Quotes of the Day:

"The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men." 

– Robert Ingersoll

"What we become depends on what we read after all of the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is a collection of books." 

– Thomas Carlyle

It cannot be repeated too often, that nothing is more fertile in prodigies than the art of being free; but there is nothing more arduous than the apprenticeship of liberty.

– Alexis de Toqueville 

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2024

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 14, 2024

3. The New Civil War Movie Is Eerily Right About How the Country Could Split Apart

4. What Are the Stakes of ‘Civil War,’ Really?

5.  75th Rangers sweep Best Ranger, Best Mortar, and International Sniper competitions

6. How the U.S. Forged a Fragile Middle Eastern Alliance to Repel Iran’s Israel Attack

7. Analysis: Israel Repelled Iran’s Huge Attack. But Only With Help From U.S. and Arab Partners.

8. Chinese Company Under Congressional Scrutiny Makes Key U.S. Drugs

9. An Essential Part of Modern Life That Armies Should Never Attack Again

10. Opinion | A stunning victory with the shield creates an opening for Israel

11. Israel is quiet on next steps against Iran — and on which partners helped shoot down missiles

12. Iran says it gave warning before attacking Israel. US says that's not true

13. Return of horse-drawn caissons to Arlington National Cemetery delayed

14. U.S. details Pentagon’s role in defending Israel from Iranian attack

15. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he will push for aid to Israel and Ukraine this week

16. How to Stop the Iran Threat: Four Critical Steps America Must Take

17. ‘Catastrophic success’ of credentialing program for soldiers may lead to cuts

18. Lessons From Gaza’s Most Vulnerable: Understanding Civilian Protection in Wartime

19. Iran’s Neutralized Counterstrike: Israel’s Air Defense Operation Was Effective—Just Not Necessarily Replicable

20. Chinese exodus leaves Cambodia boomtown with 500 'ghost buildings'

21. The US Army isn't ready to attack across rivers

22. The US Army's power to rapidly defeat enemies may be a thing of the past

23. The Middle East Could Still Explode

1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-14-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Israel’s success in defending against large-scale Iranian missile and drone strikes from Iranian territory on April 13 underscores the vulnerabilities that Ukrainian geography and the continued degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella pose for Ukrainian efforts to defend against regular Russian missile and drone strikes.
• The exhaustion of US-provided air defenses resulting from delays in the resumption of US military assistance to Ukraine combined with improvements in Russian strike tactics have led to increasing effectiveness of the Russian strike campaign in Ukraine.
• Russia’s strike campaign against Ukraine demonstrates that even a limited number of successful ballistic or cruise missile strikes can cause significant and likely long-term damage to energy and other infrastructure, highlighting the need for an effective and well-provisioned air defense umbrella capable of a sustained high rate of interception.
• The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is falsely equating the April 13 large-scale Iranian strikes targeting Israel with the April 1 Israeli strike targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Damascus, amplifying Iran’s “justification” for the April 13 strikes.
• Russian milbloggers largely responded to the April 13 Iranian strikes against Israel by suggesting that the increased threat of military escalation in the Middle East will likely draw Western, specifically US, attention and aid away from Ukraine.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that the senior Russian military command aims to seize Chasiv Yar, Donetsk Oblast by Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9.
• The Russian military’s ongoing restructuring of the Western Military District (WMD) into the Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) is reportedly shifting areas of operational responsibility (AOR) for Russian force groupings in Ukraine.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has reportedly fired the commanders of a combined arms army and motorized rifle regiment operating in southern Ukraine likely for failing to recapture areas lost during the Ukrainian summer-fall 2023 counteroffensive.
• Ukrainian forces advanced south of Kreminna and southwest of Donetsk City and Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut) and Avdiivka.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, APRIL 14, 2024

Apr 14, 2024 - ISW Press

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, April 14, 2024

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

April 14, 2024, 7:15pm ET

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

Click here to see ISW’s 3D control of terrain topographic map of Ukraine. Use of a computer (not a mobile device) is strongly recommended for using this data-heavy tool.

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 12:30pm ET on April 14. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the April 15 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Israel’s success in defending against large-scale Iranian missile and drone strikes from Iranian territory on April 13 underscores the vulnerabilities that Ukrainian geography and the continued degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella pose for Ukrainian efforts to defend against regular Russian missile and drone strikes. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force launched roughly 170 Shahed-136/131 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles at targets in Israel in a strike package similar to recent Russian strike packages against Ukraine.[1] Russian forces have experimented with cruise missile, ballistic missile, and drone strikes of varying sizes and combinations, and are now routinely conducting large, combined strikes against targets in Ukraine.[2] Iran’s similarly large, combined strike package was far less successful than recent Russian strikes in Ukraine, however, with Israeli air defenses intercepting almost all of the roughly 320 air targets except several ballistic missiles.[3] Iranian drones and missiles had to cross more than 1,000 kilometers of Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian airspace before reaching Israel, affording Israel and its allies hours to identify, track, and intercept missiles and drones on approach to Israel.[4] Russian forces launch drones and missiles from throughout occupied Ukraine and in close proximity to Ukraine from within Russia, affording Ukrainian air defenders a fraction of the time that Israel and its allies leveraged to successfully blunt the mass Iranian missile and drone strike.[5] Israel also has a robust air defense umbrella that is responsible for responding to potential attacks across shorter borders with its neighbors, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank; whereas, Ukraine has increasingly degraded air defense capabilities to employ against missile and drone strikes across a much wider frontline in Ukraine as well as its international borders with Belarus and Russia. Ukraine also currently lacks the capability to conduct air-to-air interception with fixed wing aircraft as Israel and its allies did on the night of April 13. Ukraine’s large size compared to Israel makes it more difficult for Ukraine to emulate the density of air defense coverage that Israel enjoys, especially amid continued delays in US security assistance.

The exhaustion of US-provided air defenses resulting from delays in the resumption of US military assistance to Ukraine combined with improvements in Russian strike tactics have led to increasing effectiveness of the Russian strike campaign in Ukraine.[6] Without substantial and regular security assistance to Ukraine, Russian strikes threaten to constrain Ukraine’s long-term warfighting capabilities and set operational conditions for Russia to achieve significant gains on the battlefield.[7] Ukraine requires significant provisions of Western air defense systems and fighter jets capable of intercepting drones and missiles in order to establish a combined air defense umbrella that is even remotely as effective as the one Israel and its allies successfully used on April 13.[8]

Russia’s strike campaign against Ukraine demonstrates that even a limited number of successful ballistic or cruise missile strikes can cause significant and likely long-term damage to energy and other infrastructure, highlighting the need for an effective and well-provisioned air defense umbrella capable of a sustained high rate of interception. Recent large-scale Russian strike packages using drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles against Ukraine have caused significant damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure. All 15 ballistic missiles and seven of the 44 cruise missiles that Russian forces launched against Ukrainian energy facilities on the night of March 21 to 22 successfully penetrated Ukrainian air defenses.[9] Some of the missiles significantly damaged the Dnipro Hydroelectric Power Plant (HPP) in Zaporizhzhia City and took it completely offline, and it will take some time to repair the plant.[10] Three of seven ballistic missiles and eight of 30 cruise missiles that Russian forces launched against Ukrainian HPPs on the night of March 28 to 29 successfully penetrated Ukrainian air defenses, damaging HPPs and thermal power plants (TPPs) in central and western Ukraine.[11] All 18 ballistic missiles and six of the 24 cruise missiles that Russian forces launched against Ukrainian energy infrastructure on the night of April 10 to 11 successfully penetrated Ukrainian air defenses, of which five missiles completely destroyed the Trypilska TPP in Kyiv Oblast.[12] The Russian strikes against Ukrainian energy facilities on the night of April 10 to 11 also damaged energy facilities in Zaporizhia and Lviv oblasts.[13] The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on April 11 that Russian strikes, not including the April 10 to 11 strike series, have disrupted 80 percent of the generation capacity of DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, which supplies about 20 percent of Ukraine’s power.[14]

Ukrainian Deputy Energy Minister Svitlana Hrynchuk told CNN in an article published on April 14 that successful Russian strikes over the course of just a few days in the past few weeks have destroyed a year's worth of Ukrainian repairs to energy facilities following the winter 2022-2023 Russian strike campaign.[15] A Ukrainian source told CNN that Russian forces have changed their strike tactics to launch a large number of missiles and drones simultaneously against a limited number of targets. DTEK Head Maksym Timchenko stated that Russia began targeting Ukrainian energy generation infrastructure, instead of transmission systems, in late March 2024.[16] DTEK previously warned that more accurate and concentrated Russian strikes are inflicting greater damage against Ukrainian energy facilities than previous Russian attacks did.[17] Israel, the US, and their allies and partners should be cognizant of the risk that even small numbers of missiles penetrating defense umbrellas can cause nonlinear damage to modern societies if they hit the right targets.

The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is falsely equating the April 13 large-scale Iranian strikes targeting Israel with the April 1 Israeli strike targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Damascus, amplifying Iran’s “justification” for the April 13 strikes. The Russian MFA issued a statement on April 14 in response to the April 13 Iranian strikes amplifying Iran's claim that Iran conducted the April 13 strikes as an act of “self-defense” in response to claimed Israeli airstrikes on Iranian targets, including the April 1 strike targeting IRGC officials in Damascus.[18] The Russian MFA reiterated its condemnation of the April 1 Israeli strike and accused Western members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) of impeding the UNSC’s ability to “adequately respond” to the April 1 Israeli strike targeting IRGC officials. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov held a phone call with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian later on April 14, and the Russian MFA again amplified Iran’s claim that the April 13 strikes were a response to the April 1 Israeli strike in the readout of the call.[19] Russian MFA Spokesperson Maria Zakharova notably refused an Israeli request for Russia to condemn the April 13 Iranian strikes, claiming that Israel has never condemned a Ukrainian strike against Russia and criticizing Israel for its statements supporting Ukraine.[20] The Russian government is willfully furthering an information operation to justify Iran’s April 13 strikes against Israel to the international community.

Russian milbloggers largely responded to the April 13 Iranian strikes against Israel by suggesting that the increased threat of military escalation in the Middle East will likely draw Western, specifically US, attention and aid away from Ukraine. Russian milbloggers leaned into an established information operation on April 13 and 14 claiming that the Western media will slowly stop covering the war in Ukraine as Western attention turns to the risk of escalation in the Middle East and suggested that the US and Ukraine’s other Western allies may begin to falter in their expected aid deliveries to Ukraine because the West may prioritize aiding Israel.[21] Several Russian milbloggers specifically gloated that if Ukraine does not receive additional Western air defense systems, Russian drones and missiles will “safely cruise” in uncontested Ukrainian air space.[22] Russian milbloggers and Kremlin officials, including Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitri Peskov, expressed similar hopes following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.[23] Significant delays in US military assistance have already created shortages in Ukraine’s air defense missile and ammunition stockpiles, hindering Ukraine’s ability to defend against Russian frontline offensive operations and drone and missile strikes against rear areas, creating opportunities that Russian forces are actively exploiting. Russian President Vladimir Putin is likely operating on the assumption that US military assistance to Ukraine will either be further delayed or permanently ended, and any evidence supporting that notion will likely encourage Russian efforts to strain Ukrainian forces past their breaking point on the battlefield and in deep rear areas. ISW continues to assess that Ukraine’s ability to defend against Russian offensive operations and Russia’s ongoing strike campaign is heavily dependent on continued US security assistance and that the longer Ukrainian forces go under-provisioned, the harder it will be to defend against Russian offensive operations.[24]

Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that the senior Russian military command aims to seize Chasiv Yar, Donetsk Oblast by Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9.[25] The Russian military command’s objective to seize Chasiv Yar in only three and a half weeks indicates that the Russian command likely assesses that Russian forces will be able to seize the town at a faster tempo of offensive operations than efforts to seize Bakhmut in May 2023 or Avdiivka in February 2024.[26] The Russian military command likely assesses that continued Ukrainian critical munitions shortages will enable Russian forces to seize Chasiv Yar in several weeks, despite ISW’s assessment that Russian forces have currently only reached the easternmost part of the Kanal Microraion in easternmost Chasiv Yar. The Russian command has routinely set unrealistic goals for Russian advances, however, and a Russian milblogger expressed hope that Russian forces may be able to just enter the Novyi Microraion in southeastern Chasiv Yar by May 9.[27] The Russian military will likely intend to capitalize on significant Ukrainian artillery and air defense shortages that are crucial to Ukrainian defense and that were not constraining Ukraine’s defense of Bakhmut or Avdiivka to the same degree as their current constraints, however. The Russian military command will likely continue efforts against Chasiv Yar until the effort culminates, but Russian forces may be able to make speedier advances than in prior efforts given the degree of Ukraine’s current artillery and air defense shortages.

The Russian military’s ongoing restructuring of the Western Military District (WMD) into the Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) is reportedly shifting areas of operational responsibility (AOR) for Russian force groupings in Ukraine. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported on April 14 that Russian units part of the Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod border groupings will form part of the LMD and that elements of the 11th Army Corps (AC) and the 138th Motorized Rifle Brigade (6th Combined Arms Army [CAA]) and likely elements of the currently-forming 44th AC and the 25th Motorized Rifle Brigade (6th CAA) will form the “Northern” Grouping of Forces alongside existing units on the border in Bryansk, Kursk, and Belgorod oblasts.[28] This report suggests that the entire 6th CAA and 11th AC are also subordinated to the LMD, which would be consistent with the boundaries of the military district and the permanent stations of those formations. Mashovets also reported that the 1st Guards Tank Army, 20th CAA, and 25th CAA will integrate into the MMD and be responsible for the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on the Kharkiv-Luhansk Oblast axis — an observation also largely consistent with the military district boundaries and permanent stations of those formations. Mashovets also speculated on possible commanders for the MMD as well as the LMD and Northern Grouping of Forces, but ISW is unable to confirm these speculations.[29] Mashovets’ report suggests that the LMD’s Northern Grouping of Forces is pulling Russian formations currently operating on the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line — including elements of the 6th CAA and 11th AC — to the northern international border and elsewhere in the theater, which will undermine any Russian offensive efforts on that line and may create confusion in the Russian military command as it seeks to disentangle the WMD into the MMD and LMD.[30] This redeployment could support possible future Russian operations against Kharkiv City to which Ukrainian leaders have previously alluded.[31]

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has reportedly fired the commanders of a combined arms army and motorized rifle regiment operating in southern Ukraine likely for failing to recapture areas lost during the Ukrainian summer-fall 2023 counteroffensive. Russian sources claimed on April 13 and 14 that the Russian military command fired Lieutenant General Arkady Marzoev, commander of the Russian 18th Combined Arms Army (Southern Military District [SMD]) that has been fighting near Krynky, Kherson Oblast, as well as the commander of the 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Division, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], SMD) that has been fighting near Robotyne, Zaporizhia Oblast.[32] ISW is unable to confirm these reported firings. Elements of the 18th CAA have been repelling Ukrainian attacks and attempting to push Ukrainian forces from their positions in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast since Ukrainian forces established a limited tactical bridgehead in November 2023, and have notably failed.[33] Elements of the 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment have been conducting periodic counterattacks to recapture territory in and around Robotyne since September 2023 and suffered significant degradation as a result.[34] Elements of the 18th CAA and the 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment have been unable to recapture all the territory that Ukrainian forces captured in Zaporizhia and Kherson oblasts during the summer-fall 2023 counteroffensive. If the Russian sources’ speculations are accurate, the Russian MoD is likely replacing these commanders in hopes that new leadership will oversee the seizure of more territory around Robotyne and Krynky, thereby allowing the Russian MoD to claim with some degree of believability that Russia has undone the results of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Key Takeaways:

• Israel’s success in defending against large-scale Iranian missile and drone strikes from Iranian territory on April 13 underscores the vulnerabilities that Ukrainian geography and the continued degradation of Ukraine’s air defense umbrella pose for Ukrainian efforts to defend against regular Russian missile and drone strikes.
• The exhaustion of US-provided air defenses resulting from delays in the resumption of US military assistance to Ukraine combined with improvements in Russian strike tactics have led to increasing effectiveness of the Russian strike campaign in Ukraine.
• Russia’s strike campaign against Ukraine demonstrates that even a limited number of successful ballistic or cruise missile strikes can cause significant and likely long-term damage to energy and other infrastructure, highlighting the need for an effective and well-provisioned air defense umbrella capable of a sustained high rate of interception.
• The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) is falsely equating the April 13 large-scale Iranian strikes targeting Israel with the April 1 Israeli strike targeting Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Damascus, amplifying Iran’s “justification” for the April 13 strikes.
• Russian milbloggers largely responded to the April 13 Iranian strikes against Israel by suggesting that the increased threat of military escalation in the Middle East will likely draw Western, specifically US, attention and aid away from Ukraine.
• Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi reported that the senior Russian military command aims to seize Chasiv Yar, Donetsk Oblast by Russia’s Victory Day holiday on May 9.
• The Russian military’s ongoing restructuring of the Western Military District (WMD) into the Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) is reportedly shifting areas of operational responsibility (AOR) for Russian force groupings in Ukraine.
• The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) has reportedly fired the commanders of a combined arms army and motorized rifle regiment operating in southern Ukraine likely for failing to recapture areas lost during the Ukrainian summer-fall 2023 counteroffensive.
• Ukrainian forces advanced south of Kreminna and southwest of Donetsk City and Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Chasiv Yar (west of Bakhmut) and Avdiivka.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

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

Ukrainian forces made confirmed advances south of Kreminna as of April 14. Geolocated footage published on April 14 indicates that Ukrainian forces advanced east of Bilohorivka (south of Kreminna), although the Ukrainian advance was likely not recent.[35] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces recently marginally advanced to the eastern outskirts of Terny (west of Kreminna), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[36]

Ukrainian Air Force Commander Lieutenant General Mykola Oleshchuk thanked Ukrainian pilots on April 14 for conducting a successful strike against an unspecified Russian military object in occupied Luhansk Oblast on April 13.[37] Ukrainian Air Force Spokesperson Major Ilya Yevlash stated that Ukrainian pilots struck a Russian control post in occupied Luhansk Oblast with Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles and noted that Ukraine needs additional long-range missiles to conduct similar strikes against Russian military infrastructure in occupied Ukraine.[38] Russian sources claimed on April 13 that Ukrainian forces conducted a Storm Shadow strike against the Luhansk Machine Building Plant in occupied Luhansk City.[39]

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

Positional engagements continued northeast of Bakhmut on April 14. Positional engagements continued east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske; southeast of Siversk near Vyimka, Spirne, and Vesele; and south of Siversk near Rozdolivka.[40]

Russian forces recently made confirmed advances east of Chasiv Yar on April 14 and continued offensive operations in the area. Geolocated footage published on April 14 indicates that Russian forces advanced northeast of the Kanal Microraion (easternmost Chasiv Yar) and along a windbreak southeast of Chasiv Yar.[41] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced north of Ivanivske, although ISW has not observed visual evidence of this claim.[42] Fighting continued near the Novyi Microraion in southeastern Chasiv Yar; northeast of Chasiv Yar near Bohdanivka; southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, and Opytne; and south of Chasiv Yar near Niu York.[43] Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn stated that Russian forces are assaulting Chasiv Yar and the surrounding areas in small assault groups “almost 24 hours a day” and that the Bakhmut and Avdiivka directions are the most active sectors of the frontline in eastern Ukraine).[44] Elements of the Russian 58th Spetsnaz Battalion (1st Donetsk People’s Republic Army Corps [DNR AC]) are reportedly operating near Chasiv Yar; elements of the 11th Airborne (VDV) Brigade are reportedly operating near Ivanivske; and elements of the “Alexander Nevsky” Volunteer Reconnaissance and Assault Brigade (Volunteer Corps) are reportedly operating near Klishchiivka.[45]

Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance west of Avdiivka, amid continued Russian offensive operations in the area on April 14. Geolocated footage published on April 14 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced east of Novobakhmutivka (northwest of Avdiivka).[46] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in the direction of Yasnobrodivka (west of Avdiivka), although ISW has not observed visual evidence of this claim.[47] Fighting continued northwest of Avdiivka near Novobakhmutivka, Novokalynove, and Berdychi; west of Avdiivka near Semenivka, Umanske, and Tonenke; and southwest of Avdiivka near Pervomaiske, Vodyane, and Nevelske.[48] Elements of the Russian 114th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) reportedly continue operating near Semenivka.[49]

Ukrainian forces recently regained a position southwest of Donetsk City amid continued positional fighting in the area on April 14. Geolocated footage published on April 13 shows that Ukrainian forces marginally advanced along Timiryazeva Street in southwestern Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[50] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces continued advancing westward along Tsentralna Street in central Novomykhailivka, although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[51] Positional fighting also continued west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka.[52]

Positional fighting continued in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area on April 14. Positional fighting continued south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske and Urozhaine.[53] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command Spokesperson Colonel Nataliya Humenyuk stated that Russian forces in southern Ukraine — likely referring to the frontline between Kamyanske, Zaporizhia Oblast (northwest of Robotyne) to Vuhledar, Donetsk Oblast — are rotating units and are shifting assaults east to the Velyka Novosilka area.[54] Humenyuk stated that Ukrainian forces are observing an increased number of Russian assaults near Velyka Novosilka and fewer near Robotyne and that Russian forces are not using armored vehicles in these assaults.

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

Positional fighting continued near Robotyne and northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne) in western Zaporizhia Oblast on April 14.[55] Elements of the Russian 7th Airborne (VDV) Division are reportedly operating near Robotyne.[56]

Positional fighting continued in the east (left) bank of Kherson Oblast, including near Krynky, on April 14.[57]

Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign (Russian Objective: Target Ukrainian military and civilian infrastructure in the rear and on the frontline)

Russian forces conducted a limited series of missile and drone strikes against Ukraine on the night of April 13 to 14 and later on April 14. Ukrainian military officials reported that Russian forces launched 10 Shahed-136/131 drones from Kursk Oblast and four S-300/S-400 missiles from occupied Donetsk Oblast.[58] Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces downed all 10 Shahed drones over Kharkiv Oblast and that Russian forces struck Selydove, Donetsk Oblast with the four S-300 missiles and a D-30 universal joint glide munition (UMPB), a guided glide bomb.[59] Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Synehubov stated that Russian forces struck critical infrastructure in Kharkiv City with at least two Shaheds, however.[60] Ukraine’s Southern Operational Command reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed two Russian Kh-59 cruise missiles targeting Odesa City later on April 14.[61]

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

See topline text.

Russian Technological Adaptations (Russian objective: Introduce technological innovations to optimize systems for use in Ukraine)

Nothing significant to report.

Ukrainian Defense Industrial Efforts (Ukrainian objective: Develop its defense industrial base to become more self-sufficient in cooperation with US, European, and international partners)

ISW is not publishing coverage of Ukrainian defense industrial efforts today.

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

ISW is not publishing coverage of activities in Russian-occupied area today.

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

Ukrainian officials warned that Russian forces may be preparing to conduct a false flag provocation at the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) amid Russian accusations that Ukrainian forces are behind recent alleged drone strikes against the ZNPP. The Ukrainian General Staff warned on April 14 that intelligence indicates that Russia is preparing to conduct another false flag provocation at the ZNPP.[62] Russian sources have recently accused Ukrainian forces of conducting drone strikes against the ZNPP and this information operation could be part of the Kremlin’s effort to lay the groundwork for a false flag attack at the ZNPP.[63] Russia has routinely raised the specter of a radiological incident at the ZNPP to prompt negotiations with international organizations, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that aim to force these organizations to meet with Russian occupation officials and legitimize Russia’s occupation of the ZNPP and by extension Russia’s occupation of sovereign Ukrainian land.[64]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, April 14, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-april-14-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Senior Iranian military and political officials praised the alleged success of the April 13 Iranian attack against Israel and simultaneously warned the United States that Iran would target US bases in the region if the US supported an Israeli response.
• A senior Iranian military official asserted that Iran has adopted a new policy to target Israel directly from Iranian territory due to the “success” of the Iranian attack on Israel.
• Israel and its partners are discussing possible responses to the Iranian attack on Israel.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to clearing operations in Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas rejected a US-proposed ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal.
• West Bank: A Palestinian militia claimed three shooting attacks in and around the West Bank in retaliation for recent settler violence.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel during and after the Iranian attack on Israel.

IRAN UPDATE, APRIL 14, 2024

Apr 14, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, April 14, 2024

Andie Parry, Alexandra Braverman, Ashka Jhaveri, Johanna Moore, Peter Mills, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

The Iran Update provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities abroad that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests. It also covers events and trends that affect the stability and decision-making of the Iranian regime. The Critical Threats Project (CTP) at the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) provides these updates regularly based on regional events. Click here to see CTP and ISW’s interactive map of Israeli ground operations. This map is updated daily alongside the static maps present in this report. Click here to subscribe to the Iran Update.

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate with one another to secure their collective interests. Tehran considers itself to be both part of the alliance and its leader. Iran furnishes these groups with varying levels of financial, military, and political support in exchange for some degree of influence or control over their actions. Some are traditional proxies that are highly responsive to Iranian direction, while others are partners over which Iran exerts more limited influence. Members of the Axis of Resistance are united by their grand strategic objectives, which include eroding and eventually expelling American influence from the Middle East, destroying the Israeli state, or both. Pursuing these objectives and supporting the Axis of Resistance to those ends have become cornerstones of Iranian regional strategy.

We do not report in detail on war crimes because these activities are well-covered in Western media and do not directly affect the military operations we are assessing and forecasting. We utterly condemn violations of the laws of armed conflict and the Geneva Conventions and crimes against humanity even though we do not describe them in these reports.

For additional CTP-ISW analysis of the April 13 Iranian Strike Targeting Israel, please see Iran’s Attempt to Hit Israel with a Russian-Style Strike Package Failed...for Now by Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan

Senior Iranian military and political officials praised the alleged success of the April 13 Iranian attack against Israel and simultaneously warned the United States that Iran would target US bases in the region if the US supported an Israeli response.[1] Iranian Armed Forces General Staff (AFGS) Chief Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri warned that, if the United States supports any Israeli response to its attack, Iran will target US bases in the region.[2] Bagheri further specified that Iran intended to target the IDF Air Force Nevatim airbase in the Negev desert and the IDF intelligence center in Mt. Hermon during the attack against Israel. Iranian missiles caused limited damage to the Nevatim airbase, and the base remains operational.[3] There are no reports of any damage to the intelligence center in northern Israel. The IRGC issued a warning to the United States not to get involved in a response to the Iranian operation.[4] Artesh Commander Maj. Gen Abdol Rahim Mousavi stated that, if the United States uses any of its regional bases to support Israel, then Iran will consider the US bases legitimate targets and retaliate accordingly.[5] Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi stated that, if Israel responds to the Iranian operation, Iran will retaliate with greater severity than its April 13 attack.[6] Raisi emphasized that Israel’s supporters, presumably meaning the United States, should ”appreciate” the ”responsible and propionate” nature of the Iranian April 13 operation.

A senior Iranian military official asserted on April 14 that Iran has adopted a new policy to target Israel directly from Iranian territory due to the “success” of the Iranian attack on Israel.[7] IRGC Commander Maj. Gen Hossein Salami stated that Iran has adopted a new “equation” for confronting Israel following the “success” of the attack, which Iran dubbed the “True Promise” operation.[8] Salami warned that, should Israel attack Iran or Iranian targets abroad, Iran will retaliate by launching attacks targeting Israel directly from Iranian territory.[9] This would represent a significant shift in Iranian policy, where historically Iran has relied on proxy and partners to launch attacks targeting Israel rather than conducting the attacks itself.

Israel and its partners are discussing possible responses to the Iranian attack on Israel. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said that the Iranian attack was “like a declaration of war” but emphasized that Israelis “are not war seekers.”[10] Israeli War Cabinet member Benny Gantz stated that Israel would respond to the attack at a time of its choosing.[11] Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Israel Katz stated, “We said that, if Iran attacks Israel, Israel will attack Iran – that is still valid.”[12] US President Joe Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the night of April 13 in a phone call that the United States will not participate in an offensive response to Iran’s attack.[13] Leaders from the Group of 7 nations (G7) convened on April 14 to coordinate a “diplomatic response” to Iran’s attack, according to the White House.[14] An unspecified Biden administration official said that the G7 leaders discussed the possibility of recognizing the IRGC as a terrorist organization, which the United States did in 2019.[15]

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Senior Iranian military and political officials praised the alleged success of the April 13 Iranian attack against Israel and simultaneously warned the United States that Iran would target US bases in the region if the US supported an Israeli response.
• A senior Iranian military official asserted that Iran has adopted a new policy to target Israel directly from Iranian territory due to the “success” of the Iranian attack on Israel.
• Israel and its partners are discussing possible responses to the Iranian attack on Israel.
• Northern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to clearing operations in Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza.
• Political Negotiations: Hamas rejected a US-proposed ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal.
• West Bank: A Palestinian militia claimed three shooting attacks in and around the West Bank in retaliation for recent settler violence.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel during and after the Iranian attack on Israel.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Erode the will of the Israeli political establishment and public to sustain clearing operations in the Gaza Strip
• Reestablish Hamas as the governing authority in the Gaza Strip

Israeli forces continued to clearing operations in Nuseirat along Wadi Gaza on April 14. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 401st Brigade combat engineers built two bridges for Israeli tanks to cross Wadi Gaza, a natural separation between the north and south of the Gaza Strip.[16] Elements of the IDF 162nd Division, including the Nahal and 401st brigades, are operating in the area to kill Palestinian fighters and destroy military infrastructure.[17][18] Israeli forces destroyed rocket launch sites in the central Gaza Strip that several Palestinian militias used .[19] Palestinian fighters had prepared to launch the rockets into Israel. Israeli forces have killed dozens of Palestinian fighters in close-range engagements over the past several days of operations in the Nuseirat area.[20]

Palestinian fighters claimed a single attack targeting Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip on April 14. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which is the self-proclaimed military wing of Fatah, reported that its fighters mortared Israeli forces north of Nuseirat.[21]

Hamas rejected a US-proposed ceasefire and hostage-for-prisoner exchange deal on April 13.[22] The proposal would have reportedly established a six-week ceasefire in exchange for the release of 40 Israeli hostages held by Palestinian militias in the Gaza Strip.[23] Mediators presented Hamas with the US proposal on April 7.[24] Hamas reiterated in its rejection that the group would only accept a ceasefire proposal that includes a permanent ceasefire, the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the entire Gaza Strip, the return of the displaced Palestinians, an increase in the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and the start of reconstruction efforts.[25] [26] The Israeli Prime Minister's Office confirmed that Hamas rejected the ceasefire proposal on April 14 and said that the proposal ”included the most significant flexibility on Israel's part” since the beginning of negotiations.[27]

The IDF Arabic-language spokesperson reiterated on April 14 that Palestinians cannot return to the northern Gaza Strip, calling the area “a war zone.”.[28] The spokesperson specified that Palestinian civilians should not try to migrate to the northern Gaza Strip on the Salah al Din or al Rashid roads despite ”rumors” the IDF is allowing civilians to return.[29] Local Palestinian sources posted footage of crowds of Palestinians civilians walking to the northern Gaza Strip on al Rashid Road on April 14 as a munition exploded on near the road.[30] Israeli military correspondents previously hypothesized that the recent IDF withdrawal from the southern Gaza Strip would enable displaced Palestinians in Rafah to migrate to parts of Khan Younis and the central Gaza Strip.[31] [32]

Several Palestinian political factions, including Hamas, issued supportive statements of Iran’s April 13 attack on Israel. The groups called the Iranian attack a “natural” and “justified” response to the April 1 Israeli airstrike that targeted Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officials in Damascus.[33] The Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestinian, a secular leftist Palestinian group fighting alongside Hamas in the war, called the Iranian attack an “important turning point“ in the war.[34]

Palestinian fighters did not conduct any indirect fire attacks from the Gaza Strip into Israel on April 14.

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed three shooting attacks on April 13 in and around the West Bank in retaliation for recent settler violence. The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades targeted an Israeli military checkpoint, an Israeli settlement near Tulkarm, and an Israeli town on the border with the West Bank..[35] An Israeli Army Radio West Bank correspondent posted a flyer signed by 11 West Bank Rabbis in response to the death of a 14-year-old boy who was murdered near the Malachi HaShalom settlement on April 12.[36] The flyer called on Israelis to strengthen and grow settlements across the West Bank in response to the boy’s death. Palestinian media claimed that Israeli settlers have targeted Palestinians in Auja, Huwwara, Jalazoun refugee camp, Kafr Shuba, and Nabe Ghazzal since CTP-ISW’s last data cut off on April 13.[37] CTP-ISW cannot independently verify these reports.

This map is not an exhaustive depiction of clashes and demonstrations in the West Bank.

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Deter Israel from conducting a ground operation into Lebanon
• Prepare for an expanded and protracted conflict with Israel in the near term
• Expel the United States from Syria

Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least four attacks from southern Lebanon into northern Israel during and after the Iranian attack on Israel on April 13.[38]

Recorded reports of attacks; CTP-ISW cannot independently verify impact.

3. The New Civil War Movie Is Eerily Right About How the Country Could Split Apart

I will cease with the reviews of this movie after this Pooltico one and the next NY Times one. I think both of these reviews do the best job of describing the film and some of the criticism and analysis surrounding it

Excerpts:

The result is a take on wartime life that’s scarier than your standard Hollywood military flick — and especially resonant in these post-Jan. 6 times, when death threats come to federal judges overseeing Donald Trump’s trials, a lawmaker’s spouse is bludgeoned with a hammer and a gun-toting extremist shows up at the home of a Supreme Court justice. As Garland portrays it, the violence of war is much more random — and, probably, much more accurate.

Partly, that’s a matter of history: The real-life Civil War of the 1860s was also marked by terrifying brutality, far away from the official battlefields. “Much of the worst unnecessary violence of the American Civil War happened because of what we would call today insurgents — what they called guerrillas,” says Aaron Sheehan-Dean, a historian at Louisiana State University and the author of The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War.

...

As the 2024 election approaches, Cooter agrees, close militia watchers anticipate a greater threat from independent actors than from organized groups. There are no signs of specific plots or threats right now, she says, but if anything erupts, it’s likely to happen on the local or state level: protests at state capitals, violence at election locations where votes are counted. And it’s likely to come from rogue actors, not broader organizations.

“We’re not seeing any mass coordination,” she says. Any violence after the election is “probably going to be small groups, individuals, taking it upon themselves to lash out at something they perceive in their communities.”

It’s that small-scale threat, honestly, that makes Civil War feel so scary — more horror flick than political parable, though maybe a little bit of both.

The movie looks dimly at everyone’s violence fetishes: the dudes in camouflage play-acting as warlords, the adrenaline-junkie journalists who rush excitedly into war zones, the movie audiences who pay good money to sit in a theater and watch symbols of America go up in flames.

But it’s one thing to stare at a CGI-driven battle and get a vicarious thrill from imaginary explosions and popcorn gore. It’s quite another to imagine yourself running into Jesse Plemons on a rural road with an AK-47, questioning who you are and how you fit into his world. He believes that he’s right — or at least that he’s righteous. And he’s not taking orders from anyone but himself.

The New Civil War Movie Is Eerily Right About How the Country Could Split Apart

By JOANNA WEISS

04/13/2024 07:00 AM EDT

Joanna Weiss is a writer in Boston and a contributing writer for Politico Magazine.

Politico ·

The political violence in Alex Garland’s dystopian thriller is chaotic and random — which is exactly what makes it so scary. The real Civil War was a lot like that, too.

Kirsten Dunst plays a journalist in the movie Civil War. | Murray Close/A24 via AP

By Joanna Weiss

04/13/2024 07:00 AM EDT

Joanna Weiss is a writer in Boston and a contributing writer for Politico Magazine.

When the trailers for the movie Civil War dropped a few months ago, the internet assumed it knew what was coming. The promos, after all, leaned hard into disaster flick tropes: army helicopters descending on D.C., armored tanks rolling through urban streets, the Lincoln Memorial blown up spectacularly. On movie websites and Reddit threads, some called it irresponsible to glorify violence in a tense election year. On message boards populated by militia members, some imagined they’d be portrayed as heroes, fighting against the tyranny they always knew was coming.

All of them were wrong, since, like many movie trailers, these only loosely reflected what the movie is actually about. Yes, Civil War, which opened nationwide Friday, is packed with plenty of violence. But not on the scale you’d expect. The film is light on battlefield set-pieces and CGI explosions, spends scant time with government figures — and barely touches on political issues. Its main villains are insurgents who dot the war-torn landscape and exercise power, not to any greater end, but simply because they can.

The result is a take on wartime life that’s scarier than your standard Hollywood military flick — and especially resonant in these post-Jan. 6 times, when death threats come to federal judges overseeing Donald Trump’s trials, a lawmaker’s spouse is bludgeoned with a hammer and a gun-toting extremist shows up at the home of a Supreme Court justice. As Garland portrays it, the violence of war is much more random — and, probably, much more accurate.

Partly, that’s a matter of history: The real-life Civil War of the 1860s was also marked by terrifying brutality, far away from the official battlefields. “Much of the worst unnecessary violence of the American Civil War happened because of what we would call today insurgents — what they called guerrillas,” says Aaron Sheehan-Dean, a historian at Louisiana State University and the author of The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War.

Those independent actors, scattered and loosely organized, were the precursors to some of today’s armed militia groups and the unaffiliated radicals who latch on to their ideas. And in the event of a real-life political breakdown, some experts say, these are the people who might feel most empowered and unchecked. “Civil War” performs the sleight of hand of imagining a large-scale war, big enough to match our metaphorical divisions as we fight over blue and red, R and D.

But the real threat it lays out has little to do with those battle lines. It’s not the autocracy, but the chaos.

Civil War is set in what looks like present-day America, plus or minus some wide-scale bloodshed. A group of secessionist states known as the Western Forces, led by Texas and California, has been battling an authoritarian president (Nick Offerman) who is serving a third term, has disbanded the FBI and physically attacks his political enemies. (The movie takes pains to pretend it’s not an allegory about Trump, but it opens with Offerman giving a distinctly Trumpian speech on the eve of a fight: “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind.”)

Still, the opening scenes are the last we see of Offerman, or war, for a long while. The protagonists aren’t combatants, but observers: a group of war correspondents, including a world-weary Reuters photographer named Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), who pack into an old SUV labeled “PRESS” and travel from New York to Washington, hoping to get an interview with the president before his regime falls. Traveling to Washington is a suicide mission, they’re told, because journalists crossing city limits are “shot on sight.”

Skirting around the major fighting zones — they’re warned not to go anywhere near Philadelphia — they take a circuitous route through Pittsburgh, West Virginia and Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Western Front forces have gathered.

It’s the kind of road trip you’d see in a zombie movie, as the characters zoom through eerily quiet back roads, passing abandoned cars and empty storefronts, stumbling on pockets of peril. A group of men with rifles sit menacingly at a gas station, where they’ve been torturing their neighbors for reasons unknown. A pair of men swathed in expert camouflage aim at an unseen sniper at an abandoned “winter wonderland” theme park. A gun-wielding thug in flamboyant red sunglasses (Jesse Plemons) stands beside a dump truck that holds a shockingly large pile of bodies. Some of these armed men wear military-style fatigues, but it’s unclear who they’re fighting for — and in some cases, they don’t seem to know themselves. They’re moved by self-aggrandizement, or the sheer thrill of power, or a sense that this is the best way to survive.

“Nobody’s giving us orders, man,” one of the fighters in the winter theme park says. “Someone’s trying to kill us. And we are trying to kill them.”

Independent fighters, known at the time as guerrillas, were also common in the real-life Civil War, says Sheehan-Dean, the LSU historian. Most were white Confederate sympathizers who didn’t want to join the official army — either because they saw it as an emasculating experience with humiliating disciplinary tactics, or because they thought they could fight better and bolder on their own. In contrast to a robotic, regimented army, where soldiers fired huge volleys in unison under a central command, the guerrillas used smaller pistols and hit-and-run tactics to attack Union army detachments and civilian Union sympathizers. They also created a kind of cultural myth around themselves, often wearing distinctive embroidered shirts and priding themselves in their expert skills as horsemen.

“They imagined themselves as fighting with a kind of elan and flair that the corporatized and mechanized infantrymen didn’t have,” Sheehan-Dean says. And because they weren’t associated with an official army, they didn’t have to follow the rules of war, such as treating prisoners humanely and avoiding civilians. They killed, stole and plundered for supplies, Sheehan-Dean says, and “caused a huge amount of mayhem, far out of proportion to their size.”

The fictional journalists in Civil War also encounter men operating outside the war and the law, setting their own rules and enforcing them down the barrel of a gun. At a skirmish in an abandoned office building, insurgents capture some official army soldiers and proceed to mete out justice on the spot. On the grounds of an unassuming farm, Plemons engages in slow-motion psychological torture, buoyed by his enormous weapon and his victims’ evident terror. The character, like the Confederate guerrillas, seems unconnected to an institution, but loosely tied to an ideology. He’s intensely interested in where the journalists are from — what state, what country — and whether they represent “real” America.

Filmmaker Alex Garland told Time magazine that he modeled his movie insurgents on real-life examples of warlords, such as the Khmer Rouge. But it’s hard to escape the comparison with present-day American insurgency groups — Oathkeepers, Proud Boys — who came to greater prominence during Trump’s presidency. One thing these real-life militias have in common with the movie militants is a sense of independence from official political power, says Amy Cooter, director of research at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies.

Though many militia groups converged on the Capitol on Jan. 6, they’ve never been fully in lockstep with Trump, says Cooter, who spent years interviewing members of those groups for her new book, Nostalgia, Nationalism, and the US Militia Movement. Nor are they aligned with every principle of Trump’s Republican Party. Some hold fast to traditional white supremacist views — even the nonwhite combatants — but some support abortion and LGBTQ rights. Some were embarrassed by Jan. 6, and some are reserving judgment on Trump until they learn the outcome of his ongoing court cases.

Their operating values, Cooter says, predate and transcend any single politician, and have more to do with a cultural idea. “What they seem to have in common is that this notion of an ideal version of society existed at some point in the past,” Cooter says. “Their job is to fight to get it back, or to prevent further slippage from that ideal.” Trump captured their attention, she says, because he was skilled at exploiting their fears, suggesting, “you’ve got all these concerns, and it’s even worse than you think.”

Militia groups are also preparing for a dark future, though they don’t share the same beliefs about what the immediate threat might be, says Sam Jackson, a senior research fellow at the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. Some are convinced that the federal government is going to go door-to-door, confiscating people’s guns. Some are more generally preparing for social collapse — what’s known in online circles as “teotwawki,” for “the end of the world as we know it”— and are stockpiling weapons and supplies in anticipation.

Jan. 6 notwithstanding, formal militia groups often argue against violence in the short term, says Jackson, the author of Oath Keepers: Patriotism and the Edge of Violence in a Right-Wing Anti-Government Group. Some declare that they’ll never take the first shot, only the second one, he says. Some say they’re waiting for the right moment to act, though there are uncertain standards around what the right moment might be. In many cases, he says, militia leaders realize that violence would harm their reputations or wouldn’t achieve their goals.

But individual radicals, who stumble on militias’ online literature or wander into their chatrooms, aren’t subject to those same internal pressures. (Jackson says terrorism experts no longer use the term “lone wolf,” which implies someone operating in a vacuum, rather than immersed in a soup of insurrectionist propaganda and social media chatter.) “One of the things we’re starting to know about these landscapes is [that] sometimes the people who end up committing violence are unaffiliated,” Jackson says. “So if we’re focused on the formal groups, it might be that we are more likely to miss people who are more likely to commit violence.”

As the 2024 election approaches, Cooter agrees, close militia watchers anticipate a greater threat from independent actors than from organized groups. There are no signs of specific plots or threats right now, she says, but if anything erupts, it’s likely to happen on the local or state level: protests at state capitals, violence at election locations where votes are counted. And it’s likely to come from rogue actors, not broader organizations.

“We’re not seeing any mass coordination,” she says. Any violence after the election is “probably going to be small groups, individuals, taking it upon themselves to lash out at something they perceive in their communities.”

It’s that small-scale threat, honestly, that makes Civil War feel so scary — more horror flick than political parable, though maybe a little bit of both.

The movie looks dimly at everyone’s violence fetishes: the dudes in camouflage play-acting as warlords, the adrenaline-junkie journalists who rush excitedly into war zones, the movie audiences who pay good money to sit in a theater and watch symbols of America go up in flames.

But it’s one thing to stare at a CGI-driven battle and get a vicarious thrill from imaginary explosions and popcorn gore. It’s quite another to imagine yourself running into Jesse Plemons on a rural road with an AK-47, questioning who you are and how you fit into his world. He believes that he’s right — or at least that he’s righteous. And he’s not taking orders from anyone but himself.

POLITICO

Politico · by JAMES ROMOSER

4. What Are the Stakes of ‘Civil War,’ Really?

Here is the NY Times article. I think this will be the last article I send out this movie unless something more interesting comes up.​Excerpts:

Garland and his collaborators make no attempt to explain the war. They make no attempt to explain the politics of the war. They make no attempt to explain anything about the world of the film. ​

The point, however, is not to bemoan division in the usual facile way that marks a good deal of modern political commentary. The point is to remind Americans of the reality of armed conflict of the sort that our government has precipitated in other countries. The point, as well, is to shake Americans of the delusion that we could go to war with each other in a way that would not end in catastrophic disaster.

Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.

By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really want?

SUBSCRIBER-ONLY NEWSLETTER

Jamelle Bouie

OPINION

What Are the Stakes of ‘Civil War,’ Really?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/opinion/civil-war-alex-garland.html?utm_source=pocket_saves

April 13, 2024

Credit...Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; photographs by A24/Associated Press and SensorSpot/Getty Images

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By Jamelle Bouie

Opinion Columnist

You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter, for Times subscribers only.  Historical context for present-day events. Get it in your inbox.

Ahead of the release of “Civil War,” the new alt-history action-drama from the director Alex Garland, A24, the studio that produced the film, released a map of the United States showing the lines of the conflict. There was the “New People’s Army” of the Pacific Northwest, the Mountain West and some of the Great Plains. There were the “Western Forces” of Texas and California. And there was the “Florida Alliance,” encompassing most of the Southeast. What remained was labeled “the Loyalist States.”

This little bit of information spurred a torrent of speculation on social media about the political contours of the film. What, exactly, were the stakes of the conflict? How, precisely, did the country come to war in the world of the movie? In what universe do the people of California find common cause with the people of Texas? The scenario wasn’t just far-fetched; it seemed nonsensical. And it did not help that in interviews, Garland took a “pox on both their houses” approach when asked about the relationship between his film and contemporary political life. “It’s polarization,” he said. “You could see that everywhere. And you could see it getting magnified.”

I saw “Civil War” a few weeks ago at a screening in Charlottesville. I had no particular expectations, but I was interested to see if the film would try to flesh out its world. It is not a spoiler to say that, well, it didn’t.

Garland and his collaborators make no attempt to explain the war. They make no attempt to explain the politics of the war. They make no attempt to explain anything about the world of the film. There are hints — allusions to the precipitating crisis and the contours of the conflict. In one scene, a television broadcast refers to the president’s third term. In another, a soldier or paramilitary whose allegiances are unclear, executes a hostage who isn’t the right “kind of American.” In another sequence, we see a male soldier — an insurgent fighting the government — sporting colored hair and painted fingernails.

Overall, however, the movie isn’t about the war itself. It is about war itself. It is not an idle choice that the protagonists of the film — and the people we spend the most time with overall — are journalists. They are on a road trip to see the front lines of the war in Charlottesville (I will say that it was a very strange experience watching the movie in a movie theater roughly 30 minutes from where the scene is supposed to be set), and we experience the conflict from their perspective as men and women who cover violent conflict. Their job is to view things as objectively as possible. This carries over to the way the story is filmed and edited. We see what they see, shorn of any glamour or excitement. The war is bloody, frightening and extremely loud.

Nothing depicted in the film — torture, summary executions and mass murder — is novel. It is part of our actual past. It has happened in many places around the world. It is happening right now in many places around the world. What makes the film striking, and I think effective, is that it shows us a vision of this violence in something like the contemporary United States.

The point, however, is not to bemoan division in the usual facile way that marks a good deal of modern political commentary. The point is to remind Americans of the reality of armed conflict of the sort that our government has precipitated in other countries. The point, as well, is to shake Americans of the delusion that we could go to war with each other in a way that would not end in catastrophic disaster.

There is a palpable thirst for conflict and political violence among some Americans right now. There was the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, of course. There are also open calls on the extreme right for civil war. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right Republican representative from Georgia, wants a “national divorce.” A writer for the influential Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank, once mused that “most people living in the United States today — certainly more than half — are not Americans in any meaningful sense of the term.” Disturbingly large numbers of Americans believe that violence might be necessary to achieve their political goals.

More than anything else, “Civil War” is plugged into this almost libidinal desire. It shows people, on both sides of the conflict, relishing the opportunity to kill — taking pleasure in the chance to wipe their enemies from the earth. In depicting this, “Civil War” is asking its American viewers to take a long, hard look at what it means to want to bring harm to their fellow citizens.

By setting the details of the conflict aside to focus on the experience of violence, “Civil War” is a film that asks a single, simple question of its audience: Is this what you really wan​t?

5. 75th Rangers sweep Best Ranger, Best Mortar, and International Sniper competitions

Hooah. Rangers truly do lead the way.

75th Rangers sweep Best Ranger, Best Mortar, and International Sniper competitions

Teams from 2nd and 3rd Battalions, 75th Ranger Regiment took the top prize in several contests at the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence.

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISHED APR 14, 2024 6:27 PM EDT

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 14, 2024

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The 40th annual U.S. Army Best Ranger Competition wrapped today and soldiers with the 75th Ranger Regiment took the top spot.

At a dinner event to mark the end of the competition, presenters announced that 1st Lt. Andrew Winski and Sgt. Matthew Dunphy, both with 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, had won the three-day competition. The duo earned the highest marks, beating 55 other teams from across the U.S. Army.

The 56 teams, including other members of the 75th Ranger Regiment, competed in a variety of tests and challenges. That ranged from physical challenges such as rope bridges and ruck marches to skill tests with weapons and several obstacle courses. These competitions often push teams to show their physical prowess and their ingenuity.

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In addition to their overall win, Winski and Dunphy won the highest marks on marksmanship among the 56 teams.

Winski and Dunphy’s win is the latest major competition won by soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment this last week. In fact, soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment took the top spots at the International Best Mortar Competition and the International Best Sniper Competition. It was something of a sweep.

The other competitions were held at the the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Moore. On Friday, April 12, Spc. Emmanuel Jackson, Spc. Logan Otis, Staff Sgt. Enrique Caballero and Sgt. Mason Davison, all with 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, earned the top spot at the International Best Mortar Competition. That put them through not only tests on their aiming and marksmanship skills, but also plenty of obstacle courses, land navigation and how they would react to contact with enemy fire.

Earlier, Staff Sgt. Brian Sheffield and Staff Sgt. Matthew Howard, also with 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, were deemed the top shots at the International Best Sniper Competition. As part of their challenges, competing teams were tested on their long-range marksmanship as well as related skills such as stealth and reconnaissance.

The trio of wins comes after two members of the 75th Ranger Regiment, Staff Sgt. Patrick Murphy and Staff Sgt. Ryan Musso took the top spot at the U.S. Army Best Medic Competition on March 8. That contest put teams of two through a series of physical challenges as the medics had to navigate simulations of combat scenarios and test their medical skills.

The awards ceremony for the U.S. Army Best Ranger Competition will be held on Monday, April 15.

The latest on Task & Purpose

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• ‘Black Hawk Down’ Ranger veteran awarded Silver Star
• The Air Force’s new $60 million Special Warfare center honors a fallen pararescueman
• Former Air National Guardsman may have defected to Russia
• Marine battalion commander fired for “loss of trust and confidence”

Nicholas Slayton

Nicholas Slayton is a contributing editor for Task & Purpose, covering conflict for over 12 years, from the Arab Spring to the war in Ukraine. His previous reporting can be found on the non-profit Aslan Media, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Architectural Digest, The Daily Beast, and the Los Angeles Downtown News. You can reach him at nicholas@taskandpurpose.com or find him on Twitter @NSlayton and Bluesky at @nslayton.bsky.social. Contact the author here.

Army

Branch

taskandpurpose.com · by Nicholas Slayton · April 14, 2024

6. How the U.S. Forged a Fragile Middle Eastern Alliance to Repel Iran’s Israel Attack

My guess is that we have generational relationships that contributed to this effort.

Excerpts:

Israeli and the U.S. forces intercepted most of the Iranian drones and missiles. But they were able to do so in part because Arab countries quietly passed along intelligence about Tehran’s attack plans, opened their airspace to warplanes, shared radar tracking information or, in some cases, supplied their own forces to help, officials said.

The operation was the culmination of years of U.S. effort to break down political and technical barriers that thwarted military cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab governments, officials said. Instead of a Middle East version of the NATO alliance, the U.S. has focused on less formal regionwide air-defense cooperation to blunt Tehran’s growing arsenal of drones and missiles—the very weapons that threatened Israel Saturday.

Efforts to build an integrated air-defense system for the region date back decades. After years of false starts and minimal progress, the initiative gained momentum after the 2020 Abraham Accords brokered by the Trump administration, which established formal ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Two years later, the Pentagon shifted Israel from its European Command to Central Command, which includes the rest of the Middle East, a move that enabled greater military cooperation with Arab governments under U.S. auspices.

“Israel’s move into Centcom was a game changer,” making it easier to share intelligence and provide early warning across countries, said Dana Stroul, who until December was the most senior civilian official at the Pentagon with responsibility for the Middle East.

How the U.S. Forged a Fragile Middle Eastern Alliance to Repel Iran’s Israel Attack

American-led effort was years in the making and hadn’t been battle-tested when Tehran launched missile and drone barrage against Israel

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/how-the-u-s-forged-a-fragile-middle-eastern-alliance-to-repel-irans-israel-attack-4a1fbc00?mod=hp_lead_pos7

By David S. CloudFollow

, Dov LieberFollow

, Stephen KalinFollow

 and Summer SaidFollow

April 15, 2024 12:05 am ET

TEL AVIV—As hundreds of Iranian drones and missiles winged across the Middle East Saturday night, a defensive line of radars, jet fighters, warships and air-defense batteries from Israel, the U.S. and a half dozen other countries was already activated against the long-feared attack from Iran.

Almost nothing got through to Israel. 

The formidable display of collective defense was the culmination of a decades-old but elusive U.S. goal to forge closer military ties between Israel and its longtime Arab adversaries in an effort to counter a growing common threat from Iran.

But the U.S.-led effort to protect Israel in the days and hours before the Iranian attack had to overcome numerous obstacles, including fears by Gulf countries at being seen as coming to Israel’s aid at a time when relations are badly strained by the war in Gaza.

Much of the cooperation Saturday night that led to the shooting down of the Iranian-directed barrage needed to be forged on the fly, and many details about the role played by Saudi Arabia and other key Arab governments are being closely held.

Israeli and the U.S. forces intercepted most of the Iranian drones and missiles. But they were able to do so in part because Arab countries quietly passed along intelligence about Tehran’s attack plans, opened their airspace to warplanes, shared radar tracking information or, in some cases, supplied their own forces to help, officials said.

The operation was the culmination of years of U.S. effort to break down political and technical barriers that thwarted military cooperation between Israel and the Sunni Arab governments, officials said. Instead of a Middle East version of the NATO alliance, the U.S. has focused on less formal regionwide air-defense cooperation to blunt Tehran’s growing arsenal of drones and missiles—the very weapons that threatened Israel Saturday.

Efforts to build an integrated air-defense system for the region date back decades. After years of false starts and minimal progress, the initiative gained momentum after the 2020 Abraham Accords brokered by the Trump administration, which established formal ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.

Two years later, the Pentagon shifted Israel from its European Command to Central Command, which includes the rest of the Middle East, a move that enabled greater military cooperation with Arab governments under U.S. auspices.

“Israel’s move into Centcom was a game changer,” making it easier to share intelligence and provide early warning across countries, said Dana Stroul, who until December was the most senior civilian official at the Pentagon with responsibility for the Middle East.

Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie PHOTO: AHMAD SEIR/ASSOCIATED PRESS

In March 2022, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, then the top U.S. commander in the region, convened a secret meeting of top military officials from Israel and Arab countries to explore how they could coordinate against Iran’s growing missile and drone capabilities. The talks, held at Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, marked the first time that such a range of ranking Israeli and Arab officers met under U.S. military auspices to discuss countering Iran.

“The Abraham Accords made the Middle East look different…because we could do things not just under the surface but above it,” a senior Israeli official said. Joining Central Command enabled even more technical cooperation with Arab governments. “That’s what created this alliance,” the official said.

Despite the progress made, the U.S. goal of having Israel and the Arab states seamlessly share tracking data on Iranian threats in real time has never been fully realized because of political concerns, officials said.

Bilal Saab, a former Pentagon official who worked on security cooperation in the Middle East, said it was premature to speak of security integration in the region. “It was always going to be gradual, and [Saturday] was an important real-world first step,” said Saab, now a fellow at the London-based Chatham House think tank.

But cooperation between Israel and Arab government on air defense with the U.S. as an intermediary has become common, even with Saudi Arabia, which still hasn’t established diplomatic relations with Israel, Israeli and U.S. officials say.

Rescue workers search in the rubble of a building annexed to the Iranian embassy a day after an airstrike in Damascus, Syria. PHOTO: LOUAI BESHARA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

This nascent air-defense alliance had never been battle tested when on April 1, a missile strike in Damascus, Syria, killed several Iranian officers, including Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, who according to Iranian state media and U.S. officials, managed Iranian paramilitary operations in Syria and Lebanon. Israel hasn’t claimed responsibility for the attack.

Tehran quickly vowed to respond, and senior U.S. officials began pressing Arab government to share intelligence about Iran’s plans to strike Israel and to assist with intercepting drones and missiles launched from Iran and other countries toward Israel, according to Saudi and Egyptian officials.

Israel’s multilayered aerial-defense system has shown itself capable of defending the country against individual or small volleys of incoming drones and missiles. But officials and analysts say it could potentially be overwhelmed by a sufficiently large swarm of drones or a massive missile barrage.

An antimissile system operates after Iran launched drones and missiles toward Israel, as seen from Ashkelon, Israel. PHOTO: AMIR COHEN/REUTERS

The initial response from several Arab governments was wary, fearing that assistance to Israel could involve them directly in the conflict and risk reprisals from Tehran. After further talks with the U.S., the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia agreed privately to share intelligence, while Jordan said it would allow use of its airspace by U.S. and other countries’ warplanes and use its own aircraft to assist in intercepting Iranian missiles and drones, the officials said.

Two days before the attack, Iranian officials briefed counterparts from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries on the outlines and timing of their plan for the large-scale strikes on Israel so that those countries could safeguard airspace, the officials said. The information was passed along to the U.S., giving Washington and Israel crucial advance warning. 

With an Iranian attack all but certain, the White House ordered the Pentagon to reposition aircraft and missile-defense resources to the region and took the lead in coordinating defensive measures between Israel and Arab governments, according to the senior Israeli official.

“The challenge was to bring all those countries around Israel” at a time when Israel is isolated in the region, the official said. “It was a diplomatic issue.”

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, center, met with U.S. Centcom Commander Gen. Michael Erik Kurilla, left, at an Israeli air base on Friday, before Iran’s attack. PHOTO: ARIEL HERMONI/ISRAEL MOD/ZUMA PRESS

Arab countries offered help in defending against the Iranian attacks because they saw the benefits of cooperating with the U.S. and Israel, as long as it remained low profile, said Yasmine Farouk, a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank.

“Gulf countries know they still don’t have the same level of support that Israel gets from the United States and see what they did [Saturday] as a way of getting it in the future,” she said.

The Iranian missiles and drones were tracked from the moment they launched by early warning radars in Persian Gulf countries linked to the U.S. operations center in Qatar, which transmitted the information to fighters jets from several countries in the airspace over Jordan and other countries, as well as to warships at sea and missile-defense batteries in Israel, officials said.

When the slow-moving Iranian drones came within range, they were shot down, mostly by fighters from Israel and the U.S. and in smaller numbers by British, French and Jordanian warplanes, officials said.

A police officer and residents inspect the remains of a rocket booster near Arad, Israel. PHOTO: CHRISTOPHE VAN DER PERRE/REUTERS

At one point, more than 100 ballistic Iranian missiles were in the air at one time heading toward Israel. The overwhelming majority were shot down by Israeli air-defense systems in Israeli airspace and outside it, a U.S. official said.

U.S. aircraft shot down more than 70 drones, and two U.S. guided-missile destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean intercepted as many as six missiles. A U.S. Patriot air-defense system near Erbil, Iraq, shot down an Iranian ballistic missile on its way to Israel, the official said.

Of more than 300 drones and cruise and ballistic missiles fired by Iran toward Israel, only a small number of missiles landed in Israel, causing minor damage to a military base in the southern part of the country, Israel’s military said.

An Israeli official involved in regional security cooperation efforts said that while there had been frequent sharing of intelligence on air-defense threats in the past, Iran’s attack Saturday “was the first time that we saw the alliance work at full power.”

Michael R. Gordon and Gordon Lubold contributed to this article.

Write to David S. Cloud at david.cloud@wsj.com, Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com, Stephen Kalin at stephen.kalin@wsj.com and Summer Said at summer.said@wsj.com

7. Analysis: Israel Repelled Iran’s Huge Attack. But Only With Help From U.S. and Arab Partners.

Video, photos, and map at the link.

Analysis: Israel Repelled Iran’s Huge Attack. But Only With Help From U.S. and Arab Partners.

Working with partners, it fended off worst of Iranian strikes; what comes next will test powers in the Middle East and beyond

By Yaroslav TrofimovFollow

Updated April 14, 2024 6:16 pm ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/analysis-israel-repelled-irans-huge-attack-but-only-with-help-from-u-s-and-arab-partners-a7844065?mod=hp_lead_pos8

Saturday’s Iranian strike on Israel was huge by any standard. Tehran launched more than 170 explosive-laden drones, around 120 ballistic missiles and about 30 cruise missiles, according to Israel. The damage could have been catastrophic. As it turned out, almost all were intercepted.

That success was due to a combination of Israel’s sophisticated air-defense system and critical assistance provided by the U.S. and other Western and Arab partners. American, British and Jordanian warplanes played an especially important role in downing drones. Most of the Iranian drones and missiles were destroyed before they even reached Israeli airspace.

Whether Israel and its supporters can replicate that performance under the conditions of an all-out war—this weekend’s salvo from Iran, clearly telegraphed in advance, was the opposite of a surprise attack—is an open question, as is Israel’s ability to defend itself without outside help.

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Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel. It was the first time Iran had directly attacked Israel from Iranian territory. Here’s how the conflict between the two rival nations unfolded in recent weeks. Photo Composition: Kaitlyn Wang

That is a key consideration as Israel and the U.S. consider responses to what is a new strategic reality, created by Iran’s first direct military attack on Israeli territory since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Israel’s war cabinet met in Tel Aviv on Sunday as the country’s leaders weighed their options, and Western officials said they believed Israel’s response could come quickly, as soon as Monday.

Striking back hard on Iranian soil could invite far more devastating retaliation. But not responding at all, or too weakly, could also erode deterrence, making Israel and others more vulnerable to future Iranian barrages.

“Iran has started a new phase. It has stopped hiding behind proxies and has now become exposed to a direct attack from Israel,” said Nadav Pollak, a former Israeli government analyst teaching at Reichman University. “Going forward, Israel is not going to be able to sit quietly and intercept everything.”

Israel closed its airspace to all domestic and international flights after the attack. PHOTO: ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Tel Aviv on Sunday after the Iranian attack. PHOTO: HANNAH MCKAY/REUTERS

Interceptors, particularly the Arrow and Patriot systems used against ballistic missiles, are extremely expensive and are limited in quantity. The U.S. Congress, by stalling the military aid package for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan, has created an additional complication.

Saturday’s attack, which Tehran says was carried out in retaliation for a suspected Israeli strike on April 1 that killed seven Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officers, including two generals, at an Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus, has used up only a tiny fraction of the Islamic Republic’s vast arsenal of drones and missiles.

Crucially, Tehran has also kept in reserve its Lebanese proxy force, the Hezbollah militia, which has thousands of missiles and rockets. And, while only a handful of Iranian missiles got through on Saturday, causing minor damage to Israel’s Nevatim air base, the Iranian military has drawn valuable intelligence from observing how Israeli and U.S. air defenses operate.

“Iran was testing the missile-defense system, the resolve of the regional countries, the resolve of the United States,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a researcher at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington. “Out of all of this comes a great risk. When two powerful parties engage in direct hostility, no one knows where this thing goes.”

How the Iranian Attack on Israel Unfolded

99% of drones and missiles failed to hit their target thanks to an air-defense operation coordinated by Israel and the U.S. with help from Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

TURKMENISTAN

Caspian

Sea

TURKEY

Tehran

IRAQ

SYRIA

CYPRUS

LEB.

Damascus

IRAN

Baghdad

AFGHANISTAN

AFGHANISTAN

Med. Sea

ISRAEL

120 ballistic missiles, 30 cruise missiles and more than 170 drones were launched by Iran and its allies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen toward Israel.

GAZA

JORDAN

Soroka Medical Center in Israel treated eight people who suffered light injuries.

KUWAIT

PAKISTAN

Countries closed their airspace temporarily due to the attack. They have reopened and

air traffic has resumed.

Persian

Gulf

Nevatim military airbase suffered minimal damage.

QATAR

Gulf of Oman

U.A.E.

SAUDI ARABIA

OMAN

Arabian Sea

Red

Sea

SUDAN

YEMEN

250 miles

200 km

Sources: Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv; ICAO GIS; staff reports

Camille Bressange/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The commander of the IRGC, Hossein Salami, portrayed the Saturday barrage as creating a new strategic equation: Every Israeli attack on Iranian interests in the region will be met with a direct Iranian attack on Israel. This is, of course, a red line that Israel, which has been fighting against Iranian proxies for decades, cannot accept.

As it considers its response, however, Israel must also weigh the interests of its Arab partners, such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Despite popular anger over the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians during Israeli military operations in Gaza, Jordan and other partners helped Israel fight off Iranian missiles and drones on Saturday.

“Our regional partners stepped up despite six months of very significant tension between them and Israel, and between them and the United States as they begged the United States to do something to restrain the Israelis,” said Steven Cook, a Middle East analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Cook said that no matter how much countries in the region may dislike Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they dislike Iran’s government more.

A funeral this month for a Hezbollah commander killed in southern Lebanon. PHOTO: MARWAN NAAMANI/ZUMA PRESS

The vital role played by these Arab partners along with the U.S. and others in providing intelligence, opening their airspace and, in the case of Jordan, actually downing Iranian weapons, is likely to give them new influence with the Israeli government, as the crisis unfolds, to shape responses.

The design of Iran’s strike replicated in many ways some of the biggest Russian attacks in Ukraine: first a swarm of slow-moving Shahed drones intended to overwhelm air defenses and to identify the locations of air-defense batteries, then cruise missiles and then a volley of faster ballistic missiles that are notoriously hard to intercept.

The scope of the attack was also among the biggest seen in modern warfare. Russia’s opening “shock and awe” barrage on the first day of the invasion of Ukraine, Feb. 24, 2022, involved between 160 and 200 cruise and ballistic missiles—against a country that is more than 20 times as large as Israel.

An Israeli Air Force jet fighter. PHOTO: ISRAEL DEFENSE FORCES/REUTERS

Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile defense system near Jerusalem. PHOTO: ABIR SULTAN/SHUTTERSTOCK

Russia first used Iranian-made Shahed drones in a combination with missile strikes in the Oct. 10, 2022, barrage that targeted Ukraine’s infrastructure, with a total of 84 missiles and 24 drones. That salvo came after Ukraine struck the bridge linking occupied Crimea to mainland Russia, and only about half of the Russian missiles were intercepted.

While Ukraine has since improved its interception rates for drones and cruise missiles, most of Russian ballistic missiles hit their targets—a contrast with the outcome of Saturday’s Iranian attack. Iran’s missile technology is to a great extent based on Soviet and North Korean know-how.

U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal that half of the ballistic missiles that Iran launched either failed to launch or fell from the sky before reaching their targets.

Iran’s failure to inflict serious pain on Israel as a result of superior Israeli air defenses “exposed how weak they are when it comes to the conventional military threat—which is nothing new, and is the reason why Iran has invested so much in terror groups and different groups that have essentially weakened the state system in the Middle East,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “But they still have great capacity to sow fear and be a cause of a great deal of risk for the region.”

The demonstrated weakness of Iran’s conventional military capacity could carry escalatory risks of its own, cautioned Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group. As neither the proxy attacks by Hezbollah or Hamas nor a direct barrage on Israel appear to work, decision makers in Tehran may be increasingly tempted by the nuclear option, he said: “If they conclude that their conventional deterrence, which is really their missile and drone systems, really is insufficient, they will probably conclude that the only outlet left open to them is the ultimate deterrent.”

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

8. Chinese Company Under Congressional Scrutiny Makes Key U.S. Drugs

Are we our own worst enemy?

Chinese Company Under Congressional Scrutiny Makes Key U.S. Drugs

Lawmakers raising national security concerns and seeking to disconnect a major Chinese firm from U.S. pharmaceutical interests have rattled the biotech industry. The firm is deeply involved in development and manufacturing of crucial therapies for cancer, cystic fibrosis, H.I.V. and other illnesses.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/health/wuxi-us-drugs-congress.html

By Christina Jewett

• April 15, 2024

A Chinese company targeted by members of Congress over potential ties to the Chinese government makes blockbuster drugs for the American market that have been hailed as advances in the treatment of cancers, obesity and debilitating illnesses like cystic fibrosis.

WuXi AppTec is one of several companies that lawmakers have identified as potential threats to the security of individual Americans’ genetic information and U.S. intellectual property. A Senate committee approved a bill in March that aides say is intended to push U.S. companies away from doing business with them.

But lawmakers discussing the bill in the Senate and the House have said almost nothing in hearings about the vast scope work WuXi does for the U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical industries — and patients. A New York Times review of hundreds of pages of records worldwide shows that WuXi is heavily embedded in the U.S. medicine chest, making some or all of the main ingredients for multibillion-dollar therapies that are highly sought to treat cancers like some types of leukemia and lymphoma as well as obesity and H.I.V.

The Congressional spotlight on the company has rattled the pharmaceutical industry, which is already struggling with widespread drug shortages now at a 20-year high. Some biotech executives have pushed back, trying to impress on Congress that a sudden decoupling could take some drugs out of the pipeline for years.

WuXi AppTec and an affiliated company, WuXi Biologics grew rapidly, offering services to major U.S. drugmakers that were seeking to shed costs and had shifted most manufacturing overseas in the last several decades.

WuXi companies developed a reputation for low-cost and reliable work by thousands of chemists who could create new molecules and operate complex equipment to make them in bulk. By one estimate, WuXi has been involved in developing one-fourth of the drugs used in the United States. WuXi AppTec reported earning about $3.6 billion in revenue for its U.S. work.

“They have become a one-stop shop to a biotech,” said Kevin Lustig, founder of Scientist.com, a clearinghouse that matches drug companies seeking research help with contractors like WuXi.

WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics have also received millions of dollars in tax incentives to build sprawling research and manufacturing sites in Massachusetts and Delaware that local government officials have welcomed as job and revenue generators. One WuXi site in Philadelphia was working alongside a U.S. biotech firm to give patients a cutting-edge therapy that would turbocharge their immune cells to treat advanced skin cancers.

The tension has grown since February, when four lawmakers asked the Commerce, Defense and Treasury Departments to investigate WuXi AppTec and affiliated companies, calling WuXi a “giant that threatens U.S. intellectual property and national security.”

A House bill called the Biosecure Act linked the company to the People’s Liberation Army, the military arm of the Chinese Communist Party. The bill claims WuXi AppTec sponsored military-civil events and received military-civil fusion funding.

Richard Connell, the chief operating officer of WuXi AppTec in the United States and Europe, said the company participates in community events, which do not “imply any association with or endorsement of a government institution, political party or policy such as military-civil fusion.” He also said shareholders do not have control over the company or access to nonpublic information.

Relations Between China and the U.S.

• Yellen’s Visit: Despite a warm welcome on Janet Yellen’s second trip to China as Treasury secretary, it was evident that the level of trust between Washington and Beijing does not run deep. 
• Biden-Xi Call: President Biden spoke with Xi Jinping, China’s leader, in a call that was aimed at addressing a variety of combative and cooperative issues, as the United States grapples with wars and other global crises.
• Influencing the U.S. Election: Covert Chinese accounts are masquerading online as American supporters of Donald Trump, signaling a potential tactical shift in how Beijing aims to influence U.S. politics.
• Mounting Space Threats: The United States and China are locked in a new race over a fundamental resource: time.

Last month, after a classified briefing with intelligence staff, the Senate homeland security committee advanced a bill by a vote of 11 to 1: It would bar the U.S. government from contracting with companies that work with WuXi. Government contracts with drugmakers are generally limited, though they were worth billions of dollars in revenue to companies that responded to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mr. Connell defended the company’s record, saying the proposed legislation “relies on misleading allegations and inaccurate assertions against our company.”

WuXi operates in a highly regulated environment by “multiple U.S. federal agencies — none of which has placed our company on any sanctions list or designated it as posing a national security risk,” Mr. Connell said. WuXi Biologics did not respond to requests for comment.

Smaller biotech companies, which tend to rely on government grants and have fewer reserves, are among the most alarmed. Dr. Jonathan Kil, the chief executive of Seattle-based Sound Pharmaceuticals, said WuXi has worked alongside the company for 16 years to develop a treatment for hearing loss and tinnitus, or ringing in the ear. Finding another contractor to make the drug could set the company back two years, he said.

“What I don’t want to see is that we get very anti-Chinese to the point where we’re not thinking correctly,” Dr. Kil said.

It is unclear whether a bill targeting WuXi will advance at all this year. The Senate version has been amended to protect existing contracts and limit supply disruptions. Still, the scrutiny has prompted some drug and biotechnology companies to begin making backup plans.

Peter Kolchinsky, managing partner of RA Capital Management, estimated that half of the 200 biotech companies in his firm’s investment portfolio work with WuXi.​

“Everyone is likely considering moving away from Wuxi and China more broadly,” he said in an email. “Even though the current versions of the bill don’t create that imperative clearly, no one wants to be caught flat-footed in China if the pullback from China accelerates.”

Image

Senator Gary Peters, Democrat of Michigan, is a sponsor of the Biosecure Act. He warned last year that U.S. reliance on China for pharmaceutical manufacturing constituted a risk to national security.Credit...Julia Nikhinson for The New York Times

The chill toward China extends beyond drugmakers. U.S. companies are receiving billions of dollars in funding under the CHIPS Act, a federal law aimed at bringing semiconductor manufacturing stateside.

For the last several years, U.S. intelligence agencies have been warning about Chinese biotech companies in general and WuXi in particular. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center, the arm of the intelligence community charged with warning companies about national security issues, raised alarms about WuXi’s acquisition of NextCODE, an American genomic data company.

Though WuXi later spun off that company, a U.S. official said the government remains skeptical of WuXi’s corporate structure, noting that some independent entities have overlapping management and that there were other signs of the Chinese government’s continuing control or influence over WuXi.

Aides from the Senate homeland security committee said their core concerns are about the misuse of Americans’ genomic data, an issue that’s been more closely tied to other companies named in the bill.

Aides said the effort to discourage companies from working with WuXi and others was influenced by the U.S. government’s experience with Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant. By the time Congress acted on concerns about Huawei’s access to Americans’ private information, taxpayers had to pay billions of dollars to tear Huawei’s telecommunication equipment out of the ground.

Yet WuXi has far deeper involvement in American health care than has been discussed in Congress. Supply chain analytics firms QYOBO and Pharm3r, and some public records, show that WuXi and its affiliates have made the active ingredients for critical drugs.

They include Imbruvica, a leukemia treatment sold by Janssen Biotech and AbbVie that brought in $5.9 billion in worldwide revenue in 2023. WuXi subsidiary factories in Shanghai and Changzhou were listed in government records as makers of the drug’s core ingredient, ibrutinib.

Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, chief of hematology at the University of Miami Health System, called that treatment for chronic lymphocytic leukemia “truly revolutionary” for replacing highly toxic drugs and extending patients’ lives.

Janssen Biotech and AbbVie, partners in selling the drug, declined to comment.

WuXi Biologics also manufactures Jemperli, a GSK treatment approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year for some endometrial cancers. In combination with standard therapies, the drug improves survival in patients with advanced disease, said Dr. Amanda Nickles Fader, president of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology.

“This is particularly important because while most cancers are plateauing or decreasing in incidence and mortality, endometrial cancer is one of the only cancers globally” increasing in both, Dr. Fader said.

GSK declined to comment.

Image

Trikafta, a drug manufactured by a WuXi affiliate in Shanghai to treat cystic fibrosis, has been so effective that the Make-A-Wish Foundation stopped uniformly granting wishes to children with the disease.Credit...Dado Galdieri for The New York Times

The drug that possibly captures WuXi’s most significant impact is Trikafta, manufactured by an affiliate in Shanghai and Changzhou to treat cystic fibrosis, a deadly disease that clogs the lungs with debilitating, thick mucus. The treatment is credited with clearing the lungs and extending by decades the life expectancy of about 40,000 U.S. residents. It also had manufacturers in Italy, Portugal and Spain.

The treatment has been so effective that the Make-A-Wish Foundation stopped uniformly granting wishes to children with cystic fibrosis. Trikafta costs about $320,000 a year per patient and has been a boon for Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and its shareholders, with worldwide revenue rising to $8.9 billion last year from $5.7 billion in 2021, according to a securities filing.

Trikafta “completely transformed cystic fibrosis and did it very quickly,” said Dr. Meghan McGarry, a University of California San Francisco pulmonologist who treats children with the condition. “People came off oxygen and from being hospitalized all the time to not being hospitalized and being able to get a job, go to school and start a family.”

Vertex declined to comment.

Two industry sources said WuXi plays a role in making Eli Lilly’s popular obesity drugs. Eli Lilly did not respond to requests for comment. WuXi companies also make an infusion for treatment-resistant H.I.V., a drug for advanced ovarian cancer and a therapy for adults with a rare disorder called Pompe disease.

WuXi is known for helping biotech firms from the idea stage to mass production, Dr. Kolchinsky said. For example, a start-up could hypothesize that a molecule that sticks to a certain protein might cure a disease. The company would then hire WuXi chemists to create or find the molecule and test it in petri dishes and animals to see whether the idea works — and whether it’s safe enough for humans.

“Your U.S. company has the idea and raises the money and owns the rights to the drug,” Dr. Kolchinsky said. “But they may count on WuXi or similar contractors for almost every step of the process.”

WuXi operates large bioreactors and manufactures complex peptide, immunotherapy and antibody drugs at sprawling plants in China.

WuXi AppTec said it has about 1,900 U.S. employees. Officials in Delaware gave the company $19 million in tax funds in 2021 to build a research and drug manufacturing site that is expected to employ about 1,000 people when fully operational next year, public records and company reports show.

Mayor Kenneth L. Branner Jr. of Middletown, Del., called it “one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to land a company like this,” according to a news report when the deal was approved.

Image

WuXi executives at a groundbreaking in Middletown, Del., in 2022, with Gov. John Carney, center, and other Delaware officials.Credit...WuXi STA Pharmaceutical

In 2022, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts expressed a similar sentiment when workers placed the final steel beam on a WuXi Biologics research and manufacturing plant in Worcester. Government officials had approved roughly $11.5 million in tax breaks to support the project. The company announced this year that it would double the site’s planned manufacturing capacity in response to customer demand.

And in Philadelphia, a WuXi Advanced Therapies site next to Iovance Biotherapeutics was approved by regulators to help process individualized cell therapies for skin cancer patients. Iovance has said it is capable of meeting demand for the therapies independently.

By revenue, WuXi Biologics is one of the top five drug development and manufacturing companies worldwide, according to Statista, a data analytics company. A WuXi AppTec annual report showed that two-thirds of its revenue came from U.S. work.

Stepping away from WuXi could cause a “substantial slowdown” in drug development for a majority of the 105 biotech companies surveyed by BioCentury, a trade publication. Just over half said it would be “extremely difficult” to replace China-based drug manufacturers.

BIO, a trade group for the biotechnology industry, is also surveying its members about the impact of disconnecting from WuXi companies. John F. Crowley, BIO’s president, said the effects would be most difficult for companies that rely on WuXi to manufacture complex drugs at commercial scale. Moving such an operation could take five to seven years.

“We have to be very thoughtful about this so that we first do no harm to patients,” Mr. Crowley said. “And that we don’t slow or unnecessarily interfere with the advancement of biomedical research.”

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting, and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

Christina Jewett covers the Food and Drug Administration, which means keeping a close eye on drugs, medical devices, food safety and tobacco policy. More about Christina Jewett

9. An Essential Part of Modern Life That Armies Should Never Attack Again

Interesting. Should power generation facilities be added to the protected target category? Of course if that happens it will only be the US and like minded countries who uphold the rules based international order who will refrain from targeting such facilities.

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

An Essential Part of Modern Life That Armies Should Never Attack Again

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/15/opinion/ukraine-russia-power-grid.html

April 15, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

By Peter Fairley

Mr. Fairley is a journalist who has covered power technology and policy for over 20 years.

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In late March, after two years of withering attacks on Ukraine, Russia knocked out half of Ukraine’s power supply. Up to that point, Russia’s missiles and kamikaze drones had mostly targeted the Ukrainian substations that push electricity from power plants to consumers. But this time they hit the plants themselves, severely damaging and destroying hydroelectric and fossil fuel stations — all of which are difficult to repair or replace.

When power stops, life grinds to a halt. Lights go out. Sewage treatment stops. Clean water stops. Electric cars, buses and trolleys stop. Elevators stop, trapping older and disabled people. For many, home heating, refrigeration, cooking and clothes washing stops, along with medical devices such as oxygen generators.

Even though the world’s dependence on electricity for all of this and more is growing, power grids are still legitimate military targets, according to both international law and our own military rule book. But there are small, promising signs that could be changing. Early last month, before Russia’s most damaging assaults, the International Criminal Court in The Hague concluded that the country’s pummeling of Ukraine’s power system had already crossed the line and issued arrest warrants for a pair of senior Russian commanders, Adm. Viktor Nikolayevich Sokolov and Lt. Gen. Sergei Ivanovich Kobylash, whose units are accused of launching the missiles. (Russia has denied committing war crimes.)

It was the world’s first prosecution of combatants for attacks on a power grid and an important first step toward recognizing electricity’s growing centrality to modern life. But the global community must now draw bright lines for combatants in future conflicts — and strengthen the hand of future prosecutors — by codifying specific protections for power grids. The international community already attempts to do that for select infrastructure, including hospitals, dams and nuclear power plants, via the Geneva Conventions. It’s time to add power grids to that privileged roster.

For decades, armies have routinely attacked power grids during war. Germany targeted Britain’s grid from zeppelins in World War I, and NATO jets targeted power plants in Serbia in 1999. The civilian fallout from these attacks can be devastating: When the United States knocked out Baghdad’s electricity in 1991 in the Persian Gulf war, water and sewage treatment were disrupted, sparking typhoid and cholera epidemics.

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International law is supposed to curb these kinds of attacks; the laws set out in the Geneva Conventions consider power grids “civilian objects,” to be protected in war. But in practice, thanks to myriad exceptions, militaries can justify nearly any attack where anticipated gains outweigh the projected civilian suffering.

Governments often point to electricity’s role in everything from political and military communications to arms manufacturing. According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, the massive strikes last month were necessary because they disrupted enterprises making and repairing “weapons, equipment and ammunition.” But it would seem that the real goal was to terrorize and break the Ukrainian people. Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said as much while explaining grid attacks in November 2022 that left 10 million people without power: “The unwillingness of the Ukrainian side to settle the problem, to start negotiations, its refusal to seek common ground, this is their consequence.”

In its Department of Defense Law of War Manual updated last year, the United States says that it views power plants as important enough to a state’s military functions “to qualify as military objectives during armed conflicts.” The Pentagon rule book dismisses civilian injuries and deaths caused by blackouts as too “remote” and “myriad” for field commanders to accurately calculate and encourages them to consider only the civilians affected “very soon after the attack,” such as those at a hospital directly connected to a power plant. But even in that case, the manual hews to the general rule for civilian infrastructure, advising American forces to stand down only where the harm of powering down life support will be “excessive” relative to the gains.

Unsurprisingly, even U.S. military experts on the law of armed conflict have taken divergent stands on Russia’s grid attacks in Ukraine, attacks it continued last week. “At least some” violated international law, wrote one. Another found it hard to “definitively” identify a criminal act.

The three-judge International Criminal Court panel said it had “reasonable grounds to believe” that the officers they seek to apprehend committed crimes against humanity. That charge applies to unlawful acts that are widespread or systematic, and Russia’s grid attacks keep intensifying.

Our military began scaling down its attacks on electrical grids over 20 years ago. Gregory Noone — a captain and former judge advocate in the U.S. Navy who has trained government officials in Rwanda, Afghanistan and Russia in the laws of war — told me he saw a shift in U.S. behavior between the Persian Gulf war and the Iraq war. “We, the U.S. military, took great pride in the fact that we turned all the lights off in Baghdad in the first gulf war. We wiped out their electric grid,” Dr. Noone said. But by the time of the Iraq war, “we realized that wasn’t such a good idea.”

Other countries would be wise to follow our lead and reject wholesale attacks on the grid. It would save lives and prevent needless destruction; it would also help build an unwritten (yet enforceable) body of international law constraining power grid attacks.

But the international community can and should go further. A strong grid protection protocol that explicitly limits power system destruction could be a game changer. It would ratchet up the threat of prosecution, potentially deterring bad actors who might otherwise be tempted to target power generators. The International Criminal Court said a desire to stop further attacks prompted it to unseal the warrants for General Kobylash and Admiral Sokolov. The hope is that field officers directing missiles and drones may think twice before they order these kinds of attacks in the future.

While Mr. Putin may never face consequences for plunging Ukraine into darkness, General Kobylash and Admiral Sokolov may never leave Russia, for fear of being picked up outside its borders to face trial. If they do, a reckoning could yet lie ahead for those who would thrust civilians into darkness. Prosecutors who pursue war criminals can keep hunting for decades.

More on power grids

Opinion | Ed Conway

The Paradox Holding Back the Clean Energy Revolution

Feb. 22, 2024

Ukraine Sees New Virtue in Wind Power: It’s Harder to Destroy

May 29, 2023

Opinion | Nataliya Gumenyuk

Putin Is Making His Plans Brutally Clear

Jan. 16, 2024

Peter Fairley is a journalist who has covered power technology and policy for over 20 years.

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10. Opinion | A stunning victory with the shield creates an opening for Israel

Opinion | A stunning victory with the shield creates an opening for Israel

By David Ignatius

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April 14, 2024 at 6:50 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · April 14, 2024

After six frustrating months in Gaza, Israel finally won a decisive victory against its adversaries by blunting Iran’s all-out missile attack Saturday night with an astonishing display of high-tech military prowess.

“A good defense is the best offense” is a truism in sports. Israel demonstrated that this precept may apply to modern warfare, as well. In neutering an Iranian barrage — which included more than 100 ballistic missiles, 150 drones and 30 cruise missiles — Israel showed that in combat, the shield can be as powerful as the sword.

“It was a worst-case scenario in what Iran launched, but a best case in terms of the outcome,” Brett McGurk, the Middle East director for the National Security Council, said in an interview. He was one of the top officials who worked closely with President Biden during what officials described as a nerve-racking 12 minutes when the ballistic missiles were on their way to targets in Israel and nobody knew if the defenses would hold.

The missile war this weekend was the bookend to Israel’s bold April 1 airstrike on Tehran’s consulate in Damascus, which killed seven officers in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including two senior leaders. Now, Israel’s stunning success at fending off Iran’s reprisal for that attack could mark a psychological turning point in the trauma of the Gaza war. Israel has felt weak and embattled since Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, and increasingly isolated internationally as it tried to crush Hamas in its lairs underneath a desperate Palestinian civilian population. But the symbolic imagery reversed Saturday night.

With its Iron Dome missile defense systems, Israel became the implacable defender, shielding Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem as well as its own population. Israel, for a change, seemed to have the world on its side as it countered the Iranian assault. Britain and France joined the United States in shooting down the Iranian volley. Sources said Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab countries quietly joined in the integrated air defense, too. And Group of Seven Western nations talked Sunday morning about possible joint sanctions against Iran.

White House officials who on Friday night were waiting anxiously for the Iranian attack sounded almost jubilant Sunday afternoon describing the outcome. A senior administration called it a “spectacular defeat” of an “unprecedented” Iranian attack. Israel and its partners destroyed “99 percent” of the weapons fired in the assault, the official said, with “virtually no infrastructure damage to Israel at all.” In the Middle East, social media posts mocked the Iranian missile failure, a U.S. official told me.

The military confrontation between Israel and Iran will doubtless have more rounds. But a rapid move up the escalatory ladder seemed unlikely after Saturday’s night’s “extraordinary feat of military prowess” by Israel, as the senior administration official called it.

The White House had feared that if Iran punctured Israel’s defenses and caused heavy damage, Israel would respond with a punishing retaliation that could tip the region toward full-scale war. “If successful, the attack could have caused uncontrollable escalation,” the administration official said. But the shield proved astonishingly solid — and an Iranian statement said “the matter can be deemed concluded” after the failed barrage.

Biden spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately after the “tense moments” when most of the 100 Iranian ballistic missiles heading toward Israeli targets were successfully intercepted. “We were feeling pretty good about where we were,” the official said. Biden told Netanyahu that “Israel really came out far ahead in this exchange” but cautioned him that “we do have to think carefully and strategically about risks of escalation,” the official recalled.

“Slow things down, think through things,” Biden admonished the Israeli leader. That’s classic Biden, and he seems likely to emerge from missile weekend in a stronger position, at home and abroad. While criticizing Netanyahu’s “mistakes” on Gaza and pressing for de-escalation and humanitarian assistance, Biden has also made good on his pledge of “ironclad” support for Israel’s defense in crisis.

“Biden is the first American president to directly defend Israel,” the senior official noted. U.S. guided-missile destroyers shot down four to six Iranian missiles, a U.S. Patriot missile in Iraq destroyed another, and two squadrons of U.S. fighter jets shot down many Iranian drones, officials said.

Military success likely creates space for other actions. Some Israelis will doubtless want to go harder on the offensive now that Iran’s rocket attack has been routed. But perhaps the show of force will create an opportunity for defusing a conflict that had, until this weekend, seemed damaging and demoralizing for Israel. After Saturday night’s fireworks, that momentum may have shifted.

The Washington Post · by David Ignatius · April 14, 2024

11. Israel is quiet on next steps against Iran — and on which partners helped shoot down missiles

Quiet is right. Why telegraph the next counterpunch? But what people need to stop talking about is preaching the "gospel of de-escalation." While no one wants escalation, making that the priority actually increases the chances of escalation if it prevents Israel and allies from taking the necessary action and responding in ways that will prevent a futureu attack. The "gospel of de-escalation" cededs the initiative to our adversaries.

Israel is quiet on next steps against Iran — and on which partners helped shoot down missiles

BY TIA GOLDENBERG AND JOSEF FEDERMAN

Updated 8:20 PM EDT, April 14, 2024

AP · by TIA GOLDENBERG · April 14, 2024

By and JOSEF FEDERMAN

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Follow AP’s live updates on Iran’s attack against Israel.

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — Israeli leaders on Sunday credited an international military coalition with helping thwart a direct Iranian attack involving hundreds of drones and missiles, calling the coordinated response a starting point for a “strategic alliance” of regional opposition to Tehran.

But Israel’s War Cabinet met without making a decision on next steps, an official said, as a nervous world waited for any sign of further escalation of the former shadow war.

The military coalition, led by the United States, Britain and France and appearing to include a number of Middle Eastern countries, gave Israel support at a time when it finds itself isolated over its war against Hamas in Gaza. The coalition also could serve as a model for regional relations when that war ends.

“This was the first time that such a coalition worked together against the threat of Iran and its proxies in the Middle East,” said the Israeli military spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari.

One unknown is which of Israel’s neighbors participated in the shooting down of the vast majority of about 350 drones and missiles Iran launched. Israeli military officials and a key War Cabinet member noted additional “partners” without naming them. When pressed, White House national security spokesman John Kirby would not name them either.

But one appeared to be Jordan, which described its action as self-defense.

“There was an assessment that there was a real danger of Iranian marches and missiles falling on Jordan, and the armed forces dealt with this danger. And if this danger came from Israel, Jordan would take the same action,” Jordanian Foreign Minister Ayman al-Safadi said in an interview on Al-Mamlaka state television. U.S. President Joe Biden spoke with Jordan’s King Abdullah on Sunday.

The U.S. has long tried to forge a regionwide alliance against Iran as a way of integrating Israel and boosting ties with the Arab world. The effort has included the 2020 Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and four Arab countries, and having Israel in the U.S. military’s Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East and works closely with the armies of moderate Arab states.

The U.S. had been working to establish full relations between Israel and regional heavyweight Saudi Arabia before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack sparked Israel’s war in Gaza. The war, which has claimed over 33,700 Palestinian lives, has frozen those efforts due to widespread outrage across the Arab world. But it appears that some behind-the-scenes cooperation has continued, and the White House has held out hopes of forging Israel-Saudi ties as part of a postwar plan.

Just ahead of Iran’s attack, the commander of CENTCOM, Gen. Erik Kurilla, visited Israel to map out a strategy.

Israel’s military chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, on Sunday thanked CENTCOM for the joint defensive effort. Both Jordan and Saudi Arabia are under the CENTCOM umbrella. While neither acknowledged involvement in intercepting Iran’s launches, the Israeli military released a map showing missiles traveling through the airspace of both nations.

“Arab countries came to the aid of Israel in stopping the attack because they understand that regional organizing is required against Iran, otherwise they will be next in line,” Amos Yadlin, a former head of Israel’s military intelligence, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, said he had spoken with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and that the cooperation “highlighted the opportunity to establish an international coalition and strategic alliance to counter the threat posed by Iran.”

The White House signaled that it hopes to build on the partnerships and urged Israel to think twice before striking Iran. U.S. officials said Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Washington would not participate in any offensive action against Iran.

Israel’s War Cabinet met late Sunday to discuss a possible response, but an Israeli official familiar with the talks said no decisions had been made. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing confidential deliberations.

Asked about plans for retaliation, Hagari declined to comment directly. “We are at high readiness in all fronts,” he said.

“We will build a regional coalition and collect the price from Iran, in the way and at the time that suits us,” said a key War Cabinet member, Benny Gantz.

Iran launched the attack in response to a strike widely blamed on Israel that hit an Iranian consular building in Syria this month and killed two Iranian generals.

By Sunday morning, Iran said the attack was over, and Israel reopened its airspace. Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, claimed Iran had taught Israel a lesson and warned that “any new adventures against the interests of the Iranian nation would be met with a heavier and regretful response from the Islamic Republic of Iran.”

The foes have been engaged in a shadow war for years, but Sunday’s assault was the first time Iran launched a direct military assault on Israel, despite decades of enmity dating back to the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Iran said it targeted Israeli facilities involved in the Damascus strike, and that it told the White House early Sunday that the operation would be “minimalistic.”

But U.S. officials said Iran’s intent was to “destroy and cause casualties” and that if successful, the strikes would have caused an “uncontrollable” escalation. At one point, at least 100 ballistic missiles were in the air with just minutes of flight time to Israel, the officials said.

Israel said more than 99% of what Iran fired was intercepted, with just a few missiles getting through. An Israeli airbase sustained minor damage.

Israel has over the years established — often with the help of the U.S. — a multilayered air-defense network that includes systems capable of intercepting a variety of threats, including long-range missiles, cruise missiles, drones and short-range rockets.

That system, along with collaboration with the U.S. and others, helped thwart what could have been a far more devastating assault at a time when Israel is already deeply engaged in Gaza as well as low-level fighting on its northern border with Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia. Both Hamas and Hezbollah are backed by Iran.

While thwarting the Iranian onslaught could help restore Israel’s image after the Hamas attack in October, what the Middle East’s best-equipped army does next will be closely watched in the region and in Western capitals — especially as Israel seeks to develop the coalition it praised Sunday.

In Washington, Biden pledged to convene allies to develop a unified response. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the U.S. would hold talks with allies. After an urgent meeting, the Group of Seven countries unanimously condemned Iran’s attack and said they stood ready to take “further measures.”

Israel and Iran have been on a collision course throughout Israel’s war in Gaza. In the Oct. 7 attack, militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also backed by Iran, killed 1,200 people in Israel and kidnapped 250 others. Israel’s offensive in Gaza has killed over 33,000 people, according to local health officials.

Hamas welcomed Iran’s attack, saying it was “a natural right and a deserved response” to the strike in Syria. It urged the Iran-backed groups in the region to continue to support Hamas in the war.

Hezbollah also welcomed the attack. Almost immediately after the war in Gaza erupted, Hezbollah began attacking Israel’s northern border. The two sides have been involved in daily exchanges of fire, while Iranian-backed groups in Iraq, Syria and Yemen have launched rockets and missiles toward Israel.

___

Federman reported from Jerusalem. Associated Press writers Zeke Miller and Michelle L. Price in Washington; Amir Vahdat in Tehran, Iran; Samy Magdy in Cairo; Omar Akour in Amman, Jordan; and Giada Zampano in Rome contributed to this report.

AP · by TIA GOLDENBERG · April 14, 2024

12. Iran says it gave warning before attacking Israel. US says that's not true

​Wasn't that nice of the regime.

• Middle East

Iran says it gave warning before attacking Israel. US says that's not true

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iranian-notice-attack-may-have-dampened-escalation-risks-2024-04-14/?utm

By Jeff Mason, Ahmed Rasheed and Samia Nakhoul

April 15, 20244:25 AM EDTUpdated an hour ago

Item 1 of 3 A police officer and residents inspect the remains of a rocket booster that, according to Israeli authorities critically injured a 7-year-old girl, after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, near Arad, Israel, April 14, 2024. REUTERS/Christophe van der Perre

[1/3]A police officer and residents inspect the remains of a rocket booster that, according to Israeli authorities critically injured a 7-year-old girl, after Iran launched drones and missiles towards Israel, near Arad, Israel, April 14, 2024. REUTERS/Christophe van der Perre Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

Summary

• Iran said it gave 72 hours' notice of attack
• U.S. denies receiving extensive warning
• Israel and allies downed most drones and missiles

WASHINGTON/BAGHDAD/DUBAI, April 14 (Reuters) - Turkish, Jordanian and Iraqi officials said on Sunday that Iran gave wide notice days before its drone and missile attack on Israel, but U.S. officials said Tehran did not warn Washington and that it was aiming to cause significant damage.

Iran launched hundreds of drones and missiles on Saturday in a retaliatory strike after a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Syria.

Most of the drones and missiles were downed before reaching Israeli territory, though a young girl was critically injured and there were widespread concerns of further escalation.

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said on Sunday that Iran gave neighbouring countries and Israel's ally the United States 72 hours' notice it would launch the strikes.

Turkey's Foreign Ministry said it had spoken to both Washington and Tehran before the attack, adding it had conveyed messages as an intermediary to be sure reactions were proportionate.

"Iran said the reaction would be a response to Israel’s attack on its embassy in Damascus and that it would not go beyond this. We were aware of the possibilities. The developments were not a surprise," said a Turkish diplomatic source.

One senior official in U.S. President Joe Biden's administration denied Amirabdollahian's statement, saying Washington did have contact with Iran through Swiss intermediaries but did not get notice 72 hours in advance.

"That is absolutely not true,” the official said. “They did not give a notification, nor did they give any sense of ... 'these will be the targets, so evacuate them.'"

Tehran sent the United States a message only after the strikes began and the intent was to be "highly destructive" said the official, adding that Iran's claim of a widespread warning may be an attempt to compensate for the lack of any major damage from the attack.

"We received a message from the Iranians as this was ongoing, through the Swiss. This was basically suggesting that they were finished after this, but it was still an ongoing attack. So that was (their) message to us," the U.S. official said.

Iraqi, Turkish and Jordanian officials each said Iran had provided early warning of the attack last week, including some details.

The attack with drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles risked causing major casualties and escalating the conflict.

U.S. officials said on Friday and Saturday they expected an imminent attack and urged Iran against one, with Biden tersely saying his only message to Tehran was: "Don't."

ESCALATION

Two Iraqi sources, including a government security adviser and a security official, said Iran had used diplomatic channels to inform Baghdad about the attack at least three days before it happened.

The exact timing of the attack was not disclosed at that point, but was passed to Iraqi security and military authorities hours before the strikes, allowing Baghdad to close its airspace and avoid fatal accidents.

"The government clearly understood from the Iranian officials that the U.S. military in Iraq was also aware of the attack in advance," said the Iraqi security official.

A senior Jordanian official said Iran had summoned Arab envoys in Tehran on Wednesday to inform them of their intention to carry out an attack, though it did not specify the timing.

Asked if Iran had also given details about the targets and kind of weapons to be used, the Jordanian source did not respond directly but indicated that that was the case.

An Iranian source briefed on the matter said Iran had informed the U.S. through diplomatic channels that included Qatar, Turkey and Switzerland about the scheduled day of the attack, saying it would be conducted in a manner to avoid provoking a response.

How far escalation can be avoided remains in question. Biden has told Israel the United States will not join any Israeli retaliation, the U.S. official said.

However, Israel is still weighing its response and will "exact the price from Iran in the fashion and timing that is right for us", Israeli minister Benny Gantz said on Sunday.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Jeff Mason and Rami Ayyub in Washington, Tuvan Gumrukcu in Ankara, Ahmed Rasheed in Baghdad and Parisa Hafezi and Samia Nakhoul in Dubai; Writing by Angus McDowall; Editing by Susan Fenton and Lisa Shumaker

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Jeff Mason

Thomson Reuters

Jeff Mason is a White House Correspondent for Reuters. He has covered the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden and the presidential campaigns of Biden, Trump, Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain. He served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association in 2016-2017, leading the press corps in advocating for press freedom in the early days of the Trump administration. His and the WHCA's work was recognized with Deutsche Welle's "Freedom of Speech Award." Jeff has asked pointed questions of domestic and foreign leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong Un. He is a winner of the WHCA's “Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure" award and co-winner of the Association for Business Journalists' "Breaking News" award. Jeff began his career in Frankfurt, Germany as a business reporter before being posted to Brussels, Belgium, where he covered the European Union. Jeff appears regularly on television and radio and teaches political journalism at Georgetown University. He is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and a former Fulbright scholar.

13. Return of horse-drawn caissons to Arlington National Cemetery delayed

​I was unaware of the suspension for so long. I suppose in some way that is a good thing because it has been quite awhile since I have attended a funeral at Arlington.

Return of horse-drawn caissons to Arlington National Cemetery delayed

militarytimes.com · by Lolita Baldor · April 12, 2024

The return of horse-drawn caissons at Arlington National Cemetery is being delayed for months and maybe longer, the Army said Friday, as it struggles to improve the care of the horses after two died in 2022 as a result of poor feed and living conditions.

Nearly a year after the Army suspended the use of the gray and black horses for funerals, officials said they are making progress buying new horses, getting better equipment, and improving the training, facilities and turnout areas. But Maj. Gen. Trevor Bredenkamp, commander of the Military District of Washington, said it’s been far more time-consuming and difficult than initially expected to get the program going again. And it will take an extended period of time to get enough horses to meet the funeral needs.

“We have every intention to resume operations. I can’t give you a week or month or estimate, but it’s requirements-based,” Bredenkamp said in a call with a small number of reporters. He said he doesn’t expect it will take years but “it’s going to take some time.” He said he would not describe the delay as “indefinite” but repeatedly acknowledged the stumbling blocks to restarting a sustainable program that protects the health of the horses.

The horses are part of the caisson platoon of the 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as the Old Guard, which is best known for guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the cemetery, located just across the river from Washington.

Two of the Old Guard platoon horses, Mickey and Tony, had to be euthanized within days of each other in February 2022. Both died from colon impaction.

The Army found that the horses had very little grass in their turnout fields and they consumed sand and gravel from the ground while eating the low-quality hay they were fed. The fields were littered with construction debris and manure and were only large enough to support six or seven horses, nowhere near the 64 that were using the fields when Mickey and Tony died, according to an Army investigation.

At the time, officials said the conditions were from mismanagement, lack of resources and a poor understanding of the horses’ needs. They also said soldiers needed better training on how to care for them.

On Friday, Bredenkamp said the Army is struggling to find enough horses to buy and to find nearby locations large enough for the horses to be kept and trained. The service is also getting lighter-weight caissons and conducting more extensive training for the soldiers to ride and take care of the horses.

Ray Alexander, superintendent of the cemetery, said there are 27-30 funerals a day, Monday through Friday, at Arlington, and of those, six to eight qualify for escort honors. In order to meet that demand, without surpassing an appropriate workload for the horses, Bredenkamp said they need six squads of horses.

Currently, he said, they have 42 horses that are being cared for at a professional facility in Virginia. Two years ago, there were 60 horses in the program, but many had to be retired.

For the past year, the Army has used a funeral home hearse or another vehicle in place of the caisson. And in ceremonies for Army and Marine Corps officers who were colonels or above, there is a riderless horse that walks behind the caisson.

14. U.S. details Pentagon’s role in defending Israel from Iranian attack

U.S. details Pentagon’s role in defending Israel from Iranian attack

By Dan Lamothe and Alex Horton

Updated April 14, 2024 at 3:58 p.m. EDT|Published April 14, 2024 at 3:04 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · April 14, 2024

As Iran launched its much-anticipated attack on Israel on Saturday, the night sky was filled with deadly threats. More than 100 ballistic missiles were fired, senior U.S. officials said, complemented by about 30 cruise missiles and more than 150 explosive drones.

Israel’s vaunted missile defense systems ramped up to engage the munitions as they were launched from Iran, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But they were flanked by U.S. and British fighter jets, a Patriot missile defense system manned by U.S. troops in Iraq and U.S. destroyers off the coast of Israel, each ready to assist.

The result, a senior Biden administration official said Sunday, was a “spectacular defeat” of Iran’s attack, even though it was larger than U.S. officials had anticipated.

“You can imagine those tense moments,” the official said, speaking to reporters Sunday on the condition of anonymity under ground rules set by the White House.

Among the U.S. forces that participated were the 494th Fighter Squadron, with headquarters in Britain; and the 335th Fighter Squadron, of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. Combined, the two squadrons used their F-15E Strike Eagles to take down about 70 attack drones heading to Israel, and received a phone call after from President Biden. The jets are designed for both air-to-air combat and deep interdiction, the Air Force says.

A senior military official, speaking on the same call, said that the USS Carney and USS Arleigh Burke, destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, shot down between four and six ballistic missiles in the attack. U.S. troops manning the Patriot missile defense system in Irbil, Iraq, took down another missile that had violated Iraqi airspace on its vector to Israel, the official said.

All told, Israeli and U.S. officials said that 99 percent of the incoming munitions were intercepted, suggesting just a few may have struck their intended targets in the Jewish state. At least one ballistic missile readied by Houthis in Yemen was destroyed on the launch pad, officials said, pointing to the coalition presence that has surveilled militant activity in the region in the last few months.

“There’s virtually no infrastructure damage to Israel at all,” the senior administration official said. That, he said, was despite Iran’s intent to cause “significant damage and deaths in Israel.”

Israel-Gaza war

Iran launched more than 300 drones and missiles toward Israel in its first full-scale military assault against the country. Follow live updates.

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Iranian drones similar to those used in the attack have been deployed by Russian forces to target Ukrainian infrastructure, and a key strategy there is to exhaust Kyiv’s costly air defense with cheaper and plentiful weapons to make future attacks easier, said Samuel Bendett, a member of the Russia studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses, a policy institute based in Arlington, Va. Tehran has almost certainly taken note, Bendett said.

It was notable that some of the drones used are slower and less sophisticated than jet-powered drones they also have in their inventory, he said, and it was likely Iran knew those drones would be destroyed relatively easily.

But the attack still imposed new challenges on Israel, Bendett suggested. To achieve a 99 percent interception rate required defenses that are probably “much costlier than the total number of threats arrayed against Israel,” he said.

“In this case, the mission was accomplished,” he said. “Israel had to get its aircraft in the air.”

Iran’s success overall was hit-and-miss, said Tom Karako, director of the missile defense project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There was no strategic surprise, and the overall defeat of the threat demonstrated the value of diverse air defense systems that handle numerous types of weapons, he said.

Yet the size of the operation itself prompts questions about the stocks now available for air defense systems, Karako said, which are finite and expensive.

“The concern here is that Israel shot a lot of stuff. And so that speaks to their capacity issues,” Karako said. “You don’t take out 100 ballistic missiles of any type without dipping into capacity. So that’s going to be an issue here for the next steps.”

Retired Gen. Kenneth “Frank” McKenzie, who oversaw U.S. forces in the Middle East before retiring in 2022, said on Sunday that Iran, too, expended a lot of resources in the attack that will affect its ability to carry out anything similar soon. Speaking on CBS News’s “Face the Nation,” McKenzie said that Iran has more than 3,000 missiles of various types scattered across the country, with a little more than 100 in western Iran, where they can target Israel.

“Based on what the Israelis are saying, I believe they fired most of those weapons at Israel,” McKenzie said. “The Israelis, obviously, were able to intercept most of them. Iran could not replicate last night’s attack tonight, if they had to.”

McKenzie called the attack a “maximum effort,” and said there was “nothing moderate” about it. Iran used its “most important capability,” ballistic missiles, in the assault, and it still failed, he assessed.

“So I think Israel this morning is now much stronger than they were yesterday,” McKenzie said. “And Iran is relatively weaker than it was yesterday.”

The Washington Post · by Dan Lamothe · April 14, 2024

15. House Speaker Mike Johnson says he will push for aid to Israel and Ukraine this week

And Ukraine? I have seen a report that questioned whether the Ukraine aid package would be brought to the floor.

Also, will Iran's attack on Israel create more support for military aid? Did Iran miscalculate? I am sure many in Congress will be more comfortable supporting Israel after the Iranian attack. Also, did Iran miscaluate? Will its action halt the eroding support for Israel?

House Speaker Mike Johnson says he will push for aid to Israel and Ukraine this week

BY STEPHEN GROVES

Updated 6:50 PM EDT, April 14, 2024

AP · April 14, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Mike Johnson said Sunday he will try to advance wartime aid for Israel this week as he attempts the difficult task of winning House approval for a national security package that also includes funding for Ukraine and allies in Asia.

Johnson, R-La., is already under immense political pressure from his fellow GOP lawmakers as he tries to stretch between the Republican Party’s divided support for helping Kyiv defend itself from Moscow’s invasion. The Republican speaker has sat for two months on a $95 billion supplemental package that would send support to the U.S. allies, as well as provide humanitarian aid for civilians in Ukraine and Gaza and funding to replenish U.S. weapons provided to Taiwan.

The attack by Iran on Israel early Sunday further ratcheted up the pressure on Johnson, but also gave him an opportunity to underscore the urgency of approving the funding.

Johnson told Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures” that he and Republicans “understand the necessity of standing with Israel” and he would try this week to advance the aid.

“The details of that package are being put together right now,” he said. “We’re looking at the options and all these supplemental issues.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at a news conference also said that President Joe Biden held a phone call Sunday with the top Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate, including Johnson. The New York Democrat said there was consensus “among all the leaders that we had to help Israel and help Ukraine, and now hopefully we can work that out and get this done next week.”

“It’s vital for the future of Ukraine, for Israel and the West,” Schumer said.

The White House said Biden “discussed the urgent need for the House of Representatives to pass the national security supplemental as soon as possible.”

Johnson has also “made it clear” to fellow House Republicans that he will this week push to package together the aid for Israel, Ukraine and allies in Asia and pass it through the House, said GOP Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

The speaker has expressed support for legislation that would structure some of the funding for Kyiv as loans, pave the way for the U.S. to tap frozen Russian central bank assets and include other policy changes. Johnson has pushed for the Biden administration to lift a pause on approvals for Liquefied Natural Gas exports and at times has also demanded policy changes at the U.S. border with Mexico.

But currently, the only package with wide bipartisan support in Congress is the Senate-passed bill that includes roughly $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel.

White House national security spokesman John Kirby called on the speaker to put that package “on the floor as soon as possible.”

“We didn’t need any reminders in terms of what’s going on in Ukraine,” Kirby said on NBC. “But last night certainly underscores significantly the threat that Israel faces in a very, very tough neighborhood.”

As Johnson searches for a way to advance the funding for Ukraine, he has been in conversations with both the White House and former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.

With his job under threat, Johnson traveled to Florida on Friday for an event with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club. Trump expressed support for Johnson and said he had a “very good relationship” with him.

“He and I are 100% united on these big agenda items,” Johnson said. “When you talk about aid to Ukraine, he’s introduced the loan-lease concept which is a really important one and I think has a lot of consensus.”

But Trump, with his “America First” agenda, has inspired many Republicans to push for a more isolationist stance. Support for Ukraine has steadily eroded in the roughly two years since the war began, and a cause that once enjoyed wide support has become one of Johnson’s toughest problems.

When he returns to Washington on Monday, Johnson also will be facing a contingent of conservatives already angry with how he has led the House in maintaining much of the status quo both on government spending and more recently, a U.S. government surveillance tool.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a right-wing Republican from Georgia, has called for Johnson’s ouster. She departed the Capitol on Friday telling reporters that support for her effort was growing. And as Johnson on Sunday readied to advance the aid, Greene said on X that it was “antisemitic to make Israeli aid contingent” on aid for Ukraine.

While no other Republicans have openly joined Greene in calling to oust Johnson, a growing number of hardline conservatives are openly disparaging Johnson and defying his leadership.

Meanwhile, senior GOP lawmakers who support aid to Ukraine are growing frustrated with the months-long wait to bring it to the House floor. Kyiv’s troops have been running low on ammunition and Russia is becoming emboldened as it looks to gain ground in a spring and summer offensive. A massive missile and drone attack destroyed one of Ukraine’s largest power plants and damaged others last week.

“What happened in Israel last night happens in Ukraine every night,” said Rep. Michael McCaul, the Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

The divided dynamic has forced Johnson to try to stitch together a package that has some policy wins for Republicans while also keeping Democrats on board. Democrats, however, have repeatedly called on the speaker to put the $95 billion package passed by the Senate in February on the floor.

Although progressive Democrats have resisted supporting the aid to Israel over concerns it would support its campaign into Gaza that has killed thousands of civilians, most House Democrats have gotten behind supporting the Senate package.

“The reason why the Senate bill is the only bill is because of the urgency,” Rep. Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said last week. “We pass the Senate bill, it goes straight to the president’s desk and you start getting the aid to Ukraine immediately. That’s the only option.”

Many Democrats also have signaled they would likely be willing to help Johnson defeat an effort to remove him from the speaker’s office if he puts the Senate bill on the floor.

“I’m one of those who would save him if we can do Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine and some reasonable border security,” said Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Texas Democrat.

___

Associated Press writers Lisa Mascaro and Kevin Freking contributed.

STEPHEN GROVES

Groves covers Congress for The Associated Press.

twittermailto

AP · April 14, 2024

16. How to Stop the Iran Threat: Four Critical Steps America Must Take

​Proposed prior to the Iranian attack on Israel this weekend.

How to Stop the Iran Threat: Four Critical Steps America Must Take

Tehran will continue to increase its domination of Iraq and progress towards regional domination if it is allowed to do so.

The National Interest · by Zalmay Khalilzad · April 12, 2024

The United States and Israel are awaiting a threatened “significant” Iranian response to the attack on its consulate in Syria, but this is just part of a much larger challenge: Iran is accelerating its long-standing goal, a push for regional hegemony. The key manifestation is its current push to get U.S. forces out of Iraq and Syria. Among other things, Tehran is using its proxy militia leaders and pro-Iran-Islamist parties to oblige Iraqi prime minister Mohammad Shia’ Ali Sudani to push Washington for a timetable on full U.S. military withdrawal.

Sudani will meet President Biden on April 15. In advance of this, he has already conveyed that he wants the meeting to focus on the withdrawal. Iran knows that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and the loss of the accompanying logistics will make the U.S. military presence in Syria unsustainable.

Sudani must be aware that the withdrawal from Iraq will further strengthen Iranian domination of his country, to which our forces serve as the only effective deterrent. However, his ability to operate is limited. He does not have the backing of a political party or security forces, making him a mere figurehead in a government dominated by those two forces. His position is largely dependent on the will of pro-Iran Shia Islamist parties and pro-Iranian militia forces.

Sudani has maintained good relations with U.S. diplomats and military officials. He is the friendly face of the pro-Iran Islamists and proxy forces vis-à-vis the United States and the region. But it’s important to remember that he is not in charge. At most, he can convey messages from those in charge and act as a mediator.

The Iranian leaders, proxy militias, and parties are putting Sudani in an uncomfortable position: He is being pressed to push for a definitive timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. forces, or he risks losing his job, which he seems determined to keep. At a minimum, he must appear to be seriously trying to accommodate their instructions. He will want the Biden administration to appear to be earnestly considering negotiations for a withdrawal.

The continued presence of U.S. forces presents a formidable obstacle to one of the Iranian regime’s major strategic regional objectives: the domination of the Fertile Crescent, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian areas. Tehran aims for a continuous and unhindered land corridor to the Mediterranean.

Local obstacles to Iran’s ambition will remain. These obstacles include the Kurdistan Regional Government, some Sunni Arabs, and even a few patriotic Shia groups who oppose Iran’s domination of their country—although they have not taken a public position against the withdrawal, fearing reprisal and assassination by Tehran’s proxy militias. They are closely monitoring the United States’ response. We can work with these forces to oppose Iranian expansionism. However, a complete U.S. withdrawal would remove the most important barrier to Iran’s aggressive goals and create a vacuum into which Iran will insert itself. A withdrawal will also affect the calculations of many other players as they assess the future balance and order in their region.

Obviously, Iran’s domination of the Middle East is not in the U.S. interest. Its regime is hostile to the United States, supports terrorism, pursues nuclear weapons, is building ever-longer-range missiles to deliver conventional and eventually nuclear weapons, and has set aside mutual suspicions to partner with our global adversaries, China and Russia. It would be a mistake to facilitate Iran’s domination of the Fertile Crescent by submitting to Iran's demand and withdrawing from Iraq and Syria. If we refuse, however, we must be prepared for Iran to increase the pressure and likely instruct its proxy militias to attack our forces in Iraq or in both countries.

It’s vital that we review and make needed adjustments to our policy and posture to effectively deter this threat. Doing so must include the following four steps:

First, we must strengthen deterrence.

Responding by attacking their proxy forces is inadequate because, to Tehran, the lives of Iraqi, Syrian, Lebanese, or Yemeni militias are cheap and expendable. We would only be providing Tehran with an opportunity to test its weapons and operational concepts. Simultaneously, doing so imposes significant costs on us, financially and physically. Effective deterrence requires that we make the militias’ actions a problem for Iran. We need to clarify to Iran that a resumption of attacks by their proxies against us—our forces, including bases and naval ships in the region – will result in neutralizing Tehran’s high-value targets both in the region and inside Iran.

Second, we must clearly convey to Iran that a resumption of proxy attacks will result in a strengthening of U.S. sanctions similar to those implemented during the Trump administration. Those sanctions were significant and included the oil and non-oil sectors, impacting more than 700 persons and entities. They were very costly for Iran, and Tehran fears their restoration.

Third, we must increase our political pressure on the Iranian regime by focusing on its vulnerabilities. Political oppression and economic mismanagement have made the theocratic government odious, causing it to fear a popular revolution or a coup by elements of its own security apparatus. The regime cannot sustain itself indefinitely. We can speed its demise through effective programs that expose its corruption and waste of resources through support for terrorist and extremist groups and that highlight the widespread opposition within the country. The Iranian people are not hostile to the United States. Indeed, perhaps nowhere in the Middle East is the United States more popular than in Iran. Also, the huge and successful Iranian diaspora community in America can be a valuable asset for the country’s economic and political development and a bridge between the United States and Iran.

Fourth, as we return in earnest to the Indo-Pacific, we must encourage regional states to strengthen their military capabilities and cooperate to oppose Tehran’s continued efforts at hegemony. Two critical elements in this effort are normalizing Saudi-Israeli relations and strengthening the U.S.-Saudi mutual defense treaty, and getting this back on track should be a high and urgent priority.

The Iranian regime is an ambitious but also shrewd, calculating, and risk-averse player. Tehran will continue to increase its domination of Iraq and progress towards regional domination if it is allowed to do so. We need to push back and affirm that we don’t intend to let them succeed.

Zalmay Khalilzad was the twenty-sixth U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2007-2009) and the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq (2005-2007). Follow him on X: @realzalmayMK.

Image: Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Zalmay Khalilzad · April 12, 2024

17. ‘Catastrophic success’ of credentialing program for soldiers may lead to cuts

Will congress step in?

‘Catastrophic success’ of credentialing program for soldiers may lead to cuts

Stars and Stripes · by Brian Erickson · April 12, 2024

Army

ByBrian Erickson

Stars and Stripes •

Spc. Jared Wickert, with the 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, reviews website information during an Army Credentialing Assistance Program briefing at Fort Carson, Colo., Nov. 13, 2019. (Norman Shifflett/U.S. Army)

A program that helps soldiers sharpen their career skills before they leave the service may cost too much money, the Army’s top civilian official said this week.

The Credentialing Assistance Program allows soldiers to use up to $4,000 per fiscal year to earn certifications that can give them a leg up, whether it’s within their military job or in a field they pursue once they leave the service.

The program has become a “catastrophic success,” Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told House lawmakers Wednesday on Capitol Hill, due to its popularity and its costs.

Rep. John Carter (R-Texas), whose district includes Fort Cavazos, questioned Wormuth out of concern that cuts to credentialing and tuition assistance funding could impact recruiting and retention.

Wormuth replied that no final decisions had been made, but that a limit on soldiers to one certification per year was under consideration.

“The challenge we have is we really, frankly, didn’t put any guardrails around the program to help us scope it,” Wormuth said.

Credentialing assistance began in 2018 as a pilot program. More than 64,000 soldiers have used it for certifications as project managers, personal trainers, private pilots and other jobs, Army spokesperson Andrea L. Kelly said in a statement.

The program cost the Army $60.2 million in fiscal year 2023, Kelly said, adding that a review is underway to “ensure the long-term success of the program.”

Brian Erickson

Brian Erickson

Brian is a reporter and photographer for Stars and Stripes based at Aviano Air Base, Italy, where he writes about military operations and current events. He has experience writing for military communities in Hawaii, Texas and Korea. He holds a communications degree from University of Maryland Global Campus

Stars and Stripes · by Brian Erickson · April 12, 2024

18. Lessons From Gaza’s Most Vulnerable: Understanding Civilian Protection in Wartime

Excerpts:

Finally, with respect to international humanitarian law, legal scholars, policymakers, and practitioners should refine how they define and differentiate between combatants and non-combatants. International humanitarian law currently defines “civilian” as one who is not a member of a state or non-state armed group, or who does not actively participate in hostilities. The joint criteria of group membership and behavior are central to this definition. In practice, however, civilian status is often assigned based on ascriptive characteristics — such as age or gender — with the default assumption being that such actors are peaceful, innocent, and unarmed. Similarly, males are often viewed as “imperfect victims,” given prevailing norms surrounding the feminization of victimhood and the legitimacy of targeting military-age males.

Legal and customary definitions of “civilian” should be restricted to behavioral criteria instead of ascriptive traits or group membership. Civilians abandon their status as noncombatants during the period in which they participate in hostilities, as opposed to when they affiliate with a specific group or pursue other protective measures. A U.N. guidance note on civilian protection observes the following:

Civilians who directly participate in hostilities are excluded from protection for such time as they do so. This may include civilians in self-defense groups. However, once they cease to engage in violence they should be protected.

In practice, the Israeli army should end reliance on “kill zones” or areas where commanders loosen the rules of engagement to meet key tactical objectives.

Above all else, analysts and policymakers should maintain sensitivity to the lived experiences of ordinary people in wartime. They ought to resist the temptation to reduce human suffering to body counts or military strategy in the interest of pursuing their preferred policy objectives. Only by foregrounding the everyday experiences of local civilians can external observers not only advance research on wartime survival but also safeguard the dignity of those suffering the effects of war.

Lessons From Gaza’s Most Vulnerable: Understanding Civilian Protection in Wartime - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Austin Knuppe · April 15, 2024

There are as many ways to survive war as those affected by it. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel last October, Palestinians have been confronting existential decisions about how to survive the war between Israel and Hamas. When facing imminent danger, how do civilians decide whether to stay in their homes or flee? For those who stay, when do they collaborate with or resist armed groups? Are neutrality or autonomy ever viable strategies for surviving wartime violence? In short, how do ordinary people survive when war arrives in their neighborhood?

I have spent the past decade studying how civilians across different walks of life have survived foreign military occupation, insurgency, and civil war. I have found that when violence arrives in someone’s community, their first response is to draw on a set of subconscious decision-making shortcuts (heuristics) to informally evaluate the relative costs and benefits of staying versus fleeing their homes. Inputs including combatants’ ethnic or sectarian identity, their reputation in the community, and their behavior on the battlefield all inform how ordinary people make survival decisions. Scholars, soldiers, and policymakers ought to obtain a deeper understanding of civilian survival dynamics to develop and implement effective policy to protect the vulnerable during wartime.

In pursuit of that aim, I apply existing research on civilian survival in wartime to better understand the plight of ordinary Gazans. I draw on my fieldwork in Iraq to demonstrate how ordinary people survive escalating urban warfare and use these insights to investigate the war between Israel and Hamas. My hope is that this might inform a discussion of designing and implementing better civilian protection policy, both for the Palestinian Territories and future wars that implicate the West. This assumes, of course, belligerents are interested in civilian protection. In the case of the war between Israel and Hamas, unfortunately, there is not much evidence of that interest. However, international stakeholders such as the United States and the European Union should maintain civilian protection as a requirement for ongoing political, military, and financial support to Israel.

Become a Member

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Ordinary people will go to extraordinary lengths to stay in their homes amid wartime violence. Individuals not only need to have the motivation to flee but also the opportunity to safely travel and resettle in a new community. They acclimate to conflict by laying low, hiding, or adjusting their movement to avoid encountering armed groups. At some critical juncture, however, nearly everyone wrestles with the decision to remain or leave. Threats of violence or exploitation against a family member, friend, or neighbor only accentuate the survival dilemma.

As I found in my research on Iraq’s war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State between 2014 and 2018, threats of ethnic cleansing and human trafficking motivated many ethnic and religious minorities to abandon their homes. Forced displacement was common in the northern province of Ninewa, especially among minority communities in the rural periphery of Mosul. Internally displaced persons faced significant danger while in transit, including financial exploitation and gender- and sexual-based violence. The Islamic State’s ethnic cleansing of Yazidi communities on Mount Sinjar in August 2014 stands as an example of genocide against non-Muslim, non-Arab populations.

Forced displacement in Gaza is widespread but also constrained to a relatively small area. Given the dense, urban geography of the Gaza Strip, as well as the Israel Defense Forces’ reliance on artillery and airstrikes, Palestinian civilians have few options for safe transit and resettlement. The high rate of indiscriminate violence — with civilian–combatant casualty ratios ranging from 2:1 to as high as 4:1 — makes calculating the risk of staying versus fleeing more difficult. Accordingly, nearly 78 percent of Gaza residents have been displaced from their homes since October 7. Despite Israeli assurances that evacuating residents will not be targeted, as Gazans flee their neighborhoods, most continue to confront Israeli air and artillery strikes that damage roads, schools, and churches, as well as temporary shelter centers and more established refugee camps. Civilians who safely arrive in southern Gaza face extreme difficulty in securing access to basic needs such as daily hygiene, fresh food, and clean water, as well as basic medical care, shelter, and subsistence jobs. As U.N. Sectary General António Guterres concluded last December: “The people of Gaza are being told to move like human pinballs — ricocheting between ever-smaller slivers of the south, without any of the basics for survival.”

Those Who Remain: Collaboration, Resistance, and Neutrality

Civilians who remain in their communities — either by force or choice — confront similar existential decisions about whether to resist, collaborate, or remain neutral from insurgents or military forces operating in their neighborhoods. By their very nature, neutral strategies — such as hiding, laying low, or commuting — are short-lived. Eventually, people run out of food, fuel, or medicine, driving desperation and competition with other community members. In western Iraq, for example, many local Sunni communities initially welcomed jihadist fighters as a welcome reprieve from exploitation by coalition forces, only later to be exploited by those very same jihadists when they failed to conform to their edicts.

Collaboration or resistance depends on whether civilians can accommodate armed groups’ demands without sacrificing their basic needs or violating their core values. In the face of extreme deprivation, most people will cooperate with whatever armed group can alleviate their immediate suffering. Those with outside options for protection — including patronage to a rival militia or exclusive access to food, medicine, or work through graft or corruption — are more likely to pursue “everyday resistance,” active opposition, and armed resistance. Those who are unable or unwilling to accommodate armed rule, but who lack viable alternatives for protection, are more likely to cooperate. The most vulnerable will passively acquiesce by complying with combatants’ demands. A select few with a high tolerance for risk — including military-age males between 16 and 35 — might collaborate with insurgents in exchange for status, a sense of belonging, or a paycheck. When conflict dynamics in the neighborhood inevitably change, people revisit whether their current strategies serve their most essential needs.

In the past four months, Gaza residents have been forced to navigate repression by Hamas militants on the one hand and victimization by the Israeli military on the other. Since their election in 2006, Hamas’ repression of local residents includes not only the construction of military facilities underneath civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals, and the use of human shields on residential rooftops, but also the exploitation, torture, and murder of political dissenters. Indeed, popular support for the Hamas-led government had dropped to 38 percent just prior to the October 7 attack, according to a public opinion poll enumerated in September 2023. Gazans who interact with Israeli soldiers, on the other hand, confront AI-enabled surveillance, administrative detention, sexual humiliation, as well as injury or death while pursuing humanitarian assistance. Of course, this is not a new phenomenon. Civilians in Gaza have been killed and injured by the Israeli military for many years, although the scale of civilian suffering in Gaza now is particularly severe.

Given pervasive civilian victimization perpetrated by both Hamas and the Israeli military, evidence of local collaboration and resistance efforts among Palestinians communities is extremely difficult to externally verify. Nevertheless, several incidents of public protest against Hamas have been recorded in the past six months, including a February 2024 protest campaign in Rafah. Regular public opinion polling throughout the conflict also provides clues as to the likelihood of opportunist forms of collaboration and resistance with local militants. Since the start of the war, public support among Gazans for Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel last fall has increased from 57 percent in December to 71 percent in March. While public opinion data are not the same thing as observing collaboration or resistance firsthand, they do illustrate how difficult it will be for any governing authority — Palestinian, Israeli, or otherwise — to rebuild legitimacy after the war.

Civilian Protection in an Age of Urban Warfare

How does knowledge of civilian survival in wartime inform policies to protect civilians in Gaza?

First and foremost, the United States must continue to negotiate for an immediate ceasefire in exchange for the release of all remaining hostages. While an abstention to U.N. Security Council Resolution 2728 was a positive development, President Joe Biden’s approval to send an additional $2.4 billion in munitions and military equipment to Israel on March 29 demonstrates the fundamental incoherence of the administration’s demand for civilian protection on the one hand and its insistence that Israel has a right to defend itself on the other. Instead, Congress should consider allocating a portion of military assistance to Israel as condolence payments to Palestinian civilian victims of the war. While condolence payments played a limited role in U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, advocates contend that they are a necessary policy tool for transitional justice and post-conflict reconciliation.

Critics are right to point out that neither a ceasefire nor reparations will end the conflict. Properly executed, however, a ceasefire could create the pause necessary to accelerate humanitarian assistance to the 1.4 million displaced Gazans confronting famine, disease, and despair. Moreover, from a strategic standpoint, a temporary ceasefire is not inconsistent with Israel’s military objective of destroying the Hamas remnant embedded within and below Rafah.

In the event of a ceasefire, the United States must coordinate with its Arab and European partners to facilitate safe access for Palestinians trying to access relief supplies through the U.S.-proposed maritime corridor. To date, the delivery of relief via air drops has not only been ineffective but has also injured or killed civilians scrambling for relief supplies on the ground. Properly executed, a maritime corridor would provide safe access to humanitarian assistancein an area relatively insulated from Israel’s military offensive. Regrettably, the recent Israeli attack on a World Central Kitchen convoy in Dier al Balah raises concerns about the nature of Israeli targeting as well as the prospects for delivering aid via the maritime corridor.

At the same time, non-governmental organizations, universities, and state agencies must expand efforts to monitor, collect, and distribute real-time data from conflict-affected communities. In Iraq’s confrontation with the Islamic State, for example, Omar Mohammad’s journalism for the Mosul Eye provided policymakers and everyday observers a personal account of the group’s control through the lens of Mosul residents. Similarly, Aymenn Jawad al Tamimi has been particularly effective at distributing his field research on Islamic State control in Iraq and Syria to key stakeholders via social media channels and a subscription-based newsletter.

The challenge is tougher in Gaza, where wartime violence creates intermittent blackouts, affecting reliable cellular and Internet access across the Strip. Nonetheless, analysts such as Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib provide real-time updates on the conflict’s effect on civilians through conversations with friends and family in Gaza. Outside of Gaza, organizations like AirWars, Bellingcat, and ACLED rely on a combination of open source intelligence and eyewitness accounts to not only calculate civilian casualties but also report on the capabilities and operations of armed groups. Expanded partnerships between these organizations and more established human rights groups can serve as a force multiplier for civilian protection.

Finally, with respect to international humanitarian law, legal scholars, policymakers, and practitioners should refine how they define and differentiate between combatants and non-combatants. International humanitarian law currently defines “civilian” as one who is not a member of a state or non-state armed group, or who does not actively participate in hostilities. The joint criteria of group membership and behavior are central to this definition. In practice, however, civilian status is often assigned based on ascriptive characteristics — such as age or gender — with the default assumption being that such actors are peaceful, innocent, and unarmed. Similarly, males are often viewed as “imperfect victims,” given prevailing norms surrounding the feminization of victimhood and the legitimacy of targeting military-age males.

Legal and customary definitions of “civilian” should be restricted to behavioral criteria instead of ascriptive traits or group membership. Civilians abandon their status as noncombatants during the period in which they participate in hostilities, as opposed to when they affiliate with a specific group or pursue other protective measures. A U.N. guidance note on civilian protection observes the following:

Civilians who directly participate in hostilities are excluded from protection for such time as they do so. This may include civilians in self-defense groups. However, once they cease to engage in violence they should be protected.

In practice, the Israeli army should end reliance on “kill zones” or areas where commanders loosen the rules of engagement to meet key tactical objectives.

Above all else, analysts and policymakers should maintain sensitivity to the lived experiences of ordinary people in wartime. They ought to resist the temptation to reduce human suffering to body counts or military strategy in the interest of pursuing their preferred policy objectives. Only by foregrounding the everyday experiences of local civilians can external observers not only advance research on wartime survival but also safeguard the dignity of those suffering the effects of war.

Become a Member

Austin Knuppe is an assistant professor of political science at Utah State University, where he serves on the faculty advisory board of the Heravi Peace Institute. His new book is Surviving the Islamic State: Contention, Cooperation, and Neutrality in Wartime Iraq, from which parts of this essay were adapted.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Austin Knuppe · April 15, 2024

19. Iran’s Neutralized Counterstrike: Israel’s Air Defense Operation Was Effective—Just Not Necessarily Replicable

I do wonder how north Korea is interpreting this attack and the defense against it.  What has it learned?

Iran’s Neutralized Counterstrike: Israel’s Air Defense Operation Was Effective—Just Not Necessarily Replicable - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Peter Mitchell · April 15, 2024

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Iran directly moved against Israel over the weekend with a three-pronged saturation attack consisting of approximately 185 Shahed drones, 110 medium-range ballistic missiles, and 36 land-attack cruise missiles. The Iranian attack came after a weeklong telegraphed buildup of tensions triggered by the Israeli strike against the Iranian consulate in Damascus, Syria. In spite of, or perhaps because of, this extensive preparation phase, Tehran’s hope for an overwhelming bombardment of Israeli targets appears to be largely foiled. The vast majority of incoming munitions were intercepted by a variety of layered air defense systems, with the only substantive impacts appearing to be on Ramon air base in the Negev, far to the south of the main body of the Israeli air defense network. Since the runways at Ramon were undoubtedly cleared by scrambling the aircraft long before the missiles arrived, it is unlikely any hits on grounded aircraft were scored. The Israel Defense Forces released footage of engineers already repairing the minor cratering done to the runway, underscoring the optics of the Iranian attack being rendered largely ineffective.

Regardless of whether the attack was launched for a performative or a strictly military purpose and setting aside the panoply of political, strategic, and other questions it raises, its immediate outcome should be viewed as clear evidence that integrated air and ground air defense systems can provide adequate coverage against saturation attacks—at least under certain conditions. Simply put, the old assumption that states could invest in plentiful and cheap ballistic and cruise missiles to provide a sort of “poor man’s air force” for power projection has shown to be wanting. Just as the 1990 Gulf War proved the massive superiority of modern precision weapons against massed armored formations, so has the Iranian attack shown that integrated air defense systems are not all hype. China’s leaders will be taking notes, just as they did in 1990. For attacks like this to succeed, far more preparation of the battlefield is required.

Iran launched this attack using the same assumptions as Saddam Hussein’s strategic bombing of Iranian population centers during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War—a series of campaigns dubbed the “War of the Cities.” No radar jamming, suppression of enemy air defense, or interdiction of Israeli aircraft was attempted—only a massive, coordinated launch of three types of independently operating aerial munitions with marginal accuracy. This kind of unsophisticated attack would have been of limited effectiveness even forty years ago. Modern early warning networks and air defense systems have exposed its complete obsolescence. Nothing was tactically or strategically novel about the Iranian attack—even the one-way Shahed-136 “suicide drone” is functionally the same as a cruise missile, only cheaper. States that are concerned about similar attacks heading their way in the future—Taiwan, for example, although other states like Poland and Japan are also seeking to enhance their air defense capabilities, wary of the threat of Russia and China—may be tempted to pour their resources into a similar comprehensive air defense network as the Israelis have in the hopes of repeating this weekend’s performance. They should move with caution, because that performance comes with caveats, and the conditions characterizing their strategic situations are not identical.

Israel has three significant advantages over Iran that other states looking to bolster their air defense capabilities need to first consider. First, outside of the weeklong advance notice of Tehran’s attack, no other country in the world has been preparing for this exact sort of attack for the past twenty years like the Israelis have. The Israeli air defense system is the most sophisticated integrated air defense network on the planet. For the close fight, Israel relies on the short-range Iron Dome system (with many parts from this system being developed into the American Indirect Fire Protection Capability). At medium range, the Israelis have developed the David’s Sling, broadly similar to the Patriot. And the Arrow fulfills the long-range capabilities provided by THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system for the United States. In addition, Israel’s air force communicates with the ground-based air defense systems and provides airborne radar coverage, as well as fighter aircraft, to intercept drones and cruise missiles. While ballistic missiles cannot be intercepted by aircraft, slow and low-flying drones and cruise missiles are a turkey shoot

Second, even with Iranian proxies assisting in firing some rockets and drones,, the vast majority of the incoming weapons had to fly a great distance (nearly nine hours of drone flight time) over hostile territory into the teeth of the Israeli, Jordanian, and US air forces and navies. Iran might have hoped that cheap drones would saturate and exhaust the limited ground-based air defense interceptors, opening the way for the most destructive ballistic and cruise missiles with larger payloads to strike home. This did not work. The tyranny of distance allowed the Iranian saturation attack to be whittled down steadily by the defenders’ air and naval assets, preventing the ground-based air defense systems from wasting valuable interceptors on chaff targets. The prerequisite for this understated but absolutely vital link in Israel’s air defense bubble is its unquestioned air and naval superiority over not only its own territory, but the entire Middle East courtesy of the US Air Force and Navy.

Finally, the air defense system’s performance relies heavily on the vast financial and materiel resources of the United States and its “ironclad” commitment to Israeli security. This is fortunate for the Israelis, as the financial burden of air defense research and development alone would be ruinous to most other states, to say nothing of the industrial cost of actually building and fielding these systems. US aid provides not only backing for the Israeli air defense network, but also backfills of interceptor missiles, frustrating any Iranian hope of quickly exhausting Israeli stockpiles. The total cost of this air defense operation alone will probably come to over $1.5 billion when all the expended interceptors, jet fuel, and missiles are tallied, an enormous sum equal to nearly 10 percent of Taiwan’s annual defense budget and 7 percent of Poland’s.

Few other countries will be able to recreate Israel’s air defense successes, as certainly as they cannot perfectly copy Israel’s geographic situation. It is imperative for states looking to modernize their systems to not to be blinded by the spectacular footage and attempt to replicate the Israeli model exactly. They should instead focus on strategies appropriate for their resourcing and geopolitical realities. In the meantime, China will undoubtably begin to adapt its plans with the lessons learned by the Iranians.

Peter Mitchell is an air defense professional, a strategic studies instructor at West Point, and Modern War Institute contributor. You can follow him on X @peternmitchell.

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

Image credit: IDF Spokesperson’s Unit

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Peter Mitchell · April 15, 2024

20. Chinese exodus leaves Cambodia boomtown with 500 'ghost buildings'

If I were advising an information program, I would ensure this article (in various forms) is reproduced in every country where China's OBOR exists. 

Chinese exodus leaves Cambodia boomtown with 500 'ghost buildings'

Sihanoukville saddled with unfinished projects due to casino clampdown and COVID

https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Belt-and-Road/Chinese-exodus-leaves-Cambodia-boomtown-with-500-ghost-buildings

YUJI NITTA, Nikkei staff writer

April 14, 2024 12:05 JST

SIHANOUKVILLE, Cambodia -- An exodus of Chinese real estate companies has left this Cambodian seaside resort littered with hundreds of half-finished projects.

The concrete skeleton of one of these buildings stands on a piece of land owned by 51-year-old elementary school teacher Pan Sombo.

"This was completely unimaginable," Pan Sombo said, looking up at a high-rise with no prospect for completion.

A Chinese investor first came forward with a proposal to construct a 10-story apartment building in 2019, just when Cambodia was experiencing an unprecedented real estate boom. The investor wanted to use the teacher's roughly 750-sq. meter vacant lot.

With promises the building would be completed in 2021 and generate around 20 million riel ($5,000) a month in land usage fees -- 10 times the teacher's income -- Pan Sombo agreed to the project.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the investor returned to China, saying he couldn't come back to Cambodia. That was the last the teacher heard from the investor. Pan Sombo turned to the local authorities to start the process of dissolving the contract.

Sihanoukville has no shortage of such ghost buildings. According to the city government, there are roughly 360 unfinished buildings and about 170 others that are completed but remain empty.

With an enviable location on the Gulf of Thailand coast, Sihanoukville became a boomtown in mid-2010s on wave of Chinese money. Cambodia's pursuit of economic growth found a way forward in China's cross-border Belt and Road Initiative.

Construction workers in Sihanoukville wear hardhats with Chinese writing on them. (Photo by Hiroki Endo)

Cambodian developer Prince Real Estate Group began a string of construction projects, including a luxury hotel and a shopping mall. Sihanoukville was being called the second Macao as dozens of casinos cropped up.

Then the pandemic hit. Last year, Cambodia drew only about 550,000 Chinese tourists, down 77% from 2019, according to the Ministry of Tourism. Just 15,754 passengers arrived at Sihanoukville international airport last year, a 98% decline from 2019.

This is in stark contrast to the dramatic tourism recovery seen in Siem Reap, known for the ancient Angkor Wat temple complex -- a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Money has been slow to return to Sihanoukville after the pandemic due to the Cambodian government's clampdown on casinos and China's real estate slump. It will take $1.1 billion in additional investment to complete the unfinished buildings, according to a government estimate.

In January, Prime Minister Hun Manet announced tax breaks and preferential treatment for permit applications to try to encourage investors to rescue Sihanoukville's ghost buildings.

But with the global economy expected to slow, those measures will struggle to be effective, said Ky Sereyvath, the director-general of the Institute of China Studies at the Royal Academy of Cambodia.

Chinese investors have poured money into neighboring Asian countries, leaving them more exposed to China's economy. Cambodia is not the only example. Chinese real estate giant Country Garden Holdings' debt crisis has spilled over to Malaysia, where the fate of a $100 billion mixed-use development in Johor is in limbo.

Cambodia has a heavy dependence on Chinese money. In 2022, the Council for Development of Cambodia approved about $1.9 billion worth of foreign investments. Roughly 90% came from China.

"It'd be hard to fill the hole left by China with investments from other countries," said the manager at a Cambodian construction firm.

Long Dimanche, vice governor of Preah Sihanouk province, said Sihanoukville needs to diversify both its industry and investor countries to have a more dynamic economy. Hun Manet's government has shown an openness to attracting foreign investment.

One possibility could be Japan. Japanese companies have a smaller presence in Cambodia than in larger Thailand or Vietnam, but Japan has provided support for the port of Sihanoukville -- Cambodia's only deep-water port -- for about three decades.

21. The US Army isn't ready to attack across rivers

I think unless you have actually participated in a military river crossing operation it is hard to fathom how complex this maneuver is. River crossing is especially necessary on the Korean peninsula.

The US Army isn't ready to attack across rivers

• The US Army lacks the equipment and experience to successfully attack across a river.
• These capabilities have atrophied and need an overhaul, an Army major argued.
• River crossings are dangerous and only getting more difficult.
• 
  

Business Insider · by Michael Peck

Military & Defense

Michael Peck

2024-04-13T09:00:01Z

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Soldiers with the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) execute a wet gap crossing with the 502nd Multi-Role Bridge Company, 19th Engineering Battalion on Fort Knox on April 28, 2022. Staff Sgt. Michael Eaddy/US Army

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Assaulting across a river is among the most dangerous military operations. Yet if the US Army went to war tomorrow, it would lack the equipment, doctrine and experience to launch an attack across a defended river, according to one Army engineer.

"The Army has not conducted such an operation since World War II," wrote Maj. Aditya Iyer, an Army engineer, in an essay for the Association of the United States Army. For example, Army divisions don't have adequate bridging capabilities of their own to conduct what the Army calls "wet gap" attacks, and would need support from corps-level units that might not be available.

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"The current wet-gap crossing doctrine, organization, materiel and leadership are ineffective for division-level wet-gap crossing operations independent from the corps," Iyer warned. River crossings are especially dangerous because the massed vehicles can be targeted as they funnel across or even become stranded on the far bank against a larger enemy.

As an example of neglecting river assaults, Iyer points to the fiasco of Russia's May 2022 attempt to cross the Siverskyi Donets River, which the 74th Guards Motorized Rifle Brigade tried to storm using mobile pontoon bridges. The result was an estimated 500 casualties and dozens of tanks lost.

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Iyer lists multiple mistakes by Russian commanders, including attacking at only one point on the river, lack of prior reconnaissance, and attacking in daytime instead of night. "In contrast, the Ukrainian forces had accurate intelligence that showed the Russian troops massing along the river," Iyer said. "The Ukrainian engineer reconnaissance teams had also identified potential river crossings and had pre-coordinated artillery targets on the crossing sites, and they were right; Russian forces did indeed use those sites."

To be fair, the US Army also has a checkered history with river assaults. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, the Union Army made a foolish and bloody attempt to cross the Rappahannock River against entrenched Confederate defenders. In January 1944, the US 36th Infantry Division launched an ill-prepared and disastrous night assault across the Rapido River in Italy that cost almost 2,000 casualties (the furious survivors spurred a congressional investigation after the war).

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Indeed, the Army was unprepared for river crossings at the start of World War II. Divisions lacked sufficient bridging equipment — including bridges robust enough to bear the weight of tanks — which made them dependent on corps-level assets. Nor was there a centralized authority to coordinate complex crossing operations. However, by the time of Operation Plunder — the massive assault across the Rhine River in 1945, involving a million men and nearly 6,000 artillery pieces — many of these problems had been rectified. The Rhine crossing even used US Navy landing craft normally used for amphibious assaults on the ocean.

If anything, river crossings are even harder nowadays. The ruses that commanders like Napoleon used — such as surprise descents on a weakly held point, or feints to mask the real crossing point — are much harder when drones are constantly overhead as in Ukraine. If the enemy can spot the crossing, they can blanket the bridgehead with long-range missile and artillery strikes.

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This wasn't such a problem in counterinsurgency operations in the mountains and deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. Major combat operations against Russia and China would be different, especially in regions like Eastern Europe, where there are plenty of rivers and canals. "The Russo-Ukrainian War has highlighted that military technologies have evolved in recent decades and that the U.S. military must be prepared to conduct wet-gap crossing operations against a well-organized and technologically advanced force," said Iyer.

Kevin Larson/US Army

The Army's current wet gap deficiencies resemble those of World War II. Divisions, and the engineer battalions in brigade combat teams, don't have sufficient bridging capabilities of their own. The division is supposed to use at least four Multi-Role Bridge Companies to cross a 400-meter (1,312-foot) river. But those special bridging companies are controlled by corps headquarters.

"Divisions rely on the corps augmentation for wet-gap crossing operations, including other enablers, such as military police and smoke," Iyer noted. Nor does the Army have enough Multi-Role Bridge Companies to support all its divisions.

What's more, many of the Army's bridges, such as the Improved Ribbon Bridge, aren't strong enough to bear the weight of heavy vehicles such as the 70-ton M1 Abrams tank. "The current bridging equipment has the same capability shortfalls that we had in World War II," said Iyer.

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The Army also needs a centralized doctrine for river crossing operations that goes beyond merely building the bridge itself, and not how to seize and secure a bridgehead. "Publications remain technically focused on engineer considerations and calculations to execute a crossing," Iyer said.

Simply having the engineering capability to quickly build a bridge across a mile-long river is no minor feat. The question is whether it can be done if the enemy objects.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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22. The US Army's power to rapidly defeat enemies may be a thing of the past

The US Army's power to rapidly defeat enemies may be a thing of the past

Business Insider · by Michael Peck

Military & Defense

Michael Peck

2024-04-14T10:00:01Z

A M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle drives during a live fire exercise at Fort Cavazos, Texas, on Jan. 20. Spc. David Dumas/US Army

• The days of rapid tank and infantry advances deep into an enemy's territory may be over.
• The US Army must be prepared more for fights that resemble WWI, an Army veteran argues.
• Any advancing force must move with a defensive bubble against enemy firepower, he argued.

Modern weapons have become so accurate and lethal that soon armies will not be able to maneuver rapidly on the battlefield.

Instead, they will trudge forward under the protection of defensive "bubbles" designed to stop drones and missiles. According to this vision, swift battlefield maneuvers will be replaced by grinding wars of attrition where victory goes to the side that has the most firepower as well as the most resources to replace losses.

It's a grim vision of warfare that has more in common with the slaughter of the First World War than the mechanized blitzkriegs of World War II and Desert Storm, where infantry and armor backed by airpower seized vast territory. But it's a future the West must prepare for, warns Alex Vershinin, a retired US Army lieutenant colonel, in an essay for Britain's Royal United Services Institute think tank.

The Ukraine war has demonstrated that — at least for now — firepower dominates maneuver. Russian and Ukrainian have painfully learned that with surveillance and attack drones constantly overhead, emerging from cover is dangerous and slow. Long-range guided missiles and shells can decimate armored columns that dare to thrust through minefields and layered defenses covered by artillery and airpower. Instead of sweeping offensives, the Ukraine war has become a largely static conflict where immense preparations are made for attacks that might gain an obscure village or a few square miles of territory before the attacker halts to dig in and regroup.

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"It is easier to mass fires than forces," Vershinin said in the RUSI analysis. "Deep maneuver, which requires the massing of combat power, is no longer possible because any massed force will be destroyed by indirect fires before it can achieve success in depth. Instead, a ground offensive requires a tight protective bubble to ward off enemy strike systems."

"Shallow attacks along the forward line of troops are most likely to be successful at an acceptable cost ratio; attempts at deep penetration will be exposed to massed fires the moment they exit the protection of the defensive bubble," said Vershinin.

Anthony Sweeney/US Army

This moving shield would consist of layers of defense systems, including air defense against drones and missiles, as well as electronic warfare to jam those drones and missiles by flooding their control frequencies with electronic noise. But this protection comes at the cost of rapid maneuver. That bubble must be carefully set up to provide interlocking coverage against multiple types of threats, and move in lockstep with the column.

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"Moving numerous interdependent systems is highly complicated and unlikely to be successful," Vershinin said.

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Coordinating all these different weapons and jammers also requires skilled staff work that even advanced armies may lack. "Integration of these overlapping assets requires centralized planning and exceptionally well-trained staff officers, capable of integrating multiple capabilities on the fly," said Vershinin. "It takes years to train such officers, and even combat experience does not generate such skills in a short time."

As an example, Vershinin cites a hypothetical advance by a platoon of 30 soldiers. This would require multiple jammers to disrupt enemy drones, guided rockets, and communication systems. Engineers will have to clear a path through any minefields, and the infantry will have to coordinate with friendly artillery and drones. Failure to do this could be catastrophic: Russia is now firing 10,000 artillery shells per day, and this year it has already dropped 3,500 big GPS-guided glide bombs that have devastated Ukrainian positions.

"All these systems need to work as an integrated team just to support 30 men in several vehicles attacking another 30 men or less," Vershinin said. The preparations needed for a brigade- or division-sized attack — the kind that are needed to achieve decisive victories on the battlefield — can only be imagined.

All of this raises a deeper problem, especially for the West. Without maneuver, war becomes a battle of attrition, like the First World War, or siege warfare as with the Union and Confederate armies in front of Richmond in 1864. These kinds of wars are fought over years and cause slaughter on a massive scale.

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"The West is not prepared for this kind of war," Vershinin said. "To most Western experts, attritional strategy is counterintuitive. Historically, the West preferred the short 'winner takes all' clash of professional armies."

To some extent, all wars are attritional: what ultimately destroyed the Third Reich wasn't a few defeats like Stalingrad and Normandy, but the cumulative losses from six years of relentless fighting. However, sustaining a war of attrition requires an emphasis on production, mobilizing resources for the long haul, and the ability to continuously replace losses. Victory goes to the side that can wear down the enemy while maintaining its own strength.

"The military conduct of war is driven by overall political strategic objectives, military realities and economic limitations," said Vershinin. "Combat operations are shallow and focus on destroying enemy resources, not on gaining terrain."

One question is whether the Western public will tolerate this mode of warfare. Vladimir Putin and his generals may not lose any sleep over suffering nearly 500,000 casualties in two years. But the average American or European may feel differently.

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Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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​23. The Middle East Could Still Explode

Of course the International Crisis Group does worship the "gospel of de-escalation."

Excerpt:

If Israel does respond by striking Iranian territory, the situation could quickly spiral. The two states may find themselves in sustained, direct hostilities that result in large casualties and further destabilize an already dangerous region. Such a conflict could quickly spread. The United States, compelled to defend Israel, might directly enter the fray. Iran’s nonstate allies could become even more violent and belligerent. Iran might further align itself with China and Russia. Moreover, Western talk of stepping up sanctions could itself push Tehran to coordinate more with Beijing and Moscow. And, having failed to fend off further Israeli attacks through its regional allies and conventional weapons, Tehran might try to use its highly advanced nuclear program to produce a nuclear weapon.

There is reason to hope that such escalation can be avoided. Washington has been trying to avert a full-on regional conflict since October, and according to reporting by Axios, its message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been to treat the successful defense of his country as a win and move on. The United States has substantial leverage with Israel and therefore may prevail. But Israel is not a U.S. proxy, so Washington cannot guarantee that Netanyahu will sit still. Tehran weighed risks against benefits in its unprecedented offensive, using a calculus likely shared by the Israeli leader, and decided that it needed to one-up Israel to prevent it from crossing red lines (such as attacking its consulate). The Israeli government may come to a similar conclusion.

The Iranians have already said that they are willing to go up the escalation ladder if Israel does retaliate. Israel could then strike back again. The Middle East did not explode on April 13, but it is still at risk of a bigger conflict that would have no winners.

The Middle East Could Still Explode

Iran and Israel May Not Be Finished

By Ali Vaez

April 15, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Ali Vaez · April 15, 2024

On April 13, Iran launched Operation True Promise, its response to Israel’s April 1 attack on its consulate in Syria. Over the course of less than 24 hours, Tehran fired a combination of more than 300 hundred drones and missiles at Israeli military facilities. Senior commanders hailed the attack—which involved the first-ever direct strikes launched against Israel from Iranian territory—as successful in sending a message, even though Israel and its allies successfully downed nearly all the incoming fire.

Policymakers and pundits have known for days that the Islamic Republic would retaliate for Israel’s strike in Damascus, which killed several senior Iranian commanders and personnel. But until the drones and missiles took off, it was not clear whether Tehran would make what had previously been a covert and indirect conflict into an overt and direct one. Now the Rubicon has been crossed, and the next chapter is uncertain and fraught with danger for Iran, its regime, and the broader region.

But as the specifics of Iran’s retaliation and Israel’s success at countering it became clear, most policymakers and observers outside the Middle East expressed cautious optimism that further escalation could be avoided. It is too soon, however, for relief: both states are still rattling their sabers, and Israel may respond to Iran’s attacks with more strikes. The two states could keep trading escalating blows leading to an expanding war that draws in the United States and envelops the whole region.

SEVEN NATION ARMY

For years, Iran has sought to fight Israel by creating what Israeli strategists call a “ring of fire” around the country. It did this by providing arms and funding to what Tehran calls the axis of resistance, a collection of aligned actors that includes Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and West Bank militants. It also includes Syria, Yemen’s Houthis, and paramilitary organizations in Iraq. Iran originally backed the latter set of groups as a means of checking Saudi Arabia and the United States, but since the start of the war in the Gaza Strip last October, these partners have aided Iran’s operations against Israel as well. Tehran has also pursued a nuclear program—now closer than ever to producing a weapon—that Israeli officials view as an existential threat.

In response to this multifront alliance, Israel has conducted its own campaign against Iran. It has repeatedly carried out covert activity on Iranian soil, including operations targeting nuclear facilities and scientists as well as conventional facilities and experts. Outside Iran, in a campaign that Israeli policymakers have dubbed the “war between the wars,” the Israeli government regularly took aim at Iran’s weapons transfers, especially those dispatched into Lebanon and Syria.

The two sides were wary of letting their attacks on each other, which often followed a tit-for-tat pattern, get out of hand. But that delicate balance began to change after October 7, when Hamas attacked the Israeli communities surrounding the Gaza Strip. In a display of solidarity with Gaza residents and with the aim of ending the war there, members of Iran’s axis stepped up attacks against Israel and U.S. facilities with Tehran’s vocal support. In response, Israel attacked Iranian-backed groups in Lebanon and Syria, and then Iranian military personnel themselves. Between early December and late March, Israel killed nearly a dozen commanders and advisers in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Quds Force. Those strikes culminated in the airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus in April, which killed General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the man reportedly in charge of coordinating the Quds Force’s operations across the Levant, and his deputy and several other IRGC members.

For Tehran, the Damascus strike had serious consequences. It reflected yet another massive intelligence failure, on the heels of numerous instances in which Israel outwitted Iranian defenses. It cost Iran yet another senior commander. And it prompted Iranian leaders to question just how secure they really were from attacks by Israeli forces. Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, stated that "attacking our consulate is like attacking our soil.” He and a chorus of other political and military leaders pledged to punish Israel.

LIVING ON THE EDGE

Iran’s eventual response highlights an apparent shift in Iranian thinking. For years, its approach toward Israel and the United States largely revolved around what Iranian officials describe as “strategic patience,” a long-term approach that entails reinforcing proxy groups without resorting to immediate, provocative retaliations. This strategy was based on a belief that the networks Iran had built up gave it the ability to project power without risking direct entanglement, exacting costs while maintaining a veneer of deniability.

But the regime’s hard-liners, who are now ascendant, increasingly thought of such patience as a sign of weakness. They therefore pushed the government to increase its risk tolerance and embrace confrontation. This thinking was evident in Iran’s behavior over the last several months. In January, Iran struck targets in norther Iraq and Syria, claiming they were linked to Israel or the Islamic State. The following day, it attacked on Pakistani soil, hitting what it said were the operating bases of militant groups that had struck Iran. Now, Iran has also attacked Israel. “The era of strategic patience is over,” a senior Iranian official tweeted on April 14. “The equation has changed.”

Still, Iran’s government does not seem interested in going further. The April 13 barrage was tailored to thread between projecting military strength and avoiding retaliation from Israel (and potentially the United States). Iranian officials exchanged a flurry of messages with Washington and Middle East regional capitals before the attack, giving everyone time to prepare defensive systems. In its public and diplomatic messaging around the strikes, Iran emphasized that it was engaging in a limited and proportionate response. According to the White House, Iran said it would strike only “military facilities.” As the dust settled on the morning after the attacks, Iran’s military chief of staff declared, “Our operations are over and we have no intention to continue them.”

But this declaration does not make it so. Iran’s official statement may have “deemed concluded” its spat with Israel, but the Israeli government gets a say, as well. In anticipation of Iranian retaliation, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz declared that “if Iran attacks from its territory, Israel will respond and attack in Iran.” And although a robust defense has successfully blunted the potential toll of Iranian missile and drone strikes—Israeli officials have reported only light damage, no deaths, and just one injury—they may choose to go ahead.

The Iranian regime increasingly thought of patience as a sign of weakness.

Indeed, there are good reasons to think that they will. Iran may be taking a victory lap for avenging the Damascus strike and flexing its military might, but its response could expose the limits to its offensive capabilities, given that the overwhelming majority of its weapons were intercepted. Tehran’s strikes have also generated much international sympathy for Israel and opprobrium for itself—partly inverting an international dynamic at work just days earlier.

If Israel does respond by striking Iranian territory, the situation could quickly spiral. The two states may find themselves in sustained, direct hostilities that result in large casualties and further destabilize an already dangerous region. Such a conflict could quickly spread. The United States, compelled to defend Israel, might directly enter the fray. Iran’s nonstate allies could become even more violent and belligerent. Iran might further align itself with China and Russia. Moreover, Western talk of stepping up sanctions could itself push Tehran to coordinate more with Beijing and Moscow. And, having failed to fend off further Israeli attacks through its regional allies and conventional weapons, Tehran might try to use its highly advanced nuclear program to produce a nuclear weapon.

There is reason to hope that such escalation can be avoided. Washington has been trying to avert a full-on regional conflict since October, and according to reporting by Axios, its message to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been to treat the successful defense of his country as a win and move on. The United States has substantial leverage with Israel and therefore may prevail. But Israel is not a U.S. proxy, so Washington cannot guarantee that Netanyahu will sit still. Tehran weighed risks against benefits in its unprecedented offensive, using a calculus likely shared by the Israeli leader, and decided that it needed to one-up Israel to prevent it from crossing red lines (such as attacking its consulate). The Israeli government may come to a similar conclusion.

The Iranians have already said that they are willing to go up the escalation ladder if Israel does retaliate. Israel could then strike back again. The Middle East did not explode on April 13, but it is still at risk of a bigger conflict that would have no winners.

• ALI VAEZ is Director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group.

Foreign Affairs · by Ali Vaez · April 15, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com