Korea has not been the only battleground since the end of the Second World War. Men have fought and died in Malaya, in Greece, in the Philippines, in Algeria and Cuba and Cyprus, and almost continuously on the Indo-Chinese Peninsula. No nuclear weapons have been fired. No massive nuclear retaliation has been considered appropriate. This is another type of war, new in its intensity, ancient in its origin--war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, assassins, war by ambush instead of by combat; by infiltration, instead of aggression, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It is a form of warfare uniquely adapted to what has been strangely called "wars of liberation," to undermine the efforts of new and poor countries to maintain the freedom that they have finally achieved. It preys on economic unrest and ethnic conflicts. It requires in those situations where we must counter it, and these are the kinds of challenges that will be before us in the next decade if freedom is to be saved, a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force, and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the U.S.

Remarks at West Point to the Graduating Class of the U.S. Military Academy, June 06, 1962

Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"He conquers who endures."

– Persius

“The buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching toward infinity.”

– A. Edward Newton

“I have never believed that man’s freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do.”

– Jean-Jacques Rousseau

1. How Trump may shake up DOD: an insider’s view

2. 5 Ukraine stories you might've missed because of US election

3. ‘We have won’: Russians envision new global system with Trump victory

4. Mark Rutte: North Korean troops in Europe marks turning point

5. Trump’s Chance to Shape History with a Lasting Peace in Ukraine

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 7, 2024

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 7, 2024

8. US Army Rangers have been training for a different kind of fight: neutralizing enemy underground nuclear facilities

9. Trump to Renew ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Against Iran

10. US chip restrictions hinder AI ambitions of China’s top chip foundry, CEO says

11. What a second Trump presidency could mean for the defense budget

12. Plea deals revived for alleged 9/11 mastermind and others

13. Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind

14. Pentagon chief directs military to conduct smooth transition to Trump

15. Trump’s Pentagon overhaul: 8 policy changes he’s expected to make

16. How the Osprey Changed Air Force Special Operations

17. Philippine Forces Rehearse Island Seizure in South China Sea

18. The Army in the Pacific: Lessons from My Time as a Ghost

20. Pentagon anticipates major upheaval with Trump’s return to White House

21. China’s Gray-Zone Offensive Against Taiwan Is Backfiring

22. North Korean Residents: “I Envy the US Elections Where the President is Chosen by Voting”

1. How Trump may shake up DOD: an insider’s view

I have pasted information below on the Chapter that Chris MIller authorized in Project 2025 on the Department of Defense. I previously sent this out last July but it is now more timely and relevant. I recommend uniformed members and professional civil servants in DOD and USSOCOM study the chapter.

How Trump may shake up DOD: an insider’s view

An interview with Christopher Miller, the acting SecDef-turned-Project 2025 co-author.

defenseone.com7 min

November 7, 2024

View Original

Christopher Miller, then the acting U.S. defense secretary, speaks with Minister of National Defence of Lithuania Raimundas Karoblis at the Pentagon on November 13, 2020. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Few people, if any, have a better window into Donald Trump’s plans for the Pentagon than Christopher Miller, the final acting defense secretary of Trump’s first term and architect of the defense chapter of the Project 2025 document.

Two people with knowledge of the Trump campaign’s internal deliberations told Defense One that Miller is well-placed to play a key role in the next White House’s national security apparatus. And while Trump sought to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation document after its many controversial elements rose to public attention, it was written largely by his former appointees and staff and mirrors many of his key policy proposals.

Although he has acted as one, Chris Miller is no one’s idea of a defense secretary—not even Chris Miller’s. A retired Army Special Forces colonel who later ran the National Counterterrorism Center, he lacks the defining qualities of a Washington political operator. He shows no enthusiasm for delivering talking points or speeches; takes no joy in commanding large budgets; expresses no interest in waging culture-war battles in front of cameras. He shares Trump’s extemporaneous, unscripted speaking style but none of his former boss’s vindictiveness. Miller is far more likely to extend praise to those in the security space whose work he admires than complain about people. (Although he is quick to find colorful language to condemn what he sees as bad ideas and failures, particularly the 2021 Afghanistan pullout.) In a town that runs on political ambition, Miller displays annoyance both at the question of what role he might play in a future Trump administration and, it seemed, at the very possibility. He’s most at home in the attire of a man about to go fishing for the day and many, especially Miller himself, consider him too unpolished to make it through a Senate confirmation hearing. But given Trump’s expressed preference for acting cabinet secretaries rather than confirmed ones, that is not the barrier it once was. And Miller’s low-ego personality could serve him well in an Oval Office run by a man with ego to spare.

We caught up with Miller in June to discuss how the Defense Department might change in a second Trump term and to hear his own priorities and thoughts on the future of U.S. defense. In the interview, he said the Project 2025 defense chapter was a collaborative work, involving multiple contributors and committees. He described his role as “herding cats.” Regardless, Miller was happy to endorse and expound on several of its key provisions, many of which did originate from him.

Innovation

Unlike many of the better-known, more partisan parts of the Heritage Foundation’s voluminous Project 2025 document, the chapter on defense contains points and proposals that echo what many national security professionals have been urging for years, and many that the Biden White House has itself attempted to implement. One of these is a core focus on innovating and deploying new weapons far more quickly. He's main complaint of current innovation efforts like the Replicator program and even the Defense Innovation Unit is that such efforts aren't matched with real dollars.

Miller’s approach, however, differs from the current status quo, placing far greater emphasis on ideas and innovations that emerge from within the department, particularly at the operator level.

“Here's my idea, push down to every battalion-sized unit across all of the services an innovation fund..and let’s go bottom up,” he said in the interview. “Push decentralized innovation down to the kids in the field. Provide them some seed money.”

Miller also wants to tackle the culture of risk aversion that especially permeates the middle tier of the services by prodding inspectors general to better monitor how innovation funds are spent.

“They go in each year and guarantee that the money is being spent appropriately, that it's tied to the commander's vision and all that. Then we just institutionalize it across the force,” he said.

Irregular warfare

Unsurprisingly, Miller, a former Army Green Beret who first arrived in Afghanistan in December 2001, does not agree with the service’s plan to cut U.S. special operations forces.

Miller wants irregular warfare to have a larger, even predominant, role in implementing U.S. policy in South and Central America and Africa—and a smaller one in the Pacific.

“Let Special Operations Command, irregular warfare command, handle Latin America and AFRICOM. Let them compete against whoever it is out there. Let the services just focus on INDOPACOM and the Russian bear.”

It’s a new version of an idea that won serious consideration in the early days of the 2001 operations in the Middle East. Ultimately, combatant commanders killed it, he said. “All the geographic combat commanders just crushed that because of their authorities and their prerogatives.”

Defense intelligence

The Project 2025 document calls for substantial reform of the defense intelligence apparatus, away from “peripheral intelligence obligations that do not advance military readiness,” including screening people for security clearances.

Miller sees a possible combined role for defense intelligence and special operations, in effect transforming the latter into a quasi-intelligence service in order to better anticipate rapidly shifting geopolitical crises. It’s a vision similar to that espoused in 2016 by then-SOCOM commander Gen. Tony Thomas.

“This is nothing new. It's been kicked around for ages,” Miller said “There's this almost knee-jerk reaction to it related to civil liberties, that if you have an operational element and an intelligence element working together somehow you might violate American civil liberties. I don't see that. It requires cognizant oversight and serious attention. But we know how to do that.”

Miller would also place more emphasis on rapid collection and analysis of open-source intelligence.

“We haven't even scratched the surface of the power of open-source intelligence, and we're still kind of stuck in these silos,” he said.

Space and tactical nuclear weapons

The Project 2025 document calls on the United States to “develop a nuclear arsenal with the size, sophistication, and tailoring—including new capabilities at the theater level—to ensure that there is no circumstance in which America is exposed to serious nuclear coercion.”

Miller said that the issue of low-yield tactical nuclear weapons was a heated one during the Project 2025 committee deliberations and would likely continue to be. But he’s willing to consider adding them to America’s nuclear arsenal.

On space, Miller said the Pentagon can’t simply rely on an abundance of cheap, low-earth orbit satellites for resilience.

“Obviously, treaty restrictions for weaponizing space have to be considered. A lot of that is talking about not just space-based weapons, but also cyber effects, other effects,” he said.

National Guard

Miller expressed little enthusiasm for a proposal by former Trump advisor Stephen Miller to send the National Guard into American cities to help deport people over governor objections.

“I think the risks are a little hyperbolic,” he said of the notion sending National Guard units from state to another, even against the will of governors. “There are enough fire breaks in there” to prevent misuse.

But he believes that border security is a natural fit for the Guard, which has been helping there for years. Beyond that, he said individual governors should determine the duties of their state’s Guard units, while the Pentagon trains and equips Guard units to help deter potential foreign adversaries.

Alliances

The public perception of Trump as eager to abandon NATO—a perception Trump himself has at times advanced—doesn’t represent his previous administration’s actual policy or current thinking, which primarily emphasizes a need for NATO nations to spend more on collective defense, an idea that alliance officials have also supported.

Miller, too, dismissed the notion that Trump was preparing to storm out of the alliance.

“Everybody is concerned that [Trump] means a wholesale pullout of NATO or other organizations. I find that probably a stretch. The ultimate point is better burden-sharing.”

That expectation for greater individual defense spending by partner militaries would also extend to other countries, such as South Korea.

On the topic of joint development, particularly of ships, Miller sounds more like the present Defense Department than the next one. The United States alone just doesn’t have the ship-building capabilities to meet the former Trump administration goal of a 350-ship Navy, let alone the service’s current stated goal of 381.

“The prohibition against U.S. Navy ships being built in foreign shipyards—I understand the reason for that, but there are national-security waivers. So why don't we have a serious conversation about shipbuilding capacity in Japan, South Korea? There are other places. You can probably get the Philippines. Australia as well.”

That opinion, he said, was very much a personal one.

“This is where I am, not where Heritage is. Freaking, I have no idea where the Trump campaign is.”

So I have not done a deep dive into the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership. I missed the fact that Chapter 4, "Department of Defense, was authored by Christopher Miller, former Acting SECDEF.

Below is the excerpt on Special Operations Forces. I have not seen any other reporting on this. Chris makes an important case for how SOF can be employed effectively in strategic competition with a strong emphasis on and from an irregular warfare perspective.

I wonder if anyone at USSOCOM or DOD has read this. Probably not since it is in a very partisan document. I am sure Project 2025 is something no one associated with the current administration would be authorized to read, much less incorporate what may be some very good ideas. But there is so much sensational reporting about Project 2025 and some of the controversial proposals that any good ideas will be overlooked or simply dismissed. I wish some of the ideas below had been put into effect a year ago when the report was published.

But since I am non-partisan I will look anywhere for good ideas

The entire Chapter 4 can be downloaded here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bplTSfLz24ofgFSJkoQr8UUZD47msV7k/view?usp=sharing

The entire 920 page document can be downloaded here: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24088042/project-2025s-mandate-for-leadership-the-conservative-promise.pdf

SPECIAL OPERATIONS FORCES

Even though America’s conventional war in Afghanistan was a failure, Special Operations Forces of the United States Special Operation Command (USSOCOM) executed an extremely effective counterterrorism campaign: There has not been another major attack on the homeland, global terrorist threats are reduced and managed, collaboration with international partners is effective, and units under USSOCOM are the most capable and experienced warfighters in two generations.

There is a movement to reduce the scope and scale of USSOCOM’s mission in favor of other service priorities in great-power competition. This would be a mistake because USSOCOM can be employed effectively in great-power competition.

It makes sense to capitalize on USSOCOM’s experience and repurpose its mission to include irregular warfare within the context of great-power competition, thereby providing a robust organization that is capable of achieving strategic effects that are critical both to our national defense and to the defense of our allies and partners around the globe. Irregular warfare should be used proactively to prevent state and nonstate actors from negatively affecting U.S. policies and objectives while simultaneously strengthening our regional partnerships. If we maintain irregular warfare’s traditional focus on nonstate actors, we limit ourselves to addressing only the symptoms (nonstate actors), not the problems themselves (China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran).

Needed Reforms

· Make irregular warfare a cornerstone of security strategy. The U.S. can project strength through unified action with our Interagency, 38 allies, and partners by utilizing irregular warfare capabilities synchronized with elements of national power. Broadly redefining irregular warfare to address current state and nonstate actors is critical to countering irregular threats that range from the Chinese use of economic warfare to Russian disinformation and Islamist terrorism. A broad definition of irregular warfare in the National Security Strategy would allow for a whole-of government approach, thereby providing resources and capabilities to counter threats and ultimately serve as credible deterrence at the strategic and tactical levels.

1. Define irregular warfare as “a means by which the United States uses all elements of national power to project influence abroad to counter state adversaries, defeat hostile nonstate actors, deter wider conflict, and maintain peace in great-power competition.”

2. Characterize the state and nonstate irregular threats facing the U.S. by region in the National Security Strategy.

3. Direct that irregular warfare resources, capabilities, and strategies be incorporated directly into the overall National Defense Strategy instead of being relegated to a supporting document.

4. Establish an Irregular Warfare Center of Excellence to help DOD train, equip, and organize to conduct irregular warfare as a core competency across the spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict.

· Counter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) globally. DOD, in conjunction with the Interagency, allies, and partner nations, must work proactively to counter China’s BRI around the globe.

1. Task USSOCOM and corresponding organizations in the Pentagon with conceptualizing, resourcing, and executing regionally based operations to counter the BRI with a focus on nations that are key to our energy policy, international supply chains, and our defense industrial base.

2. Use regional and global information operations to highlight Chinese violations of Exclusive Economic Zones, violations of human rights, and coercion along Chinese fault lines in Xinjiang Province, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in addition to China’s weaponization of sovereign debt.

3. Directly counter Chinese economic power with all elements of national power in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean to maintain maritime freedom of movement and protect the digital infrastructure of nations in the region.

· Establish credible deterrence through irregular warfare to protect the homeland. A whole-of-government approach and willingness to employ cyber, information, economic, and counterterrorist irregular warfare capabilities should be utilized to protect the homeland.

1. Include the designation of USSOCOM as lead for the execution of irregular warfare against hostile state and nonstate actors in the National Defense Strategy.

2. Demonstrate a willingness to employ offensive cyber capabilities against adversaries who conduct cyberattacks against U.S. infrastructure, businesses, personnel, and governments.

3. Employ a “name and shame” approach by making information regarding the names of entities that target democratic processes and international norms available in a transparent manner.

4. Work with the Interagency to employ economic warfare, lawfare, and diplomatic pressure against hostile state and nonstate actors.

5. Maintain the authorities necessary for an aggressive counterterrorism posture against threats to the homeland.

2. 5 Ukraine stories you might've missed because of US election

5 Ukraine stories you might've missed because of US election

kyivindependent.com · by The Kyiv Independent news desk · November 7, 2024

As the world waited with bated breath for the result of the U.S. elections, Russia's war against Ukraine did not relent.

Donald Trump's sweeping victory no doubt spells an uncertain future for the besieged country.

But Russia's grinding advances in Donbas, drone attacks, and yet more allegations of war crimes committed by Moscow's forces all continued no matter who was delivering a victory speech across the Atlantic.

We bring you five stories about Russia's war in Ukraine that you might've missed in the wake of the U.S. presidential election.

Ukraine hits Russian naval base in Dagestan for first time

Ukraine's military intelligence was behind a drone attack against the city of Kaspiysk in Russia's Dagestan Republic, targeting a Russian naval base, a source in the agency told the Kyiv Independent on Nov. 6.

At least two vessels – Gepard-class missile ships Tatarstan and Dagestan – were damaged in the attack, and possibly also several small Project 21631 Buyan-M corvettes, sources said.

Dagestan authorities reported intercepting a drone attack over Kaspiysk, a port city at the Caspian Sea around 1,000 kilometers from the front line (600 miles), on the morning of Nov. 6.

Ukraine may have targeted Iranian weapon supply routes in Dagestan strike, media suggests

Although the precise consequences of the Ukrainian attack are difficult to establish, the recent strike is still “significant in several ways,” the War Zone’s experts said.

The Kyiv IndependentKateryna Hodunova

"Russian Navy ships are stationed in Kaspiysk," said Andrii Kovalenko, an official at Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council. The base is home to Russia's Caspian Flotilla, as well as Russian Marines and Coastal Troops.

Based on satellite imagery, at least eight vessels were present at the naval base after the attack, open-source intelligence (OSINT) analysts said. Some reports suggested that Ukraine may have targeted the supply routes of Iranian weapons flowing to Russia via the Caspian Sea.

The strike took place roughly 15 kilometers from a local airport, the Mash news channel claimed, identifying the drone as a Ukrainian A-22 Flying Fox drone. The nearby Makhachkala airport has suspended operations for an indefinite period due to the incident, local authorities said.

Russia has executed at least 124 Ukrainian POWs on battlefield throughout full-scale war, prosecutors say

Kyiv knows of 124 Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs) who were executed by Russian forces on the battlefield throughout the full-scale war, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General's Office said on Nov. 6.

Reports of murders, torture, and ill-treatment of Ukrainian prisoners of war are received regularly by Ukrainian authorities and have spiked in recent months. Most cases were recorded in the embattled Donetsk Oblast.

Speaking on national television, Denys Lysenko, the head of the department focused on war-related crimes, said that 49 criminal investigations were underway regarding the execution of Ukrainian POWs.

The most recent cases include the killing of six captured Ukrainian soldiers near Pokrovsk in Donetsk Oblast, prosecutors reported on Nov. 5.

"We are now analyzing all these cases, looking for patterns... We are considering all these cases comprehensively, and the involvement of a particular armed unit is, of course, analyzed in each case," Lysenko said.

Former Prosecutor General Andrii Kostin called the killing of Ukrainian soldiers in captivity a "deliberate policy" of Russia.

Some 80% of the cases of executions of Ukrainian POWs were recorded in 2024, but the trend began to appear in November 2023, when "there were changes in the attitude of Russian military personnel towards our prisoners of war for the worse," said Yurii Belousov, a senior representative of the Prosecutor General's Office.

Russian drone attack on Kyiv damages buildings, causes fires in five districts

Russia launched a drone attack on Kyiv overnight on Nov. 7, striking a residential building in the capital and injuring at least one person, the Kyiv City Military Administration reported.

According to Kyiv's military administration, the drone strike caused "significant damage" to a unit in the apartment building in the Holosiivskyi district of the city.

The administration also reported a large fire nearby caused by falling drone debris at a car repair shop.

Multiple explosions were heard in the outskirts of Kyiv around 1 a.m. local time, according to a Kyiv Independent journalist on the ground.

The aftermath of a Russian drone strike against Kyiv on Nov. 7, 2024. (State Emergency Service/Telegram)

Ukraine's Air Force warned throughout the night that Russian attack drones were in the vicinity of the city.

Around 6 a.m. local time, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko posted on Telegram that wreckage also fell in the Pechersk district and caused a fire on the 33rd floor of a residential building. The fire was contained shortly after.

Wreckage from the ongoing attack has also fallen in the Podil district, where a two-story house caught fire, in the Obolon district, where a business center caught fire on the upper floors, and in the Solomianskyi district, where debris fell both in a yard of a house and onto a private medical facility.

Germany's governing coalition collapse brings uncertainty to Ukraine support

Germany's three-party governing coalition collapsed on Nov. 6 after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced that he had dismissed Finance Minister Christian Lindner, an event that could have a profound effect on the country's support for Ukraine.

The decision to fire Lindner over economic disagreements will likely propel the country into a snap election in the near term, as it is unlikely that Scholz's Social Democratic Party (SDP) will have enough votes to pass the 2025 budget.

Under the current ruling coalition, Berlin allocated 7.6 billion euros ($8.2 billion) in military assistance for Kyiv in the 2024 budget. The next year's budget allocated roughly half of that sum.

In his statement following the dismissal, Scholz partly justified the decision by noting that he had asked Lindner to relax spending rules to allow increased aid for Ukraine, but Lindner refused.

"All too often, Minister Lindner has blocked laws in an inappropriate manner," Scholz said. "Too often he has engaged in petty party-political tactics. Too often he has broken my trust."

German media reported last week that Lindner's proposed policy paper called for significant changes to the country's economic policy, including reducing regulations on climate policy to stimulate economic growth as well as proposing tax cuts — in deep contrast with Scholz.

Political instability in Berlin may spell trouble for Kyiv amid the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party — known for its amicable views toward the Kremlin — which has continuously called for cutting funding for Ukraine.

A snap election might not necessarily mean disaster for Ukraine, however. Current polls show that while second, the AfD lags behind the center-right Conservative Christian Union-Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), whose leader, Friedrich Merz, has called for more decisive steps in support of Ukraine, including the delivery of Taurus missiles.

Scholz said he would ask Merz for parliamentary support to pass the budget.

Rise of Germany’s AfD signals growing support for pro-Russian policies

One of Russia’s top narratives is that it invaded Ukraine to “denazify” this multi-ethnic democracy led by a president with Jewish roots and holocaust survivors in his lineage. In fact, Russia’s public obsession with “fighting Nazis” masks how its closest relations among European political parties…

The Kyiv IndependentElsa Court

South Korea 'not ruling out' supplying arms to Ukraine, president says

South Korea does not rule out providing arms to Ukraine in the light of deepening cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol said at a press conference on Nov. 7.

"Now, depending on the level of North Korean involvement, we will gradually adjust our support strategy in phases," Yoon told the media.

"This means we are not ruling out the possibility of providing weapons."

Russian-North Korean ties entered a new level when Pyongyang dispatched around 12,000 troops to join Russia's war against Ukraine.

Yoon said previously that Seoul might revise its ban on supplying direct military assistance to a warzone in response.

South Korea has provided Ukraine with humanitarian and non-lethal aid but refused to provide weapons, citing legislative restrictions. Some media reports from last year claimed that the country secretly supplied artillery shells to Ukraine via the U.S., though the South Korean government denied the reports.

Living in constant tension with its North Korean neighbors, South Korea boasts a powerful military and strong defense industry, making the country a major arms exporter.

It remains unclear what weapons systems South Korea is considering, though Yoon commented that "defensive weapons" would be a priority. A source in South Korea's Presidential Office told the Yonhap news agency that a direct supply of 155 mm artillery shells is currently not on the table.

Experts told the Kyiv Independent that South Korea could provide the most significant support to Ukraine through ammunition supplies. The country fields not only 155 mm artillery but also stores 3.4 million 105 mm rounds compatible with some of Ukraine's guns.

Ukrainian officials said that simply holding the front against Russian forces requires 75,000 shells a month. Moscow's troops can fire several times more shells than Ukraine, with roughly half reportedly provided by North Korea.

Ukrainian soldiers react to Trump’s victory: ‘This could be a disaster,’ others say Biden was ‘impotent’

Donald Trump claimed victory in the U.S. presidential elections on Nov. 6, bringing additional uncertainty for many Ukrainian soldiers who already struggle to see the future of the war. Though doubt looms over Trump’s moves in the coming months, his warm relationship with Russian President Vladimir…

The Kyiv IndependentAsami Terajima

kyivindependent.com · by The Kyiv Independent news desk · November 7, 2024

3. ‘We have won’: Russians envision new global system with Trump victory

Despite the rhetoric and concerns of some, I do not think President-elect Trump will support the dismantling of the rules based international order.

‘We have won’: Russians envision new global system with Trump victory

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/world

Russians see Donald Trump’s win as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces in the world against a liberal, Western-dominated global order.

8 min

1459

A Russian national flag flies near a U.S. flag at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow on Wednesday. (Yuri Kochetkov/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

By Francesca Ebel and Catherine Belton

Updated November 7, 2024 at 2:28 p.m. EST|Published November 7, 2024 at 8:37 a.m. EST

MOSCOW — Donald Trump’s stunning political comeback has created an opening for Russia to shatter Western unity on Ukraine and redraw the global power map, according to several influential members of the Russian elite.

In the corridors of power in Moscow, the win for Trump’s populist argument that America should focus on domestic woes over aiding countries like Ukraine was being hailed as a potential victory for Russia’s efforts to carve out its own sphere of influence in the world.

In even broader terms, it was seen as a victory for conservative, isolationist forces supported by Russia against a liberal, Western-dominated global order that the Kremlin (and its allies) have been seeking to undermine.

In his first remarks since the election, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday that the West’s post-Cold War monopoly on global power was “irrevocably disappearing,” before going on to praise Trump for behaving “courageously” during an attempt on his life this summer.

“His words about his desire to restore relations with the Russian Federation and to help resolve the Ukrainian crisis, in my opinion, deserve attention,” he said during his annual speech at the Valdai Forum in Sochi.

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Members of Russia’s elite were more blunt in their response to Trump’s victory.

“We have won,” said Alexander Dugin, the Russian ideologue who has long pushed an imperialist agenda for Moscow and supported disinformation efforts against Kamala Harris’s campaign. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat,” he wrote on X.

The deputy speaker of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Konstantin Kosachev, said on his Telegram channel: “The victory of the right in the so-called ‘free world’ will be a blow to the left-liberal forces that dominate it. It is not by chance that Europe was so openly ‘rooting’ for Harris, who would, in fact, preserve the rule of the Obama-Clinton ‘clan.’”

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Konstantin Malofeyev, the Russian Orthodox billionaire who has funded a conservative agenda promoting traditional Christian values on the far right and far left across the West, crowed on Telegram that it would be possible to negotiate with Trump, “both about the division of Europe and the division of the world. After our victory on the battlefield.”

In more immediate terms, Trump’s election victory was expected to have a dramatic impact on Russia’s war in Ukraine, according to Leonid Slutsky, head of the parliament’s foreign affairs committee.

“Judging by the pre-election rhetoric … the Republican team is not going to send more and more American taxpayer money into the furnace of the proxy war against Russia,” he said. “Once the West stops propping up [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky’s neo-Nazi regime, its downfall will happen in a matter of months, if not days.”

But others were more circumspect, and some warned that Trump’s presidency could lead to a more unpredictable era. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Russia would wait to see if Trump’s campaign rhetoric, criticizing support for Ukraine and calling for an end to the war, translated into “concrete actions.” Peskov declared that the United States remains “an unfriendly country that directly and indirectly is involved in a war against our state.”

Russian lawmaker Maria Butina, who served 15 months in a U.S. federal prison after being convicted of operating as an unregistered foreign agent, told The Washington Post that this was “a good chance for U.S.-Russian relations to improve.” She added, “Hopefully this time … Trump will keep his promise to truly be a peacemaker.”

Russian agent Maria Butina with an armful of flowers upon her arrival in Moscow from the United States in October 2019. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

In the weeks before the election, Russian officials had sought to downplay their interest in the vote, but that public stance was belied by what U.S. officials said were intensifying Kremlin-directed disinformation operations seeking to stoke chaos and target Harris. The operations built on earlier efforts to stoke isolationist sentiments, according to documents previously reported on by The Post.

In the end, Russian efforts to interfere in the 2024 election were “pretty marginal to the overall trend of voter sentiment,” said Eric Ciaramella, a former White House official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, especially compared with 2016, when U.S. intelligence officials concluded that a Russian hack-and-leak operation had helped change the narrative in support of Trump.

But analysts also noted that more than a decade of Russian propaganda operations amplifying antiestablishment, isolationist voices through increasingly sophisticated social media operations, including on X, had changed the mainstream political debate in a way that would never have been possible via traditional media.

“On a digital platform, your ability to do these things works,” said Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center. After the vote, X owner Elon Musk hailed the result as cementing the power of his platform to provide alternative views over “legacy media.”

Russia’s business community also could not hide its sense of optimism that Trump’s victory would change things for the better, in the Russian view.

Shares on the Moscow stock exchange surged nearly 3 percent in early trading as the election results came in, amid widespread speculation that Trump could lift sanctions against Russia in return for an end to its military action.

“Trump is someone who is used to doing deals,” said one Moscow businessman, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution. “The expectation is that under Trump, decisions will be reached faster to end the conflict and ease sanctions.”

“For big business, Trump’s election is a hopeful factor,” he added. “Sanctions are strangling the economy, and costs are soaring.”

But share prices later settled, and some analysts said risks remain high that relations could run aground and that the standoff could worsen under Trump. Alexei Venediktov, the well-connected longtime editor of the Echo of Moscow radio station, said the possible Republican capture of both houses of Congress would break the long-standing deadlock in the U.S. political system, letting the government reach decisions at far greater speed and creating new risks.

The Republican majority “is the threat from the Kremlin’s point of view, because there are no internal contradictions, no internal chaos,” Venediktov said. “It was important for the Kremlin that the winning candidate was Mr. or Mrs. Chaos.”

A clear sign of the lack of Kremlin trust in President-elect Trump, Venediktov said, was Putin’s decision not to immediately congratulate him as other leaders had. “This is actually an insult,” he said. “It’s a signal.”

Putin waited until the third hour of his annual speech Thursday to congratulate Trump, first discussing inequality, artificial intelligence and climate change.

Russia's Vladimir Putin with President Donald Trump at meeting on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan, in 2019. (Susan Walsh/AP)

But others said Putin’s move was in fact a sign of the Kremlin’s growing confidence. Sergei Markov, a Kremlin-connected political analyst, said the expectation is that Trump will eventually, though not immediately, call Zelensky and Putin and propose a cease-fire deal along the lines of one already floated by his running mate, JD Vance, which appears to hand Russia the Ukrainian territory it already controls.

Under this proposal, a cease-fire would be reached along the current front line, together with the creation of a large demilitarized buffer zone, with new borders to be ratified under later referendums. “If everything goes okay, then Trump will lift sanctions” to pull Moscow out of China’s orbit, Markov said.

But Markov and other analysts said Putin is unlikely to agree to any deal that does not include the complete demilitarization of Ukraine, which even Trump might reject. “Putin wants what no one can give him,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

One possibility, though, would be an agreement in which Moscow and Kyiv would halt strikes on energy and power infrastructure, Markov suggested, an arrangement that was under discussion this summer, until Ukraine’s incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. “This would be a colossal victory for Trump,” Markov said.

Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute for International Relations, said other far-right and far-left political forces in Europe — many of which have been supported by Moscow — could be boosted by Trump’s win.

They could call for a U.S. rapprochement with Russia, potentially ushering in a new era in which politics would be dominated by autocrats, and in which the winning coalition of Trump, Vance and Musk would introduce a new disruptive ideology. “In a sense, it could be a new realignment in Europe,” Gomart said.

“This is a very good moment against the globalist deep state,” said Jean-Luc Schaffhauser, a far-right French politician and former member of the European Parliament who once facilitated a 9.4 million euro ($10.1 million) loan from a Russian bank to the presidential campaign of the French far right’s Marine Le Pen. “It’s a moment for Europe to make a bridge with conservative America” and align with Russia, he said.

“It can be a new era,” Schaffhauser said.

Belton reported from London. Mary Ilyushina in Berlin and Natalia Abbakumova in Riga, Latvia, contributed to this report.

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By Francesca Ebel
Francesca Ebel is The Washington's Post's Russia correspondent. Before joining The Post in 2022, Ebel was the Associated Press's Tunis correspondent.follow on X @FrancescaEbel
By Catherine Belton
Catherine Belton is an international investigative reporter for The Washington Post, reporting on Russia. She is the author of “Putin's People,” a New York Times Critics’ Book of 2020 and a book of the year for the Times, the Economist and the Financial Times. Belton has worked for Reuters and the Financial Times.follow on X @CatherineBelton

4. Mark Rutte: North Korean troops in Europe marks turning point

Mark Rutte: North Korean troops in Europe marks turning point

What we need is the political commitment to stay the course for the long haul.

https://www.politico.eu/article/north-korea-troops-europe-turning-point-mark-rutte/

Service personnel of the Ministry of Public Security pay tribute as they visit the statues of late North Korean leaders Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il at Mansu Hill in Pyongyang on September 9, 2024. | Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images

Opinion

November 6, 2024 4:00 am CET

By Mark Rutte

Mark Rutte is secretary-general of NATO.

Last week, a delegation of South Korean intelligence and defense chiefs briefed the 32 NATO allies and our Indo-Pacific partners on the deployment of thousands of North Korean troops to Russia’s Kursk region, with the intention of participating in the war of aggression against Ukraine.

North Korean troops on European soil is certainly historic — and for all the wrong reasons. This is the first time in a century that Russia has invited foreign troops into the country.

And this should give us all pause.

Are we on the verge of something far darker than the devastation that’s already been visited upon the people of Ukraine?

President Vladimir Putin’s litany of failures since starting this senseless war has only made Russia more reliant on its authoritarian friends in Asia: China, Iran and North Korea.

Although Russia’s war against Ukraine has created enormous dependencies, Putin’s hubris continues to shape his decision-making. He relies on China to prop up Russia’s economy and to access dual-use technologies to sustain his war effort. He relies on Iran for the deadly drones and missiles that have murdered and maimed so many Ukrainians. And he depends on North Korea for millions of rounds of ammunition, ballistic missiles and now troops.

These are all signs of growing desperation.

On every front, Putin is failing to achieve his strategic objectives through this illegal and ill-judged war of aggression. While we seek a just and lasting end to the conflict, he’s only prolonging and expanding it.

This comes at an incredible cost. Russia’s suffering an estimated 1,200 casualties per day — more than 600,000 since February 2022. And unable to face the political costs of mass conscription, Putin has now opted to draft soldiers from North Korea too.

This dangerous expansion of the conflict escalates the war and demonstrates that our security is not regional, it is global.

Putin certainly isn’t getting this support for free. The Russian president is propping up Kim Jong Un’s cash-strapped regime in return, providing Pyongyang with military technology that its dictator will use to threaten neighbors, adding to the Korean Peninsula’s instability.

Furthermore, the North Koreans, who haven’t fought a war in over 70 years, will now gain valuable battlefield experience and insight into modern conflict. Just last week, the country conducted its longest-range intercontinental ballistic missile test — its first in a year — in yet another breach of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions.

Vladimir Putin is propping up Kim Jong Un’s cash-strapped regime, providing Pyongyang with military technology that its dictator will use to threaten neighbors, adding to the Korean Peninsula’s instability. | Kim Won Jin/AFP via Getty Images

These deepening military and economic ties between a reckless Russia and an emboldened North Korea don’t just threaten Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific security, they are deeply dangerous for global security.

China bears particular responsibility here, to use its influence in Pyongyang and Moscow to ensure they cease these actions. Beijing cannot pretend to promote peace while turning a blind eye to increasing aggression.

Since the start of Russia’s full-fledged invasion, NATO allies have provided more than 99 percent of all military support to Ukraine. And we’re on track to deliver on the financial pledge of €40 billion in military aid to Ukraine this year.

What we need now is the political commitment to stay the course for the long haul.

So far, our support has kept Ukraine in the fight. But we need to do much more in order to shift the conflict’s trajectory. We need to raise the cost for Putin and his enabling authoritarian friends.

We also need to invest more in our relationship with our Indo-Pacific partners. That means more consultation, more intelligence-sharing — like we did last week — and more practical and political cooperation, including on defense production.

Our Indo-Pacific partners are already doing a lot for Ukraine, and we hope they can step up their support even further.

Backing Ukraine costs a fraction of our annual military budgets. That’s a small price to pay for peace. The question is, can we afford not to?

5. Trump’s Chance to Shape History with a Lasting Peace in Ukraine

Thu, 11/07/2024 - 7:58pm

Trump’s Chance to Shape History with a Lasting Peace in Ukraine

by Dan Rice

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/trumps-chance-shape-history-lasting-peace-ukraine

President-elect Trump has inherited one of the most complex and devastating conflicts of our time, a war that has scarred Ukraine, challenged NATO, and shaken European security. Now, with his recent victory, Trump stands poised to seize a historic opportunity: to end a brutal conflict, honor America’s longstanding commitments, and demonstrate global leadership on the scale of President Eisenhower and President Reagan.

In 1952, Dwight Eisenhower ran on a promise to end the Korean War—a UN-backed conflict against North Korea and China. He recognized the toll on American lives, the devastation in Korea, and the need for a durable peace. After his inauguration on January 20, 1953, Eisenhower swiftly moved to negotiate peace, reaching an armistice by July 27, 1953, that created the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), an international buffer that has kept North and South Korea separated ever since. His decisiveness ended the fighting, solidified U.S. credibility, and showed the world that America would uphold its commitments to allies while pursuing peace.

Now, Trump has the chance to pursue a similar course in Ukraine, where hundreds of thousands have suffered, many have died, and millions have been displaced. Yet, Trump must tread carefully, as proposals from his team are already stirring concerns. One floated idea suggests freezing current front lines, establishing a demilitarized zone with European allies such as Poland, Germany, Britain, and France taking on a monitoring role, and, perhaps most controversially, barring Ukraine from NATO for two decades. While Trump’s intentions to broker peace are commendable, we must scrutinize these conditions closely.

The suggestion that Ukraine could be pressured to concede territory raises troubling historical parallels. In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear arsenal—the third largest in the world—under the Budapest Memorandum. In exchange, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia provided “assurances” of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. But Russia’s aggression in Crimea in 2014 and its subsequent invasion reveal the perils of relying solely on unenforced assurances.

Trump can take inspiration from another iconic leader: Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s, Reagan faced off against the Kremlin with a mix of strength and diplomacy, refusing to make concessions that compromised core values or U.S. interests. He championed democracy, demanded reforms, and pursued a peace grounded in strength. Reagan’s success came from his unwavering commitment to challenging Soviet overreach, showing that true peace emerges from standing firm, not bending under pressure.

Trump’s team has signaled that the United States may continue military support to Ukraine, helping it deter further Russian aggression. But even the suggestion of freezing aid to compel Ukraine into negotiations could undermine Kyiv’s bargaining power, especially with Russian forces still conducting offensives. Our military assistance has been pivotal in leveling the field for Ukraine’s defense and must remain so if we are to achieve a sustainable peace.

Furthermore, the idea of relying solely on European allies to monitor any future peacekeeping mission respects the need for regional ownership and limits direct U.S. involvement while promoting a balanced European security structure. This approach aligns with Trump’s emphasis on burden-sharing, particularly given that countries like Poland and Germany are already deeply invested in European stability and Ukraine’s defense. Yet, without clear enforcement mechanisms, any peace agreement risks becoming another shaky armistice vulnerable to future violations.

President Trump has promised to end this war. To do so, he can follow Eisenhower’s path by securing a strong, enforceable peace while taking a page from Reagan’s playbook, resisting any agreement that compromises Ukraine’s sovereignty. This could mean maintaining NATO aspirations for Ukraine or, at the very least, fortifying Kyiv’s position until a fair deal is reached. Only through this balanced approach can Trump help Ukraine secure a future that honors its sacrifices and strengthens, rather than weakens, our commitment to global stability.

Trump has the unique opportunity to unite the diplomatic acumen of Eisenhower with the firm resolve of Reagan, crafting a lasting peace that respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, deters future Russian aggression, and stands as a testament to American leadership in uncertain times. History will remember how Trump chooses to wield this chance to end the war—not as a hurried deal, but as a lasting resolution that stands the test of time.

About the Author(s)

Dan Rice

Dan Rice is a 1988 graduate of West Point and is the President of the American University Kyiv and the Co-President of Thayer Leadership at West Point. He holds an MBA from Kellogg/Northwestern, a master’s in journalism and Marketing from Medill/Northwestern, a Masters of Education from the University of Pennsylvania and has completed all doctoral classes in Leadership from the University of Pennsylvania. He served in the Infantry in combat in Iraq in 2004-2005. Dan served as Special Advisor to the Commander in Chief of Ukraine Armed Forces (May 2022-March 2023) as an unpaid volunteer. He has been the primary advocate for Cluster Munitions for Ukraine and received the Saint Barbara’s Medal in 2023 for his advocacy that helped gain cluster artillery shells in July 2023, and then cluster rockets and missiles in October 2023.

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 7, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, November 7, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-november-7-2024

Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to shape US President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy and achieve another Russia–US reset on Russia's terms. Putin addressed the 21st annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club on November 7 and advocated for a reset of US–Russia relations. Putin implied that that Trump’s presidential campaign expressed a "desire to restore relations with Russia, to help end the Ukrainian crisis" and later noted that Russia is open to the "possibility of restoring relations with the United States." Putin attempted to blame the United States for undermining US–Russia relations, noting that the United States imposed sanctions and restrictions on Russia, and chose to support Kyiv — without mentioning that these measures were in response to Russia’s illegal and unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Putin's statement implies that Russia would only accept any reset in US–Russia relations if the US dropped sanctions and restrictions against Russia and stopped supporting Ukraine — effectively entirely on terms that benefit Russia at the expense of US interests. Putin reiterated the boilerplate narrative that NATO is a "blatant anachronism," accused the West of maintaining a bloc-oriented mentality, and deliberately misrepresented his invasion of Ukraine as NATO's efforts to remain relevant. Putin attempted to frame BRICS as a non-bloc alternative to NATO and falsely implied that Russia is not interested in becoming a hegemon, despite the fact that the Kremlin has been forming a new anti-Western bloc composed of Iran, North Korea, and China.

Key Takeaways:

Russian President Vladimir Putin is attempting to shape US President-elect Donald Trump's foreign policy and achieve another Russia–US reset on Russia's terms.

A recent failed Russian assault northeast of Siversk near Bilohorivka prompted outrage from some Russian ultranationalist milbloggers over Russian command failures and the pervasive Russian military culture of exaggerating battlefield successes.

A Russian brigade commander and a sniper platoon commander were reported killed in combat recently in the Kurakhove and Chasiv Yar directions.

Ukrainian authorities continue to report systematic Russian executions of Ukrainian prisoners of war (POWs), noting a clear increase in such executions in 2024.

Ukrainian strikes on Russia and Western sanctions are reportedly disrupting Russia's energy industry.

Russian forces recently advanced near Siversk, Pokrovsk, and Kurakhove.

Russian authorities are reportedly creating "fake" non-combat volunteer battalions in occupied Ukraine and merging them with existing Cossack organizations led by occupation administrations.

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 7, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, November 7, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-november-7-2024

Hezbollah executed a prepared but limited defense of Khiam in southeastern Lebanon against the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) from October 28 to 31. Hezbollah’s Operations Room claimed that the group prevented an Israeli force from seizing and controlling terrain in Khiam by executing a “fire defense,“ which likely refers to a prepared but limited defense that involved pre-registering targets for indirect fire while committing only a small amount of infantry. This requires a certain level of preparation by Hezbollah but it is limited because a small amount of infantry could not hope to hold Khiam against an Israeli mechanized assault. Hezbollah fighters conducted 70 attacks over the IDF’s three-day advance towards Khiam. Most of these attacks were indirect fire attacks using rockets, thus supporting the theory that Hezbollah planned a defense centering on indirect fire. Hezbollah did not claim small arms engagements with Israeli forces during this period, suggesting that Hezbollah commanders used light infantry fighters sparingly, if at all. Lebanese sources reported small arms engagements between Hezbollah fighters and the IDF but did not specify at what range the engagements occurred. The low number of small arms engagements suggests that Hezbollah commanders were either unwilling or unable to deploy many infantrymen during the IDF advance into Khiam and preferred to deplete stocks of rockets, anti-tank guided missiles, and mortar shells.

Hezbollah’s prepared fire-heavy defense also suggests that Hezbollah commanders were focused on inflicting casualties rather than holding ground. This would be consistent with a defense that prioritizes the attrition of enemy forces and thus the enemy’s will to fight over holding ground. The IDF advanced at least five kilometers from Israel towards and into Khiam during the three-day operation. Hezbollah claimed that the IDF withdrew into northern Israel from Khiam on October 31 but did not provide additional evidence.

Hezbollah’s defense of Khiam has been the most organized defense of a southern Lebanon village since the IDF began its ground operation in Lebanon in early October. Hezbollah commanders may have chosen to defend this area given that Khiam is located on high ground from which Hezbollah could fire into northern Israel. Khiam, moreover, grants Hezbollah a vantage point from which it could observe Israeli forces and other targets around the Galilee Panhandle. The IDF never confirmed that it operated in Khiam and did not publicize Hezbollah equipment or infrastructure seized there. Geolocated footage posted on November 6 showed the IDF 8th Armored Brigade (res.) (91st Division) operating in Khiam in recent days, however. Israeli forces destroyed firing points aimed toward northern Israeli towns and located and destroyed weapons, including Kornet missiles, grenades, and explosives in Khiam. The IDF killed the commander of Hezbollah’s local unit in Khiam unit on November 3 after the IDF withdrew from the town. The IDF continued artillery shelling of Khiam and its outskirts post-withdrawal. The fact that Hezbollah’s tactical command echelons near Khiam managed to execute a defense is not a strong indicator that Hezbollah’s higher command echelons have recovered from the severe degradation caused by Israeli air and ground operations. The defense of Khiam could be planned and executed at a relatively low echelon of command.

Key Takeaways:

Iranian Retaliation Against Israel: Recent statements by senior Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commanders suggest that the IRGC may conduct a direct attack on Israel from Iranian territory in response to the October 25 Israeli strike targeting Iran. Iran may conduct a smaller-scale direct attack on Israel than it did in April and October 2024 to preserve its diminishing long-range missile stockpile.

Iran: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei described the features a future supreme leader should embody during his first public meeting with the Assembly of Experts on November 7.

Houthi Response to US Election: Houthi Supreme Leader Abdulmalik al Houthi stated on November 7 that the reelection of former US President Donald Trump does not impact the Houthis’ campaign against shipping or Israel. Abdulmalik said that Houthi fighters will continue to attack merchant vessels, US and Royal (UK) Navy vessels transiting through the Red Sea, and Israel itself.

8. US Army Rangers have been training for a different kind of fight: neutralizing enemy underground nuclear facilities

Some might ask, if the Rangers can do all the missions, why do we need Delta and ST 6? Why don't we just add another battalion or two of Rangers?

Someone else might ask, what about the Abrams charter? Were these missions envisioned in the Abrams Charter (or the Wickham or Sullivan Charter)?

The battalion is to be an elite, light and the most proficient infantry battalion in the world.

A battalion that can do things with its hands and weapons better than anyone.

The battalion will contain no “hoodlums or brigands” and if the battalion is formed from such persons it will be disbanded.

Wherever the battalion goes, it must be apparent that it is the best

The vision that General Abrams had for the Ranger Battalion, as a leader of change for the rest of the Army, was not so specifically articulated. This piece of his vision was conveyed indirectly to the commander of the unit. Then Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth C. (K.C.) Leuer was the officer selected as the first Ranger Battalion Commander since World War II. In a interview with Lieutenant Colonel (now Brigadier General) Frank Kearney in 1997, now retired Major General Leuer said he was “…never specifically told that the Rangers were to be role models for the Army…”22 Rather it was in his conversations with senior leaders that he came to understand this implied mission of the Ranger Battalion. 23 Colonel Ken Keen in a study titled 75th Ranger Regiment: Strategic Force For The 21st Century researched this transfer of vision. He writes, “It was understood that the Rangers were to be a role model for the Army and leaders trained in the Ranger battalions should return to the conventional Army to pass on their experience and expertise.”24The vision that General Abrams had for the Ranger Battalion, as a leader of change for the rest of the Army, was not so specifically articulated. This piece of his vision was conveyed indirectly to the commander of the unit. Then Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth C. (K.C.) Leuer was the officer selected as the first Ranger Battalion Commander since World War II. In a interview with Lieutenant Colonel (now Brigadier General) Frank Kearney in 1997, now retired Major General Leuer said he was “…never specifically told that the Rangers were to be role models for the Army…”22 Rather it was in his conversations with senior leaders that he came to understand this implied mission of the Ranger Battalion. 23 Colonel Ken Keen in a study titled 75th Ranger Regiment: Strategic Force For The 21st Century researched this transfer of vision. He writes, “It was understood that the Rangers were to be a role model for the Army and leaders trained in the Ranger battalions should return to the conventional Army to pass on their experience and expertise.”24

Formation of the 7th Ranger Regiment

https://armyranger.com/the-75th-ranger-regiment/https://armyranger.com/the-75th-ranger-regiment/

RANGERS LEAD THE WAY: THE VISION OF GENERAL CREIGHTON W. ABRAMS

https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA415822.pdfhttps://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA415822.pdf

Excerpt:

But the demands of the Global War on Terror across the force opened the way for the 75th Ranger Regiment to take on more missions. Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan went after the same high-value targets as Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. And now, they have taken on another strategic mission set, responding to the nuclear threat.But the demands of the Global War on Terror across the force opened the way for the 75th Ranger Regiment to take on more missions. Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan went after the same high-value targets as Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. And now, they have taken on another strategic mission set, responding to the nuclear threat.

US Army Rangers have been training for a different kind of fight: neutralizing enemy underground nuclear facilities

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

Military & Defense

Stavros Atlamazoglou

2024-11-07T12:21:01Z

A US Army soldier participates in an exercise to seize and exploit an underground nuclear facility. US Army/Sgt. Daniel R. Hernandez

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

US Army Rangers and Nuclear Disablement Teams trained this summer to neutralize enemy nuclear sites.
The exercise reflects rising tensions with nuclear-armed nations and those pursuing such weapons.
The training speaks to an evolving role for the Rangers, an elite light infantry, special ops unit.

Over the summer, soldiers from the Army's little-known Nuclear Disablement Team linked up with the elite 75th Ranger Regiment at a training event that offered insight into how the US military is thinking about taking out enemy underground nuclear facilities in the event of a conflict.

The drill came as the US grapples with rising tensions with China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, three of which already possess nuclear weapons and one that is, as far as the US is concerned, a little too close for comfort.

Rangers taking down nuke sites

For decades, taking down adversary nuclear facilities has been a concern for the US military. No one wants to think about a near-peer conflict because of the specter of nuclear war that such a conflict could bring, but militaries regularly prepare for a wide range of scenarios that might never happen.

Ranger training to prosecute nuclear targets seems to signal a shift in their role. For decades, the mission to find and eliminate enemy nuclear facilities belonged to the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and its tier 1 special missions units. The Army's Delta Force was primarily tasked with finding ways to penetrate highly guarded nuclear facilities and neutralize nuclear warheads.

"The Unit [Delta Force] has been involved with the mission set. It is an extremely difficult task that incorporates a wide range of skill sets like CQB [close quarters battle], breaching, and CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear warfare]," a retired Delta Force operator told Business Insider.

"The fact that Rangers and SF [Army Special Forces] are getting involved in the mission set tells me that the military is getting ready for a fight where there might be several different nuclear sites that need to be secured," said the retired Delta Force operator, who talked on the condition of anonymity because of his ongoing work with the Department of Defense.

A new kind of mission for the Rangers

The 75th Ranger Regiment is the world's premier light infantry, special operations unit. Comprised of three line infantry battalions, an intelligence battalion, and a special troops battalion, the 75th Ranger Regiment is America's answer to difficult situations that require raw force, numbers, and violence of action, the latter involving unrestricted speed, strength, surprise, and aggression.

NDT soldiers are part of a little-known unit tasked with dealing with WMDs and other nuclear threats. Their cooperation with the Rangers is notable. US Army/Sgt. Daniel R. Hernandez

Military commanders and planners have long recognized the value and effectiveness of the unit. In December 2020, the unit achieved a remarkable 7,000 days in continuous combat.

Today, the 75th Ranger Regiment is a vastly different organization than it was 20 or 30 years ago. For years, the Rangers were limited to capturing airfields and pulling security for Delta Force. as they did during the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993.

But the demands of the Global War on Terror across the force opened the way for the 75th Ranger Regiment to take on more missions. Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan went after the same high-value targets as Delta Force and SEAL Team 6. And now, they have taken on another strategic mission set, responding to the nuclear threat.

China Russia Iran

More...

Business Insider · by Stavros Atlamazoglou

9. Trump to Renew ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Against Iran

Excerpts:

But when he takes office on Jan. 20, Trump’s approach to Iran is likely to be colored by the knowledge that its agents tried to assassinate him and former top national security aides after they left office, former Trump officials said. Iran is believed to be seeking revenge for a 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s covert paramilitary operations.

“People tend to take that stuff personally,” said Mick Mulroy, a top Pentagon official for the Mideast in Trump’s first term. “If he’s going to be hawkish on any particular country, designated major adversaries, it’s Iran.”

...

But an Iranian diplomat said Tehran would offset the U.S. restrictions by deepening its trade partnerships through the Asia-focused Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and other alliances. It could also respond to the pressure by stepping up its nuclear program or threatening oil facilities in the Middle East, he said.

Despite the mutual hostility, some who worked for Trump don’t rule out an eventual U.S.-Iran diplomatic deal in his second term. Trump likes to make deals, Mulroy said, but only “if it’s his deal.”

Trump to Renew ‘Maximum Pressure’ Campaign Against Iran

Relations with Tehran, which sought to assassinate the president-elect and other former American officials, are likely to be even worse this time around

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/trump-to-renew-maximum-pressure-campaign-against-iran-f0db5fd5?mod=hp_lead_pos1

By Warren P. Strobel

Follow, Benoit Faucon

Follow and Lara Seligman

Updated Nov. 7, 2024 11:34 pm ET

An image of Donald Trump on display at a mosque in Tehran in 2022, at a death anniversary ceremony for Qassem Soleimani, an Iranian commander killed in a 2020 U.S. drone strike. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/Zuma Press

President-elect Donald Trump plans to drastically increase sanctions on Iran and throttle its oil sales as part of an aggressive strategy to undercut Tehran’s support of violent Mideast proxies and its nuclear program, according to people briefed on his early plans.

Trump took a dim view of Iran during his first term, aborting a six-nation agreement with Tehran—known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—that sought to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons work. He also imposed what was described as a “maximum pressure” strategy in hopes Iran would abandon ambitions for a nuclear weapon, stop funding and training what the U.S. considers terrorist groups and improve its human-rights record.

But when he takes office on Jan. 20, Trump’s approach to Iran is likely to be colored by the knowledge that its agents tried to assassinate him and former top national security aides after they left office, former Trump officials said. Iran is believed to be seeking revenge for a 2020 U.S. drone strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, head of Iran’s covert paramilitary operations.

“People tend to take that stuff personally,” said Mick Mulroy, a top Pentagon official for the Mideast in Trump’s first term. “If he’s going to be hawkish on any particular country, designated major adversaries, it’s Iran.”

Demonstrators gathered in Tehran in 2020, holding up images of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani following the U.S. airstrike that killed him. Photo: Ali Mohammadi/Bloomberg News

The people briefed on Trump’s plans and in touch with his top advisers said the new team would move rapidly to try to choke off Iran’s oil income, including going after foreign ports and traders who handle Iranian oil. That would re-create the strategy that the former president adopted in his first term, with mixed results.

“I think you are going to see the sanctions go back on, you are going to see much more, both diplomatically and financially, they are trying to isolate Iran,” a former White House official said. “I think the perception is that Iran is definitely in a position of weakness right now, and now is an opportunity to exploit that weakness.”

The officials familiar with Trump’s plan didn’t provide details of how precisely he would increase the pressure on Iran.

Israel in recent months has killed the leaders of Iranian proxies Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, and damaged much of the groups’ command structure. It launched strikes inside Iran, in retaliation for an Iranian missile attack on Israel, that severely damaged Tehran’s missile-production capabilities and air defenses.

Iran has vowed to respond to the Oct. 26 Israeli attack, but it is unclear whether Trump’s election victory this week will change Tehran’s calculus or timing.

Brian Hook championed the maximum-pressure campaign to squeeze Iran during Trump’s first term and is expected to receive a top national security job in his second term. Photo: Zuma Press

Brian Hook, who oversaw Iran policy at the State Department in Trump’s first term and is now in charge of the Trump transition for the department, said Thursday that the president-elect has “no interest” in seeking to overthrow Iran’s rulers.

But Hook, in an interview with CNN, noted that Trump has pledged to “isolate Iran diplomatically and weaken them economically so they can’t fund all of the violence” perpetrated by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen and other proxies in Iraq and Syria.

Hook is widely expected to receive a top national security job in Trump’s second term. During the first term, he championed the maximum-pressure campaign to squeeze Iran. Advocates say it reduced the funds available to Tehran’s security services. But it failed to halt Iran’s operations via its proxies or its nuclear work.

Iran’s oil exports surged last year amid quiet negotiations to free Americans detained by the regime, leading Republicans to accuse the administration of not fully enforcing the current oil sanctions, which the White House has denied.

Trump had reimposed a full embargo on Iran’s crude exports in 2019, and its shipments collapsed to 250,000 barrels a day by early 2020—substantially less than their level two years earlier. But after Biden took office, they reached a six-year high in September this year.

Once back in the White House, Trump could face the same dilemma that Biden did in curbing oil sales by Iran and other adversaries such as Venezuela—the risk that oil prices could rise and spark inflation.

Robert McNally, a former U.S. energy official, said the Trump administration could impose U.S. bans on Chinese ports that receive Iranian oil and also sanctions targeting Iraqi officials that fund Iran-backed militias. Even expectations of an aggressive enforcement of the oil embargo would be enough to cut at least 500,000 barrels a day in mostly Chinese oil purchases, he said.

“It’s going to be maximum pressure 2.0,” said McNally, who now heads Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group.

US chip restrictions hinder AI ambitions of China’s top chip foundry, CEO says

SMIC co-CEO Zhao Haijun said the foundry can still benefit from rising demand for less advanced ‘legacy chips’ required for some AI products

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3285717/us-chip-restrictions-hinder-ai-ambitions-chinas-top-chip-foundry-ceo-says?utm

Che Panin Beijing

Published: 5:00pm, 8 Nov 2024

The chief executive of China’s top foundry said on Friday that the company cannot take full advantage of surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips because of US restrictions on advanced-node technologies.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) co-CEO Zhao Haijun made the comments the day after the chipmaker reported record revenue in the third quarter owing to strong demand for “legacy chips” such as those used in electric vehicles (EVs).

US sanctions have prevented the Shanghai-based foundry from importing advanced tools needed to upgrade its processing and narrow its technological gap with international rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Yet Zhao suggested SMIC could still be benefiting from the industry-wide AI boom.

“AI is a blessing for semiconductor manufacturing,” Zhao said during an earnings conference call with analysts on Friday. “It can bring us business growth in many years ahead.”

IN A MINUTE: Tech giants Foxconn and Nvidia to team up on ‘AI factories’ #shorts

The AI boom over the past couple of years has led to a surge in demand for global foundries, which have rushed to reconfigure their production mix to focus on graphics processing units (GPUs), the chips that power much of the training of AI models. TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, said in October that it is bullish about its outlook for the next year because of solid AI demand.

11. What a second Trump presidency could mean for the defense budget

What a second Trump presidency could mean for the defense budget

An increase is likely, but not assured, as military aid to allies hangs in the balance

Defense News · by Noah Robertson · November 7, 2024

Former president Donald Trump won reelection Tuesday, a night of voting that led to Republicans taking control of the Senate and potentially holding their House majority.

The chance for a governing trifecta, which would repeat the first two years of Trump’s term, already has some in Congress, the Pentagon and think tanks wondering what it means for the defense budget.

While it’s too early to forecast with confidence, analysts who spoke to Defense News said, the return of a Trump presidency will likely augur a larger defense budget, though less security aid for American partners abroad like Ukraine.

Part of why its so difficult to predict the effects of a second Trump term is that there is less Republican consensus on defense spending, said Mark Cancian, who studies security budgets at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Whereas the right once almost uniformly supported higher military spending, it’s now split into three main camps, he argued.

The first is traditional defense hawks, such as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who favor a more assertive military and funding to support one. The second is budget hawks, like the House Freedom Caucus, who are most concerned with bloated government spending and would in some cases favor cuts.

And the third is the “America First” wing of the Republican Party, such as Trump’s final acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, who are skeptical that America’s military needs to maintain so many missions around the world, and may also support cuts.

What faction will prevail won’t start to become clear until a future Trump Cabinet is set, Cancian said.

“Until we get some sense of that, we’re just guessing,” he said.

Clear telltales will be the nominees to become secretary of defense and director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on the defense budget at the American Enterprise Institute.

“The first thing that matters is the OMB director,” she said, noting the office’s role in managing government budget requests.

By Eaglen’s count, Trump oversaw a massive hike in defense spending during his first term — some $225 billion higher than projected from the late Obama years. Defense hawks in Congress are counting on a repeat of that trend, and will have more power to force it.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., published a memo earlier this year calling for a $55 billion surge in defense spending. The paper helped increase the Senate Armed Services Committee budget bill, though by less than half that number. With Republicans taking control of the Senate, Wicker will now chair that committee and can push for further increases.

Republican aides in Congress, when asked by Defense News, signaled confidence that a second Trump term would increase the military budget, though cautioning that it’s still too early to predict.

Congress hasn’t passed either of its two main defense bills this fiscal year, instead operating on a short-term spending bill that lasts through December.

While those will in all likelihood pass eventually, now that control of both chamber is becoming clear, the large security aid packages America has been sending to Ukraine are far less certain. The U.S. has committed more than $60 billion in security aid so far during the Biden administration — much of it going to American arms companies — gleaned from additional spending bills passed by Congress.

“Will there be any more supplementals?” Eaglen said, arguing that Taiwan and Israel had better chances of maintaining American aid.

Trump has said his main priority is ending the war with Russia, without committing to an outcome first. If Trump did abruptly end American assistance, it also risks a whiplash for defense firms that have expanded their product lines to meet Ukraine’s needs, Cancian said.

“That’s industry’s great worry,” Cancian said, though he was skeptical the shift would be too abrupt for firms to adjust.

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

12. Plea deals revived for alleged 9/11 mastermind and others

Plea deals revived for alleged 9/11 mastermind and others

militarytimes.com · by Ellen Knickmeyer, The Associated Press · November 7, 2024

A military judge has ruled that plea agreements struck by alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two co-defendants are valid, voiding an order by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to throw out the deals, a government official said.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because the order by the judge, Air Force Col. Matthew McCall, has not yet been posted publicly or officially announced.

By Hope Hodge Seck

Unless government prosecutors or others attempt to challenge the plea deals again, McCall’s ruling means that the three 9/11 defendants before long could enter guilty pleas in the U.S. military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, taking a dramatic step toward wrapping up the long-running and legally troubled government prosecution in one of the deadliest attacks on the United States.

The plea agreements would spare Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, the risk of the death penalty in exchange for the guilty pleas.

Government prosecutors had negotiated the deals with defense attorneys under government auspices, and the top official for the military commission at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base had approved the agreements.

The plea deals in the Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people spurred immediate political blowback by Republican lawmakers and others after they were made public this summer.

Within days, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a brief order saying he was nullifying them. Plea bargains in possible death penalty cases tied to one of the gravest crimes ever carried out on U.S. soil were a momentous step that should only be decided by the defense secretary, Austin said at the time.

The agreements, and Austin’s attempt to reverse them, have made for one of the most fraught episodes in a U.S. prosecution marked by delays and legal difficulties. That includes years of ongoing pretrial hearings to determine the admissibility of statements by the defendants given their years of torture in CIA custody.

The Pentagon is reviewing the judge’s decision and had no immediate further comment, said Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, Pentagon press secretary.

Lawdragon, a legal news site that long has covered the courtroom proceedings from Guantanamo, and The New York Times first reported the ruling.

‘Don’t let me go’: Army’s 9/11 survivors and responders look back

“You were in this container of smoke, jet fuel and people running around who were disoriented."

Military officials have yet to post the judge’s decision on the Guantanamo military commission’s online site. But Lawdragon said McCall’s 29-page ruling concludes that Austin lacked the legal authority to toss out the plea deals, and acted too late, after Guantanamo’s top official already had approved the deals.

Abiding by Austin’s order would give defense secretaries “absolute veto power” over any act they disagree with, which would be contrary to the independence of the presiding official over the Guantanamo trials, the law blog quotes McCall as saying in the ruling.

While families of some of the victims and others are adamant that the 9/11 prosecutions continue until trial and possible death sentences, legal experts say it’s not clear that could ever happen. If the 9/11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, verdicts and sentencings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many of the issues in the course of any death penalty appeals.

The issues include the CIA destruction of videos of interrogations, whether Austin’s plea deal reversal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men tainted subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence.

AP writer Lolita C. Baldor contributed to this report.

13. Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind

Trump’s Win Cemented It: New Media Is Leaving the Old Guard Behind

Podcasts are exploding, TikTok is a news source, and traditional media is shrinking in reach and influence

https://www.wsj.com/business/media/new-media-social-media-presidential-election-591b0644?mod=latest_headlines

By Isabella Simonetti

Follow and Anne Steele

Nov. 8, 2024 5:30 am ET

Two weeks ago, Donald Trump sat down with the podcaster Joe Rogan for three hours, an episode that drew more than 45 million views on YouTube and over 25 million listens across Spotify and other platforms. On election night, Rogan was among several podcast hosts who got shout-outs in Trump’s victory celebration.

It underscored what the 2024 presidential race made clear: A new media landscape has emerged. The traditional gatekeepers of political discourse—TV networks and newspapers—are shrinking in influence as Americans turn to many more outlets for information.

The percentage of people listening to podcasts in a given month has more than tripled in a decade. In the social-media realm, more than half of TikTok’s users say they regularly get news on the platform, according to the Pew Research Center. Elon Musk’s takeover of X has had a major impact, with political content, especially right-leaning posts, blanketing new users’ feeds.

TV news remains a massive draw for Americans in the biggest moments. But younger audiences have fled, and there were signs even on election night of an overall erosion in the medium. The main three cable channels were down 32% in viewership collectively compared with 2020, to around 21 million, with CNN losing almost half its audience.

Share of U.S. population who have listened to a podcast in the past month

AGES 12 AND OLDER

47%

2008

’10

’15

’20

’24

BY GENDER

BY AGE GROUP

Ages 12-34

Men

35-54

Women

55+

2021

’22

’23

’24

2021

’22

’23

’24

Source: Edison Research

The upshot: Americans are hearing very different narratives about current events from very different places. Many factors might have contributed to the election’s outcome, but the media world’s fracturing is hard to ignore.

“Our information landscape has splintered into more and more pieces. Large, institutional news organizations are a smaller part of the geography,” said Nancy Gibbs, a former editor in chief of Time who is director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. “So voters were all watching different campaigns play out, with different messages and meaning and momentum.”

‘Real conversations’

Freewheeling online talk shows hosted by comedians, YouTubers and other celebrities are designed to entertain as much as to inform. They are competing for attention with mainstream media organizations that have a different mission and who are bound by editorial standards.

Some 47% of people in the U.S. have listened to a podcast in the past month, including nearly 60% of people who are under 35, according to Edison Research. And 54% of podcast listeners say getting news or political analysis is an important benefit of the medium, according to the industry advisory and data tracker Sounds Profitable.

Trump went on about 20 podcasts this year, including the comedian Theo Von’s show and Barstool Sports’ “Bussin’ With the Boys.” The interview with Rogan, who wound up endorsing Trump right before the election, was the culmination of a strategy to appeal to younger men. Trump got the support of 56% of male voters ages 18 to 29, according to the AP VoteCast survey of the electorate.

Joe Rogan and Donald Trump during a taping of ‘The Joe Rogan Experience.’ Photo: The Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube

Alex Cooper interviewed Kamala Harris on ‘Call Her Daddy’ last month. Photo: Call Her Daddy

“The whole manosphere is listening to podcasts,” Marina Hyde from “The Rest Is Entertainment” said during a livestreamed podcast Tuesday.

Vice President Kamala Harris embraced podcasts as well, sitting down with Brené Brown, whose show is popular among older women. She had a high-profile appearance on “Call Her Daddy,” a show about sex and relationships, which drew an audience of more than eight million across platforms.

Shawna Del Valle, a 55-year-old freelance photographer from Marietta, Ga., said she listens to podcasts to get a variety of viewpoints and avoids cable news. “People are waking up to real conversations versus the structured and inauthentic ways to get your information,” she said.

Del Valle, a lifelong registered Democrat, was a supporter of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.and felt he was silenced by the party. She cast her vote for Trump.

‘You are the media’

Musk, a Trump backer, took to X after the results to share his view that citizen journalists are overtaking legacy media. “You are the media now,” he told more than 200 million followers.

On TikTok, many “news influencers,” ordinary people who offer their take on current events, generate more viral posts—those with 25,000 or more views—than such mainstream media outlets as CNN, CBS and NBC, a Wall Street Journal analysis found.

The New York University student and Democratic Party advocate Harry Sisson’s video about Trump’s election victory raked in 6.7 million views on TikTok—more than double the 3.2 million views for NBC News’s similar post and nearly double CBS News’s 3.8 million views.

Share of U.S. adults who regularly get news from TikTok, by age group

OVERALL

AGES 18-29

30-49

50-64

65+

<1%

2020

’24

Source: Pew Research Center surveys, most recently of 10,658 U.S. adults conducted July 15–Aug. 4; margin of error: +/–1.2 pct. pts.

Vitus “V” Spehar, who posts as @underthedesknews on TikTok, made a video announcing livestreamed election coverage that raked in 1.7 million views.

In a first, news influencers were accredited alongside legacy media organizations at the Democratic National Convention, while Trump’s team lined up creators to watch and post about his debate with Harris in September.

The ‘Trump bump’

Not long ago, cable news was considered a kingmaker in politics. In 2016, critics of Trump accused CNN’s leadership of helping him secure the Republican nomination—and ultimately the presidency—by giving his rallies so much airtime.

The turbulence Trump brought became must-see TV and boosted ratings considerably at CNN, Fox News and MSNBC in what became known as a “Trump bump.” The viewership gains lasted longer for some networks than for others.

In 2024, a similar story might be playing out, with election interest-fueled gains helping viewership again. The presidential debate on CNN in June, between Trump and President Biden, was watched by more than 50 million viewers across several networks, and Bret Baier’s interview with Harris on Fox News averaged 7.8 million viewers.

But those periodic bursts—and others from major news events over the years, such as Covid and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza—mask challenges that imperil the cable business. The median age of an MSNBC viewer is 70, while Fox News’s is 69 and CNN’s is 68.

Cable news viewership overall is down from its recent peaks during Covid. Fox News is the leader, averaging 2.7 million prime-time viewers in October; MSNBC is second, with 1.3 million; and CNN, which has had the steepest drop-off in recent years, is averaging 792,000.

Fox News parent Fox Corp.and Wall Street Journal parent News Corp share common ownership.

Commentators on CNN and MSNBC routinely said Trump was a threat to democracy and played up criticism from those, including his onetime chief of staff, who said he would rule like a dictator. One question is how many persuadable people were listening.

“In all likelihood in the final stretch folks tuning in had largely made up their minds,” said Alyssa Farah Griffin, a CNN contributor and a co-host of “The View” who worked in the first Trump administration. She said she always believed the election would be decided on the cost of living and economics.

Griffin called the “podosphere” one of the election’s big winners, and said the new-media world can be more partisan than cable.

Though cable news is shrinking along with the broader TV universe, “Presidential campaigns still play out on television more than any other place,” said Sam Feist, C-SPAN’s chief executive, adding that he doesn’t think the medium has lost its relevance.

On election night, all three of the big cable networks saw significant ratings declines from 2020, when millions of Americans were working from home during the pandemic. Fox News drew 10.3 million prime-time viewers, while MSNBC attracted six million viewers, overtaking the No. 2 spot from CNN, which drew 5.1 million.

The TV networks also have digital arms with sizable reach. Fox News says it reaches nearly 200 million people monthly across all its platforms, including digital, audio and streaming. CNN said its election coverage reached 14 million people across CNN.com and its Max streaming service.

In the news-publishing world, interest in the election of Trump in 2016 fueled a boom in subscriptions and readership for some publishers, including the Washington Post, the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

That might be harder to replicate this time around. These days, Facebook and Google have stopped steering web users to news stories the way they once did. Their algorithm changes have had an impact—in some cases profoundly—on the web traffic publishers are generating.

The Washington Post’s referrals from search fell 26% from June 2022 to October 2024, while social-media referrals are down 52%, according to data from Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company.

Digital traffic from search and social media, change since June 2022

SEARCH REFERRALS

SOCIAL-MEDIA REFERRALS

New York

Times

Wall Street

Journal

Wall Street

Journal

–20

HuffPost

New York

Times

Washington

Post

–40

HuffPost

Washington

Post

–60

2023

’24

2023

’24

Note: Based on traffic totals for rolling 12-month periods for mobile and desktop devices.

Source: Similarweb

Jonah Peretti, the co-founder and chief executive of BuzzFeed, said publishers are even more vulnerable to social media than TV is.

“The TikTok and Instagram apps and Twitter have been better at replacing what you would get from a magazine or a newspaper or from a digital media offering than they have been at replacing what you might get from TV during a major world event or election,” Peretti said.

The fragmenting of the media world means that people are processing the same news—a presidential debate, a supposed gaffe on the campaign trail—very differently depending on where they are getting the information.

“People tend to live in their own media echo chambers now more than ever,” Feist said.

Pentagon chief directs military to conduct smooth transition to Trump

militarytimes.com · by Tara Copp and Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press · November 7, 2024

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin directed the military on Thursday to carry out a smooth transition to President-elect Donald Trump, with a reminder to the force of its obligation to follow the lawful orders of the next commander in chief.

While such memos are rare, it was not the first time the military’s top civilian leader has pressed the force on its duty to the Constitution in regard to a changeover of control under Trump.

However, in the context of the incoming president’s suggestion that he may use federal forces at the southern border, and Project 2025 plans to force out career civilians and fill positions with Trump loyalists, the Biden administration has taken unusual steps both to try to insulate those civil servants and to remind the military of its own sworn oaths.

“As it always has, the U.S. military will stand ready to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command,” Austin wrote in his letter to Defense Department personnel.

“The U.S. military will also continue to stand apart from the political arena; to stand guard over our republic with principle and professionalism; and to stand together with the valued allies and partners who deepen our security,” he wrote.

Austin reminded all members of the military that they swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution — “and that is precisely what you will continue to do.”

In 2016, the outgoing defense secretary in the Obama administration, Ash Carter, also pressed for an orderly transition after Trump was elected, telling the force he knew it would continue in the tradition of excellence “our citizens know they can expect.”

And when Trump's Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned in 2018, he urged the force to remain “undistracted from our sworn mission to support and defend the Constitution.”

“Our Department is proven to be at its best when times are most difficult,” Mattis wrote in December 2018, after resigning due to disagreements with Trump over a withdrawal of troops in Syria.

After the Biden administration, through the Office of Professional Management, issued a new rule in April to further insulate career civil servants from being involuntarily replaced by political appointees, Austin reiterated the Pentagon’s commitment to do the same. In a letter dated July 10, he said civil servants would be shielded “from unlawful or other inappropriate political encroachments."

The regulations were in response to an executive order Trump issued in 2020 that sought to allow for reclassifying tens of thousands of the 2.2 million federal employees and thus reduce their job security protections, which is expected to re-emerge in the second Trump term. It is unclear what sort of protections that workforce will still have in a new administration, particularly if Trump issues an executive order undoing the protections put in place for those civilian workers under President Joe Biden.

15. Trump’s Pentagon overhaul: 8 policy changes he’s expected to make

Trump’s Pentagon overhaul: 8 policy changes he’s expected to make

Expect the next commander in chief to quickly undo Biden-era policies.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-pentagon-defense-abortion-policy-00187836

Donald Trump’s opponents are foremost concerned that he will politicize the military and use it domestically against his political opponents. | Kenneth D Aston Jr./U.S. Navy

By Connor O’Brien and Joe Gould

11/06/2024 10:00 AM EST

Joe Biden’s first days in the Oval Office were spent undoing a number of Donald Trump’s most divisive changes at the Pentagon. Now, President-elect Trump is ready to do the same.

The full extent of Trump’s plans for the Pentagon are not entirely clear after the former president defeated Vice President Kamala Harris. But he’s likely to begin the process of reversing some of the policies Republicans have been gunning for — and reinstating some of his own from four years ago.

Trump’s opponents are foremost concerned that he will politicize the military and use it domestically against his political opponents. Should he follow through on his rhetoric, that could spark a fight over reining in his authorities to deploy troops on U.S. shores.

Trump may quickly win applause from defense hawks and social conservatives by reinstating his administration’s more restrictive policies on transgender people serving the military and scrapping initiatives aimed at helping troops access abortion.

He’s expected to revive his proposal to change the paint scheme on the new Air Force One that is slated to be delivered during his term, as POLITICO first reported. And Trump is likely to revisit a decision on which state will host the headquarters for the U.S. Space Command, which he and Biden differed on.

Here’s a rundown of the policies and issues Trump is most likely to change upon returning to the White House:

Troops on the homefront

Trump critics, and even some former officials who worked in his administration, are warning that the former president would wield the military for his own political gain after he called for the military to be used against “the enemy from within” the United States.

Indeed, Trump contemplated using the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops against protesters late in his term. And if he continues his rhetoric, there will likely be attempts to reexamine the Insurrection Act and Posse Comitatus Act to rein in Trump’s authority to use the military domestically.

Top lawmakers, such as Senate Armed Services Chair Jack Reed (D-R.I.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), have floated possible legislation. But efforts to limit Trump are unlikely to gain steam without Republican support.

Abortion travel policy

A Trump Pentagon is likely to roll back a Biden-era policy that allows troops to obtain leave and be reimbursed for the cost of traveling to seek abortions and other reproductive care. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin rolled out the policy in 2022 after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade’s national abortion protections. Biden administration officials reasoned that, with many women serving in states where abortions are now significantly limited or banned, facilitating access to abortion and other reproductive care helps maintain readiness.

But the policy sparked uproar among Republicans, who accused Biden of politicizing the military and skirting longstanding limits on federal funding for abortion — though the Justice Department advised the policy is legal.

Conservatives have pushed to block the policy in annual defense spending and policy bills, but haven’t succeeded amid Democratic opposition. With Trump headed back to the White House, GOP lawmakers will count on him to simply end the policy.

Transgender troops and diversity efforts

Within a week of taking office, Biden signed an executive order repealing Trump’s ban on transgender people serving openly in the military. Trump will likely restore the ban.

Transgender personnel began serving openly in the military in 2016 under an order from the Obama administration. But Trump announced in 2017 that he would reimpose the ban, angering LGBTQ advocates and Democrats.

“The United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” Trump said in a post. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”

Trump’s ban prohibited transgender service members from serving in their identified gender and ordered the discharge of anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria — severe anxiety some transgender people feel when their bodies don’t align with their gender — while in uniform. The move set off a flurry of lawsuits against the administration and any repeat is expected to do the same.

Conservatives in the House are fond of blasting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives at the Pentagon as distracting from its core mission — and under a Trump presidency, they’re likely to be curbed or ended entirely.

In 2020, Trump signed an executive order extending a ban on race- and sex-based discrimination training to the military, federal contractors, and grant recipients. This expanded an White House Office of Management and Budget memo directing federal agencies to cancel programs on topics such as “white privilege” and “critical race theory,” which attributes racial inequality to systemic power structures.

Trump agreed when asked at a rally in October whether he would create a task force to monitor what an audience member called “woke generals.”

Confederate base names

Trump also recently cracked the door to reversing efforts to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases, which was pushed through over his objections in the final days of his first term.

On a campaign stop in North Carolina in October, Trump said he would restore Fort Liberty’s original name, Fort Bragg, sparking a backlash from lawmakers in both parties who say they would fight back if he followed through as president. Trump said that renaming the base, which previously honored Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg was “rewriting history” and he pledged to reverse it.

Nine Army bases that previously honored Confederate leaders were renamed under a process established by Congress, which they passed in 2021 over Trump’s veto. It’s unclear if Trump would try to expand his push to the other renamed installations.

Though he’d face opposition from lawmakers if he follows through, Trump could still make good on the pledge. That’s because the executive branch, through the Defense Department and the military services, controls the naming of bases.

Troops in Europe

Trump may also look to move U.S. troops around Europe, or pull them entirely. Trump pushed to move 12,000 troops out of Germany in 2020, repositioning roughly half of them around the continent and bringing the other half back to the U.S. But that proposal was rebuffed by Congress.

Still, Trump hasn’t let up in his complaints that certain NATO allies don’t spend enough on their own defense, and could use U.S. troops as leverage to extract more concessions.

But there’s also bipartisan support for ratcheting up U.S. presence in Eastern Europe, where American troops can better train with countries that are concerned about Russian aggression. Many of those countries spend larger percentages of their GDP on defense, which could be an attractive option for Trump.

Space Command headquarters

Trump is expected to send U.S. Space Command to Alabama, which is where he wanted it before President Joe Biden reversed course and decided to keep it in Colorado.

The command, which is responsible for managing military space assets and satellite defense, was re-established in 2019, prompting the search for a permanent location. Near the end of Trump’s term, the Pentagon announced it would move to Alabama’s Redstone Arsenal, a decision Trump later claimed he personally influenced

The yearslong dispute has drawn in members of Colorado and Alabama congressional delegations from both parties, with the states accusing the other and both administrations of playing politics by rewarding a state that voted for them in 2020.

Alabama lawmakers have been counting on a Trump win to realize his original decision to move Space Command from its temporary headquarters in Colorado Springs to Huntsville.

“Trump’s gonna be there. He’s going to enforce what the secretary of the Air Force said under his administration and the secretary of the Air Force said under Biden’s administration,” House Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) predicted last year. “That is, Huntsville won the competition … and that’s where it should be and that’s where he’s going to build it.”

It’s been a grinding fight for both states, so expect the Coloradans to raise hell.

“The cement is hardening on Space Command in Colorado, that’s all I can say,” Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said in an interview. “It is at full operational capability and moving it would be pretty disastrous for our national security mission, so we’ve been moving forward.”

Space National Guard

Trump in August separately pledged to create a Space National Guard, a proposal favored by Guard leaders and officials from a handful of states to provide part-time personnel to the Space Force. It’s a move the Biden administration opposes as needlessly expensive and bureaucratic.

Congress would need to approve the reorganization, which would shift units that perform space missions that are now part of the Air National Guard. Biden’s Pentagon has proposed simply transferring space units from the Air Guard to the Space Force without creating a new branch of the National Guard, a move officials argue is the cheapest and least bureaucratic way to align space personnel.

Lawmakers, however, are split on how to proceed. The House has previously endorsed creating a Space National Guard while the Senate has sided with the Biden administration. Trump could shift the debate in favor of a new Space Guard, in the same way his support for a Space Force helped create the newest branch of the military during his first term.

Air Force One colors

Trump will also get another crack at changing the color scheme of the next Air Force One, a proposal that Biden reversed but that the former president would likely redo if he returns to the White House.

Trump pushed to change the colors of the Boeing-made planes to his preferred red, white and dark blue, similar to the pattern on his private plane.

After POLITICO first reported in 2022 that Trump’s preferred design would contribute to excessive temperatures and require expensive modifications to cool components, Biden scrapped the plans, reverting to the traditional light blue and white design

This year, a former senior Trump White House official predicted the former president would “absolutely” change it back.

There’s still time for Trump to order a change in the paint scheme to the two Boeing 747-8s that the Air Force is set to receive in 2026 and 2027, but doing so could incur even more costs and delays to a program that is already over budget and past schedule.

Due to the fixed-price contract, Boeing would eat the extra cost. The firm signed a $3.9 billion contract in 2018 for two new presidential aircraft as Trump personally got involved to push down the price. The program is already more than $2 billion over budget.

Filed under: Abortion, Military, Department Of Defense, Pentagon,

16. How the Osprey Changed Air Force Special Operations

Excerpts:

There’s no argument that the Osprey is a complex machine that requires robust training and steadfast maintenance. But it rewards this dedication with unequaled capacity for unique mission flexibility that planners revere and aircrew embrace.

During the suitable stand-down time between the November 2023 mishap and clearance to resume flight operations in March 2024, I guarantee that CV-22 aircrew were not wringing their hands in consternation over returning to flight. They were chomping at the bit to get back out there, to continue honing their skills and readying themselves and their tiltrotor fleet for the distinctive mission sets only they could do.

Approaching 20 years since we stood up that first CV-22 squadron, the Osprey has grown from the budding concepts we envisioned into directions we could not have even conceived. It has not come without a cost; application of special operations forces to defend our nation rarely does. But the necessity for the CV-22 to provide the critical capabilities — that other aircraft can’t — remains as strong as ever.

The men and women who fly and fix it stand ready. I remain honored to have been part of their community and blessed for the chance to help realize the air commando vision for the Osprey.

How the Osprey Changed Air Force Special Operations - Defense Opinion

defenseopinion.com · by Jim Cardoso · November 4, 2024

Almost 20 years ago, in May 2005, I was among a small cadre of aircrew and maintainers who stood up the first CV-22 squadron in the Air Force, the 71st Special Operations Squadron (SOS) at Kirtland Air Force Base.

That sunny spring day in New Mexico was a historic milestone, transitioning the Osprey from flight test article to a critical player in the Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) combat arsenal. All of us understood our role: to establish the training pipeline so future aircrews could employ this amazing aircraft in ways that, given its unique capabilities, were still not fully envisioned.

It’s now almost impossible to imagine a time in the AFSOC without the CV-22 Osprey. The Osprey has been at the forefront of AFSOC’s toughest missions since its first combat deployment in 2009.

Difficult choices before the Osprey

But I remember this time very clearly, as a younger officer flying the MH-53 Pave Low helicopter. In those days, we had to make difficult choices when considering which aircraft to employ. Those choices injected limitations into our ability to carry the fight to our nation’s enemies. The Pave Low was a rotary wing beast, able to carry special operations forces (SOF) and equipment to the most austere and challenging landing zone. However, like any helicopter, it was limited in air speed, altitude and range.

AFSOC’s MC-130 aircraft could carry a lot and go a long way, but they needed some form of runway at the end of the journey. This stark difference injected mission complexity during the attempted rescue of American hostages in Iran in 1980, leading to mission failure and the loss of eight Americans. While that tragedy spurred the creation of AFSOC in 1990, special operations leaders and planners still had to balance these tradeoffs; it’s just the way it was.

Enter the Osprey. The CV-22’s amazing ability to take off and land like a helicopter, but fly enroute at fixed-wing altitudes, speeds and ranges, is well established. What’s less transparent is how it transformed the mindset of commanders and how they could execute their missions. Over the past 15 years, they have grown accustomed to not having to make those tradeoffs. They’ve had the great fortune of creating plans that previously were simply not possible, leading to untold numbers of missions that could not have happened without tiltrotor capability.

Let’s be clear; the CV-22 does not replace purely rotary-wing and fixed-wing assets. Today’s special operations commanders need multiple tools in the aviation toolkit for the increasingly complex range of operational challenges they’ll confront.

In 2005, as the 71st SOS colors were unfurled, the select cadre of pilots, flight engineers and maintainers set out to provide those decision-makers capabilities that were just emerging. We were all eager to start turning concepts into realities, develop and train in the tactics and build the community of aircrew who would eventually take the aircraft into combat.

Although we had an idea of what this might look like, we knew we were dealing with a whole new concept of SOF aviation employment. Since then, it has been professionally and personally rewarding to see what air commandos have since realized with the CV-22 from these beginnings.

Expanded capabilities and capacity

This does not whitewash the cost. To the general public and even some national policymakers, the Osprey is known more for high-profile accidents than the capabilities it delivers for our nation. When a voracious media culture intersects with that of AFSOC’s quiet professionals, this is a predictable result. The CV-22 community is still dealing with a tragic mishap in November 2023, which took the lives of eight precious airmen. When a brother or sister in arms is lost, no one feels it more keenly than their squadron mates.

There’s no argument that the Osprey is a complex machine that requires robust training and steadfast maintenance. But it rewards this dedication with unequaled capacity for unique mission flexibility that planners revere and aircrew embrace.

During the suitable stand-down time between the November 2023 mishap and clearance to resume flight operations in March 2024, I guarantee that CV-22 aircrew were not wringing their hands in consternation over returning to flight. They were chomping at the bit to get back out there, to continue honing their skills and readying themselves and their tiltrotor fleet for the distinctive mission sets only they could do.

Approaching 20 years since we stood up that first CV-22 squadron, the Osprey has grown from the budding concepts we envisioned into directions we could not have even conceived. It has not come without a cost; application of special operations forces to defend our nation rarely does. But the necessity for the CV-22 to provide the critical capabilities — that other aircraft can’t — remains as strong as ever.

The men and women who fly and fix it stand ready. I remain honored to have been part of their community and blessed for the chance to help realize the air commando vision for the Osprey.

defenseopinion.com · by Jim Cardoso · November 4, 2024

17. Philippine Forces Rehearse Island Seizure in South China Sea

in the South China Sea or the West Philippines Sea?

Philippine Forces Rehearse Island Seizure in South China Sea - USNI News

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · November 7, 2024

Philippine Navy personnel aboard the Rigid-Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB) demonstrate a boat transfer exercise from the BRP Ramon Alcaraz (PS-16) during the simulated island seizure exercise as part of the AJEX DAGIT-PA 08-2024 on November 6 at Kota Island in the West Philippine Sea. Armed Forces of the Philippines Photo.

Supported by gunboats and a former U.S. Coast Guard cutter, Philippine Navy SEALs and Marines approached a South China Sea island owned by Manila in a simulated seizure drill as Chinese forces observed from afar on Wednesday.

Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Brawner and other high-ranking officers observed the exercise, among the most intense that Manila has held in the disputed waters, from the bridge of BRP Ramon Alcaraz (PS-16). Four rigid-hull inflatable boats transported members of Naval Special Operations Unit 4 and the 61st Force Reconnaissance Company to Loaita Island. Known to the Philippines as Kota, and to China as Nányào Dǎo, the island is one of the Philippines’ few possessions in the South China Sea. The island is home to a small Philippine Navy personnel detachment that monitors the surrounding waters and is administered under the Kalayaan municipality of the province of Palawan.

Two new Israeli-built Acero-class fast patrol gunboats, BRP Domingo Deluana (PG-905) and BRP Lolinato To-Ong (PG-902), and a helicopter supported the landing activity. A Philippine Air Force transport aircraft also air dropped supplies. Chinese warships shadowed the drills, with ABS-CBN News reporting the presence of at least two vessels. Brawner told reporters that this was expected, and noted their presence added “realism” to the drills.

A Philippine Air Force’s NC212i provides logistic support during the simulated island seizure exercise as part of the AJEX DAGIT-PA 08-2024 on November 6 at Kota Island in the West Philippine Sea. A People’s Liberation Army Navy Type 056 corvette can be seen in the background. Armed Forces of the Philippines Photo.

“This exercise marks a significant step in strengthening our national defense capabilities and ensuring that we are prepared to defend our sovereignty and sovereign rights. Today, our forces demonstrate the unwavering commitment to protecting the West Philippine Sea and our nation’s future,” Brawner said in a news release following the drill.

On Monday, 3,000 personnel from the Philippine Army, Air Force and Navy kicked off this year’s iteration of the joint Dagat-Langit Lupa exercise. As the country shifts from internal security to territorial defense operations, joint service drills have intensified in scope and scale at strategic locations throughout the Philippine archipelago. The Dagat-Langit Lupa series of exercises usually occur in Luzon, the largest Philippine island that borders the South China Sea and Luzon Strait, and the westernmost province of Palawan.

Previous iterations of the exercise have only seen Philippine forces rehearse island seizure drills notionally, with Marines landing on Palawan beaches. While the Philippine Navy used to be able to conduct large-scale landing drills in the area during the 1990s, a focus on counterinsurgency operations sapped the service up until the 2010s, as the country began to modernize its forces amid tensions with China.

news.usni.org · by Aaron-Matthew Lariosa · November 7, 2024

18. The faces of Trump’s natsec transition

The who's who below.

Excerpts:

People close to the president-elect aren’t being subtle about how loyalty could matter above all else for job seekers in a second Trump term. As MIKE DAVIS — a leading contender to be Trump’s attorney general — put it in a post on X:

“Dear Trump Job Seekers: Long time, no chat. Before asking me for help, I am going to ask you to provide me specific and concrete evidence of your łoyalty to Trump. If you cannot provide a lot of that, stop asking me. Political appointments require both competency and loyalty.”

The faces of Trump’s natsec transition

By ROBBIE GRAMER and ERIC BAZAIL-EIMIL 11/07/2024 04:02 PM EST

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2024/11/07/the-faces-of-trumps-natsec-transition-00183727?utm

NatSec Daily and the rest of POLITICO’s ace reporting team has spoken to former Trump officials and Republicans close to the campaign to collate a user guide for natsec wonks of transition officials and contenders for senior administration posts. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

With help from Nahal Toosi, Meredith McGraw, Jack Detsch, John Sakellariadis, Veronika Melkozerova and Daniel Lippman

Subscribe here | Email Robbie | Email Eric

President-elect DONALD TRUMP’s transition team is already taking shape, giving early insights into who could staff his national security and defense team once he takes office in January

The speculation around Cabinet secretary posts is hogging a lot of attention, but lower-level appointees in the National Security Council, State Department and Pentagon could have outsized influence over the direction of Trump’s foreign policy. And people who work on the transition often end up joining the administration in influential posts.

Without further ado, here’s who’s in the room or in the mix:

The State Department: BRIAN HOOK, former State Department policy planner and special envoy for Iran, has been tapped to lead the State Department transition team.

The Pentagon: ROBERT WILKIE, former Veterans Affairs secretary in the first Trump administration, is leading the Defense Department’s transition team, as our colleagues reported in today’s Morning Defense (for Pros!).

National Security Council: JOEL RAYBURN and MICHAEL ANTON are expected to play roles in Trump’s NSC transition team, several people familiar with internal campaign and transition deliberations said. Rayburn was a Trump appointee for Middle East policy in the State Department and an adviser to Sen. BILL HAGERTY (R-Tenn.). Sidebar: It’s worth noting that Hagerty is a contender for Trump’s secretary of State post, as we have previously reported. Anton was a former National Security Council spokesman under Trump. (The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment on this or other positions.)

Intel: Trump’s former director for national intelligence, JOHN RATCLIFFE, is involved in transition planning for national security policy. (POLITICO first reported his name and others on this list last week.) CLIFF SIMS, who served as deputy director of national intelligence for strategy and communications in the first Trump administration, is also playing a leading role in national security and intelligence transition matters, according to the people familiar with internal campaign and transition matters.

Global trade: Trump’s former trade representative, ROBERT LIGHTHIZER, and Lighthizer’s former chief of staff, JAMIESON GREER, are playing a leading role in economic and international trade transition policy.

Cybersecurity: JOSHUA STEINMAN, a former Trump NSC official, is a leading contender for the NSC’s top cyber policy post, as our cybersecurity colleagues report (for Pros!). Others who could be involved in the transition’s cybersecurity team and take up top administration posts include SEAN PLANKEY, a former NSC and Energy Department official, and KAREN EVANS, a former Trump Homeland Security Department official.

Technology: MICHAEL KRATSIOS and GAIL SLATER are managing tech policy during the Trump transition, as POLITICO reported today (for Pros!). Kratsios is managing director of the artificial intelligence startup Scale AI, which has secured some notable Pentagon contracts, and was former chief technology officer in the first Trump administration. Slater is another Trump administration alumni who also serves as economic policy adviser to Vice President-elect JD VANCE.

One key litmus test that could be a deciding factor for who joins Trump’s national security team once he takes office: Loyalty.

19. The Army in the Pacific: Lessons from My Time as a Ghost

Excerpts:

A strategist by trade, I recently vacated an assignment that I held for nearly three years where I worked directly for the commanding general of US Army Pacific and often struggled to describe my role as a so-called special assistant. I typically fumbled through a menu of duties I felt were appropriate to share and held back on others more confidential in nature. I eventually grew unsatisfied with my wandering explanations, so I found it easier to say I was like an aide-de-camp. When I first came across the ghost memo about a year after I started in the job, I realized that mine was not like any official position on the books. It clarified that I was the commander’s “alter ego.” I was a ghost.

...

Drawing upon insights from last century’s catastrophes and based on the perspective I have gained from my unique experience as a ghost, I invite Army leaders to consider the following proposals. They are not all-inclusive, but can rather serve as initial actions to demonstrate the “priority theater” is indeed the Army’s top priority.

...

First, overhaul the Army’s force-generation process to expose more troops to the China problem set.

...

Second, assume risk elsewhere by funding the Army’s Pacific campaigning activities to the maximum extent possible.

...

Third, given the enduring nature of the region’s maritime geography, a fight in the Pacific requires a lopsided ratio of fires and support capabilities over traditional maneuver units. While the US Marine Corps “stand-in forces” concept promises capability that can rapidly transition to combat, only the Army can add the necessary scale for certain critical capabilities like land-based long-range fires, terrestrial collection, intratheater sustainment, air and missile defense, and command and control.

...

The death toll from the early failures of World War II was profound. Losses from the failed defense of the Philippines, among prisoners of war, and from the later liberation campaign resulted in the largest overseas interment of American soldiers. Britain’s once ironclad security guarantee in Asia crumbled following the loss of Singapore giving rise to a new centerpiece of the region’s security architecture, the United States. The parallels with possible consequences from a regional war with China are stark.

The Army is obviously a global force with growing demands in an increasingly volatile world, including from the ongoing war in Europe and a widening war in the Middle East, but anxiety over going “all in on Asia” is unfounded. Russia, Iran, and North Korea independently present significant challenges, and the new coalescing among—embodied most recently in North Korean troops’ deploying into Ukraine—is causing fresh alarm. Yet the most dangerous threat facing our nation—and our Army—is no longer in Europe but in Asia.

If the future resembles the past, land forces will perform decisive roles in the Indo-Pacific based on what they do or fail to do. The Army need not be haunted by two of history’s worst catastrophes in a region that few in our ranks fully comprehend. My experience as a ghost left me with a clear conviction. The Army must overcome its internal tensions by prioritizing the theater where we all have the most at stake.

The Army in the Pacific: Lessons from My Time as a Ghost - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Tim Devine · November 8, 2024

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Colonel Patrick Sullivan’s article, “Staff Jobs and Officer Education: An Army Ghost Story,” caught me by utter surprise. I was putting the finishing touches on this article when I scanned the Modern War Institute’s website for the latest content and saw it. Sipping coffee on my back lanai in the quiet morning hours in the hills above Pearl Harbor, I gasped aloud when I read the title of Sullivan’s piece. To my astonishment, he had written about an obscure—but evocative—forty-year-old memo that holds special meaning to me. The memo described the ideal qualities of someone who would occupy a proposed new role, working directly for a senior leader with the innocuous title of “special assistant” but who, the document’s author declared, was “not an aide—ever.”

A strategist by trade, I recently vacated an assignment that I held for nearly three years where I worked directly for the commanding general of US Army Pacific and often struggled to describe my role as a so-called special assistant. I typically fumbled through a menu of duties I felt were appropriate to share and held back on others more confidential in nature. I eventually grew unsatisfied with my wandering explanations, so I found it easier to say I was like an aide-de-camp. When I first came across the ghost memo about a year after I started in the job, I realized that mine was not like any official position on the books. It clarified that I was the commander’s “alter ego.” I was a ghost.

The unique experience offered me a front-row seat to the immensely complex and increasingly tumultuous security environment involving China. I routinely sat in meetings with senior officials from across our government and numerous partner nations. I gained a deep appreciation for the role of land forces in a region that many—even in my own ranks—find unfamiliar. In addition, I read and wrote extensively on these matters. Overall, my experience as a ghost convinced me, despite the obstacles like my service’s Eurocentrism and other competing demands, that the US Army must prioritize requirements for the Indo-Pacific first.

Encounters with History

While I did not meet all criteria for a ghost—I don’t speak a foreign language nor am I an artilleryman (included in the memo as a playful nod to the memo’s recipient)—I definitely met the requirement that a ghost travels. Traveling throughout the Indo-Pacific allowed me to better comprehend the region’s characteristics, including its vast distances, harsh climates, and maritime geography. I also became well acquainted with its characters, namely the other services in the joint force, allies and partners, and potential adversaries.

On the margins of my official duties while traveling, I had several incredible encounters with the region’s military history. I visited the infamous Hoa Lo Prison, better known as the Hanoi Hilton, in Vietnam. I briefly laid over in Chuuk, a tiny remote island in Micronesia heavily garrisoned during World War II (when it was known as Truk). I walked through the solemn Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, viewed a gripping exhibit on Gallipoli in Wellington, and visited the splendid Australian War Memorial in Canberra. However, two encounters palpably stand out: one in the Philippines and the other in Singapore.

During a visit to Corregidor, an island fortress strategically located at the entrance to Manila Bay, I viewed rows of bombed out structures, climbed atop destroyed fortifications, and walked through the eerie corridors of the Malinta Tunnel. The “Rock” is, of course, where Army forces made their last stand against a relentless onslaught by the Japanese from December 1941 to May 1942. The campaign included horrific events like the Bataan Death March and resulted in twenty-three thousand Americans and one hundred thousand Filipinos killed or captured—the worst defeat in US military history.

In Singapore after a long flight and day of meetings, I convinced my understandably reluctant boss to join me on a detour to a museum known as the Former Ford Factory. There, British Commonwealth forces surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942 following their disastrous Malayan Campaign. In conversations with my colleagues, few knew about this catastrophe (which occurred in parallel to events unfolding in the Philippines) or that the British Commonwealth lost upwards of 130,000 troops in the fall of Singapore. It was “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history,” according to Winston Churchill.

What piqued my interest in both cases was how armies figured centrally in the tragic outcomes in a theater where many—then and now—view seapower and airpower as premier capabilities. Notably, the naval and air elements were crippled in the opening stages of each campaign, leaving ground forces virtually isolated without support, resupply, or relief. Things quickly devolved into a battle for survival. Beforehand, troops rarely trained in local conditions and were not properly equipped to fight in jungle terrain. They lacked knowledge of their enemy, coordinated ineffectively with naval and air forces, and were poorly organized. In sum, the armies were grossly unprepared to fight in the region’s exacting conditions and against a determined enemy.

The key point I came to appreciate was how these catastrophes were not simply the results of battlefield actions or even more proximate strategic developments. The outcomes were decades in the making. The culpability largely came to rest on the shoulders of the local commanders, yet years of decisions in Washington and London over matters like manning, equipping, and resourcing indeed had much to do with the result. These two episodes naturally influenced my thinking about present-day challenges.

Transforming for What?

Considering the US Army is undergoing its largest transformation in nearly half a century, senior leaders are thoughtfully wrestling with the drivers and characteristics of force development and design. In other words, how, where, and against whom is the Army being built to fight? The Army’s focus was straightforward during the Cold War, but these days multiple threats along many blurred axes complicate matters. Further, flat budgets, recruiting woes, and shrinking end-strength for the nation’s land force are prompting many tough calls for Army senior leaders.

Influential voices in the Army argue for the service’s continued orientation toward Europe, with some suggesting the chief of staff of the Army “should act boldly, with the wisdom of his predecessor [General George C. Marshall], and focus the Army on Europe first.” But this argument is based on a glaring historical misinterpretation. Marshall recognized that Germany was the more dangerous threat over Japan. Today China wields greater political influence, possesses more economic and military capacity—including the world’s largest standing army—and overall poses a graver threat to US national interests than Russia. Plus, the geostrategic center of gravity is no longer in Europe, but in Asia. Arguments in favor of prioritizing Europe over the Info-Pacific thus ignore Marshall’s very rationale.

The Army’s unfunded requirements for the Indo-Pacific, despite the “priority theater” labeling by the Department of Defense, routinely exceed hundreds of millions of dollars each year. According to the Army’s latest budget request, base funding to support NATO is over a third larger (by a magnitude of $164 million) than the Army’s campaigning activities that underwrite deterrence against China and assurance of Indo-Pacific allies and partners. Furthermore, Army forces in Europe benefit from billions in supplemental funding, while those in the Pacific do not, because the Pacific Deterrence Initiative is not a separate funding source like the European Deterrence Initiative. As the business magnate (and Pacific war veteran) James W. Frick aptly stated: “Don’t tell me where your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money, and I’ll tell you what they are.”

To be fair, the Army has considerably increased investments for campaigning in the Indo-Pacific from a relatively scant $125 million just a few years ago to $461 million for fiscal year 2025. Other gains include the establishment of a regional combat training center—the Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center—and the assignment of new formations like multi-domain task forces to the region. The Army is increasingly emphasizing aspects of a China fight in its professional military education, doctrinal publications, and training at multiple echelons to include a new service-wide Unified Pacific wargame and Pacific-focused operational exercises for forces based in the continental United States. But this momentum must lead to a new end.

Institutional Friction

Several obstacles inhibit the Army from making urgently needed changes to achieve its missions in the Indo-Pacific. First, arguments in favor of prioritizing Europe at the expense of commitments in the Indo-Pacific reflect the Army’s institutional bias for the familiar continental landscapes and traditional land warfare missions in the former, rather than the noncontiguous geography and multidomain roles in the latter. The same is true regarding the institutional emphasis on the threat posed by Russia compared to a nascent awareness of China. Moreover, the Army’s force-generation process is optimized to meet rotational requirements elsewhere overseas and not for the modern era of great power competition against China.

By contrast to other theaters, Army forces operating in the Pacific overwhelmingly consist of permanently assigned forces, rather than rotational forces, meaning fewer troops from the continental United States ever gain regional experience. If they do, then chances are they serve in Korea where they are alert to another important problem set—but not the “pacing threat.” Thus, by default, the Army and its major institutional commands like US Forces Command overwhelmingly concentrate on generating readiness to meet demands in other theaters. In other words, the Army’s headquarters and the bulk of the force do not make China their main focus.

While it may be true that the US Navy and US Air Force would play leading roles in a regional war in the Indo-Pacific, the US Army provides critical capabilities—like common user logistics and land-based air and missile defense—to the joint force at depth and scale. Projecting seapower and airpower is practically impossible without them because of inherent joint interdependence with landpower. Further, Europe benefits from a collective security architecture, but the Indo-Pacific does not. Consequently, Indo-Pacific allies and partners—whose armies, in fact, comprise 80 percent of their militaries—require greater commitments from the US Army to resist Chinese coercion and intimidation within their territorial boundaries and sovereign areas.

Even respected proponents of prioritizing Europe like Army War College Professor John Nagl who have come to appreciate the scope and importance of US Army Pacific’s role typically do so only after directly seeing it. Nagl wrote that he “didn’t understand the organization very well” until after he taught a new course in Hawaii for soldiers freshly assigned to the region. The lack of understanding regarding the Army’s role in the Indo-Pacific is part of the challenge, but deterring China and potentially waging a regional war ultimately requires sweeping change by prioritizing this problem above all else.

Three Proposals

Drawing upon insights from last century’s catastrophes and based on the perspective I have gained from my unique experience as a ghost, I invite Army leaders to consider the following proposals. They are not all-inclusive, but can rather serve as initial actions to demonstrate the “priority theater” is indeed the Army’s top priority.

First, overhaul the Army’s force-generation process to expose more troops to the China problem set. In 2020, the Army created a new force-generation model to regionally align Army formations, generate readiness to meet global demands, and sequence its major transformation efforts. However, regional alignment never took root because fresh demands from global events like the war in Ukraine and both persistent and growing security challenges in the Middle East outweighed these plans. Seeking more permanent stationing, namely in Europe, is one way to alleviate the resource-intensive burden from constantly rotating forces overseas. Lengthy Pacific experience is in short supply in today’s Army, especially at the senior level, but is desperately needed. Of note, General George C. Marshall, like many of his contemporaries spent his formative years serving in the Pacific.

Second, assume risk elsewhere by funding the Army’s Pacific campaigning activities to the maximum extent possible. The complex formulae involving competition with China and assuring regional allies ultimately requires robust landpower capabilities on key terrain. This involves episodic presence of ground forces through longstanding exercises like Talisman Sabre in Australia or Yama Sakura in Japan that place high payloads of troops and equipment forward alongside allies and partners at key times. Campaigning also involves posture initiatives, like prepositioning equipment and supplies, that take years to play out and typically span multiple senior leader tenures. These efforts are vital to placing Army forces in positions of advantage so they can accomplish their mission as an integral part of the joint force.

Third, given the enduring nature of the region’s maritime geography, a fight in the Pacific requires a lopsided ratio of fires and support capabilities over traditional maneuver units. While the US Marine Corps “stand-in forces” concept promises capability that can rapidly transition to combat, only the Army can add the necessary scale for certain critical capabilities like land-based long-range fires, terrestrial collection, intratheater sustainment, air and missile defense, and command and control. Though maneuver forces are still important, the reality is that these units are in lower demand in the Indo-Pacific because logistically intensive service concepts, such as the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment, are infeasible without the Army’s enabling capabilities.

The hard decisions facing Army senior leaders come down to where they assume risk. Admittedly, objectively prioritizing geographic roles and functions is difficult given the Army’s cultural affinity for its more traditional experiences in land warfare and familiarity with other theaters. However, the trajectory of events in Asia does not bode well for the long-term security and prosperity of the United States.

The Future is in Asia

The death toll from the early failures of World War II was profound. Losses from the failed defense of the Philippines, among prisoners of war, and from the later liberation campaign resulted in the largest overseas interment of American soldiers. Britain’s once ironclad security guarantee in Asia crumbled following the loss of Singapore giving rise to a new centerpiece of the region’s security architecture, the United States. The parallels with possible consequences from a regional war with China are stark.

The Army is obviously a global force with growing demands in an increasingly volatile world, including from the ongoing war in Europe and a widening war in the Middle East, but anxiety over going “all in on Asia” is unfounded. Russia, Iran, and North Korea independently present significant challenges, and the new coalescing among—embodied most recently in North Korean troops’ deploying into Ukraine—is causing fresh alarm. Yet the most dangerous threat facing our nation—and our Army—is no longer in Europe but in Asia.

If the future resembles the past, land forces will perform decisive roles in the Indo-Pacific based on what they do or fail to do. The Army need not be haunted by two of history’s worst catastrophes in a region that few in our ranks fully comprehend. My experience as a ghost left me with a clear conviction. The Army must overcome its internal tensions by prioritizing the theater where we all have the most at stake.

Tim Devine is an active duty lieutenant colonel and strategist in the US Army. He is a LTG (Ret) James Dubik writing fellow.

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

Image credit: Sgt. Alec Dionne, US Army National Guard

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Tim Devine · November 8, 2024

20. Pentagon anticipates major upheaval with Trump’s return to White House

Sometimes it is worth reflecting on out oaths of office:

Commissioned officer:

I ___, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God. (Title 5 U.S. Code 3331, an individual, except the President, elected or appointed to an office of honor or profit in the civil service or uniformed services)

Enlisted oath:

I, _____, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God. (Title 10, US Code; Act of 5 May 1960 replacing the wording first adopted in 1789, with amendment effective 5 October 1962).

Pentagon anticipates major upheaval with Trump’s return to White House

Critics fear the president-elect intends to make good on a host of campaign pledges with enormous implications for the nonpartisan military.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/07/trump-military-pentagon/

President Donald Trump reviews service members during a Pentagon ceremony in 2019. (Alex Brandon/AP)

By Dan Lamothe, Missy Ryan and Alex Horton

Updated November 7, 2024 at 8:28 p.m. EST

The Pentagon anticipates major upheaval once President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House, amid fears that the once and future commander in chief will follow through on vows to deploy the military domestically against American citizens, demand fealty from key leaders and attempt to remake the nonpartisan institution into one explicitly loyal to him.

The trepidation harks back to Trump’s first term, when he smashed norms and frequently clashed with senior Pentagon leaders — including several of his own political appointees. He has shown no signs of altering course this time around, stating throughout his campaign an intent to use military force against the “enemy from within,” to fire any military officer associated with the chaotic evacuation from Afghanistan after he left office in 2021, and to reverse what he and his supporters have denounced as “woke” decisions by the Biden administration that include renaming several Army bases that had honored Confederates.

“The greatest danger the military faces” under a second Trump presidency is a “rapid erosion of its professionalism, which would undermine its status and respect from the American people,” said Richard Kohn, a professor and military historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Mr. Trump does not have a real understanding of civil-military relations, or the importance of a nonpartisan, nonpolitical military.”

A spokeswoman for Trump, Karoline Leavitt, said that with Tuesday’s vote, the American public had given him “a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail. He will deliver.”

Several senior figures in Trump’s first administration later issued public warnings about his authoritarian impulses. Among them were his former defense secretary Mark T. Esper; retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and his former White House chief of staff John Kelly, also a retired general. Jim Mattis, the retired general who was Trump’s first defense secretary, said little publicly during the election but castigated Trump in an essay in June 2020, calling him “the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people.”

While in office, each served as a bulwark against Trump’s darkest impulses and subsequently voiced grave concerns that he would violate the Constitution by issuing unlawful orders to the military.

As president, Trump boosted the Pentagon’s budget, pressed U.S. allies to spend more on their own defense and loosened battlefield restrictions imposed by President Barack Obama — moves that were greeted positively within the Defense Department.

But the impulsive, antiestablishment nature of his presidency created uproar, including when he intervened in the criminal cases of U.S. troops convicted of war crimes, sought retribution against retired generals who criticized him and abruptly called for a ban on transgender service members but had no plan in place. Such moves often caught Pentagon officials flat-footed and left them scrambling to discern what exactly Trump wanted and whether he would change his mind.

As president, Trump used his personal social media to broadcast major U.S. troop movements overseas, including a withdrawal from northern Syria that caused chaos for partner forces there, and personnel reductions in Afghanistan while U.S. officials were simultaneously negotiating a departure with the Taliban. Doing so was seen by commanders as unconventional at best.

Earlier this year retired Gen. Austin “Scott” Miller, who oversaw U.S. forces in Afghanistan, recalled for House investigators scrutinizing the withdrawal how in 2018 he was awakened by a phone call informing him the military had been ordered to prepare to leave “in the middle of the night.” The general responded that doing so was “not feasible.”

The first Trump administration also worked to root out career civil servants who were suspected of undermining the president’s agenda or who spoke out when it appeared his directives were unlawful. A Defense Department official said Wednesday that while most career Pentagon staff and military personnel there seek to avoid politics, some now feel afraid based on their experiences during the hyper-partisan first Trump presidency, when chaotic decision-making and abrupt leadership changes at times made it difficult for them to do their jobs.

“People around here are used to transitions — but a lot of them were around for the Trump administration,” said the official, who like some others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations.

After the race was called Wednesday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, himself a retired general who spent more than 40 years in uniform, issued a memo to all personnel saying the Pentagon will carry out a “calm, orderly, and professional transition to the incoming Trump administration.”

“As it always has,” Austin wrote, “the U.S. military will stand ready to carry out the policy choices of its next Commander in Chief, and to obey all lawful orders from its civilian chain of command.” He emphasized, too, that the military must “continue to stand apart from the political arena.”

Asked during a news briefing Thursday to clarify why Austin had specified “lawful” orders, Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh declined to engage in what she called “hypotheticals.” She characterized the memo as intended to “clearly communicate” Austin’s expectations that the military remain apolitical, she said.

In July, Austin made an attempt to shield nonpartisan career employees from future political interference. In a memo titled “Integrity and Continuity of the Defense Career Civilian Workforce,” he wrote that such employees must be granted due process and must not be subjected to summary dismissal. It’s not clear what lasting effect, if any, such efforts will have on civilian personnel.

While incoming presidents always choose their own political appointees, the Pentagon’s senior military ranks have long been selected on a rotational basis that stretches across presidential terms. Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the top officers in each service all stepped into assignments last year that typically stretch four years.

Trump, as commander in chief, has the authority to remove any of them at will. Such a move could risk political backlash from retired generals and lawmakers from both parties who evaluated and approved those nominations, but doing so also would allow him to appoint someone else he perceives to be more loyal to him and his agenda.

One senior U.S. official familiar with discussions in the Pentagon said there is palpable concern among senior staff that Brown “won’t make it through his full term.” In 2020, Trump selected Brown, an Air Force fighter pilot, to become the first African American to lead a branch of service, but since then the general has faced Republican criticism for supporting the Defense Department’s diversity programs.

Biden’s pick to lead Joint Chiefs tangles with GOP at Senate hearing

Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. faced questions about the military’s recruiting crisis, the war in Ukraine and Pentago...

A spokesman for Brown declined to comment.

Rachel VanLandingham, a former Air Force attorney, said her greatest concern for the military is if it is used to suppress dissent in the United States. While service members are required to follow U.S. law, all presidential orders stand to be interpreted by rank-and-file personnel as lawful even if they appear to fall in a gray zone, she said, with the possibility of disciplinary punishment for anyone who defies them.

“They will follow President Trump’s orders, particularly because the president can lawfully order domestic use of the military in a wide variety of situations,” VanLandingham predicted, calling the statutory limits on such force “easily legally surmountable.”

“There is huge risk in disobeying a president’s order, and seemingly little risk in obeying it,” she said.

Peter Feaver, an expert on civil-military relations at Duke University, said that most military personnel and career civil servants are likely to see their mission as serving the new president and enabling him to exercise his powers as commander in chief. He urged the new administration not to sideline or retaliate against them if they make recommendations that run counter to White House desires — something that occurred repeatedly during Trump’s first term.

“Their professional duty is to warn the bosses of unintended consequences of what they’re trying to do,” Feaver said. “That’s not resistance; that’s not disloyalty; that’s literally their job.”

21.China’s Gray-Zone Offensive Against Taiwan Is Backfiring

The yin-yang of the title and subtitle. Good news but prepare for the coming bad.

Excerpts:

It is important for Taiwan to prioritize preparing for the fight that it cannot lose. This means adapting its defense strategies to the reality of the power imbalance: because it cannot match China tank for tank, plane for plane, or ship for ship, Taiwan should divest from some of these legacy platforms in favor of uncrewed systems, mines, and missiles, which Taipei can produce itself—or procure from the United States—in far greater quantities. To be sure, Taiwan’s government cannot allow perceived gray-zone threats to go unanswered, and it must find some way of demonstrating to its citizens that it is protecting them. But with limited resources, preparing for genuine military escalation must remain the primary focus.

Meanwhile, the United States, which has a vital strategic interest in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, must raise the costs for China of pursuing these tactics. It should respond to gray-zone coercion by announcing additional military aid to Taiwan, deploying more of its high-end military capabilities to the region, and deepening its military engagement with Japan, particularly in that country’s southwestern islands, which stretch toward Taiwan. China’s military exercises in the Taiwan Strait are meant to signal to the United States that China’s capabilities are too advanced for Washington to be able to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf; likewise, the United States should respond with its own exercises that demonstrate that it can keep open critical sea lanes near Taiwan and surge forces into the region as needed. Washington should also warn Beijing that its response to Chinese coercion against Taiwan would not be limited to the military domain—that further pressure on Taiwan will invite broader U.S. restrictions on high-tech exports to China.

This kind of coordination between Washington and Taipei would complicate Chinese plans for a blockade or invasion and may prompt Beijing to reexamine whether the costs of continuing on its current path outweigh the benefits. Even if China does not abandon its gray-zone playbook, such steps would, at the very least, better prepare Taiwan for a conflict that such coercion has made all the more likely.

China’s Gray-Zone Offensive Against Taiwan Is Backfiring

Washington and Taipei Must Prepare for Further Escalation

By David Sacks

November 8, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by David Sacks · November 8, 2024

In mid-October, China conducted yet another round of large-scale military drills in the Taiwan Strait, including practicing a blockade of Taiwanese ports. This time, the trigger was a series of unremarkable comments by Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te on the occasion of Taiwan’s National Day a few days prior. Beijing “has no right to represent Taiwan,” Lai had asserted, describing Taiwan as a place where “democracy and freedom are growing and thriving.” Although Lai gave no indication that he would pursue independence or seek to change Taiwan’s international status, Beijing used his remarks as a new pretext to ramp up the pressure.

Over the past two years, major Chinese military exercises around Taiwan have gone from comparatively rare to almost routine. Beijing launched major drills after former U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited the island in August 2022; when Lai’s predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen, briefly stopped in the United States in April 2023; and again after Lai’s inauguration in May 2024. But rather than isolated actions responding to specific events, these high-profile military drills should be viewed as a core component of China’s larger campaign of “gray-zone” operations against Taiwan—coercive activities that fall below the threshold of armed force. As part of these tactics, China has levied tariffs and embargoes on Taiwanese exports, sought to increase Taiwan’s international isolation, and employed disinformation campaigns and cyberattacks meant to destabilize its people and government.

The ultimate goal is forcing Taiwan to acquiesce to unification. In China’s ideal scenario, the Taiwanese people would find the accumulating pressures of these gray-zone activities unbearable and ultimately capitulate, allowing Beijing to win control of Taiwan without having to fire a shot. Short of these maximalist aims, the Chinese leadership hopes to erode trust in Lai’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and sow division in Taiwanese society, including by raising questions about whether the United States would come to Taiwan’s defense in the event of a Chinese blockade or invasion.

But it is already clear that China’s gray-zone operations are backfiring. The threat against which China justifies its campaign—a Taiwanese push for independence—does not really exist: the Taiwanese people support the status quo and understand that pursuing independence would alienate the island’s international partners and likely invite a Chinese attack. Instead, China’s actions have hardened Taiwan’s resolve to resist unification, making it only more likely that Beijing will have to resort to force to achieve this aim. Taiwan and the United States should therefore remain focused on deterring—and, if necessary, defeating—a Chinese blockade or invasion. And they should respond to aggressive gray-zone behavior by imposing costs on China that might change its calculus for an invasion or blockade. To prevent a hot conflict, they need to win the cold one. Put simply, Washington and Taipei need to exploit the gray zone themselves.

HONEY INTO VINEGAR

China’s strategy for unifying with Taiwan has always rested on a combination of inducements and threats—a marriage proposal at gunpoint. Beijing has attempted to demonstrate to the Taiwanese people the benefits of a closer political and economic relationship and the costs of further estrangement. China’s overtures were sweetest from 2008 to 2016, during the administration of Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, whose Kuomintang party emphatically rejected Taiwanese independence and favored a relatively conciliatory approach to Beijing, based on the so-called 1992 Consensus—a vague framework in which both sides agree there is “one China” but disagree on how to define it. During that period, Beijing and Taipei inked more than two dozen agreements on everything from trade to people-to-people exchanges. In 2016, however, Ma was succeeded by Tsai, of the DPP, which views Taiwan as an already independent and sovereign nation, formally called the Republic of China. Although Tsai, in her inaugural address, offered a formulation for cross-strait relations that satisfied the idea of “one China,” she declined to explicitly endorse the 1992 Consensus. Since then, China’s approach has grown more antagonistic, especially in the past few years.

Since late 2020, People’s Liberation Army aircraft have flown through Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone—a buffer area outside its territorial airspace—on a near daily basis. In 2022, Chinese aircraft began routinely flying over the median line in the Taiwan Strait, a demarcation that both sides had previously respected for over half a century. China has progressively increased the sophistication of these sorties as well as their proximity to Taiwanese territory. Before, the People’s Liberation Army Navy only occasionally operated in the waters near Taiwan; today, it stations warships around the island almost continuously. As a result, according to Taiwan’s naval chief, Chinese forces “are ready to blockade Taiwan at any time they want.”

China is also targeting Taiwan economically, attempting to drive divisions within its society by penalizing industries typically located in municipalities that favor the DPP. In May, it announced it would reinstate tariffs on 134 imports from Taiwan and in September added another 34 products to that list. Beijing has also threatened and fined China-based subsidiaries of Taiwanese companies that it believes support the DPP and pressured Taiwanese companies with operations in China to publish pro-China public statements.

China’s gray-zone campaign, intended to help achieve unification, is instead pushing Taiwan further away.

Politically, China continues to attempt to isolate Taiwan. It has succeeded in barring Taiwan from various world bodies, including the World Health Organization, Interpol, and the International Civil Aviation Organization. More recently, it has embarked on a sustained effort to persuade countries and global organizations to declare that Taiwan is a part of China’s territory and to support its efforts to achieve unification. In one notable example, which occurred after Lai’s inauguration, Nauru, a tiny island nation in Micronesia, severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan. This was not the first time a country had “flipped” to Beijing by cutting ties with Taipei, but it was the first time such a country explicitly recognized that “the Government of the [People’s Republic of China] is the sole legal Government representing the whole of China, and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory.” In this narrative battle, China is attempting to establish that disagreements between Beijing and Taipei constitute an internal matter. If this perspective were to become broadly accepted around the world, Beijing could argue that any use of force would not be in violation of international law, making it more difficult for the United States to lead a response.

In June, China unveiled new legal guidelines meant to target Taiwan independence activists; these crimes, some punishable by death, include promoting Taiwan’s inclusion in international organizations for which statehood is a requirement. A few months later, a Chinese court convicted a Taiwanese political activist who had moved to China and had previously advocated for Taiwan’s inclusion in the UN, sentencing him to nine years in prison. (The Republic of China was a founding member of the UN, representing “China” even after its government fled to Taiwan. In 1971, however, the UN voted to move representation to the People’s Republic of China; Taiwan has not had a presence in the body since.) China also continues to sanction Taiwanese officials—including its current vice president and national security adviser—and nationals it considers to be pro-independence.

Taiwan is now the target of more external disinformation attacks than any other democracy, with China producing the lion’s share of large-scale operations against it. And Beijing’s campaigns are growing increasingly sophisticated: in the run-up to Taiwan’s most recent presidential election, actors linked to the Chinese government used generative artificial intelligence to create audio and video deepfakes of Taiwanese political leaders. In recent years, China has attempted to sow skepticism of the United States among the Taiwanese population, as well. Consequently, a new perspective has taken hold: a September 2023 poll by Taiwan’s top research institution found that only 34 percent of Taiwanese people consider the United States to be a trustworthy partner, which represents a decline of 11 percentage points since 2021. Although this is a worrying trend, growing Taiwanese skepticism of the United States has not translated into a greater desire to unify with Beijing.

HARDENED STEEL

China’s gray-zone campaign, intended to help achieve unification, is instead pushing Taiwan further away. It is fueling a growing conviction among Taiwanese that China is hostile and raising an awareness among the population that conflict is a real possibility. Taiwanese people also see Beijing’s crackdown on democracy in Hong Kong as a harbinger of their likely fate following unification, and they are determined to prevent that from happening. Now, according to a long-running poll from National Chengchi University, in Taipei, less than seven percent of Taiwanese people desire unification with China at any point. That number was more than twice as high just six years ago.

Rather than buckling to Chinese pressure, Taiwan is stiffening its resolve, inspired in part by Ukraine standing up to Russia. In the past three years, Taiwan has consistently increased its defense budget, lengthened mandatory military conscription from three months to a year while overhauling its training regimen, invested in indigenous missile and drone production, and made important strides in civil defense. In 2016, more than 80 percent of Taiwanese people believed that resistance in a potential conflict with China would be futile; by 2022, the proportion of the population expressing this view had nearly halved to 43 percent.

On the economic side, Beijing’s pressure on Taipei has led to an erosion of its leverage over the island. Taiwanese firms, having witnessed the political risks of doing business on the mainland, are reducing their dependence on China. Investment in China made up 43 percent of Taiwanese outbound foreign direct investment in 2016, a number that dropped to just 11 percent last year. The island’s commerce with China continues to decline as a share of its overall trade, as well. Beijing, on the other hand, remains reliant on Taiwanese technology products for its manufacturing industry, meaning that China is now arguably more vulnerable to a disruption in cross-strait trade than Taiwan.

China is unlikely to find a path from gray-zone coercion to unification that does not involve the use of military force. It cannot return to the niceties of the Ma era, either: its gray-zone campaign has revealed its strategic aims to an extent that many Taiwanese people find irreconcilable with their own desires—an outcome no tactical adjustment can reverse.

A MOVING TARGET

Although China’s gray-zone tactics do not pose an existential threat, Taiwan cannot simply ignore them. Taipei should continue to diversify its economy away from China, build resilient communications networks, improve the cybersecurity of its key infrastructure and government ministries, stockpile critical supplies, and work with like-minded democracies on global challenges.

At the same time, there is a danger of Taiwan responding to Chinese pressure in such a way that eats up the finite resources the island needs to prepare for a blockade or invasion. Indeed, Taiwan’s decision to respond to incursions into its Air Defense Identification Zone by scrambling fighter jets and to trail Chinese naval ships on the seas has heavily taxed its defense platforms and risks exhausting the military, thereby compromising Taiwan’s readiness for direct conflict. Continuing on this path would weaken Taiwan’s ability to withstand a blockade or invasion just as China’s use of force becomes more likely.

It is important for Taiwan to prioritize preparing for the fight that it cannot lose. This means adapting its defense strategies to the reality of the power imbalance: because it cannot match China tank for tank, plane for plane, or ship for ship, Taiwan should divest from some of these legacy platforms in favor of uncrewed systems, mines, and missiles, which Taipei can produce itself—or procure from the United States—in far greater quantities. To be sure, Taiwan’s government cannot allow perceived gray-zone threats to go unanswered, and it must find some way of demonstrating to its citizens that it is protecting them. But with limited resources, preparing for genuine military escalation must remain the primary focus.

Meanwhile, the United States, which has a vital strategic interest in maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, must raise the costs for China of pursuing these tactics. It should respond to gray-zone coercion by announcing additional military aid to Taiwan, deploying more of its high-end military capabilities to the region, and deepening its military engagement with Japan, particularly in that country’s southwestern islands, which stretch toward Taiwan. China’s military exercises in the Taiwan Strait are meant to signal to the United States that China’s capabilities are too advanced for Washington to be able to intervene on Taiwan’s behalf; likewise, the United States should respond with its own exercises that demonstrate that it can keep open critical sea lanes near Taiwan and surge forces into the region as needed. Washington should also warn Beijing that its response to Chinese coercion against Taiwan would not be limited to the military domain—that further pressure on Taiwan will invite broader U.S. restrictions on high-tech exports to China.

This kind of coordination between Washington and Taipei would complicate Chinese plans for a blockade or invasion and may prompt Beijing to reexamine whether the costs of continuing on its current path outweigh the benefits. Even if China does not abandon its gray-zone playbook, such steps would, at the very least, better prepare Taiwan for a conflict that such coercion has made all the more likely.

DAVID SACKS is Fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Foreign Affairs · by David Sacks · November 8, 2024

22. North Korean Residents: “I Envy the US Elections Where the President is Chosen by Voting”

For thoes who do not normally read the Korean news this Radio Free Asia report is worth reading.

A powerful and important message. This is a necessary element and a good example of a sound information campaign.

Fascinating comments. Here is how the truth and transparency makes a difference.

Excerpt:

“ Up until now, the authorities have criticized U.S. elections as anti-people elections that do not reflect the people’s views and are decided by money, ” the source said . “ It is surprising that even if you have less campaign funds than your opponent, you can still become president if you get a lot of support , and even if you have a lot of money, you can still lose the election if you don’t get support . ”

He added, “ It is surprising that if you have a lot of support from the people, you can become president, but if you don’t, even the incumbent president can fall . ”

He said , “The bottom line is that it is not money but the people’s support through elections that is important,” and “We ( North Korea ) also hold elections, but it is not the people’s support that determines everything from the selection of candidates to the results . ”

This is a Google translation of an RFA report.

North Korean Residents: “I Envy the US Elections Where the President is Chosen by Voting”

https://www.rfa.org/korean/in_focus/human_rights_defector/north-korea-people-decide-real-election-11072024092529.html

Seoul-Ahn Chang-gyu xallsl@rfa.org

2024.11.07

Voters are casting their ballots early in Michigan on the 3rd (local time).

/ Yonhap News

00:00 / 00:00

Anchor : Some North Korean residents are surprised by the news that Donald Trump was elected as the 47th president in the US presidential election held on the 5th . Some residents are looking forward to the future of President-elect Trump, whose face is familiar . Reporter Ahn Chang-gyu reports from inside North Korea .

North Korea's state-run media, including the Rodong Sinmun, have yet to report the news that Republican candidate Trump was elected as the next president in the US presidential election as of the afternoon of the 7th .

A resident of North Hamgyong Province ( requesting anonymity for personal safety reasons ) who heard the news of Trump’s election from a Radio Free Asia reporter on the night of the 6th said , “It’s surprising that Trump was elected president again ,” and “ I envy a true election where the people’s support determines everything . ”

“ Up until now, the authorities have criticized U.S. elections as anti-people elections that do not reflect the people’s views and are decided by money, ” the source said . “ It is surprising that even if you have less campaign funds than your opponent, you can still become president if you get a lot of support , and even if you have a lot of money, you can still lose the election if you don’t get support . ”

North Korean General Secretary Kim Jong-un casts his vote at an election station set up at the Ryongsong Machine Complex on November 26, 2023. /Yonhap

He added, “ It is surprising that if you have a lot of support from the people, you can become president, but if you don’t, even the incumbent president can fall . ”

He said , “The bottom line is that it is not money but the people’s support through elections that is important,” and “We ( North Korea ) also hold elections, but it is not the people’s support that determines everything from the selection of candidates to the results . ”

The source continued, “ This country is a situation where the grandfather eats , the son eats , and then the grandson eats , ” and “ yet the authorities are spreading ridiculous propaganda that we have been enjoying ‘ the leader’s clothes ’ for generations . ”

North Korean authorities remain silent about US presidential election

Some North Korean officials interested in next week's US presidential election

Another source from Yanggang Province ( who requested anonymity for personal safety ) said after hearing the news of the election, “ It doesn’t seem so bad that Trump, whose face is well-known, is president again, rather than someone he doesn’t know at all . ”

The source explained, “We ( North Koreans ) don’t even know the U.S. President’s name well, let alone his face , ” but “ Trump has been featured in newspapers and broadcasts a lot since the North Korea - U.S . summit , so there are almost no people who don’t know his face . ”

“ I don’t know if it will help us if Trump becomes president again, but personally, I don’t think it is a bad thing, ” he said . “ From the authorities’ point of view, Trump is the first US president to have met with Kim Jong-un . ”

“ Both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il tried every trick they could to sit down with the United States, but the United States didn’t even pay attention, ” he said, adding , “ It was Trump who met with the young Kim Jong-un, who was unpopular with the people . ”

“ For ordinary citizens like us, it doesn’t matter who becomes the U.S. president,” the source said. “ We just hope that relations with the U.S. will improve, tensions will ease, and economic sanctions will be lifted . ”

The source continued , “The ( North Korean ) authorities refer to nuclear weapons as the ‘ treasured sword of the revolution ’ that protects socialism , but many people do not think that way . ”

He continued, “ There was a moment when I was thrilled at the fact that we had created a nuclear weapon that no one could have when we first succeeded in conducting a nuclear test, but now I know that because of that nuclear test, economic sanctions against us were strengthened and the international community’s view of us has become negative . ”

The source added , “ I hope Kim Jong-un does not miss this opportunity to see Trump, who he knows well, become president again . ”

This is Ahn Chang-kyu of RFA Radio Free Asia in Seoul .

Editor Yang Seong-won , Web Editor Lee Gyeong-ha

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

If you do not read anything else in the 2017 National Security Strategy read this on page 14:

"A democracy is only as resilient as its people. An informed and engaged citizenry is the fundamental requirement for a free and resilient nation. For generations, our society has protected free press, free speech, and free thought. Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data. The American public and private sectors must recognize this and work together to defend our way of life. No external threat can be allowed to shake our shared commitment to our values, undermine our system of government, or divide our Nation."

Access NSS HERE

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By David Sacks

HONEY INTO VINEGAR

HARDENED STEEL

A MOVING TARGET

North Korean Residents: “I Envy the US Elections Where the President is Chosen by Voting”