Quotes of the Day:
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader."
- John Quincy Adams
“Let each citizen remember at the moment he is offering his vote...that he is executing one of the most solemn trusts in human society for which he is accountable to God and his country.”
- Samuel Adams
“Those who are willing to die will live, those who to try to spare their own lives will die.”
- Yi Sun-sin
1. The AP Interview: Karzai 'invited' Taliban to stop chaos
2. The best part of the Army-Navy game took place off the football field
3. Putin and Xi Show United Front Amid Rising Tensions With U.S.
4. A Free and Open Indo-Pacific - United States Department of State
5. Japan’s Shinzo Abe warns China: Invasion of Taiwan would be ‘suicidal’
6. China targeted Taipei's allies while U.S. hosted democracy summit -Taiwan foreign minister
7. Marine Corps commandant calls for focus on small forces not just hypersonic weapons to challenge China in the Pacific
8. Liberals ‘Need to Get On the Defense Committees,’ If They Want Change
9. Time to Target Hezbollah’s Illicit Finance Facilitators
10. Blinken Vows More US Military Might in Indo-Pacific
11. Bipartisan lawmakers call on Biden to speed up lethal aid to Ukraine
12. After extraordinary sacrifice, and years of delay, Alwyn Cashe gets his Medal of Honor
13. NPS Gains Access to Joint Information Operations Range
14. PLA conducts paratrooper assault exercise with drones: Report
15. Russia shows no sign of retreat on invading Ukraine
16. Blinken cuts overseas trip short due to reporter testing positive for Covid-19
17. U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz says defense bill raises preparedness for threats by China, Russia
18. The Space Force's Critical Lesson for the Rest of the Military
19. Tony Blinken’s Tiny Island Diplomacy
20. America’s Cyber-Reckoning - How to Fix a Failing Strategy
21. Cold War Warriors Are Gaining The Upper Hand Again – OpEd
22. Biden scores big with democracy summit, stumbles badly on Ukraine
1. The AP Interview: Karzai 'invited' Taliban to stop chaos
Some of the "rest of the story?"
The AP Interview: Karzai 'invited' Taliban to stop chaos | AP News
AP · by KATHY GANNON · December 15, 2021
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The Taliban didn’t take the Afghan capital — they were invited, says the man who issued the invitation.
In an Associated Press interview, former Afghan President Hamid Karzai offered some of the first insights into the secret and sudden departure of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani — and how he came to invite the Taliban into the city “to protect the population so that the country, the city doesn’t fall into chaos and the unwanted elements who would probably loot the country, loot shops.”
When Ghani left, his security officials also left. Defense minister Bismillah Khan even asked Karzai if he wanted to leave Kabul when Karzai contacted him to know what remnants of the government still remained. It turned out there were none. Not even the Kabul police chief had remained.
Karzai, who was the country’s president for 13 years after the Taliban were first ousted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, refused to leave.
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In a wide-ranging interview at his tree-lined compound in the center of the city where he lives with his wife and young children, Karzai was adamant that Ghani’s flight scuttled a last-minute push by himself, the government’s chief negotiator Abdullah Abdullah and the Taliban leadership in Doha that would have seen the Taliban enter the capital as part of a negotiated agreement.
The countdown to a possible deal began Aug. 14, the day before the Taliban came to power.
Karzai and Abdullah met Ghani, and they agreed that they would leave for Doha the next day with a list of 15 others to negotiate a power-sharing agreement. The Taliban were already on the outskirts of Kabul, but Karzai said the leadership in Qatar promised the insurgent force would remain outside the city until the deal was struck.
Early on the morning of Aug. 15, Karzai said, he waited to draw up the list. The capital was fidgety, on edge. Rumors were swirling about a Taliban takeover. Karzai called Doha. He was told the Taliban would not enter the city.
At noon, the Taliban called to say that “the government should stay in its positions and should not move that they have no intention to (go) into the city,” Karzai said. “I and others spoke to various officials and assurances were given to us that, yes, that was the case, that the Americans and the government forces were holding firm to the places (and) that Kabul would would not fall.”
By about 2:45 p.m., though, it became apparent Ghani had fled the city. Karzai called the defense minister, called the interior minister, searched for the Kabul police chief. Everyone was gone. “There was no official present at all in the capital, no police chief, no corps commander, no other units. They had all left.”
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Ghani’s own protection unit’s deputy chief called Karzai to come to the palace and take over the presidency. He declined, saying legally he had no right to the job. Instead the former president decided to make a public, televised message, with his children at his side “so that the Afghan people know that we are all here.”
Karzai was adamant that there would have been an agreement for a peaceful transition had Ghani remained in Kabul.
“Absolutely. Absolutely. That is what we were preparing for, what we were hoping (along) with the chairman of the peace council to go to Doha that evening, or the next morning, and to finalize the agreement,” he said. “And I believe the Taliban leaders were also waiting for us in Doha for the same ... objective, for the same purpose.”
Today, Karzai meets regularly with the Taliban leadership and says the world must engage with them. Equally important, he said, is that Afghans have to come together. War has dominated Afghanistan for more than 40 years, and in the last 20 years “Afghans have suffered on all sides,” he said. “Afghans have lost lives on all sides. . . . The Afghan army has suffered. Afghan police have suffered, the Taliban soldiers have suffered.”
He added: “An end to that can only come when Afghans get together, find their own way out.”
The former president has a plan. In his talks with the Taliban, he is advocating the temporary resurrection of the constitution that governed when Afghanistan was a monarchy. The idea was also floated during earlier Doha talks.
At the same time, a traditional Loya Jirga — a grand council of all Afghans, including women — would be convened. It would decide the country’s future, including a representative government, a constitution, a national flag.
There’s no indication the Taliban will accept his formula, though he says they have not rejected it in discussions. A jirga is a centuries-old Afghan tradition for decision-making and is particularly popular among ethnic Pashtuns, which make up the backbone of the Taliban.
Karzai said a future Afghanistan has to have universal education rights for boys and girls and women “must find their place in the Afghan polity, in the administration, in economic activity and social activity, the political activity in all ways of life. ... That’s an issue on which there cannot be any compromise.”
But until it happens, Karzai says, the world has to engage with the Taliban. Afghanistan needs to operate. Government servants have to be paid. Health care facilities need to function.
“Right now, they need to cooperate with the government in any form they can,” said Karzai. who also bemoaned the unchallenged and sometimes wrong international perceptions of the Taliban. He cited claims that women and girls are not allowed outside their homes or require a male companion. “That’s not true. There are girls on the streets — women by themselves.” The situation on the ground in Kabul bears this out.
Asked to describe the Taliban, Karzai said: “I would describe them as Afghans, but Afghans who have gone through a very difficult period in their lives as all other Afghans have done for the past 40 years.”
We “have been through an extremely difficult period of our history in which we, the Afghans, have made mistakes on all sides, in which the international community and those who interacted with us have made tremendous mistakes,” Karzai said. “It’s time for all of us to realize that, and to look back at the mistakes that we have all made and to make it better.”
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Kathy Gannon, Associated Press news director for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has been covering the region for more than 30 years.
AP · by KATHY GANNON · December 15, 2021
2. The best part of the Army-Navy game took place off the football field
Go Navy. BZ to the football team for their win and more importantly for honoring the family of a fallen brother.
The best part of the Army-Navy game took place off the football field
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As U.S. Navy Academy midshipmen celebrated a win against the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, they were joined by a special guest: the son of fallen Navy SEAL Cmdr. Brian Bourgeois.
Bourgeois, the 43-year-old commander of SEAL Team 8 who died following a training accident last week, left behind his wife and five children. The Bourgeois family was honored at the annual Army-Navy football game over the weekend, and in a moment that was both heartfelt and heart-rending, the Navy players tossed Bourgeois’ youngest son in the air, clad in one of their helmets, as they celebrated their win.
That is Brian Bourgeois' youngest son that the team is throwing up in the air. The entire Bourgeois family was in the locker room after the win and his wife Megan spoke to the team. https://t.co/jRUZyWH4BE
— Navy Athletics (@NavyAthletics) December 12, 2021
While the training incident that led to Bourgeois’ death is still being investigated, initial indications last week were that Bourgeois was injured during a fast-rope training evolution on Dec. 4 in Virginia Beach, Virginia. He was taken to a hospital in Norfolk, where he died on Dec. 7.
Bourgeois graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in May 2001 and completed Naval Basic Special Warfare Training in April 2005. He played on the Navy Football team all four years while at the academy, and earned three varsity letters. His military awards and decorations include a Bronze Star with “V” device for valor, Combat Action Ribbon, two Defense Meritorious Service Medals, a Joint Service Commendation Medal, and two Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals.
Bourgeois is leaving behind his wife of 20 years, as well as five children ages six to 18 years old, according to a fundraiser by the All In All The Time Foundation, which says it provides financial assistance to Naval Special Warfare families.
Cmdr. Brian Bourgeois. (U.S. Navy)
In honor of Bourgeois, a #13 home jersey with two SEAL Team 8 patches and a Navy Football helmet sat on the Navy sideline during Saturday’s game. The Navy football team also ran out on the field with a SEAL Team 8 flag, in addition to the American, Navy and Marine Corps flags, and two football players — senior wide receiver Michael Salisbury and sophomore wide receiver Jayden Umbarger — had SEAL Team 8 patches on their uniforms. According to a release from the academy, the two patches were given to the wide receivers coach earlier this year by Bourgeois.
Capt. Donald Wetherbee, commodore of Naval Special Warfare Group 2, said in a press release last week that Bourgeois was “as tough as they come, an outstanding leader, a committed father, husband and friend.”
Justin Jordan, a fellow Naval Academy graduate who played football with Bourgeois and joined the Marine Corps after graduation, told a local news outlet that Bourgeois was “one of the greatest human beings you have ever met in your life.”
“He had a way of lighting up a room,” Jordan said. “He just had this … infectious personality that everybody wanted to gravitate to and he has a way of putting you at ease in the most difficult situations.”
Read more on Task & Purpose
Haley Britzky is the Army reporter for Task & Purpose, covering the daily happenings in the Army and how they impact soldiers and their families, as well as broader national security issues. Originally from Texas, Haley previously worked at Axios before joining Task & Purpose in January 2019. Contact the author here.
3. Putin and Xi Show United Front Amid Rising Tensions With U.S.
Excerpts:
The talks came at a high-stakes moment. Mr. Putin is threatening an invasion of neighboring Ukraine with alarming military deployments near the border, Western officials say, just as he demands new legal guarantees from the West that would establish a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Xi is facing Western calls for diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics in February as well as pressure over China’s actions in the western region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been subjected to detention and re-education.
“I expect that in February of next year we will finally meet in person in Beijing,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi. “We have unfailingly supported each other in questions of international athletic cooperation, including in not accepting any attempts to politicize sports or the Olympic movement.”
Putin and Xi Show United Front Amid Rising Tensions With U.S.
Dec. 15, 2021, 5:19 a.m. ET
President Vladimir V. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, meeting in a video summit, sought mutual support in their conflicts with the West over Ukraine, Taiwan and other issues.
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President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, the leader of China, in 2019 in Brazil. Credit...Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters
Dec. 15, 2021, 5:19 a.m. ET
MOSCOW — President Biden may have his alliance of democracies, but Russia and China still have each other.
Xi Jinping addressed Vladimir V. Putin as his “old friend,” and the Russian president called his Chinese counterpart both his “dear friend” and his “honorable friend,” as the two leaders held a video summit on Wednesday — a display of solidarity in the face of Western pressure over Ukraine, Taiwan and many other matters.
In footage of opening remarks released by the Kremlin, Mr. Putin said he would attend the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics in February, making him the first leader of another country to confirm he would come to the event that Mr. Biden has already pledged to boycott, as have the leaders of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and others.
Mr. Xi, noting that he was meeting Mr. Putin for the 37th time since 2013, praised the Russian president for thwarting attempts to “drive a wedge between our countries.” He said the two countries were “defending the true meaning of democracy and human rights,” according to the Russian translation of their remarks as the virtual summit began.
That message appeared meant to strike a contrast with the Summit for Democracy that Mr. Biden hosted last week, which was widely viewed as an effort to build a united front against Russia and China.
The two countries, once adversaries, have formed an ever-tighter economic, military and geopolitical partnership under Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi — one that increasingly looks like a bloc against American influence as both countries’ confrontations with the United States deepen.
The talks came at a high-stakes moment. Mr. Putin is threatening an invasion of neighboring Ukraine with alarming military deployments near the border, Western officials say, just as he demands new legal guarantees from the West that would establish a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
Mr. Xi is facing Western calls for diplomatic boycotts of the Olympics in February as well as pressure over China’s actions in the western region of Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs and other Muslims have been subjected to detention and re-education.
“I expect that in February of next year we will finally meet in person in Beijing,” Mr. Putin told Mr. Xi. “We have unfailingly supported each other in questions of international athletic cooperation, including in not accepting any attempts to politicize sports or the Olympic movement.”
Anton Troianovski reported from Moscow, and Steven Lee Myers from Seoul. Claire Fu, John Liu and Khava Khasmagomadova contributed research.
4. A Free and Open Indo-Pacific - United States Department of State
Key excerpts (showing my Korea bias):
We’ve welcomed leaders from the region in our country, including the first two foreign leaders President Biden hosted after taking office from Japan and South Korea, and all the foreign ministers whom I’ve had the privilege of hosting at the State Department, including Foreign Minister Retno. And we’ve come to your region – Vice President Harris, Secretary of Defense Austin, Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, and so many other Cabinet members, not to mention many senior State Department officials from my team.
...
Another way we will promote freedom and openness is by defending an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable internet against those who are actively working to make the internet more closed, more fractured, and less secure. We’ll work with our partners to defend these principles, and help build the secure, trusted systems that lay the foundation for it. At the Moon-Biden Leaders’ Summit earlier this year, the Republic of Korea and the United States announced more than $3.5 billion in investments in emerging technologies, including research and development on secure 5G and 6G networks.
...
Second, we will forge stronger connections within and beyond the region. We’ll deepen our treaty alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Those bonds have long provided the foundation for peace, security, and prosperity in the region. We’ll foster greater cooperation among these allies, as well. That’s one of the things we’ve done by deepening U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral cooperation, and launching an historic new security cooperation agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom. We’ll find ways to knit our allies together with our partners, as we’ve done by reinvigorating the Quad. And we’ll strengthen our partnership with a strong and independent ASEAN.
...
And U.S. Trade Representative Tai launched the interagency Supply Chain Trade Task Force, and raised the issue in her travel to Japan, the Republic of Korea, and India.
...
At the same time, we’re working together with our partners to end the pandemic. The Quad vaccine partnership is playing a key part in that. We’re working together to finance, to manufacture, to distribute, and to put as many shots in arms as quickly as possible. Individual countries are stepping up. India recently committed to produce an additional 5 billion doses by the end of 2022. The Republic of Korea and Thailand are ramping up their production as well.
...
And it’s about reinforcing our strengths so that we can keep the peace, as we’ve done in the region for decades. We don’t want conflict in the Indo-Pacific. That’s why we seek serious and sustained diplomacy with the DPRK, with the ultimate goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. We’ll work with allies and partners to address the threat posed by the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs through a calibrated, practical approach, while also strengthening our extended deterrence.
UNIVERSITAS INDONESIA
JAKARTA, INDONESIA
DECEMBER 14, 2021
A Free and Open Indo-Pacific - United States Department of State
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
MS KUSUMAYATI: Excellency, ambassadors, ASEAN Secretary General, Honorable Rector of Universitas Indonesia, and the chairperson of the U.S.-Indonesia Board of Trustees, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:
First of all, let’s praise our God Almighty for the blessings that we receive, so today we can gather here in healthy and wealthy condition. I am honored to extend our warmest welcome to the campus of Universitas Indonesia here in Depok City.
Universitas Indonesia are humbled and delighted to be the host of the honorary speech will be delivered by the Honorable U.S. Secretary of the State, Mr. Antony Blinken. Universitas Indonesia, as the name suggests, take the pride to carrying the name of the nation. We equally recognize this as the privilege as well as also our responsibility.
Our visions underscores the importance of science, technology, and culture, and how we take them forward to benefit the people in Indonesia as we are asked in the world.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, as we all experience, far-reaching and complex problems are unfolding around us. The COVID-19 pandemic, natural disaster, global warming, climate change, are some among others. There are no instant solutions of those matters, but we believe in investing our time to meet our minds together our ideas and acquire inspirations, and then transform it to collaborations, policies, and actions.
Today marks a unique moment for us. We are privileged to have His Excellency the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken present among us to share his view. Many key figures from different backgrounds and expertise are here already with us, and we really believe that the diversity of knowledge will align into one goal: to safeguarding our future generations while at the same time to solve the challenges that we have faced at the present days.
Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the Honorable U.S. Secretary of State, Mr. Antony Blinken. (Applause.)
SECRETARY BLINKEN: Well, good morning, everyone. It is wonderful to be with all of you. And Dr. Kusumayati, thank you so much for the generous introduction. But more than that, thank you for decades of service working to improve public health, to educate the next generation of doctors and nurses – including as the first woman to serve as the University’s Dean of the School of Public Health. From your research on reproductive health to your leadership on Indonesia’s COVID task force, your dedication to your community is truly inspirational, and I thank you. (Applause.)
And good morning to everyone here. Selamat pagi. It is wonderful to be back in Jakarta. I was here on a couple of occasions when I was last in government as deputy secretary of state, and I was looking forward to this opportunity to return to Southeast Asia’s largest democracy.
And for the students who are in this room, I expect it feels good to be back on campus. I understand many of you have been studying remotely for some time and are looking forward to actually getting back in the classroom, and I’m glad we’ve had a little bit of an excuse to bring you back together today. I know, Doctor, you and the task force want the students back, and I know how much everyone is looking forward to that.
I’m here, we’re here, because what happens in the Indo-Pacific will, more than any other region, shape the trajectory of the world in the 21st century.
The Indo-Pacific is the fastest growing region on the planet. It accounts for 60 percent of the world economy, two-thirds of all economic growth over the last five years. It’s home to more than half the world’s people, seven of the 15 biggest economies.
And it’s magnificently diverse, more than 3,000 languages, numerous faiths stretching across two oceans and three continents.
Even a single country like Indonesia is home to a rich patchwork that is hard to distill, except for its variety. And this nation’s motto holds – Bhinneka Tunggal Ika, unity in diversity – which sounds pretty familiar to an American. In the United States we say E Pluribus Unum, out of many, one. It’s the same idea.
The United States has long been, is, and always will be an Indo-Pacific nation. This is a geographic fact, from our Pacific coast states to Guam, our territories across the Pacific. And it’s a historical reality, demonstrated by our two centuries of trade and other ties with the region.
Today, half of the United States’ top trading partners are in the Indo-Pacific. It’s the destination for nearly one-third of our exports, the source of $900 billion in foreign direct investment in the United States, and that’s creating millions of jobs spread across all 50 of our states. And more members of our military are stationed in the region than anywhere outside the continental U.S., ensuring peace and security that have been vital to prosperity in the region, benefiting us all.
And of course, we’re tied together by our people, whose connections go back generations. There are more than 24 million Asian Americans living in the United States, including Ambassador Sung Kim, when he’s not serving his country in one part of the world or another, as he has been for the last three decades.
Before the pandemic, there were more than 775,000 students from the Indo-Pacific studying at U.S. colleges and universities. And your American classmates here at Universitas Indonesia are among the millions of Americans who have come to the region to study, to work, to live, including one who went onto become our president.
There’s an Indonesian proverb – one that I’m told kids are taught from a young age: “We have two ears, but only one mouth.” That means that before we speak or act, we have to listen. And we’ve done a lot of listening to people in the Indo-Pacific in the first year of this administration to understand your vision for the region and its future.
We’ve welcomed leaders from the region in our country, including the first two foreign leaders President Biden hosted after taking office from Japan and South Korea, and all the foreign ministers whom I’ve had the privilege of hosting at the State Department, including Foreign Minister Retno. And we’ve come to your region – Vice President Harris, Secretary of Defense Austin, Secretary of Commerce Raimondo, and so many other Cabinet members, not to mention many senior State Department officials from my team.
The President has participated in multi leader-level summits held by key regional bodies: APEC; the U.S.-ASEAN and East Asia Summits; and the Quad, made up of India, Japan, and Australia. I’ve done the same with fellow foreign ministers, including hosting the Mekong-U.S. Partnership Ministerial. And President Biden has met with Indo-Pacific leaders overseas as well, including a very productive meeting with President Jokowi in Glasgow during the COP26.
But we’re not just listening to leaders. At our embassies and consulates across the region, our diplomats are using two ears to take in the views of people from all walks of life – students, activists, academics, entrepreneurs.
And while it’s an extraordinarily diverse region with distinct interests, distinct views, we see a great deal of alignment between the vision we’re hearing from the Indo-Pacific and our own.
People and governments of the region want more, better opportunities for all of their people. They want more chances to connect – within their nations, between their nations, around the world. They want to be better prepared for crises like the pandemic that we’re living through. They want peace and stability. They want the United States to be more present and more engaged. And above all, they want a region that is more free and more open.
So what I’d like to do today is to try to set out that shared vision, and how together we’re going to work to make it a reality. And there are five core elements that I’d like to focus on.
First, we will advance a free and open Indo-Pacific.
Now, we talk a lot about a free and open Indo-Pacific, but we don’t often define what we actually mean by that. Freedom is about the ability to write your future and have a say in what happens in your community and your country, no matter who you are or who you know. And openness naturally flows from freedom. Free places are open to new information and points of view. They’re open to different cultures, religions, ways of life. They’re open to criticism, to self-reflection, as well as to renewal.
When we say that we want a free and open Indo-Pacific, we mean that on an individual level, that people will be free in their daily lives and live in open societies. We mean that on a state level, that individual countries will be able to choose their own path and their own partners. And we mean that on a regional level, that in this part of the world problems will be dealt with openly, rules will be reached transparently and applied fairly, goods and ideas and people will flow freely across land, cyberspace, and the open seas.
We all have a stake in ensuring that the world’s most dynamic region is free from coercion and accessible to all. This is good for people across the region. It’s good for Americans because history shows that when this vast region is free and open, America is more secure and more prosperous. So we will work with our partners across the region to try to realize this vision.
We will continue to support anti-corruption and transparency groups, investigative journalists, think tanks across the region like the Advocata Institute in Sri Lanka. With our support, that institute created a public registry of state-owned enterprises like banks and airlines that operate with big losses, and proposed ways to reform them.
We’re finding partners in government, too, like Victor Sotto. He’s the mayor of the city of Pasig in the Philippines. Victor set up a 24/7 hotline for constituents to report cases of corruption. It has made the awarding in public contracts more transparent, has given community-based organizations a say in the way the city spends its resources. He’s part of the State Department’s first group of global anti-corruption champions that we announced earlier this year.
And we’ll continue to learn best practices from our fellow democracies. That’s the idea behind the Summit for Democracy that President Biden convened last week, where President Jokowi spoke – indeed, he was the first speaker – and the Bali Democracy Forum that Indonesia just held for the fourteenth time, and where I had an opportunity to speak.
We’ll also stand up against leaders who don’t respect their people’s rights, as we are seeing now in Burma. We will continue to work with our allies and partners to press the regime to cease its indiscriminate violence, release all of those unjustly detained, allow unhindered access, and restore Burma’s path to inclusive democracy.
ASEAN has developed a Five-Point Consensus, and it calls on the regime to engage in constructive dialogue with all parties to seek a peaceful resolution that respects the will of the Burmese people, a goal we will not give up on.
Another way we will promote freedom and openness is by defending an open, interoperable, secure, and reliable internet against those who are actively working to make the internet more closed, more fractured, and less secure. We’ll work with our partners to defend these principles, and help build the secure, trusted systems that lay the foundation for it. At the Moon-Biden Leaders’ Summit earlier this year, the Republic of Korea and the United States announced more than $3.5 billion in investments in emerging technologies, including research and development on secure 5G and 6G networks.
Finally, we’ll work with our allies and partners to defend the rules-based order that we’ve built together over decades to ensure the region remains open and accessible.
And let me be clear about one thing: the goal of defending the rules-based order is not to keep any country down. Rather, it’s to protect the right of all countries to choose their own path, free from coercion, free from intimidation. It’s not about a contest between a U.S.-centric region or a China-centric region. The Indo-Pacific is its own region. Rather, it’s about upholding the rights and agreements that are responsible for the most peaceful and prosperous period that this region and the world has ever experienced.
That’s why there is so much concern, from northeast Asia to southeast Asia, and from the Mekong River to the Pacific Islands, about Beijing’s aggressive actions, claiming open seas as their own, distorting open markets through subsidies to its state-run companies, denying the exports or revoking deals for countries whose policies it does not agree with, engaging in illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing activities. Countries across the region want this behavior to change.
We do, too, and that’s why we’re determined to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea, where Beijing’s aggressive actions there threaten the movement of more than $3 trillion worth of commerce every year.
It’s worth remembering that, tied up in that colossal number, $3 trillion, are the actual livelihoods and well-being of millions of people across the world. When commerce can’t traverse open seas, that means that farmers are blocked from shipping their produce; factories can’t ship their microchips; hospitals are blocked from getting lifesaving medicines.
Five years ago, an international tribunal delivered a unanimous and legally binding decision firmly rejecting unlawful, expansive South China Sea maritime claims as being inconsistent with international law. We and other countries, including South China Sea claimants, will continue to push back on such behavior. It’s also why we have an abiding interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait, consistent with our longstanding commitments.
Second, we will forge stronger connections within and beyond the region. We’ll deepen our treaty alliances with Japan, the Republic of Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand. Those bonds have long provided the foundation for peace, security, and prosperity in the region. We’ll foster greater cooperation among these allies, as well. That’s one of the things we’ve done by deepening U.S.-Japan-South Korea trilateral cooperation, and launching an historic new security cooperation agreement with Australia and the United Kingdom. We’ll find ways to knit our allies together with our partners, as we’ve done by reinvigorating the Quad. And we’ll strengthen our partnership with a strong and independent ASEAN.
ASEAN centrality means we will keep working with and through ASEAN to deepen our engagement with the region all the more, given the alignment between our vision and ASEAN’s outlook on the Indo-Pacific.
In October, President Biden announced more than $100 million to bolster our cooperation with ASEAN across key areas, to include public health, women’s empowerment. And the President will be inviting ASEAN’s leaders to a summit in the United States in the coming months to discuss how we can deepen our strategic partnership.
We’re strengthening strategic partnerships with other countries in the region: Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and, of course, Indonesia. And that’s the reason I’ve made this trip.
We’re also deepening ties between our people. YSEALI, the signature program to empower the rising generation of leaders in Southeast Asia, has more than 150,000 members and counting.
Finally, we’ll work to connect our relationships in the Indo-Pacific with an unmatched system of alliances and partnerships beyond the region, particularly in Europe. The European Union recently released an Indo-Pacific strategy that aligns closely with our own vision. At NATO, we’re updating our Strategic Concept to reflect the Indo-Pacific’s growing significance, and address new threats, like the security implications of the climate crisis. And we’re putting ASEAN’s centrality at the heart of our work with partners. We did that just a few days ago, when the G7 ministers were meeting in the UK, and met with their ASEAN counterparts for the first time.
We’re doing all this for a simple reason: it allows us to assemble the broadest, most effective coalitions to tackle any challenge, to seize any opportunity, to work toward any goal. The more countries that we can rally around common interests, the stronger we all are.
Third, we will promote broad-based prosperity. The United States has already provided more than $1 trillion in foreign direct investment in the Indo-Pacific. The region has told us loud and clear that it wants us to do more. We intend to meet that call. At President Biden’s direction, we’re developing a comprehensive Indo-Pacific economic framework to pursue our shared objectives, including around trade and the digital economy, technology, resilient supply chains, decarbonization and clean energy, infrastructure, worker standards, and other areas of shared interest.
Our diplomacy will play a key part. We’ll identify opportunities that American firms aren’t finding on their own, and make it easier for them to bring their expertise and their capital to new places and new sectors. Our diplomatic posts, our embassies across the Indo-Pacific are already leading on this, and we’re going to surge capacity so that they can do more. More than 2,300 business and government leaders from the region joined me for this year’s Indo-Pacific Business Forum, which we co-hosted with India, and where we announced nearly $7 billion in new private-sector projects.
We’ll work with our partners to shape the rules of the growing digital economy on key issues like data privacy and security, but in a way that reflects our values, and unlocks opportunities for our people. Because if we don’t shape them, others will. And there’s a good chance they’ll do it in a way that doesn’t advance our shared interests or our shared values.
At APEC in November, President Biden set out a clear vision for how we can build a common way forward in the region. On digital technologies, he talked about the need for an open, interoperable, reliable, and secure Internet, and our strong interest in investing in cybersecurity and developing digital economy standards that will position all of our economies to compete in the future. And when U.S. Trade Representative Tai and I co-led our delegation to the APEC ministerial in November, we focused on the need to ensure that technology serves a free and open Indo-Pacific.
We’ll also promote fair and resilient trade. That’s the story of the ASEAN Single Window, a project the United States supported to create a single automated system for clearing customs across the region. It helped streamline trade by making it more transparent and secure, lowering costs for business and prices for consumers. And the move from paper to digital customs has made is possible to keep cross-border trade moving, even during the lockdowns.
During the first year of the pandemic, the countries that were most active on the platform saw their trade activity rise by 20 percent, when most other cross-border trade was actually falling. And at the U.S.-ASEAN Summit in October, President Biden committed additional U.S. support to the Single Window. We’ll work with partners to make our supply chains more secure and more resilient. I think we have all seen, through the pandemic, just how vulnerable they are, how damaging disruptions can be, including shortages of masks and microchips and pileups at ports.
We’ve been leading efforts to bring the international community together to try to resolve bottlenecks and build greater resiliency against future shocks. President Biden convened a Leaders Summit on supply chain resilience. Vice President Harris made it a core focus of her meetings during her visit to the region. Commerce Secretary Raimondo has tackled the issue with Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia on her recent travel. And U.S. Trade Representative Tai launched the interagency Supply Chain Trade Task Force, and raised the issue in her travel to Japan, the Republic of Korea, and India. In the new year, the Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, and I will team up to convene government and private-sector leaders from around the world to tackle these issues at a Global Supply Chain Forum. As the hub of so much of the globe’s production and commerce, this region, the Indo-Pacific, will be core to these efforts.
Finally, we’ll help close the gap on infrastructure. There is, in this region as well as around the world, a large gap when it comes to infrastructure needs and what’s currently being provided. Ports, roads, power grids, broadband – all are building blocks for global trade, for commerce, for connectivity, for opportunity, for prosperity. And they’re essential to the Indo-Pacific’s inclusive growth. But we’re hearing increasing concerns from government officials, industry, labor, and communities in the Indo-Pacific about what happens when infrastructure isn’t done right, like when it’s awarded through opaque, corrupt processes, or built by overseas companies that import their own labor, extract resources, pollute the environment, and drive communities into debt.
Countries in the Indo-Pacific want a better kind of infrastructure. But many feel it’s too expensive, or they feel pressured to take bad deals on terms set by others rather than no deals at all. So we will work with countries in the region to deliver the high-quality, high-standards infrastructure that people deserve. In fact, we’re already doing that.
Just this week, together with Australia and Japan, we announced a partnership with the Federated States of Micronesia, with Kiribati, and Nauru to build a new undersea cable to improve internet connectivity to these Pacific nations. And since 2015, the members of the Quad have provided more than $48 billion in government-backed financing for infrastructure for the region. This represents thousands of projects across more than 30 countries, from rural development to renewable energy. It benefits millions of people.
The Quad recently launched an infrastructure coordination group to catalyze even more investment, and it is looking to partner with Southeast Asia on infrastructure and many other shared priorities. The United States will do more than that. Build Back Better World, which we launched with our G7 partners in June, is committed to mobilizing hundreds of billions of dollars in transparent, sustainable financing over the coming years. And together with Australia and Japan, we launched the Blue Dot Network to start certifying high-quality infrastructure projects that meet the benchmarks developed by the G20, the OECD, and others, and to attract additional investors.
Fourth, we will help build a more resilient Indo-Pacific. The COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have underscored the urgency of that task. The pandemic has taken the lives of hundreds of thousands of people across the region, including more than 143,000 men, women, and children here in Indonesia. It has also inflicted a massive economic toll, from shuttered factories to the halt of tourism.
The United States has been there with the people of this region at every step, even as we battle the pandemic at home. Of the 300 million doses of safe, effective vaccines that the United States has already distributed worldwide, we’ve sent more than 100 million doses to the Indo-Pacific. And over 25 million of those have come here, to Indonesia. By the end of next year, we will have donated more than 1.2 billion doses to the world. And we’ve provided over $2.8 billion in additional assistance to the region to save lives, including $77 million here in Indonesia for everything from personal protective equipment to medical oxygen for hospitals. And we’ve been providing this aid free of charge, with no strings attached. By making most of these donations through COVAX, we have ensured they are distributed equitably, based on need, not on politics.
At the same time, we’re working together with our partners to end the pandemic. The Quad vaccine partnership is playing a key part in that. We’re working together to finance, to manufacture, to distribute, and to put as many shots in arms as quickly as possible. Individual countries are stepping up. India recently committed to produce an additional 5 billion doses by the end of 2022. The Republic of Korea and Thailand are ramping up their production as well.
We are rallying the private sector to our side. At a ministerial that I convened last month, we launched something called the Global COVID Corps. It is a coalition of leading companies that will provide expertise, tools, and capabilities to support logistics and vaccine efforts in developing countries, including the last mile, and that is critical for actually getting shots into arms. This is what we’re seeing increasingly around the world, where the production of vaccines has increased, they are getting out there, but then they are not getting into arms because of the last-mile difficulties, the logistics that need to be solved, and that is exactly what we are focusing on.
At the same time, as we fight the virus, we’re building the health systems back better in the Indo-Pacific, around the world, to prevent, detect, and respond to the next pandemic. And the thing is, we actually know how to do this. The United States has been working with partners to strengthen health systems in the region for decades. In ASEAN alone, we’ve invested more than $3.5 billion in public health over the past 20 years. And we have a lot to show for it, both in significant improvements to public health, and also in deep relationships that we’ve built on the ground.
As part of our support for ASEAN, President Biden recently announced that we’ll provide $40 million for the U.S.-ASEAN Health Futures Initiative, and that’s going to accelerate joint research, strengthen health systems, train a rising generation of health professionals.
We’re also supporting the development of an ASEAN Public Health Emergency Coordination System. That’s going to help countries in the region coordinate their response to future health emergencies. And the first Southeast Asian regional office of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which we opened in Hanoi this summer, is already supporting these efforts on the ground.
The climate crisis, of course, is another global challenge that we have to tackle together. People across the Indo-Pacific are already feeling its catastrophic impact: 70 percent of the world’s natural disasters strike in this region, and over 90 million people in the region were affected by climate-related disasters in 2019. The following year, on our own Pacific coast, California endured five of the six biggest wildfires in its history.
Now, many of the biggest emitters in the region have recognized the need to act urgently, as we saw in the ambitious pledges that they set out at COP26. In Glasgow, 15 Indo-Pacific countries, including Indonesia, signed the Global Methane Pledge to cut emissions by 30 percent over the next decade. If all the biggest emitters join us, that would do more to reduce warming than taking every ship out of the seas and every plane out of the skies.
But it would be a mistake to think about climate only through the prism of threats. Here is why: every country on the planet has to reduce emissions and prepare for the unavoidable impacts of climate change. And that necessary transformation to new technologies and new industries also offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create new, good-paying jobs.
We believe that opportunity runs through the Indo-Pacific, and we’re already working with our partners to seize it. In the last five years alone, the United States has mobilized more than $7 billion in renewable energy investments in the region. As we step up our efforts, we’re bringing to bear the unique constellation of partnerships that we’ve built up: multilateral organizations and advocacy groups, businesses and philanthropies, researchers and technical experts.
Consider the Clean EDGE Initiative that we’re launching this month, which will bring together the expertise and innovation of the U.S. Government and private sector to help advance clean energy solutions across the region. Consider the more than $20 million that President Biden recently committed to a U.S.-ASEAN Climate Futures initiative, or the $500 million in financing announced just last week by the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation to help build a solar manufacturing facility in Tamil Nadu, India.
The factory, being built by the American company First Solar, will have an annual capacity of 3.3 gigawatts. That’s enough to power more than two million homes. Building and operating this facility will create thousands of jobs in India, the majority for women, and hundreds more jobs in the United States. And that’s just one of the ways in which the United States will help India reach its ambitious goal of 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity by 2030, and, in turn, help the world avoid a climate catastrophe.
Now, we recognize that, even if the transition to a green economy produces a big increase in jobs, which we’re confident it will, not all of those positions will be filled by workers who lost jobs in old industries and old sectors during this transition. So we have an obligation that we are committed to, to bring everyone along.
Fifth, and finally, we will bolster Indo-Pacific security. Threats are evolving. Our security approach has to evolve with them. We’ll seek closer civilian security cooperation to tackle challenges ranging from violate extremism, to illegal fishing, to human trafficking. And we’ll adopt a strategy that more closely weaves together all our instruments of national power – diplomacy, military, intelligence – with those of our allies and our partners. Our Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, calls this “integrated deterrence.”
And it’s about reinforcing our strengths so that we can keep the peace, as we’ve done in the region for decades. We don’t want conflict in the Indo-Pacific. That’s why we seek serious and sustained diplomacy with the DPRK, with the ultimate goal of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula. We’ll work with allies and partners to address the threat posed by the DPRK’s nuclear and missile programs through a calibrated, practical approach, while also strengthening our extended deterrence.
And that’s why President Biden told President Xi last month that we share a profound responsibility to ensure that the competition between our countries does not veer into conflict. We take that responsibility with the greatest of seriousness, because the failure to do so would be catastrophic for all of us.
On February 14th, 1962, the United States Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy, came to speak at this university. He talked about the enduring struggles that our people shared, which, he said, had to be carried forward by young people like the students here today. And he quoted something that his brother, John F. Kennedy, then President of the United States, said about our vision for the world. President Kennedy said, “Our basic goal remains the same: a peaceful world, a community of free and independent states, free to choose their own future and their own system, so long as it does not threaten the freedom of others.”
For all that’s changed in the nearly 70 years since President Kennedy spoke those words, it’s remarkable how much that vision aligns with the one we share. And the reason I am so grateful to be able to speak about this here at this university, with students and alumni of so many of our youth leadership programs present, is because you are the ones still today who will carry forward that vision. As you do, know that you have people across the Indo-Pacific, including in the United States, whose hopes and fates are tied up with yours, and who will be your steadfast partners in making the Indo-Pacific, this region that we share, more open and more free.
Thanks so much for listening. (Applause.)
state.gov · by Antony J. Blinken, Secretary of State
5. Japan’s Shinzo Abe warns China: Invasion of Taiwan would be ‘suicidal’
Words of wisdom in this conclusion:
“Lest we forget, weakness invites provocations,” Abe told the trilateral security forum. “The three of us must stop no effort in building our capabilities in all domains, from the undersea, sea surface, air space, to the cyber and outer space. To that end, let us consider new ways of sharing our knowledge and technologies even more effectively.”
Japan’s Shinzo Abe warns China: Invasion of Taiwan would be ‘suicidal’
Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned China that an invasion of Taiwan would incur incalculable costs as the senior Japanese politician and U.S. officials spoke up for the island democracy’s autonomy.
“When there is a threat over Taiwan and its democracy, it is a dire challenge to all of us, especially to Japan,” said Abe, who resigned from the premiership over health reasons but remains a heavyweight among Japanese legislators. “An adventure in military affairs, if pursued by such a huge economy like China’s, could be suicidal, to say the least.”
Abe’s reference to the economic costs of a conflict did little to dull the edge of the threat, as he emphasized the need for both Taiwan and Japan to coordinate security cooperation with the United States — which does not maintain official relations with the government in Taipei. And yet, that diplomatic lacuna has prevented neither Japanese nor American officials of late from characterizing Taiwan as the linchpin of Indo-Pacific security in the face of a rising Chinese Communist power.
“It’s critical for the United States, Japan, and Taiwan, as three indispensable cornerstones, to continue to stand shoulder-to-shoulder in order to address common challenges in the Indo-Pacific,” Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican and former ambassador to China, told the Prospect Foundation’s Taiwan-US-Japan Trilateral Indo-Pacific Security Dialogue .
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s representative to the forum, deputy assistant secretary Scott Busby, struck a similarly affirming note after touting the importance of “democracy and human rights” to American diplomacy.
“These values are a critical source of our strength, and a key advantage of the United States and our closest partners on the global stage — including Taiwan,” Busby told the trilateral forum.
Chinese Communist officials, who have claimed sovereignty over Taiwan since taking power in 1949 but have never ruled the island, regard such rhetoric as a sign of disrespect for their territorial claims. U.S. officials historically have tread carefully when discussing this subject, yet a bipartisan consensus is emerging in Washington that augurs for more forthright acknowledgment that the mainland Chinese regime’s acquisition of Taiwan would represent a serious threat to American interests.
“It’s plain to see that the Chinese Communist Party aims not only to achieve dominance in the world’s most vibrant and rapidly growing region, but also to fundamentally revise the environment here, placing the People’s Republic of China at the center and serving Beijing’s authoritarian and hegemonic ambitions,” Hagerty said. “The defense of Taiwan and Japan lies at the center of pushing back against the Chinese Communist Party’s revisionist ambitions.”
Hagerty’s remarks followed a line of analysis offered earlier this month by Abe, who said that Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping should bear in mind that "a Taiwan emergency is a Japanese emergency, and therefore an emergency for the Japan-U.S. alliance.” The Chinese Foreign Ministry rebuked Abe for “openly challeng[ing] China’s sovereignty and [giving] brazen support to Taiwan independence forces,” a tongue-lashing delivered directly to the Japanese ambassador in Beijing.
Abe, for his part, cited the mainland Chinese threats against Taiwan as a key motivation for the Japanese military upgrades that took place during his tenure as prime minister.
“Lest we forget, weakness invites provocations,” Abe told the trilateral security forum. “The three of us must stop no effort in building our capabilities in all domains, from the undersea, sea surface, air space, to the cyber and outer space. To that end, let us consider new ways of sharing our knowledge and technologies even more effectively.”
6. China targeted Taipei's allies while U.S. hosted democracy summit -Taiwan foreign minister
China targeted Taipei's allies while U.S. hosted democracy summit -Taiwan foreign minister
Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu speaks at an event marking the 70th anniversary of American Chamber of Commerce (AmCham) in Taipei, Taiwan December 8, 2021. REUTERS/Fabian Hamacher/File Photo
TAIPEI, Dec 14 (Reuters) - Nicaragua's decision last week to cut ties with Taiwan was part of a deliberate move by China to target the island's diplomatic allies after it was excluded from a democracy summit hosted by Washington, Taiwan's foreign minister said on Tuesday.
Nicaragua broke its longstanding diplomatic ties with Taiwan last week, switching allegiance to Beijing in a recognition of the Chinese Communist Party's One China policy and reducing Taipei's dwindling pool of international allies. read more
"When democratic countries were holding a democratic summit, China was excluded, China was a target, so China chose this opportunity to set about targeting our diplomatic allies," said Foreign Minister Joseph Wu on the sidelines of a forum on regional security.
Digital Minister Audrey Tang and Taiwan's de facto ambassador in Washington Hsiao Bi-khim represented the island at the Biden administration's "Summit for Democracy" last week. China was not on the U.S. State Department's invited participants list. read more
"Losing a diplomatic ally is a very painful thing for us," Wu told reporters.
China's foreign ministry said in a statement to Reuters the comments were an attempt to "cover up the failures of separatist activities".
Beijing has increased military and political pressure on Taiwan to accept its sovereignty claims, drawing anger from the democratically ruled island, which has repeatedly said it would not be bullied and has the right to international participation.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen said the island would not bend to pressure or change its determination to uphold democracy and freedom.
"The more successful Taiwan's democracy is, the stronger the international support, and the greater the pressure from the authoritarian camp," she said in Taipei.
China and Nicaragua's move to re-establish diplomatic ties will likely boost Beijing's influence in a part of the world long considered the United States' backyard, angering Washington. read more
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega first cut ties with Taiwan in 1985, but they were re-established with the island in 1990 under then-Nicaraguan President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.
Wu said all of his colleagues in the foreign ministry "put forth their greatest efforts to maintain these diplomatic ties."
Nicaragua's move to cut ties with Taiwan leaves the island with just 14 formal diplomatic allies, most of them in Latin America and the Caribbean, plus a handful of small states.
Reporting by Sarah Wu; Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom; Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa
7. Marine Corps commandant calls for focus on small forces not just hypersonic weapons to challenge China in the Pacific
Whenever I read articles such as this calling for small mobile forces I remember reading Brigadier Simpkin's book, Race to the Swift (1985). He said the most important person on the future battlefield will be the soldier with a radio as part of a small team who can operate deep in the enemy's rear and bring air power and other fires to bear on enemy forces.
There may be nothing new under the sun.
Marine Corps commandant calls for focus on small forces not just hypersonic weapons to challenge China in the Pacific
Gen. David Berger, the 38th commandant of the Marine Corps, visits Camp Lejeune, N.C., on May 3, 2021. (Lance Cpl. Jennifer Reyes/U.S. Marine Corps)
WASHINGTON – Marines – not just hypersonic missiles – are key to preventing a conflict with China and its growing military arsenal, the top general for the Marine Corps said Tuesday.
“The standoff [with missiles] from 1000 miles away works right into [China’s] strategy,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. David Berger said during an event at the Center for a New American Security, a liberal-leaning Washington-based think tank. “We have to be in there [with troops], we have to be close-up and forward.”
In August, China successfully tested its first hypersonic missile – a feat the United States is working toward but has not accomplished. Some lawmakers, such as Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., called the test “a call to action” for American arms development, urging more be done to field such weapons.
The missiles, capable of flying five times the speed of sound, could be important in a future fight against China, but Berger said the Pentagon also cannot forget about its most precious assets – its troops – in preventing a war before it starts.
The general said there are two arguments for countering China. The first calls for a “standoff” with China, where the two countries – armed with precision-strike and long-range missiles – keep each other at bay for fear of conflict. The other argues the U.S. should place its forces within a contested area to challenge Chinese operations.
Berger said the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
“I'm convinced that you need both -- you need a whole defense in depth,” he said. “The standoff alone plays right into [China’s] threat strategy.”
To advance his strategy, Berger released a document Dec. 1 outlining his plan for using “stand-in forces” as the Marine Corps continues to adjust its focus from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism operations to addressing near-peer adversaries such as China and Russia.
Berger said the strategy was born out of discussions regarding how the “conventional force -- not strategic, not nuclear … [is] going to deter a peer adversary or a near-peer adversary.”
The idea is to disrupt an adversary’s plans by sending “small but lethal, low signature, mobile and relatively simple-to-maintain” forces from the Marine Corps, Navy and Coast Guard into contentious regions such as the South China Sea, Berger wrote in a Dec. 1 report on the strategy.
The small forces can then conduct better reconnaissance and counter-reconnaissance “below the threshold of violence” in contested areas, according to the report.
“This allows [the stand-in force] to assist in identifying and countering malign behavior, and if armed conflict does erupt, the joint force can attack effectively first and prevent the enemy from doing so,” the report said.
Berger said the strategy’s success lies in its counter to China’s strategy, which has long involved restricting access in the South China Sea and operating unnoticed.
“Their effort is to make sort of a bubble – a shield – push us way, way out, and then they operate in here without being seen,” he said. “That’s perfect for them, so they want to do that over and over again.”
That’s why, Berger said, the “standoff” strategy of pitting the adversaries against each other should be a strategy of last resort.
“Standoff is ‘what is the force that you’re going to need to fight China and win?’ To me, that equals strategy failure,” he said. “If we’re fighting China, then our strategy has failed.”
Berger said the stand-in strategy will help stop a potential conflict before it happens by staying close in the region.
“What we should be asking is, what do we need to prevent conflict from happening? How are we going to assure our partners and allies every day, every week? How are we going to sense what's in front of us [and] every day, paint a picture of what the adversary is doing?” he said. “Stand-in answers a lot of questions.
Caitlin Doornbos
Caitlin Doornbos covers the Pentagon for Stars and Stripes after covering the Navy’s 7th Fleet as Stripes’ Indo-Pacific correspondent at Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Previously, she worked as a crime reporter in Lawrence, Kan., and Orlando, Fla., where she was part of the Orlando Sentinel team that placed as finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news. Caitlin has a Bachelor of Science in journalism from the University of Kansas and master’s degree in defense and strategic studies from the University of Texas at El Paso.
8. Liberals ‘Need to Get On the Defense Committees,’ If They Want Change
One criteria for anyone serving on the defense committees should be that they are committed to national defense but I know that is a naive thought.
Liberals ‘Need to Get On the Defense Committees,’ If They Want Change
“At this point, I think defense is just not that important to progressives one way or the other,” said one expert after Democrats came away from negotiations empty handed.
Though Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress, liberals who spoke loudly to limit defense spending and change certain military policies still largely came up empty handed in this year’s $768 billion defense policy bill. Republicans, meanwhile, walked away with a $25 billion win.
Now some progressive national security advocates are urging those liberal members of the party to learn from the loss and take steps to make sure their voices are heard in the future: by serving on defense committees and negotiating more strategically.
Progressives were largely absent from the process of writing a final version of the fiscal 2022 National Defense Authorization Act. Besides a few notable national left-wing leaders like Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in the Senate, few progressive liberals serve on the armed services committees that oversee the military and shape the legislation. As a result, their priorities were overwhelmingly left out of the final bill, in which Republicans notched big wins.
“It seems like we’re ending up in a pattern where Democrats are thinking where the bill will end up and starting there with their negotiating position,” said Stephen Miles, the executive director of Win Without War, a group that advocates for smaller defense budgets. “They need to put forward what they want, not what they think Republicans will agree to, and then negotiate from there.”
Progressives pushed to cut defense spending, but the final bill includes a Republican-backed $25 billion boost above the budget requested by President Joe Biden. Other Democratic priorities were stripped out during conference negotiations, including requiring women to register for the draft, which some liberals opposed, and prohibiting the military from supporting the Saudi-led war against the Houthis in Yemen.
Some liberals were surprised Democrats came up so empty handed in negotiations. The amendment to end support to Saudi Arabia’s fighting in Yemen, for example, was taken out of the final bill. But a similar provision in 2019 had the support of then-vice presidential national security advisors Jake Sullivan and Colin Kahl, who now serve as Biden’s national security advisor and Pentagon policy chief respectively.
“A lot of Democratic priorities were left on the board,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who sponsored the Yemen amendment. “My amendment was stripped out in conference...I understand why it was stripped with Trump. I don’t understand why it was stripped this time.”
The bill passed the House on Dec. 7 with strong bipartisan support, but got more Republican votes than Democratic. It’s expected to pass the Senate this week.
Progressives all year publicly railed against defense spending levels while lawmakers were shaping the bill. In August, Reps. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., and Barbara Lee, D-Calif., two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, penned a letter to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., criticizing the bill for authorizing $25 billion more than Biden requested.
“At a time when America’s largest national security threat is a global pandemic, our spending priorities should embrace efforts such as increased COVID vaccination efforts abroad instead of continually increased military spending—especially during a period of military withdrawal from foreign wars,” said more than two dozen lawmakers who signed on to the letter.
Khanna is the only one of the 27 signatories who serves on the House Armed Services Committee.
The annual defense policy bill is written by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. It provides the policy outlines and permissions for appropriators, who pass actual spending levels in separate legislation. In the House, members have a chance to offer amendments at an all-night public session called a markup, while the Senate panel considers amendments to its bill behind closed doors.
It’s much more difficult for members of Congress who aren’t on those two committees to push amendments on the floor of the full House and Senate. Most years, the number of amendments is limited by committee or party leaders. But some years, such as this year, no amendments by non-committee members are allowed, so the entire process is driven by those who serve on the armed services committees.
“If progressives ever want to get serious about influencing defense, they must develop the expertise to know what to change and how to change it,” said Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “That means they need to get on the defense committees and start shaping defense policy and spending bills from the inside. Offering amendments on the floor is not an effective way to do it. Saying you want to cut 10 percent of the defense budget without having a plan for what specifically you would cut is just posturing. At this point, I think defense is just not that important to progressives one way or the other. They are spending far more time and energy on domestic issues.”
Khanna agreed that progressive lawmakers need a strategy for America’s national security that is “a more compelling message than just saying, ‘Cut, cut, cut,’ without a reorientation of a smarter defense strategy.”
“I would love to have more people engage seriously in national security issues in the progresive movement…[but] it has to be standing up for human rights, but also answering the question, what are we doing to keep America safe?...That vision can be critical of defense contractors and legacy industries, but it’s not enough to say we aren’t for legacy industries without first saying what we are affirmatively for.”
There are some prominent progressives who serve on these panels, including Khanna and Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., in the House, and Warren and Sanders in the Senate. But because progressives generally do not seek out seats on these committees, these voices are in the minority and can struggle to influence the bill. Even Warren’s national prominence has not translated into major policy shifts on defense.
“It would desperately help things to have more progressives on the committee,” Miles said, adding that Warren lending her voice to the successful push last year to rename bases that honored Confederate leaders is a model for how progressives can leverage their positions on the committee. “You routinely see the armed services committees reflect a far more hawkish subset of the Democratic caucus than the full committee at large.”
Because the defense authorization bill is often seen as a must-pass piece of legislation, Democrats must also think strategically about how to ensure the bill passes, said Mandy Smithberger, director of the Center for Defense Information at the Project on Government Oversight. On Tuesday, 13 senators voted against cloture to effectively stall passage of the bill, including some of the chamber’s most progressive members such as Warren, Sanders, Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., and Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass.
“If they don’t think that they’re going to be able to get progressive votes no matter what, it means they have to rely more on Republicans to be able to get there,” she said.
9. Time to Target Hezbollah’s Illicit Finance Facilitators
Excerpts:
Sanctions can be effective against illicit financial networks but, like locks on doors designed to prevent break-ins, they need to be constantly maintained, improved, and replaced with better ones in order to stay a step ahead of the criminals they are meant to deter.
The Biden administration should waste no time and designate Sheikh Khojok and numerous other AQAH account holders exposed by the SpiderZ leak who, much like Khojok, are key facilitators for Hezbollah’s illicit finance operations overseas.
Time to Target Hezbollah’s Illicit Finance Facilitators
A hack on the group’s official bank yielded a trove of information that the Biden administration could use to implement sanctions.
Danny Citrinowicz and Emanuele Ottolenghi
Dec 14
(Photo by AFP/Getty Images.)
In December 2020, an anonymous group called SpiderZ hacked Hezbollah’s unofficial bank, the U.S.-sanctioned al-Qard al-Hassan (AQAH). The hacked files include account information for nearly 400,000 individuals and entities. In addition to average Lebanese citizens, the documents exposed expatriates, Hezbollah cadres and institutions, so-called “major depositors,” Iranian entities, and, importantly, the Lebanese banks that serviced AQAH.
The AQAH leak offers the Biden administration a much better understanding of how Hezbollah self-funds. The leak also provides data that would facilitate any U.S. effort to launch a sustained sanctions campaign against Hezbollah’s financiers, deny them access to the financial system, and ensure that targeted sanctions against Hezbollah continue to diminish the terror group’s ability to transfer funds raised overseas—often through illicit means—back to its headquarters. Yet since taking office in January, the Biden administration has refrained from exploiting the SpiderZ treasure trove, sanctioning only a handful of AQAH managers in May 2021.
This is a mistake the Biden administration needs to urgently rectify. The U.S. pressure campaign against Hezbollah that the George W. Bush administration launched and that continued, up to a point, under the Obama administration was successful because it relentlessly sustained multiple, protracted, and coordinated law enforcement actions and sanctions. Conversely, when the Obama administration relented in the mistaken belief that continued pressure against Hezbollah, an Iran proxy, could jeopardize nuclear negotiations with Tehran, Hezbollah’s illicit financial networks were able to regroup and reorganize. Without enforcement, follow-ups, and updating of sanctions, Hezbollah has been able to simply replace sanctioned officials with new ones and keep its funding streams flowing.
A case in point is the action the Obama administration took in 2009 against a key fundraiser for Hezbollah, Sheikh Abd El Menhem Qubaysi, the head of the Shiite mosque and al-Ghadir Association in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire’s capital. The Treasury Department sanctioned the Al-Ghadir Association and Sheikh Qubaisy, having identified him as the personal representative in Africa for Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. Treasury noted that Qubaysi “hosted senior Hizballah officials traveling to Cote d’Ivoire and other parts of Africa to raise money for Hizballah.”
Treasury even considered Qubaysi a quasi-ambassador for Hezbollah, including “speaking at Hizballah fundraising events and sponsoring meetings with high-ranking members of the terrorist organization.” Additionally, Qubaysi helped establish an official Hezbollah foundation in Cote d’Ivoire, “which has been used to recruit new members for Hizballah’s military ranks in Lebanon.”
Coupled with U.S. diplomatic pressure, Treasury sanctions resulted in Qubaysi’s deportation from Cote d’Ivoire. The initial success, however, was short-lived. Hezbollah eventually appointed Sheikh Ghaleb Khojok, another Hezbollah cleric, to replace Qubaysi in Abidjan. Khojok is the imam of the U.S.-sanctioned al-Ghadir Association, which continues to operate despite U.S. sanctions. He is also a major financial supporter of AQAH. The SpiderZ AQAH leaks indicate Khojok is one of the group’s major depositors, with an account in U.S. currency—likely evidence that he is a money collector for financial contributions from Hezbollah’s local supporters and activities.
Khojok, unlike his predecessor Qubaysi, is not under U.S. sanctions and is thus able to continue propaganda, indoctrination, recruitment, and fundraising activities for his overlords. His role as a major contributor to AQAH alone should be grounds for a U.S. designation. Lack of U.S. follow-up since 2009 against al-Ghadir’s fundraising activities in Cote d’Ivoire means that Washington has only briefly disrupted Hezbollah’s financial streams, which successfully resumed once Qubaysi’s replacement emerged.
Sanctions can be effective against illicit financial networks but, like locks on doors designed to prevent break-ins, they need to be constantly maintained, improved, and replaced with better ones in order to stay a step ahead of the criminals they are meant to deter.
The Biden administration should waste no time and designate Sheikh Khojok and numerous other AQAH account holders exposed by the SpiderZ leak who, much like Khojok, are key facilitators for Hezbollah’s illicit finance operations overseas.
Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan research institute based in Washington, DC, that focuses on national security and foreign policy. Major (Res.) Danny (Dennis) Citrinowicz is a senior fellow at the Institute for Strategy and Policy in Israel and a senior analyst at Maisha Group Ltd. Follow them on Twitter @eottolenghi and @Citrinowicz.
10. Blinken Vows More US Military Might in Indo-Pacific
When I read this my question is where are we going to put more military might? I think the Global Force Posture REview may have illustrated that the locations for US troops are limited and at best we may be able to increase rotational forces but there will not be any permanently based forces in any new locations in the region. What country would want to host permanent US bases?
Blinken Vows More US Military Might in Indo-Pacific
military.com · by 14 Dec 2021 Associated Press | By Matthew Lee · December 14, 2021
JAKARTA, Indonesia — The United States will expand its military and economic relationships with partners in Asia to push back against China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Tuesday.
Blinken said the Biden administration is committed to maintaining peace and prosperity in the region and will do that by boosting U.S. alliances, forging new relationships and ensuring that the U.S. military maintains “its competitive edge.”
“Threats are evolving, our security approach has to evolve with them. To do that, we will lean on our greatest strength: our alliances and partnerships,” Blinken said in a speech in Indonesia, outlining the administration's Indo-Pacific plans.
“We’ll adopt a strategy that more closely weaves together all our instruments of national power — diplomacy, military, intelligence — with those of our allies and partners," he said. That will include linking U.S. and Asian defense industries, integrating supply chains and cooperating on technological innovation, he said.
Later he signed a series of three agreements with Indonesia's foreign minister, including one that extends until 2026 an existing maritime cooperation pact that among other issues calls for enhanced joint U.S.-Indonesian naval exercises.
“It’s about reinforcing our strengths so we can keep the peace, as we have done in the region for decades,” he said. He did not elaborate further but the administration made waves earlier this year by agreeing to a pact that will see Australia produce nuclear-powered submarines.
Blinken insisted that the U.S. is not trying to force countries to choose between the United States and China, or seeking conflict with China. But he laid out a litany of complaints about “Beijing's aggressive actions” from “Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia and from the Mekong River to the Pacific Islands."
At a daily briefing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said Blinken's latest comments showed the U.S. was contradicting itself by “playing up the so-called China threat on the one hand while claiming that it has no intention to seek conflict with China on the other.”
Wang criticized the U.S. for “frequently sending ships and aircraft to the the area to flex muscles and stir up trouble."
Blinken is in Indonesia on the first leg of a week-long, three-nation tour of Southeast Asia that will also take him to Malaysia and Thailand. Countering China’s growing aggressiveness in the region, particularly in the South China Sea, in Hong Kong and against Taiwan is prominent on his agenda.
“Countries across the region want this behavior to change,” he said. “We do too.”
“We are determined to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea,” he said. “It is also why we have an abiding interest in peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”
Blinken said the U.S. “will forge stronger connections” with its five treaty allies in the region — Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand — boost ties between them and cultivate a stronger partnership with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, many of whose members feel threatened by China.
“A strong and independent ASEAN has long been central to tackle urgent crises and long-term challenges,” Blinken said, in particular calling out the military rulers of Myanmar, also known as Burma, for their February takeover and subsequent crackdown on protesters.
“We will continue to work with our allies and partners to press the regime to cease its indiscriminate violence, release all of those unjustly detained, allow unhindered access, and restore Burma’s path to inclusive democracy,” he said.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang countered by accusing Washington of policies that “sow discord, undermine solidarity and disrupt cooperation.”
“If the U.S. really wants to play a constructive role for the peaceful development of the Asia-Pacific region as it claims, it should earnestly respect the ASEAN-centered regional cooperation structure,” Wang told reporters in Beijing.
Blinken confined his remarks to the Indo-Pacific and China although he began his current overseas journey in Britain at a Group of Seven foreign ministers meeting that delivered a stern warning to Russia over Ukraine.
On arriving in Indonesia on Monday, Blinken found that a top aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, national security adviser Nikolay Patrushev, was already in Jakarta for security talks. Asked why he had not sought out Patrushev to expand on Sunday's G7 warning, Blinken replied that the administration's top diplomat for Europe, Karen Donfried, who is currently in Ukraine, would be traveling to Moscow in the coming days to deliver that message.
military.com · by 14 Dec 2021 Associated Press | By Matthew Lee · December 14, 2021
11. Bipartisan lawmakers call on Biden to speed up lethal aid to Ukraine
Bipartisan lawmakers call on Biden to speed up lethal aid to Ukraine
Bipartisan lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee came away from a three-day visit to Ukraine alarmed by Russia's rapid military buildup on the border and urged the Biden administration to "cut the red tape" in order to speed up lethal aid to Kyiv.
Congressmen Ruben Gallego, Michael Waltz and Seth Moulton — all military veterans serving on the committee — told reporters that proactive measures, including economic sanctions and weapons procurement, were key to deterring Russia from launching a military incursion.
"This is about speed," Moulton, a Massachusetts Democrat, said at a virtual news conference Tuesday. "[Russian President Vladimir] Putin is moving very quickly…It's now up to the administration to respond quickly, and that's exactly what we, as legislators, are pushing them to do."
"We need to be more focused on preventing an invasion than just responding to one," he said.
"We need to help Ukraine 'porcupine' themselves and raise the cost now," said Waltz, a Republican from Florida. "We're talking about helping the capability, the will of our Ukrainian allies, who made it clear to us they intend to fight if Putin does the worst and conducts a partial or full-scale invasion."
"The more that we can show that there will be resistance, the less likely they'll want to get bogged down in a war in Ukraine," Gallego, a Democrat, said in a separate interview Tuesday with CBS News. "I think Putin understands at least one thing: if he gets into war in Ukraine and doesn't win it, it is part of an existential threat to his to his ability to hold power."
Gallego, who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations, also said assessments of Russia's buildup he had reviewed from both the U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon suggested all the lights were "blinking red."
Over the past two months, Russia has massed more than 100,000 troops near its border with Ukraine, prompting fears of an invasion as early as January, according to U.S. intelligence assessments. U.S. officials have also accused Moscow of mounting an aggressive information operation to destabilize Ukraine politically, undermine its social cohesion and pin blame for any escalation on Kyiv and NATO.
The Pentagon's press secretary, John Kirby, said Tuesday there had been no indication that Russia had begun moving its troops away from the Ukrainian border, despite direct talks between Presidents Biden and Putin last week.
The Biden administration has prioritized diplomatic engagement since the buildup began. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that the administration was consulting "closely" with European allies on the potential launch of security discussions with Russia. Assistant Secretary of State Karen Donfried this week traveled to Kyiv and Moscow for continued talks.
"Our objective continues to be to keep this on a diplomatic path and for that to lead to de-escalation," Psaki said.
In a press conference in Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance continued to "stand ready to engage with Russia."
Gallego, Moulton and Waltz warned on Tuesday that protracted diplomatic efforts risked emboldening Moscow. Putin, they said, had positioned himself to pursue multiple options, from continued political destabilization designed to undermine the Ukrainian government to cutting off electricity, gas or coal imports, to a full-scale invasion.
"If Putin invades I want him to know that he'll have trouble buying a soda from a vending machine in the next five minutes, not that NATO will convene a conference to debate what to do next over the ensuing several weeks," Moulton said.
"The next round of lethal aid is literally sitting on [President Biden's] desk," Waltz said. "The Ukrainians are practically begging for it."
"This is a policy issue, and we hope to see some important shifts in policy," he said.
12. After extraordinary sacrifice, and years of delay, Alwyn Cashe gets his Medal of Honor
Tomorrow is the day SFC Cashe's widow will finally receive the honor that he deserves, along with the late Ranger SFC Class Christopher Celiz and Special Forces MSG Earl Plumlee.
After extraordinary sacrifice, and years of delay, Alwyn Cashe gets his Medal of Honor
Staff Sgt. Douglas Dodge was dazed and sick to his stomach, still in shock after a roadside bomb blast slammed him and other soldiers against the ceiling of their 27-ton armored vehicle. He had regained consciousness and forced his way to safety, but his friends were still inside — screaming and on fire.
Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, who had been riding in the front of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, appeared out of the darkness. He was wearing a helmet, body armor and boots, but little else. His camouflage uniform, sopped in fuel, had begun to melt away.
“Dodge!” Cashe yelled. “Where are the boys?”
The desperate moments that followed became the subject of a years-long Army investigation — mired by internal conflict — to determine whether Cashe, who reached into the burning vehicle at least six times to rescue those trapped, merited the military’s preeminent distinction for his courage and selflessness in Iraq on Oct. 17, 2005.
On Thursday, more than 16 years after he died in a Texas burn center, his widow, Tamara, will accept the Medal of Honor from President Biden at a ceremony celebrating Cashe, 35, and two fellow soldiers heralded for their valorous acts in separate battles.
Joining Cashe’s family will be Master Sgt. Earl Plumlee, 41, who faced down suicide bombers at close range during a Taliban assault in Afghanistan in 2013, and the family of Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Celiz, 32, who will posthumously receive the award, for protecting a medical evacuation helicopter there in 2018 until he was cut down by gunfire. All three cases have met congressionally mandated standards, including a risk to one’s life that is “above and beyond the call of duty.”
But Cashe’s actions, especially, have captured the imagination of a generation of U.S. troops, while raising an often-repeated question about his award: What took so long?
“This is probably the clearest-cut case of a Medal of Honor action that I’ve ever seen,” said Douglas Sterner, a Vietnam veteran and historian who has studied military awards for decades.
Notably, Cashe will become the first Black service member since 9/11 to be recognized with the military’s top combat award. Other Black troops who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have received high-ranking valor awards, but never the Medal of Honor.
How Cashe’s case came to drag on so long is a story both of bureaucracy and perseverance. The plan had been for President Donald Trump to award the medal before leaving office in January, but that was scuttled due to safety concerns after Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, according to three people familiar with the situation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations between the White House and Pentagon.
Kasinal Cashe White, Cashe’s older sister, said in an interview that she is immensely proud of her brother and grateful to the Army officers who refused to stop fighting on Cashe’s behalf, even after the Army declined to follow their recommendation more than a decade ago that he receive the award. She said she does not believe that race was a factor in the initial decision, and noted that some of her brother’s fiercest advocates within the Army are White.
“He earned this,” White said. “And, okay, he’s Black. Yes, he is. He’s just as dark as my daddy. But he just happened to be a Black soldier who did what he did. He did what he did out of love for his men, and respect for his men.”
‘It looked like a movie’
Cashe grew up poor, the youngest of 10 children in a blended family in Oviedo, Fla., an Orlando suburb. Their father died during a surgery when Cashe was 5, and they lived in a three-bedroom apartment overseen by the Seminole County Housing Development for the first years of Cashe’s life before moving into a rental house that has since burned down.
Cashe was “rambunctious” as a child and a daredevil, his sister said. It surprised his siblings when he joined the Army, but it was evident that he loved the lifestyle.
“He found his niche when he went into the service,” White said. “It allowed him to be as adventurous as he wanted to be, and he loved it.”
In January 2005, Cashe and his unit — 1st Battalion, 15th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Infantry Division — deployed to a decrepit airfield north of the Tigris River that U.S. forces called Forward Operating Base Mackenzie. Their patrols through the nearby town of Duluiyah frequently encountered al-Qaeda fighters, said Col. Jimmy Hathaway, who became Cashe’s company commander that April.
“It was always a powder keg,” Hathaway said. “There was always a fight going on someplace.”
On Oct. 17, the soldiers from Mackenzie were assigned a reconnaissance mission to ensure a vital supply route from nearby Balad air base remained safe. A sandstorm prevented U.S. aircraft from observing potential threats along the road, but unit leaders, including Cashe, decided they needed to launch the patrol anyway.
The mission called for at least three Bradley Fighting Vehicles — armored infantry transports on tracks outfitted with machine guns — to provide security near Duluiyah. One of the Bradleys stayed behind with a mechanical issue, however, prompting Cashe, the platoon sergeant, to put his vehicle in the front as they rumbled through the night.
The convoy, carrying 17 soldiers and their interpreter, was barely a couple of miles from the base when the explosion occurred. Sgt. Gary Mills, in the back of Cashe’s Bradley, felt the vehicle veer right just before the blast. An instant later, he saw the interpreter, Baka, engulfed in flames beside him.
Dodge, seated in the same compartment, reached for the door handle, burning his hand. He grabbed a breaching tool, he said, forced open the hatch, fell to the ground and vomited.
Moments later, Cashe leaned into the flames.
From the second Bradley, 1st Lt. Leon Matthias witnessed the explosion — and then saw Cashe under gunfire. His crew opened fire on a nearby tree line as Cashe pulled the wounded from the wreckage, and others raced to smother the flames.
“I swear,” said Matthias, now a lieutenant colonel, “it looked like a movie to me.”
Matthias radioed to the base, requesting immediate aid. By the time Cashe had pulled out the last man, it appeared as if he was wearing no clothes.
“His uniform was so burned off,” Matthias said. “His pants looked completely shredded, like someone took scissors to it and just cut it up.”
A convoy arrived from Mackenzie to pick up the wounded. Helicopters were prepared to evacuate them when they returned to the base, but Cashe insisted that other soldiers leave first and refused to be put on a stretcher despite his extensive burns, Matthias said.
“It was the last time I saw him,” he added. “Him walking to the helicopter in a shredded uniform.”
‘Tell them to fight!’
The Army sent the burned soldiers, including Cashe, for treatment at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. They were split into two groups, with the least injured among them — Dodge, Mills and Spec. Raymond Salerno III — in one contingent and the rest in the other. Even then, Mills, who had burns over 17 percent of his body, was placed in a medical coma for four days, he said.
Cashe had burns over 72 percent of his body but continued to share optimism. He and Mills made plans to go hunting despite the long recovery ahead.
“I was standing there and talking to him, and I was like, ‘How are you not in this bad mood?’ Mills said.
But the injuries took their toll. Baka, the interpreter, was declared dead the night of the explosion. Staff Sgt. George Alexander, 34, who was engulfed in flames as Cashe pulled him from the Bradley, died five days later. Sgt. Michael Robertson, 28, died three days after that, followed by the vehicle’s driver, Spec. Darren Howe, 21, about a week later.
Cashe, still in severe pain, was anguished about the deaths, his sister said.
“It was sad because when Al would gain consciousness, I would have to tell him,” White said. “He was like, ‘Tell them to fight! Tell them, ‘Come on, man!’ I pulled them out!’”
Cashe died Nov. 8, about three weeks after the attack. Infections had taken his legs, Dodge said. The following July, Salerno died.
Soldiers who witnessed Cashe’s actions were certain they saw something extraordinary. Lt. Col. Gary Brito, their battalion commander, quickly nominated Cashe for the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for valor in combat. Cashe was presented the award along with the Purple Heart, which is reserved for those wounded in battle, before he died.
But for years, Brito, Hathaway and others thought it was likely that Cashe deserved more. Brito submitted a nomination to upgrade the Silver Star to a Medal of Honor, writing in a 2009 sworn statement that the lasting impact of Cashe’s actions seemed “even more amazing” over time.
The nomination came as the U.S. military faced criticism from rank-and-file troops and veterans for having awarded just a handful of Medals of Honor for combat exploits early on in the Iraq War, despite the extreme violence troops encountered there. Sterner, the historian, attributed the pattern to senior commanders at the outset of America’s post-9/11 campaigns not recognizing what heroic actions in combat rated.
It was not clear who may have held up the nomination. Brito, in a 2011 memo arguing again for an upgrade, said that he “was not able to secure an endorsement” for the Medal of Honor from retired Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who had approved Cashe’s Silver Star. Vines could not be reached for comment. In other cases, Army officials have declined to upgrade awards while citing insufficient evidence, conflicting witness statements or a belief that experienced soldiers should be held to a higher standard.
Hathaway said that Brito, now a three-star general serving in the Pentagon, “was the one who fought and fought and fought through the bureaucracy to make sure it never died.”
Last fall, the case finally seemed to be on the brink of White House approval. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper, an Army veteran, wrote in a letter to lawmakers that Cashe’s actions merited the Medal of Honor, and asked for them to waive a limit that says the award must be presented within five years of a service member’s actions. Congress passed legislation to do so, and Trump signed it into law last December.
Dodge and Mills, the two survivors who were in the back of Cashe’s Bradley, each said they have struggled with what happened. Dodge said he sought 30 days of inpatient treatment for post-traumatic stress last year, and he tells others about it to encourage candor about mental health.
“I now know that the more I revisit an event, the less painful it becomes,” said Dodge, who retired from the Army as a sergeant first class. “I’m happy to share this story because I just want to do Sergeant Cashe the service of doing something for him.”
13. NPS Gains Access to Joint Information Operations Range
This caught my eye:
This advanced capability provides NPS faculty and students with access to a globally-distributed, closed-loop, live-fire cyber range complex that integrates users and capability providers to enable classified training, testing and experimentation.
NPS Gains Access to Joint Information Operations Range
Photo By Petty Officer 2nd Class James Norket | U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Senft, a military faculty lecturer in the NPS Department of Computer Science, led the effort to connect NPS to the Joint Information Operations Range to support classified testing and experimentation at the university. (U.S. Navy photo by MC2 James Norket) | View Image Page
MONTEREY, CA, UNITED STATES
12.13.2021
The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) has added a new capability to the university’s technological toolbelt with a node connecting NPS to the Joint Information Operations Range (JIOR). This advanced capability provides NPS faculty and students with access to a globally-distributed, closed-loop, live-fire cyber range complex that integrates users and capability providers to enable classified training, testing and experimentation.
The node and installation were supported by the Joint Staff J7, recognizing the critical role of NPS in bringing together DOD and industry partners for collaboration on key defense-related areas.
U.S. Army Lt. Col. Michael Senft, a military faculty lecturer in the NPS Department of Computer Science, worked diligently with the Joint Staff J7 and multiple stakeholders across NPS to bring the JIOR node installation to fruition despite challenges created by the current COVID environment. The JIOR is a closed-loop, scalable and transportable network providing a secure and accredited training and test environment. This capability provides students and faculty researchers access to both persistent and ephemeral training and testing event environments.
“Access to the JIOR helps support the essential classified research and education mission of NPS,” Senft said. “This node connects NPS to other organizations with access to the JIOR through creation of virtual test ranges for evaluation of cyber capabilities.”
JIOR connectivity enables NPS students and faculty to connect with realistic cybersecurity environments including the National Cyber Range Complex, Persistent Cyber Training Environment, and CyberTropolis. CyberTropolis, located at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in Indiana, replicates the cyber environment of a real city.
“The JIOR allows organizations to connect securely at multiple classification levels to test and evaluate different programs and capabilities,” stressed Senft. “The information technology architecture on a Navy ship, for example, is not something that we can replicate in an unclassified environment. JIOR allows NPS to securely connect with organizations that have existing physical and virtual environments identical to those present on a ship to allow testing of new capabilities.”
The JIOR currently has over 100 access points across the U.S. and other countries. This allows NPS to securely connect with other organizations including many that are developing next-generation capabilities for the DOD.
“Our industry partners are key and being able to collaborate with them in a secure environment is enabled by JIOR,” added Senft. “We are able to conduct tests and evaluations on a temporary network designed for a specific testing or experimentation event.”
Given the prevalence of cyber-related capabilities across current DOD and DON strategies, expanding NPS research capabilities in cyber at the classified level was part of the university’s strategy. NPS’ connection to the JIOR is a completed action from the NPS 2018-2023 Strategic Plan to support expansion of classified cyberspace operations research and education. Specifically, action S4.2 states, “We will upgrade our classified networks to ensure uninterrupted, high-speed access at the Top-Secret level to our sponsors and provide them with enhanced test environments. We will establish a Joint Information Operations Range node at NPS in order to support visibility and participation in classified experiments and exercises.”
Thanks to the efforts of Senft and critical support from NPS and partner organizations, NPS has expanded access for its classified cyberspace operations research and education programs. The JIOR node brings another invaluable capability to the university and its direct support to warfighters.
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Date Taken: 12.13.2021 Date Posted: 12.13.2021 12:52 Story ID: 410998 Location: MONTEREY, CA, US Web Views: 243 Downloads: 0
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14. PLA conducts paratrooper assault exercise with drones: Report
Alas, the article was not what I thought it would be based on the headline. I was hoping to read they were dropping paratroopers from drones.
PLA conducts paratrooper assault exercise with drones: Report
According to China state-run Global Times, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) air corps conducted military exercises with paratroopers along with multiple drones.
The drones delivered supplies to PLA troops deep inside the "enemy line", the Chinese daily reported. The UAVs were reportedly "medium-sized rotary wing drone" with 50 kilograms of munitions.
China has been conducting military drills amid escalating tensions with Taiwan. Chinese troops had earlier conducted military exercises close to Taiwan near an island.
The Chinese newspaper said PLA troops used "swam" of drones for frontline troops during the exercise as they were expected to hold their positions.
As China continues to make its move, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned the Xi regime not to make "aggressive actions" in the Indo-Pacific as he emphasised that there is growing concern over China's actions from "Northeast Asia to Southeast Asia and from the Mekong River to the Pacific Islands".
Blinken also asserted that the US was "determined to ensure freedom of navigation in the South China Sea".
US defence secretary Lloyd Austin had said recently that China's military exercises near Taiwan were "rehearsals" as the Chinese troops were apparently "exploring their true capabilities".
Austin said although the US will remain "steadfast" on the One-China policy, however, it would continue to support Taiwan in its ability to defend itself.
(With inputs from Agencies)
15. Russia shows no sign of retreat on invading Ukraine
Excerpts:
“It is strange to hear the Russian side asking for any guarantees when so many promises have already been broken,” he declared.
Ukraine has taken steps to beef up its defense with American-made anti-tank missiles and drones from Turkey, to at least bloody a Russian advance. Ukrainian troops have also received training from US military instructors.
Officials in Kiev despair of having insufficient anti-aircraft equipment and would like NATO to supply some.
If it comes to war, a likely date for a Russian invasion comes down to the weather, according to Air Force Times, an independent defense publication: Next month, probably, when swampy land in eastern Ukraine “will freeze … making it easy for Russian tanks to roll in.”
Russia shows no sign of retreat on invading Ukraine
Moscow says US and Ukraine must guarantee Kiev never joins NATO to avoid war, a demand neither are likely to countenance
Russian military intimidation and Western threats of retaliatory economic punishment suggest there’s no end in sight to tensions over Ukraine, with a stalemate at best and war at the worst.
Over the past month, Russian President Vladimir Putin has made bellicose moves that scare Ukraine and worry the US and its allies. He dispatched 120,000 troops and numerous armored groups to Russia’s border with Ukraine, including one large unit that moved in from Siberia.
Large numbers of transport trucks have been ferried just to the east of the Ukraine border, suggesting they could be used to quickly transport infantry across the frontier. Last weekend, Russia sent Buk anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine’s frontier.
A Buk shot down a Malaysian passenger aircraft in 2014, killing 298 people. All that’s missing, a NATO defense official said, were sufficient supplies of ammunition, field medical facilities and fuel supply lines.
Putin and US President Joe Biden spoke via video connection last week, with the American urging Moscow not to go to war on Ukraine. Yet the talks triggered no pullbacks.
The Conflict Intelligence Team, an internet research group that tracks Russian military moves, said on the ground signs “allow us to conclude that despite the negotiations between Biden and Putin, the concentration of Russian troops in the areas bordering the territory controlled by the Ukrainian authorities continues.”
The United States and allies in the Group of Seven have taken Russian moves as a sign of impending warfare. They warned that “military aggression against Ukraine would have massive consequences and severe costs.”
The “costs” of invasion for Russia would apparently be limited to new economic sanctions to supplement ones imposed in 2014. That’s when Russia first sent troops into Ukraine and then supported and armed pro-Russian separatists.
All this gives the appearance of a 21st-century chapter of March of Folly, a 1980s book that chronicled historic miscalculations in disastrous wars, from Troy to Vietnam. The question now is whether the West is miscalculating Putin’s resolve.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is beating war drums. Photo: AFP / Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik
Last week, Putin laid out Russia’s demand to resolve the face-off: Ukrainian neutrality. Ukraine must give up aspirations to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United States must provide Russia with “reliable and firm legal guarantees” that Ukraine will never join.
As a sweetener, Putin could tolerate Ukraine’s participation in the European Union; it’s harder to declare EU membership a casus belli, though for Putin, it was in 2014.
Alexander Baunov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said such a deal would require “a chain of actions and obligations that should lead to a Ukraine that is friendly and neutral, but not necessarily subordinate, to Moscow.”
There is an old example of a Western country that accepted neutrality at Moscow’s insistence: Austria.
Following World War II, the US, United Kingdom, France and Russia occupied the country. Russia only agreed to pull out, along with the rest of WWII’s victorious powers, in 1955, when Austrian neutrality was guaranteed.
Austria enshrined neutrality in its own constitution and the country remains outside NATO to this day. However, it joined the European Union in 1995 without Soviet complaint.
There are big obstacles that make such an outcome more difficult, if not impossible, for Ukraine. First, the USSR did not bite off a chunk of Austria, whereas in 2014, Putin invaded and then annexed Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine.
Moreover, Putin’s pan-Slavic credentials are at stake. In many Russian minds, and certainly in Putin’s, Ukraine is an indigenous piece of the Slavic family; it should go hand in hand with Russia.
Last summer, Putin lamented that the “wall that has emerged between Russia and Ukraine in recent years, between parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual place, to my mind is our great common misfortune and tragedy.”
Objections to NATO, but not EU?
Moreover, having declared that “Crimea is forever part of Russia,” Putin seems unlikely to give that piece of Ukraine back.
The 2014 invasion was nominally meant to block Ukraine’s determination to join the EU instead of Putin’s copycat Eurasian Economic Union. Curiously, the issue then was not about prospective Ukrainian NATO membership.
Would Putin need to explain how he dropped the EU issue that appeared so important to him in 2014 and which led to seven years of turmoil and death in Ukraine?
Meanwhile, US President Biden might find it hard to surrender Ukraine’s decision-making over NATO to Russia. He is already being portrayed as a weak incompetent by critics over his botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Adverse opinion might multiply exponentially if he is viewed as giving Putin a veto over who can join NATO.
If Russia gets to keep Crimea, as Putin undoubtedly would demand, would Biden be ready for the inevitable comparison to pre-WWII British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who notoriously acquiesced to Hitler’s takeover of part of Czechoslovakia?
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected enforced neutrality, if solely on the grounds that Moscow can’t be trusted.
He noted that in 1991, Ukraine gave up its store of nuclear weapons to facilitate its split from the Soviet Union. In return, Ukraine received assurances “from Russia that our borders and our security will be respected,” Zelensky said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has little faith in promises from the Kremlin. Photo: AFP
“It is strange to hear the Russian side asking for any guarantees when so many promises have already been broken,” he declared.
Ukraine has taken steps to beef up its defense with American-made anti-tank missiles and drones from Turkey, to at least bloody a Russian advance. Ukrainian troops have also received training from US military instructors.
Officials in Kiev despair of having insufficient anti-aircraft equipment and would like NATO to supply some.
If it comes to war, a likely date for a Russian invasion comes down to the weather, according to Air Force Times, an independent defense publication: Next month, probably, when swampy land in eastern Ukraine “will freeze … making it easy for Russian tanks to roll in.”
Follow Daniel Williams on Twitter at @dwilliams1949
16. Blinken cuts overseas trip short due to reporter testing positive for Covid-19
Blinken cuts overseas trip short due to reporter testing positive for Covid-19
Updated 8:51 AM ET, Wed December 15, 2021
(CNN)Secretary of State Antony Blinken is cutting his overseas trip to Southeast Asia short after a member of the press traveling with the top US diplomat tested positive for Covid-19 Wednesday, according to the US State Department.
Blinken will no longer have scheduled meetings and events in Thailand, which were supposed to begin on Thursday morning, and instead will make his way back to the United States.
The individual tested positive for Covid-19 upon arrival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and is in isolation and will not continue traveling with Blinken, State Department spokesperson Ned Price announced Wednesday.
Blinken and his senior staff tested negative for Covid-19 on Tuesday night and upon arrival in Malaysia.
"We will continue to adhere to and go beyond CDC guidance, including with our rigorous testing protocol, for the remaining traveling party," Price said in a statement.
Blinken has already visited the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Malaysia on his more-than-a-week long international trip, which marks his first visit to Southeast Asia as President Joe Biden's top diplomat. He had planned to visit Thailand and Hawaii as his last stops before returning to Washington, DC, on Saturday.
Blinken spoke with Thai Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai over the phone on Wednesday and "expressed his deep regret" that he will not visit Thailand this week, according to Price.
Blinken "explained that in order to mitigate the risk of the spread of Covid-19 and to prioritize the health and safety of the US traveling party, and those they would otherwise come into contact with the Secretary would be returning to Washington, DC, out of an abundance of caution," Price said.
Blinken invited the foreign minister to visit Washington "at the earliest opportunity and noted that he looked forward to traveling to Thailand as soon as possible," Price added.
The route Blinken will take home includes short logistical stops in Bangkok and Guam. He will then go onto Hawaii before flying back to DC.
This story has been updated.
17. U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz says defense bill raises preparedness for threats by China, Russia
I thought the vote distribution between Republicans and Democrats on the NDAAis interesting.
Excerpt:
Waltz, a member of the Armed Services Committee, joined with 169 Democrats and 193 fellow Republicans Tuesday to pass the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act,...
U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz says defense bill raises preparedness for threats by China, Russia
Threats from China, Russia and elsewhere occupy a good part of U.S. Rep. Michael Waltz’s mind these day, and he said in an interview last week that the passage of a $768 billion defense bill will help the U.S. military’s readiness.
Waltz, a member of the Armed Services Committee, joined with 169 Democrats and 193 fellow Republicans Tuesday to pass the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, which raises the budget by $25 billion more than President Joe Biden requested. The bill also includes some 10 provisions Waltz inserted, including:
- Prohibiting the purchase of goods from Chinese Communist Party forced labor camps in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region;
- Preventing Chinese communists and Russians access to American missile defense sites;
- Prohibiting the Defense Department from providing financial support to the Taliban, the leading party of Afghanistan following the U.S. withdrawal in August.
“If you look at the crises all over the world, you look at the rise of China — their navy is now larger than ours,” Waltz told The News-Journal. “They have more in space than we do. The ongoing Russian aggression, Iran racing toward a nuclear weapon and on and on … Republican and Democrat members in the Congress came together and said defense needs more. This is not the time for a defense cut. That’s exactly what (President Joseph) Biden was proposing.”
Waltz, who last February proposed a U.S. boycott of the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, scheduled to start Feb. 4, also reacted to Biden’s announcement this week that he will not send any government officials to China, calling it a “diplomatic” boycott.
“I’m glad he’s done it, but it’s not enough,” Waltz said.
Both U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Florida, and Waltz have argued that the International Olympic Committee is inconsistent when it claims to not “do politics,” allowing athletes to compete.
“I remind the IOC that they got involved in politics when it came to South Africa, when it came to apartheid,” Waltz said.
“Not only did they ban any Olympic games from happening in South Africa for nearly 30 years, the IOC banned the South African Olympic team itself, and those athletes, from being able to compete anywhere in the world. So when it comes to one million Muslim leaders in concentration camps, the erasing of Tibetan culture, the persecution of Christians, stamping out freedom in Hong Kong, aggression in the South China Sea, threatening Taiwan and not cooperating with any type of investigation on COVID, which killed 5 million people, you know, what more does the IOC need to see to take more meaningful actions?
“The IOC should be ashamed of themselves for putting our athletes in the position of compromising their values in order to be able to compete,” Waltz continued. “The American companies that are Olympics sponsors — Visa, Airbnb, Proctor & Gamble, Coca-Cola — should be ashamed of themselves as well. They love to tout their support … for social justice here, and yet are perfectly fine to turn a blind eye when it comes to their balance sheet in China. That hypocrisy I find disgusting and we need to call it out.”
After Russia troops amassed near the border with Ukraine, threatening an invasion, Biden had a call with Russian President Vladimir Putin warning him not to carry it out, and that if he does, the U.S. will impose economic sanctions.
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, meeting with reporters on Tuesday, said Biden has promised and delivered Russia consequences over the poisoning of Putin rival Alexei Navalny and the SolarWinds cyberattack.
“And if Russia chooses to take these actions in Ukraine, he will do the same,” Sullivan said of Biden. “He’s not doing this to saber-rattle. He’s not doing it to make idle threats. He’s doing it to be clear and direct with both the Russians and with our European allies about the best way forward.”
Waltz doesn’t agree.
“I think we should be taking a stronger stand now to prevent that invasion, to make it clear that the cost will be so high not just economically, as Biden had mentioned, but militarily as well, that their calculus, that Putin’s calculus, will change.
Waltz said that means providing air defense and anti-ship weaponry to the Ukranians, but not U.S. “boots on the ground.”
“The problem with taking the sanctions approach is that when Nord Stream 2, the gas line that goes from Russia to Germany, comes fully online, (Putin) has western Europe hostage through that gas, and that’s why lifting the sanctions on Nord Stream 2 was so devastating, because it gives Russia that checkmate over a unified European response,” Waltz said. “And so in order for sanctions to be effective, they have to be effective in both euros and dollars. And with Nord Stream 2, Russia has taken Europe off the table.”
Sullivan countered: “When it comes to Nord Stream 2, the fact is that gas is not currently flowing through the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which means that it’s not operating, which means that it’s not leverage for Putin. Indeed, it is leverage for the West, because if Vladimir Putin wants to see gas flow through that pipeline, he may not want to take the risk of invading Ukraine.”
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© 2021 www.news-journalonline.com
18. The Space Force's Critical Lesson for the Rest of the Military
Conclusion:
The Department of Defense should focus on talent development rather than talent management in order to reap the performance from the personnel necessary to maintain the advantage in strategic competition. The Space Force’s vision expressed in The Guardian Ideal” describes a modern model that follows civilian best practices that have been shown to greatly increase organizational, team, and individual performance.
To achieve the desired personnel performance, the focus needs to shift from solely developing future senior leaders to developing the total force, and the technology exists to accomplish this lofty goal today. The reality is that there are no late bloomers, only risk-adverse gardeners. The effective application of technology can help incentivize members to meet the requirements that the services actually value and need. This will help right the wrongs of poor personnel management that has resulted in retention issues and enabled peer competitors to close the performance gap with the U.S. military over the last few decades.
The Space Force's Critical Lesson for the Rest of the Military - War on the Rocks
Do you think telling NASA astronauts that they are in the top third, middle third, or bottom third of their peers in respect to their leadership ability will dramatically increase their motivation to be better teammates or develop professionally?
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that rack-and-stacking rocket scientists using a single metric (leadership) is an ineffective method for talent management. This is why NASA employs a talent marketplace model similar to the Air Force, and the rest of the Department of Defense should follow suit and also revise their performance rating systems if they hope to achieve the same levels of performance, engagement, and employee satisfaction as NASA.
The recently released document, The Guardian Ideal, will serve as the Space Force’s guidance for talent management and development. The basic premises contained in the document provide a vision for shifting from the current military model, which mirrors the best civilian practices from the 1980s, to a new military model, which mirrors the best modern civilian practices. These methods include flexible career paths, incentives for developing new skills, and career advancement for members with exceptional technical, as well as leadership ability. The continual feedback-collection model proposed by the Space Force will also reduce the administrative burden on supervisors, imposed by annual appraisals, while simultaneously providing more frequent, accurate, and timely communication with team members.
The vision articulated by the Space Force should be adopted by the entirety of the Department of Defense. The military should recruit Americans who have aspirations outside of a traditional linear two-to-four decade military career. The National Defense Authorization Act authorizes modifications to the military’s current “up-or-out system,” and the Space Force is aiming far above the other services in its vision to maximize personnel development.
The Space Force’s approach to personnel management will be a test case for the other services and for the Department of Defense as a whole. The Marine Corps, for instance, released a new document on talent management that shows tremendous promise and aligns with the desires of all service branches to employ the talent marketplace model. Senior military leaders should allocate resources towards development by educating and empowering members with the maximum ability to drive their own personal and professional development to meet the military’s needs.
If more resources were shifted from management activities to development activities, then the Defense Department would not have to work so hard to get the right person to the right place at the right time, since the military would have many more qualified people to back-fill any position. After all, if there is only one perfect person for the job and that person leaves, then that organization is in deep trouble. The department can look to some civilian companies (e.g., WD-40 Multi-Use Product) that employ a technology driven talent development and team performance assessment system as a model to be copied and modified for use in the Department of Defense. The steps taken by the Space Force hold a lot of promise and could make concrete, demonstrable improvements in the performance of the U.S. military going forward.
Guardian Ideal
The Space Force has largely borrowed the talent development model utilized by WD-40 that is documented in the book Helping People Win at Work, written by Ken Blanchard and WD-40 chief executive officer, Garry Ridge. This new model includes: team-centric assessments (e.g., team members provide feedback and assess each other based on a member’s contributions to the team’s mission) rather than solely supervisor assessments, career progression that does not follow a rigid path and timeline, and a focus on developing resilient people who quickly recover from failures and setbacks. The Space Force’s vision contained in The Guardian Ideal is to develop an inclusive culture that encourages cooperation over competition, but it has several significant barriers to overcome.
The current military officer promotion model is governed by the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act that was created in 1980 to modernize management practices and correct promotion problems following World War II. The Air Force and other military branches currently use a “rack-and-stack” system, pioneered by General Electric’s chief executive officer Jack Welch in the 1980s, which ranks peers on a bell curve from high to low performers to determine which to promote based on the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act thresholds.
The Defense Officer Personnel Management Act was effective at creating stable promotion timelines and uniform promotion rates. However, it led to high turnover, frequent moves, and shorter military careers, even for members with specialty skills critical to the organizations they were being forced to leave. The rigid hierarchical promotion model may have been appropriate for developing leaders to command conscripted and untrained troops in a large-scale ground conflict, but the reality of strategic competition today requires highly specialized teams of professionals that the talent management systems should help develop.
The proposed Space Force talent development system will incorporate work-life balance, resiliency, training, education, and individualized development. Instead of rigidly defined career fields, Space Force positions will be codified with desired skills and experience to help members identify the service’s evolving needs and identify how they can personally develop to meet them. The Space Force will use existing or develop new assessments that accurately measure skill levels. An Enterprise Talent Management Office will continually review and update position information to reflect changing requirements.
The most effective job matching will occur when every member in the process can see both the job requirements and their own assessed capabilities, then apply for jobs that they both desire and are qualified to perform. Talent marketplaces allow for the wisdom of crowds to be effective in that well- informed individuals should be able to make better decisions on their own behalf and on behalf of their organization than a specialized team of experts can make with a strong bias toward supporting organizational needs over the developmental desires of the members.
Accurate job requirements and validated member capabilities will allow for a regulated market approach to job matching. This will increase hiring transparency and effectiveness by enabling Guardians to see the job requirements for a desired position and seek developmental opportunities, either internal or external to the Space Force, to ensure they are qualified. In other words, if people know the job requirements and know their own capabilities, then they can make well-informed decisions about the next job they should pursue to get to where they want to be and where the organization needs them to be. In addition, algorithms (similar to Amazon or Facebook recommendations) can be employed in a talent marketplace model to help guide members towards relevant jobs, based on their assessed skills and desired future goals.
Official performance assessments will shift the focus from individual-based accomplishments to an individual’s contribution to the team. On average, diverse teams outperform their less diverse counterparts by at least 25 percent, so members will be deliberately placed to bolster diverse, multidisciplinary teams, based on each member’s assessed abilities. Individual performance will be evaluated by fellow teammates, based on a member’s contribution in achieving the mission, with team leaders achieving slightly greater recognition, based on their additional supervisory responsibilities and expectations.
The Space Force hopes to replace the annual performance appraisal system with an ongoing collection of 360-degree feedback from teammates (supervisors, peers, and subordinates). This would update a real-time rolling average to assess promotion readiness based on a combination of current performance within the team, situational decision-making, and other behavioral components that can all be consolidated into something similar to a three-year average that falls within the 6-10 scale (e.g., 10.0 Superior, 8.0 Slightly above average, 6.5 Well below average, etc.) currently used by officer promotion boards.
Member performance will be evaluated by teammates in respect to expertly-developed value statements that will be aggregated to provide a more holistic assessment of member performance. This continual collection model will free supervisors from the administrative burdens inherent in annual appraisal systems and increase the frequency and quality of feedback provided to members to encourage constant development. Limiting the performance data time frame to a few years, versus a full career, will better indicate significant increases or decreases in performance and incentivize Guardians to take smart risks and learn from mistakes, since failures will not follow them forever. In other industries, this type of appraisal has produced superior results and higher workforce satisfaction.
The Space Force’s proposed performance assessment system will consolidate the feedback data from teammates using a standardized web-based system that will be debriefed by a coach. Developmental feedback will focus on acquiring and strengthening skills and encouraging personal and professional growth. Coaching and mentoring programs will be central to sharing perspectives and insights, and reverse mentoring programs will ensure senior leaders gain insights from junior and underrepresented demographics.
A blend of different assessments that measure current performance within a team, applicable skills, and aptitude to determine future potential will help match the best qualified (versus the best mentored or most well-known) members to the right jobs at the right time in the Space Force. Better assessments of member potential should also reduce many of the insidious biases that have led to diversity disparities within the military today, while increasing the transparency within the personnel system and providing more accurate and timely performance feedback to members to encourage their development. The final and most complex step to address will be revising the rigid, complex, and slow hiring and transferring systems that are a barrier to acquiring and retaining talent.
The talent management systems should be flexible enough to support shifting mission requirements. Regulations need to be modified to enable smooth and timely transitions between full-time and part-time employment and capitalize on the ability to bring members into the service at the appropriate grade for their skill set. The Space Force specifically lays this out as a requirement for civilian hiring practices. It would be invaluable if the military regulations were also revised to ease the transition between Active Duty, Guard, and Reserves, with the ability to hire civilian technical specialists into an equivalent military rank, similar to the way that doctors and lawyers are currently brought into the military today.
All the U.S. military branches have recently expressed a desire and taken action to reform their personnel management systems. The Marine Corps Talent Management 2030 released in November 2021 plans to adopt the talent marketplace model currently employed by the Air Force. The goal of Marine Corps Talent Management 2030 will be to better align the talents of individual Marines with the needs of the service to maximize the performance of both, while also incorporating feedback to help highlight any toxic traits from peers and subordinates that may not have been apparent to supervisors. Other proposed Marine changes are an increased focus on retention, robust screening for member interests, correlated data-driven job matching, a revised waiver process, and explicit exclusion of applicants “previously convicted of sexual assault offenses or sexual related crimes and offenses, domestic violence, or hate crimes, effective immediately.” The fact that the Navy and Army are also shifting to talent marketplace solutions indicates that all services acknowledge that members would perform better if they had increased control over their personal and professional development.
In addition to job matching, systems such as MyVector should also encourage members to develop personally and professionally by providing mobile access (via a personal cellphone app and personal computer in additional to government issued phones and computers) to developmental opportunities that align with each member’s goals and the military’s needs. If the military truly values professional military education, college education, computer coding ability, foreign language proficiency, professional certifications, and other technical skills, then these resources should be available virtually to every member, all the time. To instill the habit of lifelong learning, the military needs to provide consistent and easy access to educational resources and encourage development throughout every phase of life. The education attained through talent management and development platforms can be fed into the algorithms to improve job matching recommendations in real time.
While the budget for the Department of Defense and the personnel it employs is substantial, the portion of that budget allocated to personnel issues is principally distributed through paychecks and retirement benefits, with minimal relative investment in improving the actual systems that manage and develop personnel. If service members and their units really are the “beating heart” of the services, then the money required to fund the coding efforts to transform the personnel system should be allocated today, since the long-term investment will result in massive dividends in both performance and retention.
The Space Force’s talent management and development vision should not be limited to the Space Force, but adopted as the vision for all military branches. “[I]nclusive teams, mission-focused and populated by bold, innovative, and empowered people” should be the heartbeat of the Department of Defense, not just the Space Force. Support from Congress and senior military leaders will be crucial to enable it. However, the ultimate success or failure of these initiatives will be based on whether each servicemember acknowledges the looming threats to our country’s security and proactively embraces the necessary change before we all lose.
Conclusion
The Department of Defense should focus on talent development rather than talent management in order to reap the performance from the personnel necessary to maintain the advantage in strategic competition. The Space Force’s vision expressed in The Guardian Ideal” describes a modern model that follows civilian best practices that have been shown to greatly increase organizational, team, and individual performance.
To achieve the desired personnel performance, the focus needs to shift from solely developing future senior leaders to developing the total force, and the technology exists to accomplish this lofty goal today. The reality is that there are no late bloomers, only risk-adverse gardeners. The effective application of technology can help incentivize members to meet the requirements that the services actually value and need. This will help right the wrongs of poor personnel management that has resulted in retention issues and enabled peer competitors to close the performance gap with the U.S. military over the last few decades.
Lt. Col. Reagan Mullin is a Colonel Assignments Officer at Headquarters Air Force. Previously, he was the Chief of Officer Assignments for the Air Force Special Operation Command A1 Personnel Directorate. Mullin is a special operations MC-130J and PC-12 Instructor Pilot with 3,000 flying hours supporting numerous contingency operations throughout Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, Department of Defense or the US Government.
19. Tony Blinken’s Tiny Island Diplomacy
Tony Blinken’s Tiny Island Diplomacy
Why the U.S., Japan and Australia are investing in three Pacific states.
WSJ · by The Editorial Board
Secretary of State Antony Blinken
Photo: Olivier Douliery/Associated Press
Even in the age of cyber attacks and hypersonic weapons, American strategists are discovering that old-fashioned physical geography matters in U.S.-China competition. One consequence is that sparsely populated island nations in the Pacific Ocean are getting heightened attention from the U.S. and its allies. The latest example is a joint investment by the U.S., Japan and Australia in an undersea cable connecting the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), Kiribati and Nauru.
The State Department’s Saturday press release headline, “Joint Statement On Improving East Micronesia Telecommunications Activity,” may not suggest a geopolitical watershed. The countries receiving the investment have a combined population not much greater than that of Boise, Idaho, and a GDP many times lower. But they encompass 641 islands among them (mostly belonging to the FSM) in the same crucial oceanic neighborhood as U.S. bases in Guam, Hawaii and Australia.
China’s strategists are well aware that if they can exercise more influence over these tiny countries, they’ll be in a better position to force the U.S. Navy out of the Western Pacific—either in a military conflict or through a gradual shift in the balance of power. In 2019 Beijing persuaded Kiribati to switch diplomatic recognition from American-aligned Taiwan to China, and this year China announced plans for an airstrip on part of the archipelago.
The FSM has also received growing Chinese investment, and it had weighed an offer from Beijing to build the undersea internet cable. But the U.S. and its allies prevailed on the island governments in behind-the-scenes diplomacy. The joint announcement says the investment will “meet genuine needs” and “respect sovereignty”—a veiled reference to the way China uses infrastructure investment as a cover for political leverage or espionage.
Diplomacy alone won’t be enough to maintain America’s Pacific position against China’s surging military reach. But small victories like this one show the U.S. has recognized the strategic implications of China’s Pacific-island inroads, and is taking steps to answer them.
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WSJ · by The Editorial Board
20. America’s Cyber-Reckoning - How to Fix a Failing Strategy
Excerpts:
Even if Washington does everything right, it will still need global cooperation. Luckily, the geopolitical environment today is conducive to strong U.S. diplomatic leadership on issues regarding cyberspace. Washington has mostly recovered from the fallout of the Snowden and the NSA leaks, and the world has finally recognized that the Chinese and Russian models of Internet autocracy are antithetical to a liberal order and a globalized economy. Washington needs to take advantage of this state of affairs through intensive cooperation with like-minded countries, such as France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
The UN is not the place to do so, however: in that forum, China and Russia can advance their interests by entangling Washington and its partners in abstract debates about norms even as they wantonly violate those norms in the real world. Many strategists have suggested that NATO could serve as the center of gravity for cooperation in cyberspace between the United States and its allies and partners, but the organization was built for the Cold War and is too clunky to foster creative strategies. Instead, Washington should pursue a series of bilateral agreements to prevent the spread of black-market ransomware tools. One model might be the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral effort inaugurated by the George W. Bush administration to improve the interdiction of weapons of mass destruction.
If American policymakers have learned anything in the past decade, it is that cyberconflict is a murky business, one that resists black-and-white notions about war and peace. That lack of clarity in the battle space makes it all the more important for Washington to be clear about its goals and strategies. The cyber-realm will always be messy. But U.S. cyber-policy does not have to be.
America’s Cyber-Reckoning
How to Fix a Failing Strategy
A decade ago, the conventional wisdom held that the world was on the cusp of a new era of cyberconflict in which catastrophic computer-based attacks would wreak havoc on the physical world. News media warned of doomsday scenarios; officials in Washington publicly fretted about a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” that would take lives and destroy critical infrastructure. The most dire predictions, however, did not come to pass. The United States has not been struck by devastating cyberattacks with physical effects; it seems that even if U.S. adversaries wanted to carry out such assaults, traditional forms of deterrence would prevent them from acting.
Behind those mistaken warnings lay an assumption that the only alternative to cyberpeace must be cyberwar. But in the years since, it has become clear that like all realms of conflict, the domain of cyberspace is shaped not by a binary between war and peace but by a spectrum between those two poles—and most cyberattacks fall somewhere in that murky space. The obvious upside of this outcome is that the worst fears of death and destruction have not been realized. There is a downside, however: the complex nature of cyberconflict has made it more difficult for the United States to craft an effective cyberstrategy. And even if lives have not been lost and infrastructure has mostly been spared, it is hardly the case that cyberattacks have been harmless. U.S. adversaries have honed their cyber-skills to inflict damage on U.S. national security, the American economy, and, most worrisome of all, American democracy. Meanwhile, Washington has struggled to move past its initial perception of the problem, clinging to outmoded ideas that have limited its responses. The United States has also demonstrated an unwillingness to consistently confront its adversaries in the cyber-realm and has suffered from serious self-inflicted wounds that have left it in a poor position to advance its national interests in cyberspace.
To do better, the United States must focus on the most pernicious threats of all: cyberattacks aimed at weakening societal trust, the underpinnings of democracy, and the functioning of a globalized economy. The Biden administration seems to recognize the need for a new approach. But to make significant progress, it will need to reform the country’s cyberstrategy, starting with its most fundamental aspect: the way Washington understands the problem.
SHOTS FIRED
The first known cyberattack occurred in 1988, when Robert Morris, a graduate student in computer science, released a small piece of software—eventually dubbed “the Morris worm”—that created outages across the still nascent Internet. During the two decades that followed, cybersecurity remained the concern mostly of geeky hackers and shadowy intelligence operatives. That all changed in 2010 with the Stuxnet operation, a devastatingly effective cyberattack on centrifuges that Iran used to enrich uranium. U.S. leaders soon began sounding the alarm about their own country’s vulnerability. As early as 2009, President Barack Obama had warned of cyberattacks that could plunge “entire cities into darkness.” Three years later, while briefing the Senate Armed Services Committee, Keith Alexander, the director of the National Security Agency (NSA), said it was only a matter of time before cyberattacks destroyed critical infrastructure. Around the same time, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, claimed that “the prospect of mass casualties” made cyberattacks “as dangerous as terrorism.”
These warnings seemed prescient when, in 2012, Iranian operatives targeted the oil company Saudi Aramco with malware, wiping out data on 30,000 computers. Two weeks later, Iran targeted the Qatari company RasGas, one of the largest natural gas producers in the world, in a similar strike. These cyberattacks were by far the most destructive in history and marked the first time a government had employed an offensive operation in cyberspace against a U.S. partner. The strikes rattled world energy markets. To signal support for the Saudis, Washington deployed a team of Pentagon cybersecurity experts to Riyadh.
Two months after the Iranian attacks, U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave a high-profile speech in which he warned of other countries or terrorists using cyberweapons to derail passenger trains or freight trains loaded with lethal chemicals, contaminate water supplies in major cities, shut down the power grid, or disable communication networks and military hardware. Americans, Panetta declared, needed to prepare for a kind of “cyber–Pearl Harbor: an attack that would cause physical destruction and the loss of life [and would] paralyze and shock the nation and create a new, profound sense of vulnerability.” Panetta also attempted to outline the U.S. strategy for deterrence in cyberspace, arguing that “improved defenses alone” would prove insufficient. When the U.S. national security services detected an imminent cyberattack of significant consequences, he said, they would need “the option to take action.” And so, he explained, the military had developed “the capability to conduct effective [offensive cyber-]operations to counter threats to [U.S.] national interests in cyberspace.”
Americans, Panetta declared, needed to prepare for a kind of “cyber–Pearl Harbor.”
From 2012 to 2014, the National Security Council staff held dozens of senior-level meetings to draft a complicated set of policies—known as Presidential Policy Directive 20—that established guidelines for when the United States could launch offensive cyber-operations to deter future attacks. At the Pentagon, the Joint Staff devoted several straight months to developing strict protocols for when the secretary of defense could approve an “emergency cyber action”—a targeted cyberattack to neutralize and counter an adversarial attack on the homeland.
That planning was put to the test in 2014, when North Korean operatives conducted the first-ever destructive cyberattack on U.S. soil, exfiltrating heaps of confidential information from servers belonging to Sony Pictures, which was planning to release a film that mocked the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. The hackers spread the information, including embarrassing emails, throughout the Internet; knocked out Sony’s digital networks; and threatened to carry out further “terrorist attacks” in cyberspace. For weeks, the U.S. intelligence community feared that North Korean operatives had prepositioned cybermunitions inside American critical infrastructure and would soon detonate them.
That did not happen, and in many ways, the Obama administration’s response to the attack was sophisticated and effective. The president directly called out the North Koreans for the hack, and the administration immediately levied economic sanctions, the first ever imposed in response to a cyberattack. The combination of public attribution and sanctions seemed to deter Pyongyang from conducting additional attacks. But the most important takeaway was that even after two years of planning and development, the U.S. military did not have the cyber-response capabilities Panetta had promised.
LESSONS NOT LEARNED
Part of the problem was that the Obama administration took an old-school approach to cyberspace that was stuck, in some ways, in an archaic, Cold War–style paradigm according to which cyber-operations could quickly escalate into a full-blown war. This perspective carried over into the Pentagon’s decisions when it came to building a force structure for the cyber-domain: in 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates established U.S. Cyber Command, which is subordinate to the four-star commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the notoriously slow-moving organization that oversees the country’s nuclear weapons. This structure suggested that the administration saw conflict in the cyber-domain as analogous to nuclear conflict or military activities in outer space, rather than as a dynamic sphere of operations more akin to counterterrorism or the world of special forces. Gates also determined that the new command would not carry out so-called information operations designed to influence the perceptions, thoughts, or beliefs of foreign actors in ways that would serve U.S. strategy.
These decisions delighted Washington’s Russian adversaries. During a 2013 meeting between senior U.S. defense officials and their Russian counterparts, a high-ranking officer in the Russian military, General Nikolai Makarov, taunted the Americans. “One uses information to destroy nations, not networks,” he said. “That’s why we’re happy that you Americans are so stupid as to build an entire Cyber Command that doesn’t have a mission of information warfare!” At the time, defense leaders didn’t consider that the United States might be one of the nations that Makarov had in mind. After Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election three years later, his remarks took on an even more sinister cast.
Cyber Command’s structure and mission had serious consequences in the years that followed, especially in the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). The Pentagon had structured the new organization and designed its capabilities based on existing war plans that focused on rival countries; as a result, Cyber Command had very few resources dedicated to counterterrorism. During the first two years of the conflict, poor leadership at the top, a lack of operational capability, and an unwillingness to risk intelligence sources and methods resulted in Cyber Command’s failure to disrupt ISIS operations. In 2015, this debacle led a top military commander of the U.S. effort against ISIS to declare, “I only wish that Cyber Command could inflict as much pain on ISIS as DISA does on me!” (DISA, the Defense Information Systems Agency, provides tech support to the U.S. military.)
A hacker in Kyiv, November 2016
Gleb Garanich / Reuters
Beneath these flawed decisions on organization and mission lay a deeper failure to learn the lessons of the 2014 North Korean hack of Sony: cyberattacks require an immediate response, public attribution, and diplomatic confrontation. In the wake of that attack, China and Russia each carried out an increasingly bold and insidious wave of cyberattacks. In the spring of 2014, for example, a group of operatives linked to the Kremlin attempted to derail the Ukrainian presidential election with a potent combination of hacking, disinformation, and denial-of-service attacks. Ukrainian cybersecurity experts narrowly prevented the assault from succeeding. But the White House was unwilling to confront Russia or provide Ukraine with any type of support in the cyber-domain.
Then, in December 2015, Russian-backed operatives attacked Ukraine’s electric grid, leaving parts of the country without power for days in the midst of winter weather. Once again, the Obama administration stood by without responding. This likely contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calculus that he could conduct cyber- and information operations to interfere with the U.S. presidential election in 2016 without fear of reprisal. He was right: the Obama administration did little to push back against Russian meddling during the summer and fall of 2016—until it became a crisis and hit the front page of The New York Times.
The Obama White House proved similarly unwilling to confront China over its transgressions in cyberspace. This was of a piece with the administration’s emphasis on building stable economic relations with Beijing, which also overrode concerns about Chinese human rights abuses and China’s aggressive military moves in the South China Sea. Even before North Korea’s Sony attack, China had taken advantage of this passivity to steal American intellectual property on a massive scale between 2008 and 2013, to the tune of between $200 billion and $600 billion of value per year. The strategic impact of this theft is difficult to prove empirically, but it almost certainly gave a huge lift to Beijing’s Made in China 2025 initiative, which seeks to advance China’s domestic production of artificial intelligence systems, telecommunications, clean energy technology, aerospace products, and biotechnology.
China took advantage of U.S. passivity, stealing intellectual property on a massive scale.
Later, in 2014 and 2015, Chinese intelligence operatives penetrated networks belonging to the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and exfiltrated the personnel files of around two million former or retired federal employees and more than two million current ones, including information on nearly all the background investigations of Americans who held security clearances at the top-secret level. Prodded by intense congressional pressure and media scrutiny, Obama confronted Chinese President Xi Jinping during a September 2015 meeting at the White House. Obama offered to not publicly attribute the OPM hack to China, and in exchange, Xi agreed to stop intelligence operations against U.S. firms and to establish a diplomatic working group to discuss issues related to cyberspace. Immediately following the summit, the volume of Chinese intellectual property theft plummeted, and Beijing and Washington held a round of talks about cybertheft. This positive outcome clearly demonstrated the importance of challenging China—but it also served as a reminder that the administration had waited far too long to take action.
U.S. President Donald Trump took office in 2017 with a more assertive, combative tone than that of his predecessor. His administration’s approach to U.S. rivals was inconsistent and unpredictable, but in 2018, the White House approved the elevation of Cyber Command to full combatant command status, which freed the organization from the constraints of working through U.S. Strategic Command. Later that year, National Security Adviser John Bolton announced that the administration would take a more aggressive approach to offensive cyber-operations by permitting the military, with the approval of the secretary of defense, to conduct operations below the legal threshold of an “armed attack.” This policy, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 13, set the foundation for cyber-operations, such as denial-of-service attacks and information operations, targeting the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm,” and may have prevented the group from interfering in the 2018 congressional midterm elections. These moves demonstrated the effectiveness of low-level, proactive cyber-tactics and drove home the idea that when it comes to cyberspace, deterrence need not take place on the level of grand strategy: low-tech, low-risk, targeted operations can do the trick.
The Trump administration’s approach to Russia’s cyber-campaigns was by no means an unqualified success, however, owing to the behavior of the president himself. Trump’s bizarre genuflection toward Putin undermined any coherent strategy against Russia, and Trump’s unwillingness to stand up for U.S. interests vis-à-vis Russia posed a genuine threat to American democracy. From his public invitation to the Russians to hack his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, to his endorsement of Putin’s nonsensical proposal to create a joint U.S.-Russian “impenetrable cybersecurity unit,” Trump repeatedly undermined the efforts of his own country’s law enforcement agencies, intelligence organizations, and military to protect U.S. national security.
OWN GOALS
But Trump is hardly the only American who has damaged U.S. cybersecurity in recent years. In 2013, an NSA contractor, Edward Snowden, perpetrated one of the most significant leaks in U.S. history when he provided journalists—and, according to some accounts, Chinese and Russian intelligence services—with thousands of highly classified documents revealing the expansive reach of the NSA’s global operations, including its eavesdropping on senior government officials of countries allied with the United States. It is difficult to overstate the negative impact these disclosures had on U.S. efforts to secure cyberspace. Washington essentially lost all credibility on the world stage when it came to issues regarding cyberspace. After learning that the NSA had spied on heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, European governments were in no mood to work with Washington against Chinese or Russian cyber-operations. “Trust needs to be rebuilt,” Merkel said at the time.
In the wake of the revelations, a wide range of governments—from U.S. allies in Europe to China—labeled Washington as the greatest threat to cybersecurity in the world. The fallout from Snowden’s leaks also dealt a devastating blow to the cooperation between the U.S. government and the private sector, an essential aspect of defending U.S. interests in cyberspace. Owing to a fear of bad publicity and the risk of losing business in China, U.S. technology companies that had previously collaborated on unclassified cybersecurity initiatives with the federal government decided to completely halt such cooperation.
Things got worse a few years later when the NSA lost control of some of its most sensitive hacking tools. In two separate incidents, employees of an NSA unit that was then known as the Office of Tailored Access Operations—an outfit that conducts the agency’s most sensitive cybersurveillance operations—removed extremely powerful tools from top-secret NSA networks and, incredibly, took them home. Eventually, the Shadow Brokers—a mysterious hacking group with ties to Russian intelligence services—got their hands on some of the NSA tools and released them on the Internet. As one former TAO employee told The Washington Post, these were “the keys to the kingdom”—digital tools that would “undermine the security of a lot of major government and corporate networks both here and abroad.”
One such tool, known as “EternalBlue,” got into the wrong hands and has been used to unleash a scourge of ransomware attacks—in which hackers paralyze computer systems until their demands are met—that will plague the world for years to come. Two of the most destructive cyberattacks in history made use of tools that were based on EternalBlue: the so-called WannaCry attack, launched by North Korea in 2017, which caused major disruptions at the British National Health Service for at least a week, and the NotPetya attack, carried out that same year by Russian-backed operatives, which resulted in more than $10 billion in damage to the global economy and caused weeks of delays at the world’s largest shipping company, Maersk. In the past few years, ransomware attacks have struck hospitals, schools, city governments, and pipelines, driving home the severe nature of the cyberthreat.
HOW TO DO BETTER
Washington’s decade spent in thrall to an outmoded conception of cyberconflict, the Obama administration’s excessive passivity, the Trump administration’s inconsistency, and the damage caused by leaks and sloppiness meant that when U.S. President Joe Biden took office earlier this year, he inherited a mess. Getting U.S. policy back on track will require his administration to substantially change the way that Washington conceives of and carries out cybersecurity. That will be particularly challenging given the current security environment, which is being shaped by China’s rollout of the “digital yuan,” the meteoric rise in the value and impact of cryptocurrencies, the flourishing of disinformation, and the sharp increase in ransomware attacks. Meanwhile, as nuclear negotiations with Iran intensify, the regime in Tehran will likely experiment with new cyber- and information operations to gain leverage at the negotiating table, and China and Russia will almost certainly test the relatively new administration with cyberattacks within the next year.
In this climate, the most important thing the Biden administration can do is embrace the notion that countries that can conduct destructive cyberattacks are not likely to be deterred by Washington’s own cyber-capabilities but can still be deterred by the United States’ conventional military power and economic might. When it comes to cyberspace, Washington shouldn’t try to fight fire with fire—or at least not with fire alone. The United States, after all, has many more effective ways to contain and extinguish the flames.
With that in mind, the first practical step the administration should take is to prioritize the defense of data. Working with Congress, Biden must redouble efforts to pass a national data security law that will provide citizens with the right to take legal action against companies that fail to protect their data, similar to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. The United States is one of the only major democracies in the world that does not have such a law. As a result, an extraordinarily complex patchwork of state-level privacy and data security laws have sprung up, inhibiting the development of a secure information-based economy. The current effort on Capitol Hill to require companies that provide critical infrastructure—including those in the manufacturing, energy production, and financial services sectors—to notify federal authorities of data breaches represents a promising development. But it is not nearly enough.
When it comes to cyberattacks, Washington shouldn’t fight fire with fire.
The administration should also make the rapid public attribution of cyberattacks a core component of its strategy, even in politically complex situations. The conventional wisdom used to hold that it was difficult to attribute cyberattacks with a high level of confidence. But over the past five years, advanced digital forensics have allowed intelligence agencies and private-sector cybersecurity firms to conclude with reasonable certainty who is behind most cyberattacks. That evolution is important: attribution alone has proved to be an effective, if short-lived, way to deter U.S. rivals from carrying out attacks.
Better U.S. policy will also require some organizational shifts. For starters, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, established in 2018 within the Department of Homeland Security, must become the true center of gravity for domestic cybersecurity operations; the final authority over such operations should not be granted to intelligence organizations, law enforcement agencies, or the military. In the past three years, CISA has developed important capabilities to combat election interference and disinformation campaigns. Now, it must improve its defense of federal government networks, speed the sharing of threat indicators with the private sector, and offer expertise and operational support to the providers of critical infrastructure that face threats from ransomware. To do all that, CISA will need more funding: the organization’s current annual budget of $3 billion should be tripled over the next four years, and it should eventually equal that of the NSA.
Law enforcement still has an important role to play, particularly when it comes to domestic defensive cyber-operations to thwart ransomware attacks. The FBI recently undertook an effective and creative effort to remove malicious tools implanted by Chinese intelligence services in hundreds of servers across the United States. In a novel and precedent-setting step, the bureau obtained warrants to unilaterally identify and delete the Chinese malware without the consent of the equipment’s owners. The legal authority for that operation was established by an update to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure; the administration should seek additional innovative updates to laws that will allow the FBI to take more proactive measures.
The U.S. military must also continue to adapt to the cyber-era. Biden should shape Cyber Command into something more akin to today’s nimble, flexible Joint Special Operations Command and less like the lumbering Strategic Air Command of the 1950s. Cyber Command has relied too much on the NSA to create unique, nonattributable cybertools, which can take years to develop; to increase its agility, Cyber Command should turn to less complex, “burnable” tools, that is, ones that are expendable because they are already publicly available, which means there is no need to conceal their origin. The Trump administration, to its credit, upped Washington’s game by increasing the frequency of low-tech, publicly attributable offensive cyber-operations. This had the effect of bolstering U.S. credibility in the cyber-realm—even in the face of Trump’s erratic personal conduct. For example, after Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down a U.S. surveillance drone in 2019, Cyber Command conducted a retaliatory attack on a database crucial to the group. The strike demonstrated Washington’s ability to achieve strategic goals while avoiding escalatory tactics.
Geopolitics are now conducive to U.S. leadership on cyberspace.
New legislation and new approaches would go a long way toward fixing Washington’s flawed cyberstrategy. But the government cannot improve U.S. cybersecurity on its own: it must meaningfully engage with the private sector to build cyberdefenses and cyber-deterrence. Companies are in the cross hairs of hackers of many stripes, and corporate leaders have become de facto national security decision-makers. To create shared norms and encourage the independent enforcement of cyber-protection standards, at least by publicly traded companies, Congress should consider creating a cybersecurity analog to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which protects the integrity of markets, and a version for cyberspace of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which shape the public disclosures that companies must make.
Even if Washington does everything right, it will still need global cooperation. Luckily, the geopolitical environment today is conducive to strong U.S. diplomatic leadership on issues regarding cyberspace. Washington has mostly recovered from the fallout of the Snowden and the NSA leaks, and the world has finally recognized that the Chinese and Russian models of Internet autocracy are antithetical to a liberal order and a globalized economy. Washington needs to take advantage of this state of affairs through intensive cooperation with like-minded countries, such as France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom.
The UN is not the place to do so, however: in that forum, China and Russia can advance their interests by entangling Washington and its partners in abstract debates about norms even as they wantonly violate those norms in the real world. Many strategists have suggested that NATO could serve as the center of gravity for cooperation in cyberspace between the United States and its allies and partners, but the organization was built for the Cold War and is too clunky to foster creative strategies. Instead, Washington should pursue a series of bilateral agreements to prevent the spread of black-market ransomware tools. One model might be the Proliferation Security Initiative, a multilateral effort inaugurated by the George W. Bush administration to improve the interdiction of weapons of mass destruction.
If American policymakers have learned anything in the past decade, it is that cyberconflict is a murky business, one that resists black-and-white notions about war and peace. That lack of clarity in the battle space makes it all the more important for Washington to be clear about its goals and strategies. The cyber-realm will always be messy. But U.S. cyber-policy does not have to be.
21. Cold War Warriors Are Gaining The Upper Hand Again – OpEd
Cold War warriors and the Blob.
Excerpts:
Presently the “Blob” is pushing Biden to be confrontational with Russia, using as a justification the deployment of 100,000 or so Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. For a couple of weeks, he appeared to be bending that way. More recently, Biden has altered his rhetoric, straightened out his ambiguity, and said clearly that the US will not be defending Ukraine militarily if there is a Russian invasion.
“The idea that the US is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not on the cards right now”, Biden told the press after his conversation with Putin on December 7. Still, very serious sanctions are being threatened.
At least Biden and Putin are talking to each other and plan to talk more regularly. This is to the good. Misunderstandings can be avoided, and dangerous military moves avoided.
Even so, Cold War 2 may have arrived. The Blob, although not getting everything it wants, is in the ascendency. The Russians have their counterparts. If the two ever tango together then it could be “goodbye”- miscalculation and over-confidence could lead to nuclear war.
Ukraine has become the tail that, with the help of the Blob, wags the Western dog. To avoid what would be the dire consequences of this, Biden and Putin need to breathe new life into the so-called Minsk agreement which committed the US, its major allies, Russia and Ukraine, to a step-by-step solution that could work to end hostilities.
Cold War Warriors Are Gaining The Upper Hand Again – OpEd
By Jonathan Power*
Oh, to be a Cold War warrior again! I always felt a bit sorry for those politicians, academics, soldiers and journalists who had hitched their careers to the onward march of the Cold War. It was satisfying. There was a clear enemy. The complex arithmetic on which side had what and what nuclear weapons could do was as satisfying intellectually as it was complicated.
At its most sophisticated level—the SALT and START nuclear weapons’ reduction negotiations between the US and the USA—you needed the mind of a chess master and the tenacity of an Olympic athlete. It was a marvellously rewarding feeling when once it was recognised that you were a member of this elite group.
When the Cold War ended in 1989 with a slew of arms limiting agreements these people in the Blob were effectively unemployed. While they were down and out this should have been the time for both superpowers to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. What were they needed for?
Lying around, albeit unused, they could be picked up and deployed again if relations turned for the worse—which they did. Simply put this was a self-fulfilling prophecy. They made leaders nervous and helped keep animosity alive, even if it was under the surface. If they had been abolished a turn in feelings from good to not-so-good wouldn’t have had the savage, malevolent, bite it does today.
Fortunately for the old Cold War warriors, the “Islamic Threat” and the “War on Terror” came along, which worked to renew their contracts. Never mind that few knew anything about Islam, its history or its doctrines, they raced ahead, contorting themselves with facts and opinions they had difficulty grasping. It all got knotted up with the personalities and actions of Al Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden and Iraq’s mercurial president, Saddam Hussein and the private wars they were fighting against Western interests.
Indeed, bin Laden did score a knockdown blow when his henchman hijacked passenger planes and flew them into New York’s Twin Towers. He justified it by referring to the Quran. An overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world were aghast. But many westerners insisted on tracing bin Laden’s activities to Mohammed’s teaching.
A while later, the US and its allies invaded Afghanistan, bin Laden’s redoubt.
It took a while, but not that long, before attention moved to Iraq where the pagan president of an Islamic country, Saddam Hussein, was said, by the same alarmists, to be possessing nuclear and chemical weapons. Again, this justified the US hanging on to its massive, albeit much reduced thanks to START, nuclear arsenal.
All this meant jobs for the boys—or to use the non-sexist term, the “Blob”, a word coined by Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s deputy national security advisor. It’s a splendid expression that describes the coalition of conservative-inclined politicians, military officers, academics and journalists- some Republicans, some Democrats- who effectively hold the reins on foreign policy and realpolitik and can often undermine any “peacenik” tendencies of a sitting president. (President Joe Biden before he became president was not part of this cabal.)
What next? Bin Laden and Hussein were killed. Their movements fell apart. Terrorism against American and European targets continued but on a limited scale- in the US in recent years most terrorist attacks have been carried out by white Americans, not by Islamist extremists.
But Americans—and the British too, who have fought more wars than any other country in the world—appear to need an enemy. (But not the Germans, who have had enough of war.) The benign atmosphere of the first few post-Cold War years gradually dissipated. Inevitably, there were irritants and the West’s response was partly understandable but often over the top. Russia and its policing, security apparatus and the courts had not been trained to respect human rights, so abuses were inevitable.
Under President Boris Yeltsin the economy nose-dived. He sold off state assets at bargain prices to oligarchs who in turn pledged him support, using their recently acquired media outlets, and financing his electoral campaign. They turned Russia towards a non-Western kind of kleptocracy, an activity also pursued by Yelstin’s successor, Vladimir Putin. Yet Yeltsin’s fervent pro-Americanism seemed to excuse him these excesses and the US intervened clandestinely in the 1996 election to make sure he won.
It was inevitable that this interference was later to produce a backlash of anti-Western feeling among much of the Russian people.
American leaders (and the British too—who have fought more wars than any other country in the world) appear to need an enemy, often to prop up their political support at home. The born-again, Cold War, warriors nit-picked at every Russian mistake or minor provocation. Then President Bill Clinton made the false step- one of the worst in the long history of Europe- of deciding to enlarge NATO. President George. H. W. Bush had promised Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not advance “by one inch” eastwards.
This was part of a deal that allowed the re-unification of Germany and for East Germany to become part of West Germany’s membership of NATO. Clinton pushed that deal on one side and rapidly signed up as NATO members former Warsaw Pact members- Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia. Later presidents- George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump—extended the new NATO’s reach right up to Russia’s borders. To put it mildly, this has driven Russians mad. The anger of not just Putin but 90% of his people is tangible.
One result of this is to make a great majority of Russians (Putin does not have to whip up opinion) highly sensitive about any Western encroachment of Ukraine, which for centuries was part of Russia.
Presently the “Blob” is pushing Biden to be confrontational with Russia, using as a justification the deployment of 100,000 or so Russian troops near the Ukrainian border. For a couple of weeks, he appeared to be bending that way. More recently, Biden has altered his rhetoric, straightened out his ambiguity, and said clearly that the US will not be defending Ukraine militarily if there is a Russian invasion.
“The idea that the US is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not on the cards right now”, Biden told the press after his conversation with Putin on December 7. Still, very serious sanctions are being threatened.
At least Biden and Putin are talking to each other and plan to talk more regularly. This is to the good. Misunderstandings can be avoided, and dangerous military moves avoided.
Even so, Cold War 2 may have arrived. The Blob, although not getting everything it wants, is in the ascendency. The Russians have their counterparts. If the two ever tango together then it could be “goodbye”- miscalculation and over-confidence could lead to nuclear war.
Ukraine has become the tail that, with the help of the Blob, wags the Western dog. To avoid what would be the dire consequences of this, Biden and Putin need to breathe new life into the so-called Minsk agreement which committed the US, its major allies, Russia and Ukraine, to a step-by-step solution that could work to end hostilities.
The deeply corrupt, extremely nationalistic, media-controlling, Ukrainian government, has sabotaged this. Apart from enabling peace in Ukraine, this would pull the carpet from under the Blob, a necessary act if the US and its partners are in the future to contribute to a more peaceful world.
*About the author: The writer was for 17 years a foreign affairs columnist and commentator for the International Herald Tribune, now the New York Times. He has also written many dozens of columns for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. He is the European who has appeared most on the opinion pages of these papers. Visit his website: www.jonathanpowerjournalist.com
22. Biden scores big with democracy summit, stumbles badly on Ukraine
Conclusion:
When the White House announced its plans for a Summit for Democracy, it not only fulfilled a Biden campaign pledge but also helped to bring America back to its place as democracy’s leading exponent. It stated as the first objective of the summit: “Strengthening democracy and defending against authoritarianism.” Beyond the eloquent messages delivered prior to and during the meeting, U.S. action to defend Ukraine — and Taiwan — will prove the ultimate demonstration of that commitment.
Biden scores big with democracy summit, stumbles badly on Ukraine
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · December 14, 2021
The success of President Biden’s Summit for Democracy is best shown by the reaction of the two leading authoritarian governments that were not invited to participate and were its main targets.
On Dec. 9, the first day of the virtual meeting, China Daily, the propaganda organ of the Chinese Communist Party, carried no fewer than five articles disparaging it.
The week before, the Chinese and Russian ambassadors to the United States published a rare joint letter lambasting Washington’s two-day event. They called it “an evident product of its Cold War mentality [that would] stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new ‘'dividing lines.’”
The letter touted Communist China’s “extensive, whole-process socialist democracy [that] reflects the people’s will, suits the country’s realities, and enjoys strong support from the people.” It also praised Russia as “a democratic federative law-governed state with a republican form of government.”
The angry defensiveness and patently hollow democratic claims of the two dictatorships alone paid geopolitical dividends from Biden’s democracy initiative. By striking a highly sensitive nerve, the summit — with its emphasis on political accountability, rule of law and human rights — also dramatized the terminal vulnerability of the two autocratic systems.
Whenever America, for all its imperfections, is debating political freedom with dictatorial regimes that falsely claim the mantle of democracy, it is winning and they are losing. That should suggest the merit of a sustained, long-term war of ideas designed to end those tyrannies as effectively as the ideological confrontation of Cold War I terminated the Soviet “Evil Empire” and East Europe’s communist regimes.
Unfortunately, after the summit, Biden missed the unique opportunity to demonstrate America’s commitment to one of the pair of democracies targeted for destruction by the world’s two leading despots. He had a two-hour telephone conversation with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to discuss the menacing situation on the Ukraine border, where almost 120,000 massed Russian forces are poised to invade.
Biden said he warned Putin that if he pulled the trigger, he would be met with unprecedented economic sanctions. “I made it very clear, if … he invades Ukraine there will be severe consequences … economic consequences like none he’s ever seen, or ever have been seen,” he said, adding that Putin “got the message.”
Regrettably, Putin also received other, more welcome messages from Biden — that Washington has no intention of defending Ukraine militarily: “[T]he idea that the United States is going to unilaterally use force to confront Russia invading Ukraine is not in the cards right now.” His disavowal of “unilateral” U.S. intervention suggested America might still act, “depend[ing] upon what the rest of the NATO countries were willing to do.”
But the prospect that Washington might follow another nation’s lead, rather than play its customary leadership role, effectively meant Western force was off the table, and Ukraine would be on its own in a direct conflict with Russia. It undoubtedly was music to Putin’s ears, vindicating his expectation that the Afghanistan debacle showed the current flaccid state of American and Western willingness to use force to defend even critical security partners.
Biden announced he would have a telephone conversation with Zelensky the next day. But he increased regional anxieties by also saying he would convene a session with Putin and “at least four NATO allies,” but not others, to determine what “accommodations” might be made to “bring down the temperature on the eastern front” — possibly by reducing U.S. military exercises in Europe.
A Polish foreign ministry official said, “Of course this bothers us, although we are not surprised by this approach.” Given Putin’s unyielding demands on NATO, Ukraine and other neighboring countries, Biden’s announcement raised concerns that some kind of U.S. concessionary deal cooked up with Putin might be afoot. It evokes the moment in 2012 when President Obama whispered to then-Russian President Dmitri Medvedev that on missile defense and other issues, he should tell Putin he would “have more flexibility … after my election.”
It also parallels earlier concerns of Taiwan, under severe threat from China, that Washington might negotiate its fate over its head. That prompted President Ronald Reagan to issue his Six Assurances in 1982 promising not to take any unilateral actions adverse to Taiwan.
If similar assurances were in place for Ukraine, Biden already would be in violation of most of them. “The United States would not consult with China in advance before making decisions about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan,” one assurance reads. Washington is surely “consulting” with Moscow and has inexplicably delayed sending Ukraine vitally-needed weapons to deter or defend against a Russian attack.
“The United States would not mediate between Taiwan and China,” reads another. Biden clearly seems to be “mediating” between Russia and Ukraine — and between Russia and NATO about Ukraine — rather than rejecting outright all Russian claims to Ukraine’s territory and sovereign independence and defending Ukraine’s right to join NATO, the European Union, or any other organization it chooses.
“The United States would not alter its position about the sovereignty of Taiwan … and would not pressure Taiwan to enter into negotiations with China,” says another of the commitments. Biden is explicitly pressing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia.
“The United States would not formally recognize Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan,” reads a fourth pledge. Washington is perilously close to formally acquiescing in Russia’s annexation of Crimea and accepting its claims to Eastern Ukraine as a basis for regional “peace.”
When the White House announced its plans for a Summit for Democracy, it not only fulfilled a Biden campaign pledge but also helped to bring America back to its place as democracy’s leading exponent. It stated as the first objective of the summit: “Strengthening democracy and defending against authoritarianism.” Beyond the eloquent messages delivered prior to and during the meeting, U.S. action to defend Ukraine — and Taiwan — will prove the ultimate demonstration of that commitment.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on Twitter @BoscoJosephA.
The Hill · by Joseph Bosco, opinion contributor · December 14, 2021
V/R
David Maxwell
Senior Fellow
Foundation for Defense of Democracies
Phone: 202-573-8647
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
FDD is a Washington-based nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
