising thorny legal and policy questions.

The Biden administration has repeatedly stated it does not want U.S.-provided weapons, including drones, to be used in attacks inside of Russia. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby reiterated this stance on May 31, affirming that the U.S. government “communicated privately to the Ukrainians, as recently as last week or so, that we don’t want to see U.S.-supplied equipment used to strike inside Russia, that we don’t support attacks inside of Russia and that we are not going to change our policy about not enabling or encouraging those attacks.”

Allied governments in Europe have raised similar concerns, fearing that such attacks could lead to broader escalation and nuclear brinkmanship.

Beyond the risk of escalation, the recent attacks underscore another risk that critics of the U.S. drone program have long feared – that pervasive drone use against suspected terrorist targets in civilian areas will set troubling precedents for allies and adversaries to follow.

Indeed, the targeting of Russian officials who likely do not have a combat role and are not in the military chain of command raises the question of whether states increasingly are adopting the more elastic U.S. military’s definition of “direct participation of hostilities,” where civilians lose their immunity from attack through “effectively and substantially contribut[ing] to an adversary’s ability to conduct or sustain combat operations” (in the words of the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual).

As the Biden administration meets with Ukrainian counterparts to discuss these incidents, senior administration officials and members of Congress should ask and be satisfied with answers to the following questions:

1. How are individual targets selected and vetted for drone strikes inside of Russian territory?
2. What is the approval process for authorizing such strikes? Do civilian or military commanders approve each strike or is this authority delegated to operatives?
3. Are lawyers in the loop? How so exactly? Do such strikes require their legal approval? What exactly are the legal standards used to define legitimate targets, to define and prohibit indiscriminate attacks, and so forth?
4. If pro-Ukrainian operatives are conducting drone strikes in civilian areas, what procedures are in place to ensure compliance with International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law?
5. What legal and policy framework is Ukraine using for accepting responsibility for actions conducted by pro-Ukrainian forces? What legal and policy framework is the United States using for deciding whether to attribute responsibility to Ukraine for actions conducted by pro-Ukrainian forces?
6. What training do pro-Ukrainian operatives receive and how much latitude do they have in terms of determining the targets, location, and timing of strikes?
7. Are post-strike assessments conducted to evaluate the accuracy and efficacy of drone strikes conducted in densely-populated civilian areas? What legal and policy standards are used to make those assessments? What is the burden of proof for initial assessments and for final conclusions? Who conducts such assessments?
8. Does Ukraine rely on any U.S. or allied-provided weapons, intelligence, or logistical support to conduct operations inside of Russia?
9. Does Ukraine rely on intelligence from joint collection streams with other states in planning or conducting such attacks?
10. How can Ukraine guarantee that U.S. weapons or intelligence will not be used in such operations when doing so would violate U.S. policies or laws?

***

While it may be uncomfortable to question belligerents fighting a just war in self-defense – particularly when Ukrainian soldiers have shown a far greater respect for the law than their Russian counterparts – failing to do so risks letting such conduct slide into more egregious behavior.

Brianna Rosen

Brianna Rosen (@rosen_br) is a Senior Fellow at Just Security and a Visiting Fellow of Practice at the Oxford Institute of Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. She previously served for a decade in the U.S. government, including at the White House National Security Council and Office of the Vice President.

Image: A “No Drone Zone” sign sits in the Zaryadye park, a short distance from the Kremlin, prohibiting unmanned aerial vehicles flying over central Moscow (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images).

justsecurity.org · by Brianna Rosen · June 8, 2023

15. Cuba Spy Station Brings China Rivalry to America’s Doorstep

Despite Pentagon denials, the Wall Street Journal continues to report on this China-Cuba information.

Excerpts:

More important, the facility roots China in a region of economic and geopolitical importance, broadens the playing field as it jostles Washington for influence and turns the tables on an enduring sore point for Beijing—U.S. spying off Chinese shores.

“The symbolism is much bigger,” said Michael Mazarr, an international security specialist at the Rand Corp. “The days of the United States thinking of the China challenge as one limited to the Indo-Pacific, with the U.S. being the one to encroach on the other’s region in security terms, those days are over.”

Beijing has for decades decried what it sees as U.S. intrusiveness for flying surveillance aircraft and sailing military survey vessels and other warships near Chinese shores or through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, areas China sees as vital for its security. 

...

Unlike the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed North America before it was shot down early this year, the Biden White House and preceding administrations have appeared to accept some Chinese espionage within international norms. Chinese surveillance vessels, for example, have sailed near large-scale U.S. naval exercises with allies off Hawaii.

China’s sole full-fledged overseas military base, in the Horn of Africa country of Djibouti, started off small then expanded. Beijing is looking to set up other bases, including as far afield as the Atlantic Coast of Africa, as the People’s Liberation Army aims to secure China’s far-flung economic interests.

A port-access agreement with Solomon Islands appears limited, though it could easily be enlarged to become a naval base, according to military affairs specialists.

“I’m sure the Chinese would like to have somewhere that they could operate in the Western Hemisphere reliably,” said Zack Cooper, a China security specialist with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “And Cuba is probably more likely to be that place than anywhere else.”

Cuba Spy Station Brings China Rivalry to America’s Doorstep

Planned listening post 100 miles off Florida will turn tables on sore point for Beijing—U.S. spying off Chinese shores

By Charles HutzlerFollow

 and Kejal VyasFollow

June 9, 2023 12:01 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuba-spy-station-brings-china-rivalry-to-americas-doorstep-21c86073?mod=hp_lead_pos1

China’s plan for an eavesdropping station in Cuba serves as a marker for Beijing’s global power ambitions, planting its spiraling rivalry with the U.S. on America’s doorstep.

The listening post, which will be 100 miles off Florida, would potentially give the Chinese military capabilities to monitor communications across a wide stretch of the southern U.S. 

More important, the facility roots China in a region of economic and geopolitical importance, broadens the playing field as it jostles Washington for influence and turns the tables on an enduring sore point for Beijing—U.S. spying off Chinese shores.

“The symbolism is much bigger,” said Michael Mazarr, an international security specialist at the Rand Corp. “The days of the United States thinking of the China challenge as one limited to the Indo-Pacific, with the U.S. being the one to encroach on the other’s region in security terms, those days are over.”

Beijing has for decades decried what it sees as U.S. intrusiveness for flying surveillance aircraft and sailing military survey vessels and other warships near Chinese shores or through the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea, areas China sees as vital for its security. 

One of China’s warships crossed paths with a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait earlier in June. PHOTO: GLOBAL NEWS/VIA REUTERS

China’s defense minister this past weekend blamed the U.S. for recent close encounters between their militaries and urged Washington to retreat. “What’s the point of going there?” asked Gen. Li Shangfu at a regional security conference in Singapore. “In China we always say, ‘Mind your own business.’”

While a Cuba eavesdropping facility will give Beijing the opportunity to engage in tit-for-tat, it is unlikely meant as a bargaining chip. The U.S. isn’t likely to pull back military deployments from China’s periphery, given Washington’s concerns about Beijing’s more assertive posture and American security commitments to allies from Japan to Australia.

Rather, the Cuba post is a sign that China now sees its struggle with the U.S. as global and that it must operate around the world to fend off Washington and protect Chinese interests. China has set up facilities that could service its navy in Asia and the Pacific and is on a global search for basing sites.

China has for many years looked to Cuba, with its Communist government, as a possible entry point to expand influence in Latin America and edge the U.S. aside in a region Washington long considered an American preserve. The Soviet Union, and later Russia, for decades operated a monitoring facility near Havana, setting a precedent. So, security specialists said, China’s listening post, while angering Washington, isn’t apt to cross U.S. red lines.

China over the last 20 years has become an economic player in Latin America, increasing trade and investment in agriculture, energy, mining and other sectors. It has become the top trading partner for many countries in the region, among them Brazil, Argentina and Chile, acquiring political influence along the way. 

The engagement has given Chinese companies access to copper, oil, soybeans and other resources that Beijing deems critical to grow the Chinese economy and underpin widening influence. 

In recent years, the focus has broadened to include materials critical to energy-saving technologies; a Chinese consortium in January won a bid to develop lithium in Bolivia, home to the world’s largest resources of the metal, which is a component of batteries for electric vehicles. 

A Russian listening station outside Havana in 2001. PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

“China’s engagement in Latin America is about China getting what China needs for its own prosperity,” said R. Evan Ellis, a professor at the U.S. Army War College who tracks Beijing’s relations in the region. In the longer term, Ellis said, “It’s about China preparing for a world where the U.S. or others may meddle in their attempts to do so.” 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said that the U.S. is out to contain China as it rises to become a global peer.

At the weekend gathering where Li spoke, he and other Chinese officials warned that the U.S. is attempting to bring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization into Asia to serve as a check on China. With that in mind, according to Chinese officials and foreign-policy specialists, Xi has placed a priority on preparing the Chinese economy to withstand the kind of sanctions and economic pressure the U.S. and its NATO allies have placed on Russia over its war on Ukraine.

The Biden administration has worked assiduously to bolster defense cooperation with allies in China’s region. Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner on Thursday touted the gains the U.S. has made in expanding access to military facilities and working with countries such as Japan, Australia, India and the Philippines, describing those relationships as “in overdrive.”

“There’s just a very strong demand signal right now for the United States to be playing its traditional stabilizing role,” Mr. Ratner said at a discussion at the Center for New American Security, a Washington think tank. “It’s no secret that China’s assertiveness and coercion have really underscored the importance of working together.”

With Beijing planning the eavesdropping facility in Cuba, the U.S. is likely to try to make sure that China’s military presence doesn’t increase. Given economic sanctions and strained ties, the U.S. would likely have to turn to European and Latin American allies to exert pressure on Havana, if Washington isn’t prepared to offer inducements, such as boosting tourism to Cuba.

Unlike the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon that traversed North America before it was shot down early this year, the Biden White House and preceding administrations have appeared to accept some Chinese espionage within international norms. Chinese surveillance vessels, for example, have sailed near large-scale U.S. naval exercises with allies off Hawaii.

China’s sole full-fledged overseas military base, in the Horn of Africa country of Djibouti, started off small then expanded. Beijing is looking to set up other bases, including as far afield as the Atlantic Coast of Africa, as the People’s Liberation Army aims to secure China’s far-flung economic interests.

A port-access agreement with Solomon Islands appears limited, though it could easily be enlarged to become a naval base, according to military affairs specialists.

“I’m sure the Chinese would like to have somewhere that they could operate in the Western Hemisphere reliably,” said Zack Cooper, a China security specialist with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. “And Cuba is probably more likely to be that place than anywhere else.”

Ryan Dube contributed to this article.

Write to Charles Hutzler at charles.hutzler@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

16. China Sets Up a Spy Shop in Cuba

it will be interesting to learn how this information was leaked, by whom, and for what purpose? The obvious – someone with a hardline China view wants to expose China's malign activities to undermine perceived US diplomatic efforts that could be perceived as "begging" for meetings when China is executing hostile actions against the US. But of course that is just speculation on my part. Enquiring minds want to know who is behind the leak of information.

Excerpt:

White House spokesman John Kirby called the Journal’s reporting “not accurate,” details unknown. But the report is inconvenient for an Administration that is desperately seeking a thaw in U.S.-China relations. Previous overtures were scuttled after a Chinese spy balloon floated across the continental U.S.

China Sets Up a Spy Shop in Cuba

Beijing gets a new base for eavesdropping on the U.S. doorstep.

By The Editorial BoardFollow

June 8, 2023 6:37 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-cuba-spy-base-u-s-military-biden-administration-xi-jinping-b938268f?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

President Biden is all but begging China for better relations, but President Xi Jinping is playing hard to get. The latest evidence is the Journal story Thursday that China is setting up a spy shop in Cuba.

The Journal says Beijing will pay Cuba billions of dollars to set up a spy outpost some 100 miles from the U.S. The ostensible purpose is signals intelligence—sucking up communications. Florida is home to U.S. military ranges and bases, including nearby in Key West.

The news is a reminder that China’s ambitions aren’t confined to the Pacific. Beijing aims to be a global power and is playing on every continent. A military base in Djibouti, a space research facility in Argentina, a secret police station in New York—all are part of its power projection strategy.

The Cuban spy outpost also ought to crush illusions that the U.S. can cede China a sphere of influence in the Pacific without consequence. Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu chided the U.S. last weekend to “mind your own business,” even as Beijing is setting up an espionage operation in America’s backyard.

Chairman Xi and comrades pretend they’re provoked by America’s presence in the Pacific or U.S. friendship with Taiwan. This is merely an excuse for their plans to replace Western global order with their authoritarian model. Much of the world, and even some Americans, fall for this false moral equivalence.

White House spokesman John Kirby called the Journal’s reporting “not accurate,” details unknown. But the report is inconvenient for an Administration that is desperately seeking a thaw in U.S.-China relations. Previous overtures were scuttled after a Chinese spy balloon floated across the continental U.S.

That provocation was met with no U.S. response, and Mr. Biden recently called it a “silly balloon” that interrupted his diplomacy. There have since been more silly incidents, including a Chinese warship harassing a U.S. Navy destroyer in the Taiwan Strait over the weekend. Now comes the silly spy base.

Will China or Cuba face any consequences for their anti-American collaboration? Few lines have aged as poorly as Barack Obama’s Havana speech in 2016 that he’d come “to bury the last remnant of the Cold War in the Americas.” The Biden Team can revisit eased travel restrictions and other measures that have been life support for the island’s regime.

As for China, Mr. Biden can strengthen his diplomatic hand by shoring up U.S. hard power. Ask Congress for more ships and munitions. Move more forces to the Pacific. Suspend the climate-change envoys that put the U.S. in a beseeching position to China. It’s embarrassing, and dangerous, to court an adversary that answers each call to engage with another hostile act.

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

0:16

Paused

0:11

/

3:48

TAP FOR SOUND

Review and Outlook: Beijing’s war hawks are making it harder to improve relations with the U.S. Images: AFP/Getty Images/Global News Composite: Mark Kelly

Copyright ©2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the June 9, 2023, print edition as 'China Sets Up a Spy Shop in Cuba'.

​17. Drone footage of collapsed Ukrainian dam counters Russian narrative

​

Drone footage of collapsed Ukrainian dam counters Russian narrative

militarytimes.com · by The Associated Press · June 8, 2023

KHERSON, Ukraine — Exclusive drone footage of the collapsed Ukrainian dam and surrounding villages under Russian occupation shows the ruined structure falling into the flooded river and hundreds of submerged homes, greenhouses and even a church — and no sign of life.

An Associated Press team flew a drone over the devastation on Wednesday, a day after the destruction of the Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River. The buildings that remain visible above the rushing waters did not show damage typical of a bomb dropped from above, such as scorch marks or shrapnel scars.

Russia accused Ukraine of bombarding the structure, which was under Moscow’s control, while Ukraine alleged that Russia blew it up from within.

The collapse of the dam in an area that Moscow has controlled for over a year and the emptying of its reservoir has irrevocably changed the landscape downstream, and shifted the dynamic of the 15-month-old war.

In the images captured by the AP, most of the dam was submerged by the rushing water. Two nearby villages under occupation, Dnipryany and Korsunka, were also underwater up to the rooftops of homes and a bright blue church.

The rounded shape of dozens of greenhouses was visible over the waterline. The images were devoid of people, but AP journalists could hear the screaming howls of dogs trapped by the flooding.

The nearby town of Nova Kakhovka, also under occupation, was less touched by the flooding but equally devoid of people and animals. Its Ferris wheel was stopped and water lapped up a main street.

CAPTION CORRECTS LOCATION - Grain storage sits underwater after the collapse of the Kakhovka Dam, in Kozatske, in Russian-occupied Ukraine, Wednesday, June 7, 2023. (AP Photo)

Ukraine has warned since last October that the hydroelectric dam was mined by Russian forces, and accused them of touching off an explosion that has turned the downstream areas into a waterlogged wasteland. Russia said Ukraine hit the dam with a missile. Experts have said the structure was in disrepair, which could also have led to its collapse.

There were no signs typical of a missile attack in the few remaining buildings.

The Dnieper River forms part of the front line in the war, and many people had already fled the area because of the fighting. Ukraine holds the western bank, while Russia controls the low-lying eastern side, which is more vulnerable to flooding.

Anna Lodygina, a Nova Kakhovka resident who fled last autumn, said the flooding has paralyzed the occupied town, with markets closed, and limited electricity and mobile reception. The Russian soldiers occupying her family home, just 500 meters (yards) from the river, fled after the dam collapsed and neighbors have told her water now reaches the upper floor of the two-story building.

Friends and neighbors told her the Russians pulled out themselves, but extended no help to residents, so people took matters into their own hands, finding shelter a neighborhood farther from the river.

According to Lodygina, the historic part of the city is submerged. “Its state now is unknown,” she said.

On the Ukrainian-controlled side, a Red Cross worker fielded calls from people begging for rescue from the other bank but could do little for them.

“Our telephone is burning up from calls and our phone number is not well known. Just yesterday we got at least 30 calls from occupied territories,” said Mykola Tarenenko, chief of the Kherson Red Cross quick response team. “People are asking us to evacuate them because no evacuation was organized.”

18. Why Are We in Ukraine?

As someone who works on this issue commented when he flagged this article for me, Are we really "in" Ukraine - the title may be a false premise.

I suppose the authors think Putin's War is all the fault of the US thus we are "in" Ukraine according to their assessment.

But the correct question that the American people deserve an answer to is why we should support Ukraine in defending itself from an invasion by a tyrannical leader who seeks to annex and occupy the sovereign country of Ukraine. The authors did not provide that. But our government must do so.

Excerpts:

To most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to “appease” Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after “every good-faith effort” by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

...

Of course, whatever strategy Europeans work out regarding Moscow would and should be a matter entirely for Europeans to determine. Unavoidably, the pursuit of a new European security system—and the embrace of the old diplomacy that it would embody—would mean a substantially diminished global role for Washington. In allowing a Concert of Europe to act truly independently, Washington would effectively renounce the pursuit of global hegemony and the belief that its foreign policy should be guided by the conviction that, to quote President Clinton, it has a “particular contribution to make in the march of human progress.” In other words, the United States would accept that it would be what President Clinton promised it would not become, “simply . . . another great power.” Every post–Cold War president has recoiled from this role. But a more restrained and even pedestrian self-image might allow the United States at long last to pursue a more tolerant relationship with a recalcitrant world. “A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power,” wrote the journalist and foreign policy critic Walter Lippmann in April 1965, three months before the United States committed itself to a ground war in Vietnam.

It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.

Why Are We in Ukraine?

On the dangers of American hubris

by Benjamin Schwarz, Christopher Layne

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-are-we-in-ukraine/

Collages by Klawe Rzeczy. Source photographs: United States Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle on its way to Poland in support of NATO © Operation 2022/Alamy; Independence Monument in Kyiv © klug-photo/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier © Michele Ursi/iStock; U.S. Marine Corps soldier and vehicle © Michele Ursi/iStock; Polish soldiers working with NATO allies © APFootage/Alamy; A member of a pro-Russian troop in an armored vehicle © Reuters/Alamy; An American soldier participates in a training exercise with NATO allies © APFootage/Alamy; Pro-Russian troops © Reuters/Alamy; Russian military leaders © Kremlin Pool/Alamy

From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and train the Ukrainian military and to integrate it into NATO systems, we are now witnessing the most intense and sustained military entanglement in the near-eighty-year history of global competition between the United States and Russia. Washington’s rocket launchers, missile systems, and drones are destroying Russia’s forces in the field; indirectly and otherwise, Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of Russian casualties in Ukraine. The United States has reportedly provided real-time battlefield intelligence to Kyiv, enabling Ukraine to sink a Russian cruiser, fire on soldiers in their barracks, and kill as many as a dozen of Moscow’s generals. The United States may have already committed covert acts of war against Russia, but even if the report that blames the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines on a U.S. naval operation authorized by the Biden Administration is mistaken, Washington is edging close to direct conflict with Moscow. Assuredly, the nuclear forces of the United States and Russia, ever at the ready, are at a heightened state of vigilance. Save for the Cuban Missile Crisis, the risks of a swift and catastrophic escalation in the nuclear face-off between these superpowers is greater than at any point in history.

To most American policymakers, politicians, and pundits—liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans—the reasons for this perilous situation are clear. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, an aging and bloodthirsty authoritarian, launched an unprovoked attack on a fragile democracy. To the extent that we can ascribe coherent motives for this action, they lie in Putin’s paranoid psychology, his misguided attempt to raise his domestic political standing, and his refusal to accept that Russia lost the Cold War. Putin is frequently described as mercurial, deluded, and irrational—someone who cannot be bargained with on the basis of national or political self-interest. Although the Russian leader speaks often of the security threat posed by potential NATO expansion, this is little more than a fig leaf for his naked and unaccountable will to power. To try to negotiate with Putin on Ukraine would therefore be an error on the order of attempts to “appease” Hitler at Munich, especially since, to quote President Biden, the invasion came after “every good-faith effort” by America and its allies to engage Putin in dialogue.

This conventional story is, in our view, both simplistic and self-serving. It fails to account for the well-documented—and perfectly comprehensible—objections that Russians have expressed toward NATO expansion over the past three decades, and obscures the central responsibility that the architects of U.S. foreign policy bear for the impasse. Both the global role that Washington has assigned itself generally, and America’s specific policies toward NATO and Russia, have led inexorably to war—as many foreign policy critics, ourselves among them, have long warned that they would.

As the Soviets quit Eastern and Central Europe at the end of the Cold War, they imagined that NATO might be dissolved alongside the Warsaw Pact. Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev insisted that Russia would “never agree to assign [NATO] a leading role in building a new Europe.” Recognizing that Moscow would view the continued existence of America’s primary mechanism for exercising hegemony as a threat, France’s president Francois Mitterrand and Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher aimed to build a new European security system that would transcend the U.S.- and Soviet-led alliances that had defined a divided continent.

Washington would have none of it, insisting, rather predictably, that NATO remain “the dominant security organization beyond the Cold War,” as the historian Mary Elise Sarotte has described American policy aims of the time. Indeed, a bipartisan foreign policy consensus within the United States soon embraced the idea that NATO, rather than going “out of business,” would instead go “out of area.” Although Washington had initially assured Moscow that NATO would advance “not one inch” east of a unified Germany, Sarotte explains, the slogan soon acquired “a new meaning”: “not one inch” of territory need be “off limits” to the alliance. In 1999, the Alliance added three former Warsaw Pact nations; in 2004, three more, in addition to three former Soviet republics and Slovenia. Since then, five more countries—the latest being Finland, which joined as this article was being prepared for publication—have been pulled beneath NATO’s military, political, and nuclear umbrella.

Initiated by the Clinton Administration while Boris Yeltsin was serving as the first democratically elected leader in Russia’s history, NATO expansion has been pursued by every subsequent U.S. administration, regardless of the tenor of Russian leadership at any given moment. Justifying this radical expansion of NATO, the former senator Richard Lugar, once a leading Republican foreign policy spokesman, explained in 1994 that “there can be no lasting security at the center without security at the periphery.” From the very beginning, then, the policy of NATO expansion was dangerously open-ended. Not only did the United States cavalierly enlarge its nuclear and security commitments while creating ever-expanding frontiers of insecurity, but it did so knowing that Russia—a great power with a nuclear arsenal of its own and an understandable resistance to being absorbed into a global order on America’s terms—lay at that “periphery.” Thus did the United States recklessly embark on a policy that would “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,” as the venerable American foreign policy expert, diplomat, and historian George F. Kennan had warned. Writing in 1997, Kennan predicted that this move would be “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era.”

Russia repeatedly and unambiguously characterized NATO expansion as a perilous and provocative encirclement. Opposition to NATO expansion was “the one constant in what we have heard from all Russian interlocutors,” the U.S. ambassador to Moscow Thomas R. Pickering reported to Washington thirty years ago. Every leader in the Kremlin since Gorbachev and every Russian foreign policy official since the end of the Cold War has strenuously objected—publicly as well as in private to Western diplomats—to NATO expansion, first into the former Soviet satellite states, and then into former Soviet republics. The entire Russian political class—including liberal Westernizers and democratic reformers—has steadily echoed the same. After Putin insisted at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that NATO’s expansion plans were unrelated to “ensuring security in Europe,” but rather represented “a serious provocation,” Gorbachev reminded the West that “for us Russians, by the way, Putin wasn’t saying anything new.”

From the early Nineties, when Washington first raised the idea of NATO expansion, until 2008, when the U.S. delegation at the NATO summit in Bucharest advocated alliance membership for Ukraine and Georgia, U.S.-Russian exchanges were monotonous. While Russians protested Washington’s NATO expansion plans, American officials shrugged off those protests—or pointed to them as evidence to justify still-further expansion. Washington’s message to Moscow could not have been clearer or more disquieting: Normal diplomacy among great powers, distinguished by the recognition and accommodation of clashing interests—the approach that had defined the U.S.-Soviet rivalry during even the most intense stretches of the Cold War—was obsolete. Russia was expected to acquiesce to a new world order created and dominated by the United States.

The radical expansion of NATO’s writ reflected the overweening aims that the end of the Cold War enabled Washington to pursue. Historically, great powers tend to focus pragmatically on reducing conflict among themselves. By frankly recognizing the realities of power and acknowledging each other’s interests, they can usually relate to one another on a businesslike basis. This international give-and-take is bolstered by and helps engender a rough, contextual understanding of what’s reasonable and legitimate—not in an abstract or absolute sense but in a way that permits fierce business rivals to moderate and accede to demands and to reach deals. By embracing what came to be called its “unipolar moment,” Washington demonstrated—to Paris, Berlin, London, New Delhi, and Beijing, no less than to Moscow—that it would no longer be bound by the norms implicit in great power politics, norms that constrain the aims pursued as much as the means employed. Those who determine U.S. foreign policy hold that, as President George W. Bush declared in his second inaugural address, “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.” They maintain, as President Bill Clinton averred in 1993, that the security of the United States demands a “focus on relations within nations, on a nation’s form of governance, on its economic structure.”

Whatever one thinks of this doctrine, which prompted Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to dub America “the indispensable nation”—and which Gorbachev said defined America’s “dangerous winner’s mentality”—it lavishly expanded previously established conceptions of security and national interest. In its crusading universalism, it could be regarded by other states, with ample supporting evidence, as at best recklessly meddlesome and at worst messianically interventionist. Convinced that its national security depended on the domestic political and economic arrangements of ostensibly sovereign states—and therefore defining as a legitimate goal the alteration or eradication of those arrangements if they were not in accord with its professed ideals and values—the post–Cold War United States became a revolutionary force in world politics.

Source photographs: Flags of Ukraine, Lithuania, the European Union, and NATO © Panther Media GmbH/Alamy; U.S. president Joe Biden © Ukraine Presidents Office/Alamy; Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky © Geopix/Alamy; Russian president Vladimir Putin © Peter Cavanagh/Alamy

One early sign of this fundamental change was Washington’s covert, overt, and (perhaps most important) overtly covert interference in Russia’s affairs during the early and mid-Nineties—a project of political, social, and economic engineering that included funneling some $1.8 billion to political movements, organizations, and individuals deemed ideologically compatible with U.S. interests and culminated in American meddling in Russia’s 1996 presidential election. Of course, great powers have always manipulated both their proxies and smaller neighboring states. But by so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.

Moscow’s alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose utopianism demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars. In 1989, just as the U.S.-Soviet global rivalry was ending, the United States assumed its self-appointed role as “the sole remaining superpower” by launching its invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the invasion as a violation of “the sovereignty and honor of other nations,” but neither Moscow nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest the United States’ exercising its sway in its own strategic backyard. Nonetheless, because no foreign power was using Panama as a foothold against the United States—and thus Manuel Noriega’s regime posed no conceivable threat to America’s security—the invasion neatly established the post–Cold War ground rules: American force would be used, and international law contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory. America’s regime-change war in Iraq—declared “illegal” by U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan—and its wider ambitions to engender a democratic makeover in the Middle East demonstrated the range and lethality of its globalizing impulse. More immediately disquieting to Moscow, against the backdrop of NATO’s steady eastward push, were the implications of the U.S.-led alliance’s regime-change wars in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and, twelve years later, in Libya.

Although Washington presented the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention to forestall human rights abuses in Kosovo, the reality was far murkier. American policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, “[We] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.”) Washington then intervened in a conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—a force that had previously been denounced by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization—and the military forces of the equally brutal regime of Slobodan Milošević. The KLA’s vicious campaign—including the kidnapping and execution of Yugoslav officials, police, and their families—provoked Yugoslavia’s equally vicious response, including both murderous reprisals and indiscriminate military actions against civilian populations suspected of aiding the insurgents. Through a stenographic process in which “ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility,” to quote a retrospective investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical insurgency was transformed into Washington’s righteous casus belli. (A similar process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)

It was not lost on Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations. President Yeltsin and Russian officials strenuously, if impotently, protested the Washington-led war on a country with which Russia traditionally had close political and cultural ties. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at the airport in Kosovo’s provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander U.S. general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: “I’m not going to start World War III for you.”) Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign state’s borders (again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers).

NATO similarly conducted its war in Libya in the face of valid Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandate—as Moscow protested—when NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. The escalation, justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis. Both wars were fought against states that, however distasteful, posed no threat to any NATO member. Their upshot was the recognition in both Moscow and Washington of NATO’s new power, ambit, and purpose. The alliance had been transformed from a supposedly mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the preeminent military instrument of American power in the post–Cold War world.

Russia’s growing concern over Washington’s hegemonic ambitions has been reinforced by the profound shift, since the Nineties, of the nuclear balance in Washington’s favor. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia is the dominant fact of their relationship—a fact not nearly conspicuous enough in the current conversations about the war in Ukraine. Long after Putin, and irrespective of whether Russia is converted to a market democracy, the preponderance of each country’s nuclear missiles will be aimed at the other; every day, the nuclear-armed submarines of one will be patrolling just off the coast of the other. If they’re lucky, both countries will be managing this situation forever.

Throughout the Cold War, Russia and the United States both knew that a nuclear war was unwinnable—an attack by one would surely produce a cataclysmic riposte by the other. Both sides carefully monitored this “delicate balance of terror,” as the American nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter put it in 1959, devoting enormous intellectual resources and sums of money to recalibrating in response to even the slightest perceived alterations. Rather than attempting to maintain that stable nuclear balance, however, Washington has been pursuing nuclear dominance for the past thirty years.

Beginning in the early Aughts, a number of defense analysts—most prominently Keir A. Lieber, a professor at Georgetown, and Daryl G. Press, a professor at Dartmouth and a former consultant to both the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation—expressed concern about a convergence of strategic developments that have been under way since the dawn of America’s “unipolar moment.” The first was the precipitous qualitative erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Throughout the Nineties and Aughts, that decline primarily affected Russia’s monitoring of American ICBM fields, its missile-warning networks, and its nuclear submarine forces—all crucial elements to maintaining a viable deterrent. Meanwhile, as Russia’s nuclear capabilities decayed, America’s grew increasingly lethal. Reflecting the seemingly exponential progress of its so-called military-technological revolution, America’s arsenal became immensely more precise and powerful, even as it declined in size.

These improvements didn’t fit with the aim of deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack—which requires only the nuclear capacity for a “countervalue” strike on enemy cities. They were, however, necessary for a disarming “counterforce” strike, capable of preempting a Russian retaliatory nuclear response. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide,” as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal concluded, “is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.”

This new nuclear posture would obviously unsettle military planners in Moscow, who had undertaken similar studies. They no doubt perceived Washington’s 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—about which Moscow repeatedly expressed its objections—in light of these changes in the nuclear balance, grasping that Washington’s withdrawal and its concomitant pursuit of various missile defense schemes would enhance America’s offensive nuclear capabilities. Although no missile defense system could shield the United States from a full-scale nuclear attack, a system could plausibly defend against the very few missiles an adversary might have left after an effective U.S. counterforce strike.

To Russian strategists, Washington’s pursuit of nuclear primacy was presumably still further evidence of America’s effort to force Russia to accede to the U.S.-led global order. Moreover, the means that Washington employed to realize that ambition would justifiably strike Moscow as deeply reckless. The initiatives the United States has pursued—advances in anti-submarine and anti-satellite warfare, in missile accuracy and potency, and in wide-area remote sensing—have rendered Russia’s nuclear forces all the more vulnerable. In such circumstances, Moscow would be sorely tempted to buy deterrence at the cost of dispersing its nuclear forces, decentralizing its command-and-control systems, and implementing “launch on warning” policies. All such countermeasures could cause crises to escalate uncontrollably and trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, mutually assured destruction provided decades of peace and stability. To remove the mutuality by cultivating overwhelming counterforce (i.e., first-strike) capabilities is—in another paradox—to court volatility and an increased likelihood of a grossly destructive nuclear exchange.

Since the nadir of Russian power in the decade and a half following the Soviet collapse, Russia has bolstered both its nuclear deterrent and, to a degree, its counterforce capabilities. Despite this, America’s counterforce lead has actually grown. And yet, U.S. leaders often act affronted when Russia makes moves to update its own nuclear capabilities. “From the vantage point of Moscow . . . U.S. nuclear forces look truly fearsome and they are,” Lieber and Press observe. The United States, they continue, is “playing strategic hardball in the nuclear domain, and then acting like the Russians are paranoid for fearing U.S. actions.”

Source photographs: NATO tank © Callum Hamshere/Alamy; A tank participating in a training exercise © APFootage/Alamy; NATO soldiers © DPA Picture Alliance/Alamy; NATO flag © Peter Probst/Alamy; Jets © Dario Photography/Alamy; Soldiers after disembarking from a U.S. Air Force plane © ZUMA Press/Alamy; NATO fighter jet © Matthew Troke/iStock

The same solipsism defined America’s assessment of what it insisted was the Russian menace to NATO. Despite Moscow’s persistent warnings that it regarded NATO expansion as a threat, the swollen alliance intensified its provocations. Beginning in the Aughts, NATO conducted massive military exercises in Lithuania and Poland—where it had established a permanent army headquarters—and, on Russia’s border, in Latvia and Estonia. In 2015, it was reported that the Pentagon was “reviewing and updating its contingency plans for armed conflict with Russia” and, in likely contravention of a 1997 agreement between NATO and Moscow, the United States offered to station military equipment in the territories of its Eastern European NATO allies, a move that a Russian general called “the most aggressive step by the Pentagon and NATO since the Cold War.” The U.S. permanent representative to NATO explicitly identified “Russia and the malign activities of Russia” as NATO’s “major” target. The United States justified these moves as necessary responses to Russian hostilities in Ukraine and to the need, as the New York Times editorial board declared in a revival of Cold War rhetoric in 2018, to “contain” the “Russian threat.” And what made the Russians a threat? According to a 2018 report by the Pentagon, it was their intention to “shatter” NATO, the military pact arrayed against them.

While Russians of every political stripe have judged Washington’s enfolding of Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies and its former Baltic Soviet republics into NATO as a threat, they have viewed the prospect of the alliance’s expansion into Ukraine as basically apocalyptic. Indeed, because from the beginning Washington defined NATO expansion as an open-ended and limitless process, Russia’s general apprehension about NATO’s push eastward was inextricably bound up with its specific fear that Ukraine would ultimately be drawn into the alliance.

That view certainly reflected Russians’ intense and fraught cultural, religious, economic, historical, and linguistic ties with Ukraine. But strategic concerns were paramount. Crimea (the majority of whose people are linguistically and culturally Russian, and have consistently demonstrated their wish to rejoin Russia) has been the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, based in Sevastopol, since 1783. Since then, the peninsula has been Russia’s window onto the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and the key to its southern defenses. Shortly after the Soviet Union’s breakup, Russia struck a deal with Ukraine to lease the base at Sevastopol. Up until its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia worried that, were Ukraine to join NATO, Moscow would not only have to surrender its largest naval base, but that base would perforce be incorporated into a hostile military pact, which happens to be the world’s most powerful military entity. The Black Sea would have become NATO’s lake.

Western experts have long acknowledged the unanimity and intensity of Russians’ fear of Ukraine joining NATO. In his 1995 study of Russian views on NATO expansion—which surveyed elite and popular opinion and incorporated off-the-record interviews with political, military, and diplomatic figures from across the political spectrum—Anatol Lieven, the Russia scholar and then Moscow correspondent for the Times of London, concluded that “moves toward NATO membership for Ukraine would trigger a really ferocious Russian response,” and that “NATO membership for Ukraine would be regarded by Russians as a catastrophe of epochal proportions.” Quoting a Russian naval officer, he noted that preventing NATO’s expansion into Ukraine and its consequent control of Crimea was “something for which Russians will fight.”

Given these views, Russia’s ground rules for Ukraine—the epitome of realpolitik—were plain. As Yeltsin’s 1999 diktat to Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma spelled out, Kyiv was not to enter into cooperative arrangements with, let alone join, NATO. Nor could Kyiv orient its foreign and economic relations toward the West in ways that disfavored Moscow. Yeltsin didn’t require Kyiv to orient its foreign or defense policies toward Moscow either. Understanding that NATO expansion couldn’t be reversed, Moscow’s vision of a lasting European security arrangement might have entailed varying degrees of arms limitations in the countries on NATO’s eastern glacis and a permanently neutral, eastern- and western-oriented status for Ukraine (somewhat like Austria’s Cold War status), including an agreement ruling out NATO membership. Washington fully grasped the cause and intensity of Moscow’s panic over the prospect of the West’s absorbing Ukraine into its orbit, as well as the diplomatic and security accommodations Russia required. But rather than attempting to reach a modus vivendi with Russia, U.S. officials continued to push for NATO expansion and supported color revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet republics as part of an apparent strategy to pull these areas out of Moscow’s orbit and embed them instead in Euro-Atlantic structures. By the second George W. Bush administration, Ukraine had emerged as the main arena of this competition.

Two critical events precipitated Russia’s war in Ukraine. First, at NATO’s Bucharest summit in April 2008, the U.S. delegation, led by President Bush, urged the alliance to put Ukraine and Georgia on the immediate path to NATO membership. German chancellor Angela Merkel understood the implications of Washington’s proposal: “I was very sure . . . that Putin was not going to just let that happen,” she recalled in 2022. “From his perspective, that would be a declaration of war.” America’s ambassador to Moscow, William J. Burns, shared Merkel’s assessment. Burns had already warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in a classified email:

Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.

NATO would be seen as “throwing down the strategic gauntlet,” Burns concluded. “Today’s Russia will respond.”

Appalled by Washington’s proposal, Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy were able to derail it. But the alliance’s “when, not if” compromise, which promised that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO,” was provocative enough. Attending negotiations toward the close of the summit regarding cooperation in transporting supplies to NATO’s forces in Afghanistan, Putin publicly warned that Russia would regard any effort to push NATO to its borders “as a direct threat.” Privately, he is reported to have advised Bush that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.” Four months later, as Burns had forecast, Moscow—having concluded that NATO’s incorporation of Ukraine was inevitable—responded by launching a five-day war with Georgia. Moscow’s focus on securing the breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as opposed to embarking on a broader war of conquests, was consistent with Putin’s previous statements about what would happen if NATO threatened to expand farther east.

The second precipitating event came when Ukraine began talks about forming an “association agreement” with the European Union in September 2008 and, in October, applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund to stabilize its economy after the global financial collapse. The association agreement, which eventually called for the “gradual convergence on foreign and security matters with the aim of Ukraine’s ever deeper involvement in the European security area,” would have precluded Ukraine from joining Moscow’s planned Eurasian Economic Union—a high priority for the Kremlin—while drawing Ukraine closer to the West. Plainly, the E.U. was seizing an opportunity to incorporate Ukraine into the West’s orbit, an outcome that Moscow had long defined as intolerable.

Ukraine’s pro-Moscow, democratically elected—though corrupt—president Viktor Yanukovych initially favored both the agreement with the E.U. and the IMF loan. But after U.S. and E.U. leaders began to effectively link the two in 2013, Moscow offered Kyiv a more attractive assistance package worth some $15 billion (and without the onerous austerity measures that Western aid would have imposed), which Yanukovych accepted. This course reversal led to the Euromaidan protests and ultimately to Yanukovych’s decision to flee Kyiv. Although much about these events remains unclear, circumstantial evidence points to the United States semi-covertly promoting regime change by destabilizing Yanukovych. A recording of a conversation between senior U.S. foreign policy official Victoria Nuland and the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine suggests that they even attempted to manipulate the composition of the post-coup Ukrainian cabinet. (A former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and longtime anti-Russia hawk, Nuland is now under-secretary of state for political affairs and a key architect of Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine.) To Moscow, these episodes of political interference further demonstrated Washington’s intent to bring Ukraine into the Western camp.

In response to Yanukovych’s downfall, Russia—just as Putin had intimated at Bucharest—annexed Crimea and stepped up its support for Russian-speaking separatist rebels in the Donbas. Washington in turn accelerated its efforts to pull Kyiv into the Western orbit. In 2014, NATO started training roughly ten thousand Ukrainian troops annually, inaugurating Washington’s program of arming, training, and reforming Kyiv’s military as part of a broader effort to achieve—to quote the State Department’s 2021 U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership—Ukraine’s “full integration into European and Euro-Atlantic institutions.” That aim, according to the charter, was linked to America’s “unwavering commitment” to the defense of Ukraine as well as to its eventual membership in NATO. The charter also asserted Kyiv’s claim to Crimea and its territorial waters.

By 2021, Ukraine’s and NATO’s militaries had stepped up their coordination in joint exercises such as “Rapid Trident 21,” which was led by the Ukrainian army with the participation of fifteen militaries and heralded by the Ukrainian general who co-directed it as intending to “improve the level of interoperability between units and headquarters of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the United States, and NATO partners.” Given the weapons and training the Ukrainian military had absorbed, and given Washington’s and NATO’s newly explicit diplomatic, military, and ideological commitments to Kyiv, and—most important—given NATO’s sophisticated program to integrate Ukraine’s forces with its own, Ukraine could now justifiably be seen as a de facto member of the alliance. Thus Washington had demonstrated its willingness to cross what William J. Burns—now Biden’s CIA director—had fifteen years ago called “the brightest of all redlines.”

Beginning in early 2021, Russia responded by amassing forces on Ukraine’s border with the intention—plainly and repeatedly stated—of arresting Ukraine’s NATO integration. On December 17, 2021, Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs conveyed to Washington a draft treaty that reflected Moscow’s long-standing security aims. A key provision of the draft stated: “The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Unionof Soviet Socialist Republics.” Other provisions proposed to bar Washington from establishing military bases in Ukraine and from engaging in bilateral military cooperation with Kyiv. A second draft treaty delivered to NATO called on the alliance to withdraw the troops and equipment it had been moving into Eastern Europe since 1997.

Far from expressing any ambition to conquer, occupy, and annex Ukraine (an impossible goal for the 190,000 troops that Russia eventually deployed in its initial attack on the country), all of Moscow’s demarches and demands during the run-up to the invasion made clear that “the key to everything is the guarantee that NATO will not expand eastward,” as Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov put it in a press conference on January 14, 2022. “We are categorically opposed to Ukraine joining NATO,” Putin elaborated two days before invading Ukraine, “because this poses a threat to us, and we have arguments to support this. I have repeatedly spoken about it.”

Even if Moscow’s avowals are taken at face value, Russia’s actions could be condemned as those of an aggressive and illegitimate state. At best those actions demonstrate Russia’s conviction that it has a claim to oversight of its smaller sovereign neighbors, a claim that accords with what Washington and the foreign policy cognoscenti condemn as a repellant concept: that of “spheres of influence.”

To be sure, any power imposing a sphere of influence is necessarily behaving in an implicitly aggressive manner. For a power to define an area outside its borders and impose limits on the sovereignty of the states within that area is contrary to the Wilsonian ideals that the United States has professed since 1917. In one of his last speeches as vice president, in 2017, Biden condemned Russia for “working with every tool available to them to . . . return to a politics defined by spheres of influence” and for “seek[ing] a return to a world where the strong impose their will . . . while weaker neighbors fall in line.” Because of America’s commitment to a just and moral world order, Biden insisted, quoting his own words from the Munich Security Conference in 2009, “we will not recognize any nation having a sphere of influence. It will remain our view that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.”

That straight-faced stance fails to recognize the spheres of influence, historically unprecedented in their sweep, that the United States claims for itself. Since promulgating the Monroe Doctrine two centuries ago, the United States has explicitly arrogated to itself a sphere of influence extending from the Canadian Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. But its globe-girdling sphere of influence also takes in the expanse, east to west, from Estonia to Australia and right up to the Asian mainland. Missing from the current discussion of the war in Ukraine, then, is any appreciation for how the United States would respond—and has responded—to foreign powers’ incursions into its own sphere of influence.

What, after all, would be America’s reaction if Mexico were to invite China to station warships in Acapulco and bombers in Guadalajara? For the past several years a civilian military analyst who has worked on international security issues with the Pentagon has put this question to the rising leaders in the U.S. military and intelligence services to whom he regularly lectures. Their reactions, he told us, range from cutting economic ties and exerting “maximal foreign policy pressure on Mexico to get them to change course” to “we need to start there, and then use military force if necessary,” revealing just how reflexively these military and intelligence professionals would defend America’s own sphere of influence.

Typifying the egocentrism that governs the U.S. approach to the world in general and relations with Russia in particular, not one of these future military and intelligence leaders has thought to connect, even in this past year, what they believe would be Washington’s response to the hypothetical situation in Mexico with Moscow’s reaction to NATO’s expansion and policy toward Ukraine. When the analyst has drawn those connections, the military and intelligence officers have been taken aback, in many cases admitting, as the analyst reports, “ ‘Damn, I never thought out what we’re doing to Russia in that light.’ ”

But America’s determination to uphold its own sphere of influence is more than hypothetical, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated. Thanks to a misleading rendition of events that members of the Kennedy Administration fed to a credulous press and later reproduced in their memoirs, most Americans see that episode as an instance of America’s justified resolve when confronted by an unprovoked and unwarranted military threat. But Russia’s deployment of missiles in Cuba was hardly unprovoked. Washington had already deployed intermediate-range missiles in Britain, Italy, and, most provocatively, in a move that U.S. defense experts and congressional leaders had warned against, on Russia’s doorstep in Turkey. Moreover, during the crisis, it was American actions—not Russian or Cuban ones—that would be considered aggressive and illegal under international law.

The parallels between Ukraine and Cuba run deep. Just as Moscow has justified its war in Ukraine as a response to a foreign military threat emanating from a neighboring country, so Washington justified its bellicose and potentially calamitous reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba. Just as Ukraine, even before the Russian invasion, was well within its rights under international law to welcome NATO’s military support, so Cuba, as a sovereign state, had every right to accept the Soviet Union’s offer of missiles. Cuba’s acceptance was itself a legitimate response to aggression: The United States had been pursuing an illegal campaign of regime change against Cuba that included an attempted invasion, terrorist attacks, sabotage, paramilitary assaults, and a series of assassination attempts.

The United States may see Russia’s fear of NATO as unfounded and paranoid, and therefore incomparable to Washington’s reaction to the installation of intermediate- and medium-range nuclear missiles—armaments that President John F. Kennedy publicly declared were “offensive weapons . . . constitut[ing] an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas.” But as Kennedy acknowledged to his special security advisory committee on the first day of the crisis, “It doesn’t make any difference if you get blown up by an ICBM flying from the Soviet Union or one that was ninety miles away. Geography doesn’t mean that much.” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara likewise conceded that the missiles did nothing to alter the nuclear balance. America’s allies, Bundy elaborated, were appalled that the United States would threaten nuclear war over a strategically insignificant condition—the presence of intermediate- and medium-range missiles in a neighboring country—with which those allies (and, for that matter, the Soviets) had been living for years. Summarizing the views of the majority of the advisory committee, Special Counsel Theodore C. Sorensen noted:

It is generally agreed that these missiles, even when fully operational, do not significantly alter the balance of power—i.e., they do not significantly increase the potential megatonnage capable of being unleashed on American soil, even after a surprise American nuclear strike.

Nevertheless, the United States deemed the strategically insignificant missiles an unacceptable provocation that jeopardized its tough-guy standing with its allies and adversaries, not to mention the Kennedy Administration’s electoral fortunes. (As McNamara acknowledged to the advisory committee on the very first day of the crisis: “I’ll be quite frank. I don’t think there is a military problem here . . . This is a domestic, political problem.”) Washington therefore embarked on an extreme, perilous course to force their removal, issuing an ultimatum to a nuclear superpower—an astonishingly provocative move, which immediately created a crisis that could easily have led to apocalyptic violence. Additionally, in imposing a blockade on Cuba—a gambit that we now know brought the superpowers within a hair’s breadth of nuclear confrontation—the administration initiated an act of war that contravened international law. The State Department’s legal adviser later recalled, “Our legal problem was that their action wasn’t illegal.”

So much for President Biden’s avowal that the United States bases its policy on the conviction “that sovereign states have the right to make their own decisions and choose their own alliances.” In short, in a foreign policy episode celebrated for its righteousness and wisdom, the United States, within its self-defined sphere of influence, committed several acts of aggression and war against its neighbor, a sovereign state, and committed an act of war against its global rival in order to force both states to conform to its will. It did so because, justifiably or not, it deemed intolerable its neighbor’s internal arrangements and security relationship with a foreign great power. In the process, it brought the world closer to Armageddon than at any point in history.

At least until now. The point here is not to make arguments of moral equivalency. Rather, given that, historically, Washington has responded aggressively to situations similar to those in which it has placed Russia today, the motive for Russian aggression in Ukraine is likely not expansionist megalomania but exactly what Moscow declares it to be—defensive alarm over an expansive rival’s military influence in a bordering and strategically essential neighbor. To acknowledge this is merely the first step U.S. officials must take if they wish to back away from the precipice of nuclear annihilation and move instead toward a negotiated settlement grounded in foreign policy realism.

To what degree would Washington even be interested in a negotiated resolution to the war in Ukraine? After all, a good deal of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have

ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to avoid mentioning.

By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his predecessors deployed against Noriega, Milošević, Qaddafi, and Saddam Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome. Diplomacy requires an understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”

Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on Russia to induce its political collapse.

Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases the risk of accidents and escalation.

The proxy war embraced by Washington today would have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.

Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow. Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with compromise.

Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union (to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.

Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014, and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad” (that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).

Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again, the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact, Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved not by steadfastness but by compromise.

But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president, JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and “resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and circumstance.

Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a superpower across the Atlantic.

That pact has made permanent what Kennan called, in 1948, “the congealment of Europe” along the line created by the U.S.-Russian standoff. Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has succeeded in pushing the borders of its own Iron Curtain “smack up to those of Russia” (as Kennan put it in 1997). By arousing Russian anxiety, it has heightened tension, conflict, and Russia’s most bellicose tendencies, thereby exposing both Europe and the United States to nuclear war. Depending on one’s point of view, membership in NATO entails either the prospect of sacrificing New York for Berlin (as the Cold War shibboleth held) or the prospect of “annihilation without representation” (as de Gaulle is reported to have put it). A new European security structure must therefore replace NATO.

This new system might embrace the notion of a community of Europe, but in reality the powerful states would exercise outsize influence (as they do in the E.U. and the U.N.). Such a system would in fundamental aspects resemble a modern Concert of Europe, in which the dominant states of the E.U., on the one hand, and Russia, on the other, acknowledge each other’s security interests, including their respective spheres of influence. In practice, this would mean, for example, that the Baltic states and Poland would enjoy the same large, but ultimately circumscribed, degree of sovereignty as, say, Canada does. It would also mean that, while Paris and Berlin won’t find Moscow’s internal arrangements to their taste, they will resume economic and trade relations with Russia and build on myriad other areas of common interest.

As for the future position of states such as Ukraine and Georgia, Europe’s (and Washington’s) approach would need to be similar to the approach that the diplomat Helmut Sonnenfeldt, while serving as a counselor at the State Department in 1976, advocated be taken toward the Soviet Union’s relations with its satellites:

a policy of responding to the clearly visible aspirations in Eastern Europe for a more autonomous existence within the context of a strong Soviet geopolitical influence.

Such an approach would reduce tension by recognizing Russia’s strategic interest in its sphere of influence, thereby inducing Moscow to exercise its claim of oversight in that sphere with as light a touch as possible.

Of course, whatever strategy Europeans work out regarding Moscow would and should be a matter entirely for Europeans to determine. Unavoidably, the pursuit of a new European security system—and the embrace of the old diplomacy that it would embody—would mean a substantially diminished global role for Washington. In allowing a Concert of Europe to act truly independently, Washington would effectively renounce the pursuit of global hegemony and the belief that its foreign policy should be guided by the conviction that, to quote President Clinton, it has a “particular contribution to make in the march of human progress.” In other words, the United States would accept that it would be what President Clinton promised it would not become, “simply . . . another great power.” Every post–Cold War president has recoiled from this role. But a more restrained and even pedestrian self-image might allow the United States at long last to pursue a more tolerant relationship with a recalcitrant world. “A mature great power will make measured and limited use of its power,” wrote the journalist and foreign policy critic Walter Lippmann in April 1965, three months before the United States committed itself to a ground war in Vietnam.

It will eschew the theory of a global and universal duty, which not only commits it to unending wars of intervention, but intoxicates its thinking with the illusion that it is a crusader for righteousness.

The policies that Washington has pursued toward Moscow and Kyiv, often under the banner of righteousness and duty, have created conditions that make the risk of nuclear war between the United States and Russia greater than it has ever been. Far from making the world safer by setting it in order, we have made it all the more dangerous.

Get the Weekly Review in your inbox

A weekly email taking aim at the relentless absurdity of the 24-hour news cycle.

Email addressSign Up

Benjamin Schwarz was formerly the national and literary editor of The Atlantic and the executive editor of World Policy Journal. 

Christopher Layne is the University Distinguished Professor of International Affairs and the Robert M. Gates Chair in National Security at Texas A&M University.

19. Green Berets Have Struggled for Years with Recruiting, Internal Data Shows

Green Berets Have Struggled for Years with Recruiting, Internal Data Shows

military.com · by Steve Beynon · June 8, 2023

Last year, the Army failed to hit its recruiting goal for the first time in decades. But the service's Special Forces has been struggling to bring in new talent since before the pandemic, recruiting data shows.

As Green Beret recruiting has faltered for years, the Army has also been chipping away at the size of its elite units.

The service has come up hundreds of Special Forces soldiers short of its goals each year since at least 2018, with one exception, based on the internal data reviewed by Military.com. Meanwhile, quality recruits are becoming increasingly scarce with fewer Green Beret applicants passing the service's grueling selection course each year.

"We have to do a better job at telling our story," Lt. Gen. Jon Braga, head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told Military.com in a statement.

Between 2018 and 2020, the service recruited an average of 1,011 new Special Forces soldiers, missing its goal of 1,540 each year. That data is strictly contract signups, not the total number of soldiers who make it all the way through Green Beret training. Those who don't make it sometimes get second chances or are put into the regular Army infantry.

In 2021, the Army scaled back its recruiting goals, seeking to bring in 1,250 new Green Berets. It exceeded its goals that year with 1,358 new Special Forces contracts, but dropped again with 779 recruits in 2022.

So far this year, 527 new applicants have signed on to try for the Green Berets.

"I feel like I can go into any high school in America and say -- whether you're in the robotics club, the STEM club, or you're a middle linebacker on the football team, if you love foreign language and culture, you build sets for the drama club, or you just want to make a difference in the world -- we've got a place for you," Braga said. "You're going to be welcomed, you'll be part of a diverse team, and you're going to make a difference."

Special Forces, or Green Berets, are the military's go-to force for unconventional and guerrilla warfare. They serve as force-multipliers on the battlefield, with their main mission being training ragtag militias.

The elite units set the stage for the invasion of Afghanistan, building up militia allies to topple the Taliban government in 2001. It was the first time Americans used horses in a combat environment since World War II.

The recruiting data is the first clear indication that the service may be slowly reducing the footprint of special operations. Military.com reported in May that the size of the Army's special operations could shrink by about 10% this decade, but those cuts were generally attributed to support personnel, not Green Berets.

A smaller Special Forces footprint in the Army would come after an end to two decades of the Global War on Terror. The diffuse global conflict, which relied on swift nighttime raids and building relationships with indigenous forces, put the Green Berets and other commando units front and center.

But that era may now be coming to an end.

"In GWOT, there was a real preference for special operations," Katherine Kuzminski, a military policy expert at Center for a New American Security, told Militarry.com. "This is part of a broader healthy realignment on the Army's part."

The service is spending this decade shifting its training and doctrine toward conventional warfare, a move that is expected to invest more into large formations of conventional troops, cyber warfare and long-range missiles.

Meanwhile, a Military.com review of the Army online found a minimal presence of Special Forces, outside of relatively active Instagram accounts for units including 3rd, 5th and 19th Special Forces Groups.

The service's new "Be All You Can Be" recruiting campaign has no meaningful reference to its elite units. There is one high-profile ad for the Green Berets the Army has shared on some of its official websites and social media, though the video is housed on an unverified YouTube channel that isn't owned by the service.

Meanwhile, the 75th Ranger Regiment, the Army's special operations infantry unit, has an active YouTube presence with high-quality videos posted regularly, most of which get a lot of views.

Recent Army recruiting ads have placed less of an emphasis on combat arms, as an internal Defense Department survey found that Gen Z thinks service automatically puts their life at risk, while those combat jobs make up only a fraction of roles in the military. Conversely, peacetime could dampen recruiting prospects among would-be applicants interested in high-octane jobs such as Special Forces.

"Some people join because they are itching for a fight, and there isn't a fight," Kuzminski said. "Some who have a propensity toward that might be more inclined toward special operations. The problem is we need to have them, even in peace."

The quality of Green Beret applicants is also on the decline. Applicants go through a series of schools and qualifications to earn their long tab, a process that can take up to two years.

Amid a low rate of soldiers making it through the initial selection process and overall recruiting woes, the Army considered shortening the Special Forces training pipeline by about half to get new operators in to fill units faster, according to an internal 2018 briefing obtained by Military.com. It is unclear whether the service is moving forward with that idea.

Before candidates can even begin training, they go through a three-week course known as Special Forces Assessment and Selection, which is effectively an interview process for Green Berets to select who will have a chance at joining their ranks.

It's a grueling gantlet of physical tasks, painful ruck marches and complicated teamwork exercises, all while under severe sleep deprivation. Even if a candidate makes it, they can still not be selected to continue into training. Roughly 13% get another chance, according to the internal briefing reviewed by Military.com. Others are kicked back to the regular Army.

That pass rate was between 60% and 80% in the early 2010s, but has plummeted to around 45% and 60% in recent years. It's unclear what led to that lower pass rate, though failing land navigation accounts for roughly 70% of all failures.

Only about 5% of candidates are medically dropped due to injuries, though it's relatively common for candidates at special operations selection courses, such as the Navy SEAL Basic Underwater Demolition course, or BUD/S, to hide or downplay injuries.

Soldiers with previous experience in the National Guard have the highest Special Forces selection rate at about 60%, compared to their active-duty counterparts with a 53% selection rate. Some of that could be attributed to Guardsmen seeking to transfer to Special Forces having opportunities to train with those units before going to the selection course.

Green Berets, through the 19th and 20th Special Forces Groups, are among the only special operations elements that troops can do part time in the National Guard. However, those commitments are significantly greater than the typical rank-and-file Guardsman responsibilities.

-- Steve Beynon can be reached at Steve.Beynon@military.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevenBeynon

military.com · by Steve Beynon · June 8, 2023

20. The Fake News about Fake News - Boston Review

The Korean War continues to have relevance today. Its effects can still be felt seven decades later.

But beyond that this review offers some interesting but apparently controversial insights about the book. Is misinformation a virus?  The reviewer really does a take down of the book.

Excerpts:

Given these problems, why has Foolproof’s viral view of misinformation itself gone viral? Panic about misinformation took off in 2016 after two events that many found shocking: the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Amid the global resurgence of nationalist populism—and social media’s role in making fringe views more visible—many pundits, policymakers, and social scientists began to ask why so many people had seemingly lost their minds. The misinformation narrative supplied an answer: because people are misinformed about the world, and they are misinformed about the world because they have been “exposed” to misinformation.

Three features of this explanation are worth noting. First, it is apolitical: it explains social and political conflict not in terms of people’s divergent identities, perspectives, and interests but in terms of factual errors caused by exposure to bad information. On this view, our political adversaries are simply ignorant dupes, and with enough education and critical thinking they will come to agree with us; there is no need to reimagine other social institutions or build the political power necessary to do so. Second, the argument is technocratic rather than democratic. By using an epidemiological metaphor, it suggests solutions to social problems akin to public health measures: experts must lead the way in tamping the spread of mind viruses and vaccinating the masses against them. Finally, though many critics find the misinformation panic too pessimistic, there is a deeper sense in which it is extremely optimistic. Foolproof does not just posit a simple explanation and remedy for complex social problems; it imagines a threat that can be straightforwardly identified.

These features, I think, help explain why the misinformation-as-virus narrative has won such widespread endorsement. The belief that a dangerous misinformation virus is a major source of society’s problems is popular not because it is supported by evidence, and not because it has duped credulous individuals, but, most plausibly, because its apolitical, technocratic, and simplistic character resonates with the interests and biases of those who consume and propagate it.

The Fake News about Fake News - Boston Review

Boston Review

Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity

Sander van der Linden

W. W. Norton, $30 (cloth)

At the end of the Korean war in 1953, captured American soldiers were allowed to return home. To widespread amazement, some declined the offer and followed their captors to China. A popular explanation quickly emerged. The Chinese army had undertaken an unusual project with its prisoners of war: through intense and sustained attempts at persuasion—using tactics such as sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, and exposure to propaganda—it had sought to convince them of the superiority of communism over capitalism. Amid the general paranoia of 1950s McCarthyism, the fact that such techniques had apparently achieved some success produced considerable alarm. The soldiers had been “brainwashed”—and everyone was vulnerable.

Fears about misinformation are fueled by the idea that the masses are extremely vulnerable to being duped.

The ensuing panic over mind control stoked a frenzied search for solutions. How could the American public be protected against this new menace? William J. McGuire, a young and ambitious social psychologist, was among those who took up the challenge. McGuire’s big idea was to liken brainwashing to a viral infection. In such cases, post-infection treatment can help, but it is far better to inoculate individuals before they are exposed. Bolstered by a series of experiments that seemed to support his conjecture, McGuire ran with this analogy. According to what he called “inoculation theory,” individuals can be immunized against brainwashing by exposing them to a weakened dose of propaganda and warning them about the manipulative techniques they might encounter in real life. The headline of a 1970 article by McGuire in Psychology Today summarized the theory’s aspiration: “A Vaccine for Brainwash.”

For some time, inoculation theory—and the fears that inspired it—gradually faded from public and scientific consciousness, but they have made a comeback in recent years. They have also had a makeover: we talk now of misinformation instead of brainwashing, and the communists who played the original villains have been joined by a more diverse cast of populist leaders, conspiracy theorists, Russian influence campaigns, social media platforms, and more. At bottom, though, lies the same fear: that the masses are extremely vulnerable to being duped into holding dangerous ideas.

Moreover, this vulnerability is once again being likened to infectious disease. In 2020 the World Health Organization described the dangers posed by the spread of misinformation about COVID-19 as an “infodemic,” a term now widely used in scientific articles and the media. McGuire’s ideas have also been revived, revised, and re-introduced into top scientific journals, informing the policies of governments and media companies in their attempts to combat the viral transmission of false content. CNN reports that “Researchers have created a ‘vaccine’ for fake news,” Scientific American declares that “There’s a Psychological ‘Vaccine’ against Misinformation,” and a Rolling Stone headline reads, “The Disinformation Vaccine: Is There a Cure for Conspiracy Theories?”

All these articles report on the work of University of Cambridge psychologist Sander van der Linden and his collaborators. Van der Linden is a leading figure in the recent eruption of scientific research on misinformation and the most influential modern proponent of inoculation theory. His recent book, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, aims to disseminate the new science of misinformation and the central ideas of inoculation theory to a general audience. Van der Linden details the considerable interest in his work from governments, international bodies, and businesses—including Google—and the book’s critical reception has been overwhelmingly positive, with glowing reviews in the Financial Times, The Times, and The Guardian. But its central ideas and arguments don’t hold up to scrutiny.

The message of Foolproof is simple: misinformation is a dangerous virus that threatens everything from public health to democracy. As van der Linden puts it, “People can catch misinformation much like a disease.” This “misinformation virus” is both highly contagious and “doesn’t only threaten the wellbeing of individuals. It poses serious threats to the integrity of elections and democracies worldwide.” If we are to fight it, van der Linden argues, it is not enough to cure victims—to disabuse them of false beliefs—after they have been infected; we must inoculate people before they are infected.

Some of van der Linden’s early work embraced McGuire’s strategy: vaccines for specific forms of misinformation. One set of experiments, for example, seemed to demonstrate that it is better to warn people about misleading claims concerning climate change than to debunk misperceptions after they arise. In more recent work, van der Linden and his collaborators are much more ambitious. Instead of inoculating individuals against misinformation about particular topics, which is costly and does not easily scale, they seek to expose people to the “DNA” of misinformation—the common structure of manipulative techniques, whether they concern climate change, vaccines, election fraud, or anything else. According to van der Linden, this DNA can be understood in terms of six structural building blocks to which he gives the acronym DEPICT: Discrediting, Emotion, Polarization, Impersonation, Conspiracy, and Trolling.

Foolproof does not just posit a simple explanation for complex social problems; it imagines a threat that can be straightforwardly identified.

With the DNA of misinformation cracked, the next step is to design and administer a vaccine. The specific intervention van der Linden and colleagues propose are games. In Bad News, the most influential game they have developed, players take on the role of a “fake news tycoon” attempting to mislead people online. The aim is to accrue badges, which you win for successfully mastering each prong of the DEPICT framework. The examples of misinformation are deliberately silly—as with real vaccines, the game exposes people to a harmless strain of the misinformation virus—but the claim is that by playing the game, individuals will develop mental antibodies, so to speak, against the more dangerous content that they encounter in the wild.

Much of Foolproof is spent on the alleged empirical vindication of this approach. In a typical experiment, participants are asked to rate the reliability of the same set of news headlines before and after playing a game. According to van der Linden, the results show that individuals are significantly better at this task after playing the game, that they outcompete individuals from a range of control groups, and that this strategy provides superior protection compared to alternative interventions.

But the argument isn’t convincing. To begin to see why, it is helpful to return to the brainwashing panic of the 1950s, which in reality was completely unfounded. Of the thousands of American prisoners of war, only twenty-one—roughly half a percent—defected to China. Further, their reasons seem to have had less to do with genuine persuasion than with prosaic self-interest: many probably feared being court-martialed for collaborating with their Chinese captors, a fate that did await some returning soldiers.

Get our latest essays, archival selections, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content in your inbox.

Sign Up

The flimsiness of the brainwashing narrative has two broad lessons for the current misinformation panic and for the central ideas of inoculation theory.

First, fears about people’s manipulability are broadly unfounded. Contrary to popular folklore, there is no such thing as brainwashing; even under the stress of an intense campaign of persuasion and manipulation, people are remarkably stubborn and difficult to influence. Of course, misinformation is not brainwashing, but a similar lesson applies. Much of the current misinformation panic depicts humans as profoundly gullible, routinely revising their worldviews and behaviors based on what they encounter on the Internet. In fact, a large body of psychological research demonstrates that people exploit sophisticated psychological mechanisms for evaluating communicated information. If anything, such mechanisms—what cognitive scientists call “epistemic vigilance”—make individuals overly stubborn, too difficult to influence rather than too easy. In general, people are highly skeptical of information they encounter: if a message conflicts with their preexisting beliefs, they demand arguments that they find persuasive from sources that they judge to be trustworthy. Otherwise, they typically reject the message.

This does not mean that everyone is always well-informed, of course. Ignorance is pervasive, and people hold inaccurate beliefs about many topics. But the issue is not whether people are misinformed; it’s why. Inoculation theory traces false beliefs to exposure to misinformation, but this is often a simplistic and misleading picture of our cognitive life. As Dietram Scheufele and colleagues argue, the idea that viral misinformation “distorts attitudes and behaviors of a citizenry that would otherwise hold issue and policy stances that are consistent with the best available scientific evidence” has “limited foundations in the social scientific literature.” First, regardless of media misinformation, the truth is often complex, uncertain, and counterintuitive, and it can be difficult to figure out, not least because people have limited information, are busy, and are subject to various reasoning biases.

Moreover, the beliefs we hold and the identities through which we interpret the world emerge over extended periods from infancy and feature complex interactions between our predispositions, personalities, development, life experiences, communities, and much more. The worldviews that result from this process are often partial, inaccurate, and difficult to dislodge, especially because many people distrust scientists, government agencies, and public health authorities. Although the causes of this distrust and its apparent recent increase in many countries are contested, it seems to be rooted in factors pertaining to economics, identity, polarization, and institutional failures, not “infection” by fake news.

This perspective is sharply at odds with van der Linden’s hypothesis that false beliefs arise because people are insufficiently skeptical of information they encounter online or from other media sources. If, instead, popular misperceptions often have much deeper roots and emerge from processes spanning many years, the real problem in many cases might be the exact opposite: that people are too wedded to their intuitions and overly skeptical of information from trustworthy sources. In that case, teaching people to be more vigilant about possible manipulation might backfire, providing them with greater resources to dismiss information at odds with their unfounded beliefs.

Fears about people’s manipulability are broadly unfounded.

Is this a genuine risk? If we lived in environments plagued by misinformation, as the infodemic metaphor suggests, greater vigilance might be appropriate. But in reality the current panic about a misinformation epidemic is itself rooted in fake news. In well-studied Western countries, at least, the share of misinformation in most people’s information diet is extremely low; the overwhelming majority of people get their news from mainstream, largely reliable sources. It might therefore be genuinely harmful to persuade them—to misinform them—that their worlds are saturated with viral fake news that they should be more skeptical of.

Of course, claims about the scale of misinformation depend on how we define “misinformation.” This is an extremely contentious topic. Whereas real epidemics have well-defined causes—viruses whose strains can be identified and sequenced—misinformation lacks a consensus definition. If one defines it broadly as misleading information, it is utterly ubiquitous. Even among mainstream news sources, reporting is often highly selective and partisan. Indeed, given that news involves presenting an extremely non-representative sample of attention-grabbing events, one could argue that news is inherently misleading even in the absence of partisan biases.

Because a broad definition of misinformation has such consequences, modern misinformation research tends to define it much more narrowly as straightforwardly false information, and van der Linden follows suit. On this narrow definition, misinformation plausibly does constitute a minute portion of most people’s information diet, not least because effective partisan media and propagandists typically refrain from expressing straightforwardly demonstrable falsehoods. Given this definition, however, the image of an infodemic in which our worlds are plagued with a contagious misinformation virus is extremely misleading and potentially harmful.

To be sure, misinformation in this narrow sense is not wholly illusory. Even if it is not as pervasive as commonly alleged, low-quality, straightforwardly false content certainly does exist. Yet the consumption of such misinformation is highly skewed. Most people consume very little, but a small minority of the population—consisting largely of avid conspiracy theorists, hyper-partisans, and extremists—consume a lot. Perhaps this audience would benefit from a misinformation vaccine of the sort van der Linden proposes?

To see why this conclusion is unwarranted, consider a second lesson of the 1950s brainwashing panic: that when people seem to have been manipulated by ideas, it is often not because they have been duped against their interests but, quite the contrary, because their behavior promotes their interests. We can see this at work in both the supply and demand of misinformation. On the supply side, some actors intentionally propagate misinformation because they benefit—financially or otherwise—from misinforming their audience. (In such cases researchers typically talk of “disinformation.”) Others simply want to troll, to generate outrage, to bond with members of their subculture, and to display their socially attractive traits. Similar goals are also central to the consumption of misinformation. We do not always want to be well-informed, even when we consciously represent ourselves as dispassionate truth seekers. Our beliefs and worldviews form parts of our identities and perform a range of emotional and social functions for us: they help us win approval from friends and co-believers, they promote and justify our interests, and they help us to feel good about ourselves and our choices.

If anything, we tend to be overly stubborn—too difficult to influence rather than too easy.

Van der Linden is aware of this phenomenon—psychologists call it “motivated cognition”—and devotes a chapter of the book to it, but he does not appreciate the deep problems it poses for the simple causal story at the heart of inoculation theory. Motivated believers seek out misleading content that rationalizes their favored convictions and narratives, and misinformation entrepreneurs stand to win social and financial rewards from satisfying this demand. In such cases, the result is not an infodemic but a marketplace of rationalizations. People do not treat harmful viruses as a consumer good, and they do not want to be infected with them; with misinformation, by contrast, they often do.

In short, inoculation theory rests on a flawed portrait of human beings as passive and credulous. Far from being gullible victims of mind viruses that plague our information ecosystems, we are sophisticated agents with complex goals and identities navigating environments dominated by largely reliable information, at least on simple factual matters. To the extent that people are misinformed on these matters, it is often not because they have been duped by encounters with unreliable sources; it is because they are overly skeptical of reliable sources that contradict their preexisting beliefs, or because the consumption and propagation of misinformation promotes their interests or goals.

Are these considerations fatal to van der Linden’s project? Even if the scale of misinformation is often exaggerated, and even if people are often motivated to consume biased and misleading content, it would be absurd to deny that people are sometimes duped by harmful falsehoods. Further, even if misinformation is different from a virus in some respects, perhaps it is analogous in the respect that matters most for inoculation theory: perhaps it has an intrinsic “DNA” that individuals can learn to identify through controlled exposure. If so, fears about making people more skeptical across the board might be unfounded. One might think that skepticism could be narrowly targeted on misinformation without undermining trust in reliable content.

To see why this is unlikely, it is essential to distinguish the claim that it is helpful to warn people about specific ideas—to prebunk rather than debunk—from the more ambitious hypothesis that people can be inoculated against all possible misinformation. The former view may be true, although the evidence is mixed. The latter view does not stand up to scrutiny, however. Its central assumption—that there is something intrinsic about misinformation, a DNA that we can be trained to recognize—is radically implausible.

The fundamental problem is that there are no intrinsic differences between true and false claims. That is, whether a claim is right or wrong—or informative or misleading—depends not on characteristics of the claim itself but on whether it accurately represents how things are. If someone tells you that the 2020 U.S. presidential election was invalidated by extensive voter fraud, for example, you cannot simply examine the statement—or even its surrounding rhetorical context—to figure out whether it is true or false; its truth or falsity depends on the world.

How, then, do we decide whether to accept what others tell us? For almost all contested questions of broad public significance, we have no ability to directly verify claims and so must draw on our preexisting beliefs—whether first order (about the issue in question) or second order (about whether the source of the claim is trustworthy). In epistemically ideal situations, people can be receptive to persuasive arguments that conflict with their gut feelings, intuitions, or prior commitments, but even in this case preexisting beliefs are also necessary to evaluate the premises of arguments and the trustworthiness of arguers. In less than ideal conditions, motivated cognition can conflict with the pursuit of accuracy, leading us to reject claims even if we possess good reasons for accepting them and accept claims even when they are counterintuitive or supported by sloppy reasoning. In those cases, we may be biased to accept claims that what we want to believe—for example, because they affirm our identity or signal our partisan allegiances—and too skeptical of claims that we find threatening or unpalatable.

When people seem to have been manipulated by ideas, it is often not because they have been duped against their interests but because their behavior promotes their interests.

This picture of our cognitive life suggests there will be sharp limits to individual-level solutions for combatting misinformation. If people are already highly skeptical and misperceptions are often rooted in motivated cognition, then the real challenges with misinformation likely reside at the systemic and political levels. For example, we must build more trustworthy institutions that can win people’s confidence, and we must address the social and political conditions that make people avid consumers of partisan and conspiratorial content. This outlook is radically at odds with the central claim of inoculation theory: that misinformation has certain “tells,” intrinsic markers of unreliability that individuals can learn to detect independently of acquiring any new knowledge or motivations.

To see the problem with this idea, return to van der Linden’s DEPICT framework. Consider the first prong of the acronym: discrediting. It is true that misinformation producers often seek to discredit those who challenge their claims, but it is equally true that mainstream and reliable outlets often seek to discredit fringe and extremist content. Van der Linden’s own book, after all, is a sustained attempt to discredit misinformation producers. What is distinctive about misinformation is that it seeks to discredit the wrong sources, not that it engages in discrediting at all.

The same lesson applies to emotional manipulation, the second prong of DEPICT. Once again, it is true that much misinformation plays on people’s emotions, but so does much reliable and important content. Few things play on the emotions more than Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The fact that a claim is emotionally charged does not and cannot tell you whether it is true or false. If it did, that would be a big problem for the central claim of Foolproof: likening misinformation to a dangerous virus, after all, plays on people’s fears.

The third element of DEPICT, polarization, is an especially revealing attempt at identifying misinformation. It is true that propagandists often seek to inflame societal divisions, and much misleading content is no doubt highly polarizing. Nevertheless, unless the only legitimate perspective on the world is centrist—an incoherent view, not least because what counts as the center or mainstream varies so radically across time and place—then perfectly legitimate content can also be highly polarizing. Van der Linden defines polarization as a misinformation technique that attempts “to move people away from the political centre,” but it is difficult to think of any progressive movement—feminists, anti-racists, indigenous rights campaigners, and so on—that could not be characterized in this way. Again, there is no reason to think that this feature of information says anything about its truth or reliability.

Finally, consider conspiracy theories—the fifth prong of van der Linden’s framework. No doubt many conspiracy theories are false, and some are deeply irrational. But what of the claim that senior members of the Catholic church conspired to cover up child abuse within the institution? Or that the Bush administration conspired to win support for the invasion of Iraq by lying about the presence of WMDs? Or that senior figures within major banks conspired to influence policies in self-serving ways in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis? Early in the book, van der Linden observes that bad conspiracy theories are distinguished from reasonable ones by their lack of evidence. But if conspiracy theories can be true and reasonable, the mere presence of conspiracy theorizing—however we define it—cannot be a distinguishing mark of misinformation.

So much for four of the six prongs of the DEPICT framework. Far from uncovering the DNA of misinformation, it identifies phenomena often associated with reliable information. Propagandists and disinformation campaigns do often use similar techniques, but it doesn’t follow that the techniques can be detected as a property of their misinformation. Consider cherry picking. Although this isn’t included in the DEPICT framework, it is an extremely widespread and effective misinformation technique precisely because the “cherries”— the news stories, the reported events, and so on—are real and because the process through which the cherries are selected is hidden. The same lesson applies more generally. Effective misinformation—presumably the only kind that we should be concerned about—tends to bypass people’s capacity to detect it.

Are these concerns devastating for inoculation theory? Perhaps the theory can serve a more modest goal—not to capture the essence of misinformation but simply to make people more alert to the possibility that they are being manipulated in certain ways. But this is at odds with van der Linden’s claims in the book.

Alternatively, one might think the proof is in the experimental pudding­—the empirical data van der Linden devotes so much space to in Foolproof. The question is whether successful performance on these experimental tasks indicates a genuine “inoculation” against real misinformation. Again there are strong reasons for doubt.

First, there are two different metrics by which one might evaluate an intervention against misinformation: improvement in the detection of misinformation, or improvement in the ability to distinguish reliable from unreliable content. To appreciate the difference, suppose a study participant is asked to judge the truth of ten headlines, five of which are false. Suppose further that before the intervention, the individual labels all of the headlines true but after the intervention labels all of them false. By the first metric (improvement in the detection of misinformation), the individual has improved dramatically—their success rate at detecting false headlines has gone from 0 percent to 100 percent—but they may not have acquired a greater capacity to discriminate between reliable and unreliable content; they could simply have become more skeptical across the board.

Van der Linden’s experimental methodology is plagued by serious weaknesses.

Remarkably, this seems to be the case with gamified misinformation vaccines, as psychologists Ariana Modirrousta-Galian and Philip A. Higham suggest in a recent article. By focusing on the first metric rather than the second, the existing research greatly inflates the apparent benefits of such games. In fact this is too charitable: given that people are already highly skeptical and that true information is far more prevalent than misinformation in the real world, making people more skeptical across the board almost certainly has negative consequences.

At one point in the book, van der Linden describes research that attempts to guard against this worry. In one experiment, he and his collaborator, Jon Roozenbeek, included two accurate headlines in their study, in addition to a set of headlines illustrating the alleged misinformation techniques identified in the DEPICT framework. After playing Bad News, participants were no more likely to regard the accurate headlines as false, but they were much better at detecting the misinformation techniques. According to van der Linden, this finding shows that the intervention does in fact improve discrimination; it does not just make people more skeptical in general.

Once again, however, it seems that this positive “discovery” is simply an artifact of the experimental design. The two accurate stories included in the study were common knowledge when the experiment was carried out in 2019: namely, that Trump wanted to build a wall along the United States–Mexico border and that Brexit would officially happen that year. A general increase in skepticism would not lead participants to doubt everything they formerly considered true.

This consideration points to a second problem with the experiments alleged to vindicate inoculation theory: the items used to test misinformation discrimination are typically chosen by the experimenters. In fact, van der Linden and his team create examples of misinformation to illustrate what they take to be the core misinformation techniques outlined in the DEPICT framework. For example, they use the tweet “The Bitcoin exchange rate is being manipulated by a small group of rich bankers. #InvestigateNow” to illustrate the conspiracy technique, whereas “New study shows that left-wing people lie far more than right-wing people” is supposed to illustrate the polarization technique. (Never mind whether these are good examples of the phenomena they are supposed to exemplify.) “If we’d used a real fake news story,” van der Linden contends, “people might have known whether it is true or false simply because they’d read, seen, or heard it before.”

This methodology has clear weaknesses. First, if real-world examples of fake news should be excluded on the grounds that people might have encountered them before, why is it ok to include real-world examples of accurate news that participants almost certainly encountered before? Second, because van der Linden and his team come up with the examples of misinformation themselves, they have significant degrees of freedom in creating examples that maximize the likelihood that their intervention will appear successful. (Perhaps this explains the examples’ cartoonish simplicity.) Finally, and worst of all, there is the problem that we have already encountered: the “misinformation techniques” that characterize the test items are not in fact diagnostic of misinformation. As a result, a greater propensity to detect such techniques is not the same thing as a greater propensity to detect misinformation.

All these considerations undermine the contention that inoculation theory has been vindicated experimentally.

Foolproof’s argument, then, is not so foolproof. At least on the relatively narrow definition that van der Linden uses in the book, misinformation is not widespread, and its causal role in major social events is either unsubstantiated or greatly overstated. In general, people are already sophisticated and vigilant social learners, if anything too skeptical than too credulous. The minority of the population that consumes the lion’s share of low-quality misinformation seems to be its avid consumers rather than its passive victims. And effective misinformation lacks an intrinsic DNA that neatly distinguishes it from true and reliable content.

The real challenges with misinformation likely reside at the systemic and political levels.

Given these problems, why has Foolproof’s viral view of misinformation itself gone viral? Panic about misinformation took off in 2016 after two events that many found shocking: the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and the election of Donald Trump in the United States. Amid the global resurgence of nationalist populism—and social media’s role in making fringe views more visible—many pundits, policymakers, and social scientists began to ask why so many people had seemingly lost their minds. The misinformation narrative supplied an answer: because people are misinformed about the world, and they are misinformed about the world because they have been “exposed” to misinformation.

Three features of this explanation are worth noting. First, it is apolitical: it explains social and political conflict not in terms of people’s divergent identities, perspectives, and interests but in terms of factual errors caused by exposure to bad information. On this view, our political adversaries are simply ignorant dupes, and with enough education and critical thinking they will come to agree with us; there is no need to reimagine other social institutions or build the political power necessary to do so. Second, the argument is technocratic rather than democratic. By using an epidemiological metaphor, it suggests solutions to social problems akin to public health measures: experts must lead the way in tamping the spread of mind viruses and vaccinating the masses against them. Finally, though many critics find the misinformation panic too pessimistic, there is a deeper sense in which it is extremely optimistic. Foolproof does not just posit a simple explanation and remedy for complex social problems; it imagines a threat that can be straightforwardly identified.

These features, I think, help explain why the misinformation-as-virus narrative has won such widespread endorsement. The belief that a dangerous misinformation virus is a major source of society’s problems is popular not because it is supported by evidence, and not because it has duped credulous individuals, but, most plausibly, because its apolitical, technocratic, and simplistic character resonates with the interests and biases of those who consume and propagate it.

We’re interested in what you think. Submit a letter to the editors at letters@bostonreview.net. Boston Review is nonprofit, paywall-free, and reader-funded. To support work like this, please donate here.

Boston Review

21. The US Army is facing excessive risk. Here’s how to mitigate that.

Excerpts:

Even in times of relative peace, the Army accounts for about two-thirds of global U.S. combatant commander requirements. As an example, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Army provided about three-fourths of the additional U.S. forces deployed to reinforce Eastern European NATO allies. Additionally, the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve have been instrumental in training U.S. partners and allies, enabling global operations with logistics support, and responding to crises at home, whether COVID-19 or natural disasters.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying: “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your strategy.” A budget that disproportionately decrements the service that routinely faces the heaviest demands both in times of peace and war is divorced from the aims of the ambitious National Defense Strategy. One temptation might be to drastically reduce U.S. commitments — in the Middle East, Africa or even Europe — to close the resource gap. But this ignores the increasingly interconnected nature of geopolitics, forfeits the strategic competitive space and discounts the potential for security deterioration that later requires a more significant U.S. commitment once vital interests are threatened. There are few risk-free reductions in either budget or global force posture.

To safeguard American security, Congress should ensure that the Army’s budget receives 3% to 5% real annual growth, matched by the necessary investments in U.S. air, sea, space and cyber power. If this is truly a “decisive decade,” the military’s budget must reflect this urgency. A joint force capable of converging each service’s capabilities across warfighting domains is one that potential adversaries will not seek to fight. To quote Milley: “The only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one.”

The US Army is facing excessive risk. Here’s how to mitigate that.

Defense News · by Gen. Robert Brown (ret.) · June 8, 2023

“General, never let it happen again. Never let it happen again.” Those words of caution from a World War II paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division during a commemoration on the 75th anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, France, resonated deeply with then-Army Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley. Now, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley repeatedly emphasizes that the United States must deter great power war in what the 2022 National Security Strategy calls a “decisive decade” that “will shape whether this period is known as an age of conflict and discord or the beginning of a more stable and prosperous future.”

Given the grave rhetoric, reports of possible 10% to 20% cuts to Army special operations forces — a prime force for competing in the “gray zone” to achieve U.S. aims short of armed conflict — seem misaligned with U.S. goals. While it is important to weigh the potential strategic ramifications of these reductions, it is as critical to recognize that they are just the latest manifestation of a misalignment between U.S. defense strategy and resources. This misalignment compels the Army to make short-term decisions to meet budgetary constraints that harm the joint force’s ability to execute the U.S. defense strategy.

The 2022 National Defense Strategy describes the most complex strategic environment the United States has faced in decades. The joint force must outpace the People’s Republic of China, deter Russia’s “acute threat,” and remain vigilant of the “persistent threats” of North Korea, Iran and global violent extremist organizations. The 2018 National Defense Strategy Commission assessed that to execute the 2018 NDS — the core tenets of which the 2022 NDS maintains — U.S. defense funding required 3% to 5% of real annual growth.

But between 2019 and 2023, the defense budget was more than $200 billion below what was necessary to have achieved 5% real growth. The fiscal 2024 defense budget request is a 0.8% increase in real terms, but it will be a decrease if inflation remains above 2.4%.

The Army has faced the most severe budgetary challenges of the joint force. Assumptions that the United States will likely fight short, high-tech wars predominantly in the air and sea, instead of protracted ground wars, have resulted in budgets that accept excessive risk to U.S. land power and the joint force. Between FY19 and FY23, the Army lost nearly $40 billion in buying power, and the FY24 request represents a 3.3% decrease in real terms from the previous year.

The Army’s end strength has fallen to its lowest level since 1940 to satisfy budgetary constraints while maintaining fight-tonight readiness and keeping modernization on track. Army Secretary Christine Wormuth has indicated that, in part driven by current recruiting shortfalls, more force structure cuts are on the horizon.

These trends would be less alarming if the historical data of all major U.S. wars in the past eight decades were not so definitive about the Army’s central role in combat. Across WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Army has averaged approximately 60% of forces deployed to the combat theater and about 70% of wartime fatalities.

Counter to the conventional wisdom that ground forces play a minimal role in the Indo-Pacific region, the Army’s share of combat deployments and casualties in the United States’ three major ground wars in the theater has been consistent with wars fought elsewhere. The war in Ukraine demonstrates that while the character of warfare is constantly evolving, there is no substitute for land forces in imposing political will.

Even in times of relative peace, the Army accounts for about two-thirds of global U.S. combatant commander requirements. As an example, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the Army provided about three-fourths of the additional U.S. forces deployed to reinforce Eastern European NATO allies. Additionally, the Army National Guard and the U.S. Army Reserve have been instrumental in training U.S. partners and allies, enabling global operations with logistics support, and responding to crises at home, whether COVID-19 or natural disasters.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell is quoted as saying: “Show me your budget and I’ll tell you your strategy.” A budget that disproportionately decrements the service that routinely faces the heaviest demands both in times of peace and war is divorced from the aims of the ambitious National Defense Strategy. One temptation might be to drastically reduce U.S. commitments — in the Middle East, Africa or even Europe — to close the resource gap. But this ignores the increasingly interconnected nature of geopolitics, forfeits the strategic competitive space and discounts the potential for security deterioration that later requires a more significant U.S. commitment once vital interests are threatened. There are few risk-free reductions in either budget or global force posture.

To safeguard American security, Congress should ensure that the Army’s budget receives 3% to 5% real annual growth, matched by the necessary investments in U.S. air, sea, space and cyber power. If this is truly a “decisive decade,” the military’s budget must reflect this urgency. A joint force capable of converging each service’s capabilities across warfighting domains is one that potential adversaries will not seek to fight. To quote Milley: “The only thing more expensive than deterrence is actually fighting a war, and the only thing more expensive than fighting a war is fighting one and losing one.”

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Robert Brown is the president and CEO of the Association of the United States Army. He previously served as the commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

22.

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