Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect, and their oneness."

– Mohandas K. Gandhi

"Few things can help an individual more than to place responsibility on him, and to let him know that you trust him."

– Booker T. Washington

"There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity."

– Samuel Johnson

1. Niger’s Eviction of U.S. Commandos, Drones Derails America’s Counterterror Strategy

2. Army SOF use video game skills to launch drones strikes and more in new course

3. USSOCOM inducts 18 new members into Commando Hall of Honor

4. Great power competition is back. What does that mean for US special operations forces?

5. The True Story Behind “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ”and“ ”History's First Special Forces Mission

6. The US Debt Clock

7. Inside the White House’s Frenetic Scramble to Avert a Full-Blown Middle East War

8. U.S. Aid Is a Lifeline for Ukraine’s Struggle to Hold Off Defeat

9. U.S.-China Internet War Intensifies as House Passes TikTok Ban

10. Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’ (Israel)

11. The American Myths Dividing Contemporary Politics

12. Give Me Liberty or Give Me … What?

13. "We're Going To Lose A Major War": US Navy Deletes Photo Of Ship Commander Shooting Rifle With Backwards Scope

14. Northern Virginia serves as the world’s internet hub. Its neighbors are paying a price.

15. Blinken will be the latest top US official to visit China in a bid to keep ties on an even keel

16. Are Iran’s leaders losing their grip on reality — and the country?

1. Niger’s Eviction of U.S. Commandos, Drones Derails America’s Counterterror Strategy

The challenge of dealing with sovereign nations whose interests no longer align with the US due to internal political change.

Niger’s Eviction of U.S. Commandos, Drones Derails America’s Counterterror Strategy

Washington eyes contingency plan to shift forces to defensive ring around West African countries hardest hit by al Qaeda, Islamic State

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/nigers-eviction-of-u-s-commandos-drones-derails-americas-counterterror-strategy-7e1eff83

By Michael M. PhillipsFollow

April 20, 2024 7:20 am ET

NAIROBI—Niger has formally ordered the U.S. to withdraw counterterrorism troops and aerial drones from the country, driving the final nail in the coffin of American strategy to defeat a violent Islamist insurgency overrunning the heart of western Africa.

The decision to expel American forces will likely accelerate contingency plans that would pivot U.S. strategy from trying to defeat al Qaeda and Islamic State where they are strongest to trying to keep militants from infiltrating neighboring countries along the West African coast.

In meetings in Washington this week, Nigerien Prime Minister Ali Lamine Zeine told Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell that virtually all of the 1,000 U.S. commandos and other personnel will have to leave, including those at a $110 million, U.S.-built drone base in the desert town of Agadez.

“Loss of basing in Niger complicates the Pentagon’s ability to achieve U.S. security objectives in the region,” a senior U.S. military officer said Saturday.

Until last year’s military coup, Niger had been the cornerstone of Washington’s counterterrorism strategy in the region, with U.S. Green Berets advising local commandos during combat operations against what has become the world’s most active Islamist insurgency. U.S. drones provided surveillance of insurgent activities.

Niger, with 1,000 American personnel, is by far the largest long-term U.S. position in western Africa, and their departure could leave just a few dozen troops split between Benin and Chad.

Prime Minister of Niger Ali Lamine Zeine during a meeting with Russian officials in Moscow. PHOTO: SERGEI PYATAKOV/ZUMA PRESS

The coup triggered U.S. laws limiting security assistance. As the U.S. prodded the new regime to free ousted President Mohamed Bazoum and restore civilian rule, the Nigerien generals, led by President Abdourahamane Tchiani, became more prickly about the U.S. presence and began tilting toward Moscow.

Last weekend, anti-U.S. protests broke out in the capital city, Niamey, days after Russian military instructors landed in the country.

In a private diplomatic message to 15 West African governments last month, known as a démarche, the State Department signaled that, once out of Niger, the U.S. would shuffle military aid and forces to assist local troops in a ring of countries stretching around the perimeter of western Africa, from Mauritania to Senegal to Ivory Coast to Nigeria.

“We know these countries have long been concerned about the spread of extremism coming from the Sahel to these countries, and they’ve asked us for assistance,” said a senior U.S. official. “And so we’re looking at those requests, and we’re trying to see what we can do.”

Insurgents control vast swaths of the Sahel, a semidesert region south of the Sahara. More than 35,000 people have been killed in jihadist violence in the region since 2017, the overwhelming majority of them in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which analyzed figures collected by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project. Acled is a U.S.-based, nonprofit monitoring service.

For years, troops from France, the former colonial power in much of West Africa, led the West’s counterterrorism campaign, while the limited U.S. forces played a supporting role.

Over the past four years, however, military juntas have seized power in Mali and Burkina Faso, as well as Niger, expelled French forces and pivoted to Moscow for help fighting insurgents.

Anti-U.S. protests took place in Niamey last weekend, days after Russian military instructors arrived in the country. PHOTO: ISSIFOU DJIBO/SHUTTERSTOCK

Niger has also expelled French troops. The former colonial power in much of West Africa had for years led the West’s counterterrorism campaign in the region. PHOTO: BOUREIMA HAMA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Mali pays Russian mercenaries to conduct combat operations against militants, and, according to U.S. officials, Russian trainers recently surfaced in Burkina Faso.

A planeload of Russian military instructors and weapons arrived in Niamey last week, according to Nigerien state television. “We’re here to train the Nigerien military,” said a man in camouflage fatigues, identified as a Russian military instructor.

Chad, whose troops have a reputation as fierce desert fighters, has been another stalwart U.S. ally against Islamist extremists, training alongside American Green Berets. The State Department sent the diplomatic démarche to Chad, and U.S. officials hope the country might form part of the defensive perimeter they envision.

But that relationship has begun to fray, as well. This month, the top Chadian air force general ordered the U.S. to cease activities at a major air base in the country, questioning the legal grounds for the American presence, according to a letter seen by The Wall Street Journal.

U.S. officials are trying to assess how widespread that sentiment is among Chad’s leaders and military commanders.

The rupture between the U.S. and Niger accelerated after a heated exchange last month between junta leaders and visiting American officials. During that meeting, senior U.S. State and Defense officials accused the junta of secretly exploring a deal to allow Iran access to its uranium reserves, Nigerien and U.S. officials said. The Nigeriens denied such plans, but a junta spokesman called the American presence “illegal” and the U.S. delegation “condescending.”

The junta, known as the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland, or CNSP, announced it was tearing up the agreement that allowed U.S. forces to remain in the country.

“After denouncing the agreements with France, it is the turn of the United States to be invited to withdraw its forces after 12 years of military presence on Nigerien territory, lacking a formal legal basis,” the junta said in a social-media post this month.

Aspiring Green Berets stand for an inspection at Camp Mackall, N.C. The elite force had been advising Nigerien commandos during combat operations against Islamists. PHOTO: TRAVIS DOVE FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

The Biden administration had hoped the generals would walk back the expulsion threat, but last week’s meetings in Washington put an end to those hopes.

Campbell and other American officials plan to visit Niger this week to hammer out details of the U.S. withdrawal, a senior U.S. defense official said. “We cannot stay there against their will,” the official said.

U.S. diplomats and military officers say last month’s démarche is the opening move in what will likely prove a lengthy reconfiguring of American forces in western Africa, a process now accelerated by Niger’s decision.

At this stage, the U.S. hasn’t settled on what military muscle it might position where in western Africa. Conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine, as well as Great Power maneuvering in the Pacific, reduce what forces are left for Africa.

The Journal reported in January that informal talks are under way about moving U.S. reconnaissance drones from Niger to Benin, Ivory Coast and Ghana, coastal countries that are experiencing militant threats emanating from Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

The U.S. dispatched a manned reconnaissance aircraft to provide overhead security earlier this year during the Africa Cup of Nations soccer tournament in Ivory Coast. Afterward, the U.S. agreed to Ivory Coast’s request to leave the plane behind to conduct counterterrorism surveillance flights.

Unlike Niger, Benin’s military, a small force with limited combat experience, has welcomed the idea of assistance from American drones and troops. PHOTO: ADRIENNE SURPRENANT/MYOP FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

U.S. Africa Command stations a special forces team in Benin to train and advise local commandos to fight al Qaeda militants infiltrating from Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria. Benin has seen nearly 300 insurgent-related incidents since 2021, with 49 people killed in the first three months of this year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies.

Benin’s military, a 15,000-strong force that has never fought a war, welcomed the idea of American drones and more American troops.

“This presence will hopefully make it possible to make up for the weaknesses of the Beninese armed forces in terms of territorial surveillance capabilities and special units,” such as commando teams, a Benin military officer said. “These capabilities are essential to face the fight against terrorism.”

Togo, which has seen 142 people killed since 2022 in militant violence, “is expecting further support from the U.S. for our army,” said a senior Togolese official familiar with the State Department démarche.

But the Togolese official warned that buttressing defenses along western Africa’s periphery won’t pry militants from their strongholds in its center, where they would likely remain a regional threat.

“Most of the terrorist groups come from the north of Mali,” said the Togolese official. “If you don’t control the north of Mali, you can’t totally defeat terrorist groups.”

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com

2. Army SOF use video game skills to launch drones strikes and more in new course

Another example of the modernization of SOF - blending the fundamentals of train, advise, and assist, and through, with, and by, with modern technology and tactics to create dilemmas for our adversaries.

Army SOF use video game skills to launch drones strikes and more in new course

By graduation, the students will know how to build their own drones and teach foreign partners on tactics.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

FORT LIBERTY, North Carolina—When Army special operations soldier Josh arrived in Poland to train Ukrainian soldiers, his students were skeptical of his prowess in flying the high-speed racing drones they use to launch pinpoint strikes on Russian positions.

They said his use of his thumbs rather than index and thumb to control the joysticks was wrong. So he challenged the Ukrainian soldiers to a friendly drone race to find out who was right.

Josh won race after race.

It came down to “a lot of hours [training] in the simulator,” he said, referring to his use of the drone racing video game DRL, which replicates the controls of first-person-view (FPV) racing drones. Josh is referred to by his first name due to Army Special Operations policy..

He’s now applying the exact lessons he learned aiding Ukraine to a new program that seeks to train Army special operations forces drone operators and prepare them to instruct partner forces on unmanned systems.

The program, dubbed the Robotics and Unmanned Systems Integration Course (RUSIC), is a six-week course within the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School here.

The first two weeks include learning Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) drone regulations and training on program-of-record drones, said Lt. Col. Steve Schuerman, who leads RUSIC and two other training units as the 2nd Special Warfare Training Group company commander.

Week three includes lessons in flying while being jammed by enemy systems, and in using drones in coordination with the Android Team Awareness Kit, an Android-based mission planning tool.

In week four, students learn to operate counter-drone systems, and learn what to do when such systems are unavailable—such as planning routes with enough overhead cover to avoid being spotted.

Week five has students building their own drones and learning to manage battery packs for different payloads, lessons necessary for learning how to advise partner forces.

“It's to teach them the fundamentals so that whatever they [work on] with a partner, they understand how to troubleshoot it,” Schuerman said.

Then, in the final week, students run through an exercise that tests all the skills they’ve learned.

“Students go from never flying a drone to being able to intelligently execute a one-way FPV attack,” said Schuerman.

Students then return to their units, and some have already gone right into advising foreign soldiers about drone usage, he said.

Without these skills, American soldiers risk looking out of touch with modern technology, said Josh, who helps lead the RUSIC program as the non-commissioned officer in charge.

“They're going to come to you with something that looks like this [and say] ‘I need you to fix this’” he said, gesturing to a table of home-made drones while presenting about RUSIC at the Army Special Operations Forces’ yearly capabilities exercise. “If you’ve never seen it before, you look dumb.”

A pilot version of the RUSIC course started in fiscal year 2023, with the first course held in October 2023. There’s been one more course since, and RUSIC intends to run four courses per year, each for 24 students.

Graduates are also certified as master trainers, a designation that allows them to train others, Schuerman said.

That’s particularly important because Army special operations as a whole lacks the master trainers that, per regulation, are the only ones who can train new drone operators. “Within the operating force, there’s very few of these people,” he said.

Besides program-of-record aerial drones, students also learn to operate a variety of commercial drones, build their own FPV drones, and operate ground robots. Josh showed off one ground robot modified to carry an electronic warfare payload.

Ground robots can have a harder time navigating terrain compared to airborne drones, but they are ideal for the tight confines of buildings or for placing other capabilities in remote locations—like electronic warfare devices.

The course does not include loitering munitions due to cost constraints, Schuerman said.

“I would say our biggest challenge, like everyone else, is resourcing,” he said.

Legal constraints are another factor, Josh said. For training exercises, his instructors use an approved contractor to buy the off-the-shelf components for the FPVs the students build. The U.S. has been leery of foreign built drones, like Chinese drone behemoth DJI, because of the risk of data exposure.

In principle, though, Army units should be able to buy any components they want, as drone pieces—such as flight controllers—do not automatically send data back to their manufacturers, Josh said.

“Policy hasn’t caught up,” he said.

The master trainer rule is another stumbling block, he said. A soldier who trained with a master trainer for months on drones but did not receive the master trainer designation could not train anyone else on drones, he said.

Instead, he has advocated for a system more similar to other types of training, where soldiers are allowed to more freely socialize new skills, like medical training.

“I would rather you just say, Hey, are you a Green Beret? I’m pretty sure you’re competent to train somebody on a piece of equipment,” he said.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

3. USSOCOM inducts 18 new members into Commando Hall of Honor

American heroes all of course.

USSOCOM inducts 18 new members into Commando Hall of Honor

dvidshub.net

Photo By Tech. Sgt. Marleah Miller | U.S. Special Operations Command inducted 18 former special operators to include 9...... read more

Photo By Tech. Sgt. Marleah Miller | U.S. Special Operations Command inducted 18 former special operators to include 9 Medal of Honor recipients into the USSOCOM Commando Hall of Honor located at the USSOCOM headquarters, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, April 17, 2024. More than 100 people attended the ceremony and watched as each inductee received a medal from U.S. Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, USSOCOM commander, and Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, USSOCOM command senior enlisted leader. The Commando Hall of Honor was established in 2010 by former USSOCOM Commander Admiral Eric T. Olson and the award recognizes individuals who have served with distinction within the special operations forces community. Photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Marleah Miller. | View Image Page

MACDILL AFB, FL, UNITED STATES

04.19.2024

Story by Michael Bottoms

U.S. Special Operations Command

By Michael Bottoms

USSOCOM Public Affairs

U.S. Special Operations Command inducted 18 former special operators to include 9 Medal of Honor recipients into the USSOCOM Commando Hall of Honor located at the USSOCOM headquarters, MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, April 17, 2024. More than 100 people attended the ceremony and watched as each inductee received a medal from U.S. Army Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, USSOCOM commander, and Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, USSOCOM command senior enlisted leader.

The Commando Hall of Honor was established in 2010 by former USSOCOM Commander Admiral Eric T. Olson and the award recognizes individuals who have served with distinction within the special operations forces community. The inductees join the storied ranks of those who preceded them.

This year’s Medal of Honor inductees were Vice Adm. John Duncan Bulkeley, Lt. j.g. (SEAL) Joseph R. Kerrey, Petty Officer Second Class (SEAL) Michael A. Monsoor, LT. (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, Lt. (SEAL) Thomas R. Norris, Seaman David G. Ouellet, Lt. Cdr. Arthur M. Preston, Senior Chief Petty Officer (SEAL) Britt Kelly Slabinski, and Lt. (SEAL) Michael E. Thornton.

The special operators inductees were Air Force Col.. Stephen L. Baker, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Lewis H. Burruss, U.S. Army Col. Jerry M. King, U.S. Marine Corps Col. Craig S. Kozeniesky, U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Wesley H. Rice, U.S. Navy Capt. William M. Shepherd, U.S. Army Sgt. Maj. Peter Stalik, U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William P. Tangney, and U.S. Air Force Lt Gen. Marshall B. Webb.

“Today for us is historic. This ceremony is about our people and really reflects our first SOF truth that humans are more important than hardware,” Fenton said. “Today we will reach 8 decades inducting 18 heroes into the Hall of Honor who took on some of the toughest missions in special operations.”

Buruss is a Vietnam veteran who conducted frequent cross border operations against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army and was also heavily involved in sensitive activities. For his numerous valorous acts and courage under fire, he was awarded the Silver Star Medal, four Bronze Star Medals with valor, the Air Medal and three Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry.

“It’s just a real honor to be inducted to the Commando Hall of Honor,” Buruss said. “I know there are so many more deserving, but I am still honored and proud.”

Webb had a myriad of assignments over his 38 years of dedicated service to special operations. He participated in the search and recovery effort of United States Commerce Secretary Ron Brown who was on an official trade mission in Bosnia, when the Air Force CT-43 he was traveling in crashed into a mountainside near Dubrovnik, Croatia. Immediately following that mission, Webb participated in Operation Assured Response, the noncombatant evacuation operation of the United States Embassy located at Monrovia, Liberia. During both events, in recognition of his extreme fortitude, airmanship, and devotion to the humanitarian effort, he earned the 1996 Cheney Award. Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, he commanded a contingent of three Pave Low helicopters, crews, and support personnel to assist with recovery, search and rescue, and provided critical assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, he led a flight of seven Pave Low helicopters that inserted several teams of United States SEAL teams and British Royal Marines in the al Faw area to safeguard oil platforms to prevent an ecological disaster. During the operation to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, he coordinated and facilitated the real-time video feed in the White House Situation Room as the United States President, Vice President, and members of the national security team looked on.

“This induction ceremony is so unique to SOCOM because it reached back 8 generations inducting people from World War II. You could see pride in the face of the families seeing their relatives inducted into the hall,” Webb said. “For me personally, it is an honor to be in the company of these heroes.”

The newest members will join other recognized warriors in the Commando Hall of Honor, which includes such legendary names as Aaron Bank, Charles Beckwith, Ted Lunger, Sidney Shacknow, William Darby and Army Col. Ralph Puckett, Jr.. Their contributions and legacies to the special operations community and this country have been unquestionably influential and are truly inspirational.

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4. Great power competition is back. What does that mean for US special operations forces?

And also focusing on the tried and true fundamentals of unconventional warfare and support to political warfare.

Excerpts.

Some of these operations will require applying the operational tactics USSOF focused on since 9/11 to new challenges.

USSOF works extensively in the information domain, pushing back against propaganda and disinformation from adversaries.

By enhancing USSOF’s capabilities and recognizing its value in strategic competition, the interagency and Department of Defense can ensure it effectively continues to protect US interests and contribute to global stability. Thus equipped, USSOF will remain adept at confronting modern conflict dynamics and asserting US international strategic priorities.

Great power competition is back. What does that mean for US special operations forces?

By Alyxandra Marine

atlanticcouncil.org · by dhojnacki · April 19, 2024

After 9/11, US special operations forces (USSOF) became well known for direct-action missions that captivated the public’s imagination and demonstrated unparalleled tactical success. The highly publicized raids, precision strikes, and elimination of terrorist threats solidified USSOF’s reputation as the tip of the spear in the US military’s arsenal.

In recent years, however, the global security environment has changed. Adversaries such as Russia and China are using a broad spectrum of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic tactics to challenge the US-led order and achieve their global aims. This return of strategic competition has drawn attention away from the surgical, direct-action operations so prominent during the height of the war on terror, and toward confronting the sophisticated strategies of near-peer adversaries.

So what does this mean for special operations forces?

USSOF will continue to have a central role in the era of renewed strategic competition—but only if there is a broader appreciation and application of USSOF’s capabilities, which extend far beyond just raids and precision strikes. Too often at present, however, USSOF’s distinct capabilities and expertise are overlooked or misunderstood among the broader national security community.

Some of these operations will require applying the operational tactics USSOF focused on since 9/11 to new challenges.

In the face of an evolving and increasingly complex global threat environment, USSOF represents a uniquely versatile component of the US Joint Force. It possesses an array of capabilities that, if fully leveraged, could significantly enhance US force posture. To do so, USSOF must shift its mindset and planning toward strategic competition. There must also be a concerted effort from the services and the Joint Force to integrate USSOF’s unique capabilities more effectively, and the broader defense community must take steps to make the most of the multifaceted value that USSOF brings to the table.

To begin with, USSOF must extend its reach into non-kinetic operations and expand its irregular warfare approach to address the advanced strategies of adversaries such as China and Russia. Some of these operations will require applying the operational tactics USSOF focused on since 9/11 to new challenges. For example, USSOF’s well-honed capabilities for navigating denied and niche environments, including underground operations—an important asset in past counterterrorism missions—are now vital for filling strategic gaps in unconventional warfare scenarios. The salience of this capability is evident, for example, if an adversary uses complex tunnel networks, and it represents just one aspect of USSOF’s highly specialized tactics, techniques, and procedures that can be transitioned to new strategic roles.

This transition will also require adapting USSOF’s strength in new ways. Some of this is already underway—for example, modernizations in naval capabilities are set to boost USSOF’s undersea warfare proficiency, which will help counter rivals such as China in contested spaces. USSOF should continue to prepare for the challenges posed by strategic competition by enhancing its cyber and space capabilities, investing in emerging fields such as artificial intelligence, and bolstering civil-affairs expertise for functioning in extreme and complex operating environments. Clear and decisive communication between the US assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict and the United States Special Operations Command is vital to define the strategic contributions of special operations within the Department of Defense.

Yet embracing these changes also presents challenges, particularly for USSOF to define and measure its own success. The often-preventive nature of USSOF’s missions, which are aimed at deterring adversaries and shaping their behavior, requires a nuanced approach to evaluating effectiveness. Establishing clear objectives and metrics for strategic competition will be essential, enabling USSOF to quantify its successes and adapt its strategies accordingly.

At the same time, USSOF must maintain its proficiency in essential ongoing tasks, such as combating violent extremist organizations, countering terrorism, and managing weapons of mass destruction. Doing so is necessary so that the United States avoids strategic distractions, such as a preventable terrorist attack.

USSOF works extensively in the information domain, pushing back against propaganda and disinformation from adversaries.

As USSOF adapts its mindset and planning to meet the challenges posed by strategic competition, the Joint Force and the broader interagency must find ways to understand and maximize USSOF’s capabilities. To do so, decision makers across the Joint Force must properly recognize the full range of USSOF’s potential roles, particularly before conflict breaks out.

Unfortunately, some of these potential roles are under-resourced and underleveraged. For example, USSOF’s civil affairs and psychological operations capabilities, though currently underutilized, are essential for strategic competition. The sole brigade responsible for civil affairs is tasked with everything from economic analysis to intelligence gathering. With sufficient resources, it could expand to cover civil-military cooperation in volatile areas, support local governance, and respond to increasingly frequent natural disasters. Notably, United States Marine Forces Special Operations Command’s linguistic and cultural expertise, as demonstrated in long-term operations in the Philippines, highlights the value of investing more in these capacities, especially in strategic areas such as the Indo-Pacific.

Other roles for USSOF are better funded but are still underappreciated across the Department of Defense. USSOF works extensively in the information domain, pushing back against propaganda and disinformation from adversaries. According to General Richard Clarke, former commander of US Special Operations Command, commanders he visited on deployment spent about 60 percent of their time working in the information space. Such work will likely continue, since Russia and China show a growing interest in using information warfare to try to counter US strategic objectives worldwide. Despite this, unfilled billets in the Army’s Special Operations military information support operations were recently cut. This decision signals a troubling undervaluation of these vital capabilities.

If the potential capabilities that USSOF brings to strategic competition are better understood, then these capabilities are more likely to be supported, developed, and implemented in ways that will help shape the strategic environment effectively. Moreover, the capabilities will need to be integrated into a cohesive strategy across the Joint Force, coordinating USSOF’s presence within all seven geographic combatant commands and interagency partners. Doing so would allow USSOF’s capabilities to bridge the divides between different combatant command zones, which could improve the overall US strategic posture in competitive regions and facilitate improved intelligence sharing.

By enhancing USSOF’s capabilities and recognizing its value in strategic competition, the interagency and Department of Defense can ensure it effectively continues to protect US interests and contribute to global stability. Thus equipped, USSOF will remain adept at confronting modern conflict dynamics and asserting US international strategic priorities.

Alyxandra Marine is an assistant director with the Forward Defense program at the Atlantic Council. The recommendations from this piece are explained in further detailed in Stealth, speed, and adaptability: The role of special operations forces in strategic competition.

The True Story Behind “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare ”and“ ”History's First Special Forces Mission

ca.news.yahoo.com · by Jack SmartApril 19, 2024 at 11:14 a.m.·4 min readLink Copied

Guy Ritchie's WWII-era action film starring Henry Cavill is based on the real-life Operation Postmaster

Dan Smith for Lionsgate; FPG/Getty

(Left-right:) Henry Cavill in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"; Winston Churchill

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is more than just another action-packed cinematic romp courtesy of director Guy Ritchie. It features Henry Cavill as a real-life hero of World War II — one whose Nazi-fighting mission changed the course of covert military operations throughout history.

Cavill, 40, stars as Gus March-Phillipps, who leads a "secret combat unit, composed of a motley crew of rogues and mavericks," according to its synopsis, that "goes on a daring mission against the Nazis using entirely unconventional and utterly 'ungentlemanly' fighting techniques."

In that crew are Alan Ritchson as Anders Lassen, Eiza González as Marjorie Stewart, Alex Pettyfer as Geoffrey Appleyard, Danny Sapani as Kambili Kalu, and Hero Fiennes Tiffin as Henry Hayes — all characters based on real-life figures involved in 1941’s Operation Postmaster.

Daniel Smith

Henry Cavill in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare"

That special operation, sponsored by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill himself, was one of many designed by the top-secret Special Operations Executive to spy on and sabotage parts of Nazi-occupied Europe behind enemy lines.

Spoiler alert for Ungentlemanly Warfare: Operation Postmaster’s crowning achievement was commandeering German and Italian ships off the coast of the neutral Spanish island of Fernando Po in 1942.

The “audacious approach” of the operation’s unconventional soldiers, as the movie’s synopsis concludes, “changed the course of the war and laid the foundation for the British SAS [Special Air Service] and modern Black Ops warfare.”

Ritchie’s film, co-written by Paul Tamasy, Eric Johnson and Arash Amel, is adapted from author Damien Lewis’ 2014 book of the same name (subtitled How Churchill’s Secret Warriors Set Europe Ablaze and Gave Birth to Modern Black Ops), itself based on British War Department files that weren’t declassified until the 21st century. Its retelling of Operation Postmaster is only one of several surprising tales.

Also featured in this version of the story are Henry Golding as fictional composite character Freddy Alvarez, Freddie Fox as Ian Fleming (the junior naval intelligence officer who would go on to become a famous British literary icon behind the James Bond novels), Rory Kinnear as Churchill, and Cary Elwes as SOE mover and Brigadier Colin Gubbins, known by his codename “M.”

Elwes, it turns out, has a personal connection to the history behind Ungentlemanly Warfare.

"My grandfather was actually recruited by the character I play in the film," the actor, 61, told PEOPLE. "He was dropped into Albania in 1943 to create a partisan brigade to fight the Italians and the Germans… He would regale me with stories when I was a kid, and he was my real-life hero.”

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Dave Hogan/Hogan Media/Shutterstock

(Left-right:) Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Eiza González, Cary Elwes, Babs Olusanmokun, Hero Feinnes Tiffin and Alex Pettyfer aboard HMS Belfast on March 22 in London

As for Cavill’s character, The Telegraph in 2005 called March-Phillips “a man of violent passions and reckless courage, who created SOE's SSRF,” or Small Scale Raiding Force.

The rogue SOE operative was killed not long after the events of Ungentlemanly Warfare, in Operation Aquatint, a raid on the coast of Nazi-occupied France that left no British survivors. Not long before then, however, he married Marjorie Stewart — played in the film by González — who, by some accounts, was a trained markswoman assisting the Allied forces.

As the movie makes clear, the efforts of March-Phillips and his unlikely team of heroes ultimately helped turn the tide of World War II, loosening Adolf Hitler’s hold on the Atlantic Ocean.

While Ritchie’s adaptation takes liberties with such real-life events, the success of Operation Postmaster and other covert operations like it undoubtedly led to the tactics of black-ops and irregular warfare that remain in play to this day.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is in theaters now.

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Read the original article on People.

ca.news.yahoo.com · by Jack SmartApril 19, 2024 at 11:14 a.m.·4 min readLink Copied

6. The US Debt Clock

This website provides some fascinating data. It cites the US Treasury department as the spruce.

But be forewarned, It will either make your head hurt or make you cry. Or both. This is likely the greatest US strategic weakness and could be our downfall. WIll the dollar as the world's reserve currency continue to protect us?

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

7. Inside the White House’s Frenetic Scramble to Avert a Full-Blown Middle East War

A pretty good run down.

Inside the White House’s Frenetic Scramble to Avert a Full-Blown Middle East War

Over the course of 19 days, U.S. officials raced to contain escalating tensions between Israel and Iran

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/white-house-scramble-avert-middle-east-war-fc012c43?mod=hp_lead_pos1

Death in Damascus

The crisis erupted on April 1, when Israeli weapons slammed into a building in Syria’s capital Damascus, killing senior Iranian military leaders, including Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, an important figure who oversaw Iran’s paramilitary operations in Syria and Lebanon for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force.

Just minutes before the strike, an Israeli official alerted his U.S. counterpart that it was under way. But the heads up didn’t include any information about who was being targeted or the location being struck, U.S. officials said.

The scene of the April strike in Syria’s capital of Damascus. PHOTO: YOUSSEF DAFAWWI/SHUTTERSTOCK

The White House soon learned of another unexpected Israeli attack that occurred the same day as the Damascus strike: An Israeli drone strike against an aid convoy in Gaza killed seven workers from celebrity chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen charity.

Shortly after the Damascus strike, Israeli Ambassador Michael Herzog and the Israeli defense attaché were at the White House as national security adviser Jake Sullivan and other top White House aides held a video teleconference with Israeli officials. In a side conversation, Herzog explained that Israel had targeted Zahedi and other senior Iranian officers, U.S. officials said.

The attack ‘will not remain without answer’

As officials in Washington and Israel awaited Tehran’s response, few Israeli or U.S. officials anticipated that it would attack Israel directly, something it had never done before.

American officials fretted that the Israeli strike could potentially trigger Iranian proxy attacks against U.S. positions in Iraq and Syria, where about 4,500 American troops and civilians are deployed at bases around the region. U.S. officials speculated that Iran might try to attack an Israel Embassy outside the country in response.

After the Syria airstrike, the Iranians asked Switzerland’s Embassy in Tehran to send the U.S. a written message blaming it for the attack in menacing language, U.S. officials said. Washington denied involvement.

Two days after Israel hit Damascus, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin expressed frustration in a call with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that he hadn’t mentioned plans for the operation, even though Gallant had visited Austin in the Pentagon a week earlier, a U.S. official said.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said the Damascus attack ‘will not remain without answer.’ PHOTO: ROUZBEH FOULADI/ZUMA PRESS

The loss of the high-ranking IRGC personnel who were well connected with the leadership in Tehran infuriated Iranian officials, who said the building Israel hit was a diplomatic facility, an assertion Israel denied to American officials. After failing to secure a U.N. Security Council condemnation of the Israeli strike, Tehran signaled it would retaliate.

The attack “will not remain without answer,” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on April 3.

U.S.-Israeli ties were at a nadir. In a tense April 4 call, Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that international support was plummeting after the World Central Kitchen deaths.

Israel needed to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza and reduce civilian casualties, and the U.S. would judge Israel by its actions, Biden said, according to officials.

But he also told the Israeli leader that the U.S. had Israel’s back against Iran. He ordered the Pentagon to step up its efforts to protect Israel, and the U.S. military activated highly classified plans for assisting Israel in a crisis.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan at a news conference in March. PHOTO: AL DRAGO/PRESS POOL

As Biden hosted the Japanese prime minister at the White House April 10, Austin pulled him aside to get authorization to turn around the USS Carney, a destroyer then heading west toward its home port in Florida. It joined the USS Arleigh Burke, another destroyer, in the eastern Mediterranean, close enough to Israel to track and shoot down incoming missiles with SM-3 interceptors that had never been used to down a ballistic missile in combat.

A team of U.S. military personnel secretly went to Tel Aviv to work out of a missile defense operations center with their Israeli counterparts.

Anticipating Iran would employ drones, a bulked-up force of F-15E fighter jets arrived in the region to help shoot them down. Other F-16s based in the region also participated in the operation. Plans were made for Saudi and Jordanian planes to defend their airspace.

The aircraft carrier USS Eisenhower, already in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, was moved closer to Israel so it could be in position to launch fighter jets to intercept any drones launched by the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen.

Biden’s top aides worked the phones, imploring other governments to tell Iran not to strike. CIA Director William Burns asked intelligence counterparts in Europe, Mideast capitals and Turkey to urge Iran to de-escalate.

‘On the high end’

Even as they watched Iran remove missiles from storage and put them on launchers, the scale of Iran’s attack plan wasn’t immediately clear to U.S. intelligence agencies. Some intelligence reports predicted Iran might only target Israeli diplomatic facilities or other sites outside Israel.

As the days without an Iranian response passed, though, U.S. and Israeli intelligence officials determined that Iran was planning a direct attack on Israeli territory and that it would be massive.

The question was when it would come and what the targets would be.

The top U.S. Middle East commander, Gen. Erik Kurilla, arrived in Israel on April 11, speeding up already-scheduled plans to visit the region because of the looming Iranian attack. Kurilla wanted to stay in Israel through the Iranian attack, but Austin ordered him out, fearing that the U.S. might look complicit in any Israeli response. Kurilla continued to participate in the deliberations from Jordan.

By the time Biden arrived in Rehoboth Beach, Del., in the early evening on Friday, April 12 for the weekend, the Iranian attack plan had come into focus. “We got better, firmer intelligence and information about the specific timing” of Iran’s coming attack, said White House national security spokesman John Kirby.

Biden abruptly returned to the capital that evening.

When the attack began Saturday night, U.S. officials in the Situation Room and at the Pentagon tracked the three waves of weapons that left Iranian airspace, crossing Iraq and Jordan, racing toward Israel. Even with the advanced warning they had received, the scale of the barrage was a shock, administration officials said.

“This was on the high end, I think, of what we were—what we were anticipating,” a senior official said.

A view from the southern Gaza strip as drones and missiles from Iran headed toward Israel. PHOTO: ATEF SAFADI/SHUTTERSTOCK

The more than 150 attack drones that Iran launched first—one of the largest swarms used at one time in combat—would take five to seven hours to reach Israel. Then came more than 30 land-attack cruise missiles with flight times of two to three hours. Last were ballistic missiles that would reach Israel in just a dozen minutes.

The Iranians timed the launches so the weapons would arrive simultaneously, an attempt to overwhelm Israel’s defenses. They avoided civilian targets in favor of military ones, like the Nevatim base in the Negev Desert, where Israel’s advanced F-35 fighters are based.

A patchwork of defense systems sewn together hastily by Kurilla and others in the days before the attack succeeded in defending the most formidable attack Israel had seen in decades. No one had ever tried to intercept so many ballistic missiles at once before. Washington thought its and Israeli forces could handle 50 ballistic missiles, but more than 100 was unknown territory.

Israel’s Arrow system intercepted most of the ballistic missiles, while the two American destroyers in the eastern Mediterranean downed several others. An American Patriot antimissile battery in Erbil, Iraq, intercepted another one.

The lumbering drones, in the meantime, were shot down by a combination of American, British, French and Israeli aircraft.

‘Take the win’

After Israel emerged almost unscathed, the White House shifted from defending its ally to restraining it. About 9 p.m. Washington time on April 13, Biden and Netanyahu held an intense call.

The U.S. president advised Netanyahu, who was with his war cabinet during the call, to think through his next step carefully and to “take the win,” U.S. officials said.

He reminded the Israeli leader that his forces had eliminated Iran’s military commanders for Lebanon and Syria and that Iran’s counterattack had failed.

U.S. officials worried Israel might strike back immediately, and powerfully. Iran was warning it would respond forcefully, which could supercharge the cycle of escalation.

Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel’s response to Iran would be ‘sensible and not something irresponsible.’ PHOTO: RONEN ZVULUN/POOL/SHUTTERSTOCK

After international condemnation of the World Central Kitchen attack, Israel was now in a different, better place strategically, U.S. officials argued. If it responded rashly, it could once again lose newly regained international support.

Members of Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition government, meanwhile, were demanding quick, massive retaliation. But Netanyahu told ministers from his Likud party that while he was determined to respond to Iran, the action would be “sensible and not something irresponsible.”

Early on April 19, Israel struck back, targeting a single military site in Iran’s Isfahan province. While the attack was narrow, it showed that Israel could overcome Iranian air defenses and strike deep inside its adversary’s territory, an unmistakable warning after Tehran’s failed attack on Israel.

Unlike the Damascus strike that started the crisis 19 days earlier, this time Israel gave the U.S. a few minutes’ advance notice of its limited attack. The White House had, at least for a time, avoided a wider war.

Corrections & Amplifications

The USS Carney was heading west on April 10. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was heading east. (Corrected on April 21)

8. U.S. Aid Is a Lifeline for Ukraine’s Struggle to Hold Off Defeat

Photos and a graphic breakdown of the Ukraine package at the link.

Lifelines do not win wars. They just keep your head above water.

U.S. Aid Is a Lifeline for Ukraine’s Struggle to Hold Off Defeat

Ammunition and arms will be rushed to Kyiv’s forces on funding bill’s approval, ‘literally in the nick of time’

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/u-s-aid-is-a-lifeline-for-ukraines-struggle-to-hold-off-defeat-176f3a4d?mod=hp_lead_pos2

By Daniel MichaelsFollow and James MarsonFollow

Updated April 21, 2024 6:48 am ET

The House vote to approve $60 billion in funding for Ukraine comes at a desperate moment for the country’s beleaguered defenders and holds the prospect of helping them stave off a Russian onslaught at the last possible moment.

If approved by the Senate, as is widely expected, and then signed into law by President Biden as soon as Tuesday, the bill will unleash a flood of American military equipment that U.S. forces have positioned for quick deployment.

But given Ukraine’s dire battlefield position and advances Moscow’s forces have made over recent months—during which they reinforced the roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory they held—the new help is unlikely to dramatically reverse Kyiv’s fortunes.

Ukraine faces severe manpower shortages on the front, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said this month that Russian troops are firing 10 artillery shells for every one that his soldiers fire.

At most it has the potential to help Ukraine blunt Russia’s relentless attacks and retain territory, potentially letting Kyiv pin down Russian forces until European allies can deliver more assistance next year.

Ukraine says its troops urgently need basic battlefield supplies as well as more-sophisticated weaponry.

SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

CIA Director William Burns said on Thursday that without the new U.S. aid, “There is a very real risk that the Ukrainians could lose on the battlefield by the end of 2024,” or at least put Russian President Vladimir Putin in a position to dictate terms of a political settlement.

With the aid, he said, “the Ukrainians are entirely capable of holding their own” on the ground this year while continuing to hit Russian air and naval forces.

Fresh U.S. arms deliveries “should have a noticeable impact on the battlefield,” said Assistant Secretary of Defense Celeste Wallander in an interview. “We can act quickly,” she said.

Since the Biden administration first proposed the current package of supplemental aid to Ukraine, the Pentagon has been in contact with Ukrainian forces regarding their needs and delivery logistics, Wallander said. “We already have planned what capabilities we would prioritize” and shipments only await funding approval, she said.

Zelensky on Friday told a videoconference of defense ministers from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which had convened at his request, that his country urgently needs at least seven Patriot air-defense systems and interceptors or comparable equipment, as well as artillery shells, small-arms ammunition and other battlefield basics. “This year we can’t wait for decisions to be made,” he implored them.

Breakdown of the Ukraine package

Defense Department

Total: $48.43 billion

Ammunition

procurement

$5.61 billion

Other

procurement

$4.59 billion

Missiles

procurement

$3.11 billion

Operation and

maintenance

$34.24 billion

Other

State Department and USAID

Total: $11.62 billion

International

security assistance

$2 billion

Other

Economic

support fund

$7.90 billion

Other bilateral

economic assistance

$1.6 billion

Other

Source: the bill

Kara Dapena/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

After the meeting, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said members had pledged to supply new air-defense systems and that the Czech Republic has delivered roughly 500,000 artillery shells as part of a program it has organized to buy up to one million shells for Kyiv. Ukraine’s Western allies supplying arms, known as the Ramstein group, plan later this month to hold a virtual meeting with the aim of expanding commitments.

Resupplying Kyiv’s forces is “already urgent,” Wallander said, citing recent congressional testimony by Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the top U.S. military officer in Europe, on the dire state of Ukrainian defenses.

“It is going to come literally in the nick of time,” said John Nagl, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel who is now a professor of warfighting at the U.S. Army War College. He cited a line attributed to Zelensky on the war’s first day in February 2022, after the U.S. was reported to have offered to fly him out of Kyiv, that what he needed wasn’t a ride but ammunition.

“Right now, if Zelensky doesn’t get this ammunition, he needs a ride,” said Nagl.

A Ukrainian tank crew hides from a Russian drone. Both sides have used such equipment to complement more established parts of their arsenals. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Ukrainian forces in areas including the Donetsk region have spent recent months trying to stop Russia from tightening its grip on captured territory. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Russian troops, thanks to their superior battlefield position, can concentrate barrages at will. “The Ukrainians can see them, but they can’t hit them,” Nagl said.

Wallander said that new U.S. aid would make it much more difficult for Russia to launch such attacks and enable Ukraine to do so. “They can look for Russian weaknesses and build stronger defensive lines,” she said.

Less obvious but potentially no less significant, the aid could also boost Ukrainian morale.

“Knowing this is coming will help them dig a little deeper until the rounds are in guns,” said Nagl.

Inside a bunker near the front line outside the besieged eastern city of Chasiv Yar, four Ukrainian troops cheered when they heard on Saturday night that the House had approved the aid package.

“Finally,” said one 34-year-old drone pilot. “The longer we’ve been here, the more we felt the shortage of ammo… I hope this stuff will be delivered ASAP.”

The new U.S. aid might also prompt Russia to quickly stage attacks it might otherwise have waited to launch, knowing that action could soon become harder, Nagl said.

Ukrainian troops in recent weeks have been improvising by targeting advancing Russian armored vehicles and troops with explosive drones. More ammunition will allow Ukraine instead to use artillery, which is more destructive and can hold Russian forces off at a greater distance, where they pose less of a threat to Ukrainian infantry.

U.S.-China Internet War Intensifies as House Passes TikTok Ban

The measure, requiring ByteDance to sell the popular app or stop operating in the U.S., now heads to the Senate

https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-china-internet-war-intensifies-as-house-passes-tiktok-ban-7d19ff05?mod=hp_lead_pos4

By Meghan Bobrowsky

Updated April 20, 2024 3:13 pm ET

A TikTok office in Culver City, Calif. PHOTO: JANE HAHN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

In the yearslong technology fight between the U.S. and China, the Americans are poised to land a major punch.

The House on Saturday easily passed a bill that would force a sale or ban of TikTok, which is owned by China–based ByteDance, bringing closer to reality a law that could remove the popular app and deepen the internet divide between the two countries.

The measure, which passed 360-58 and was tied to a sweeping aid package for Israel and Ukraine, would give ByteDance up to a year to sell the app—compared with the six-month period proposed in a prior bill.

If ByteDance can’t find a buyer within that time, TikTok—which has 170 million users in the U.S.—would be banned.

The Senate could vote on the bill in coming days. President Biden has previously said that he would sign such a bill into law.

TikTok on Saturday reiterated a statement it gave when the package was introduced that called it “unfortunate that the House of Representatives is using the cover of an important foreign and humanitarian assistance to once again jam through a ban bill.” The company has said the legislation is effectively a ban, since completing a deal would be difficult.

The Chinese government has signaled it wouldn’t allow a forced sale of the company. TikTok says it has never been asked to provide U.S. user data to the Chinese government and wouldn’t do so if asked to.

What Banning TikTok in the U.S. Would Look Like

Things Worth Remembering: ‘We Will Fight with Stones in Our Hands’

https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-remembering-golda-meir?utm=

Months before Israel achieved independence in 1948, Golda Meir came to America, asking for help in the battle for survival.

By Douglas Murray

April 21, 2024

Welcome to Douglas Murray’s column, Things Worth Remembering, in which he presents great speeches from famous orators we should commit to heart. To listen to Douglas recite from Golda Meir’s January 1948 speech in Chicago, scroll to the end of this piece.

Last Saturday, Iran launched 300 missiles and drones at the Jewish state. With help from the United States, France, Britain, and importantly, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, Israel destroyed almost all of them; and on Thursday, the Jewish state struck back.

It was a reminder that Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel was not an isolated act of terrorism, and that it was most certainly not part of a Marxist-inspired campaign to “decolonize” the Middle East, as so many Hamas apologists in the West insist on believing.

Instead, it was part of a broader Arab, and really, Muslim inability to recognize the Jewish people’s right to self-determination in the land that they had first inhabited more than 3,000 years ago, been kicked out of, returned to, been kicked out of again—and then started to return to en masse in the late 1800s.

A half-century after the rebirth of the Zionist movement, Israel finally gained its independence, and in 1948, when the United Nations announced the creation of the State of Israel in the historic homeland of the Jewish people, there was dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv.

But the new state’s neighbors didn’t allow the party to go on long. As most readers will know, no sooner was the state created than it was assailed by its Arab neighbors, who hoped to kill it at birth.

Much of what is going on today—including Iran’s recent failed attack on Israel—can be traced to that catastrophic decision by Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and others not to accept the Jewish state.

Today, it seems almost unimaginable that, in 1948, after so many years of struggle, the Israeli public had to go through yet another war. I frequently marvel that they had the energy and courage to do so, though I suppose that many were impelled by that all-important truth that Golda Meir imparted to then-Senator Biden: “We have nowhere else to go.”

At the time—1973—Meir was the Israeli prime minister and a towering figure in world politics with an almost mythological story: she had been born in Kiev in what was then the Russian Empire at the end of the previous century, then she had immigrated with her family to the United States, where she had grown up in Milwaukee, and she had made aliyah—immigrated to—the Jewish homeland years before it achieved statehood.

By early 1948, when Israel was on the cusp of becoming a state, she was known for being a powerful orator—someone who could articulate clearly and plainly why Jewish self-determination was so important. But she was not well-known in America.

In January of that year, Meir, who was then the head of the Jewish Agency, traveled to the United States to raise money in preparation for Israel’s war of independence. (The Jews knew the UN might give them the green light, but the Arabs would not.)

She had not planned to go to Chicago, but while in New York City, her sister Clara persuaded her to go—to speak to the annual conference of the Council of Jewish Federations and Welfare Funds.

Meir arrived in Chicago in the middle of a freezing cold winter “without a dime in her pocketbook even to take a taxi.” Wealthy and influential Jews in Chicago were not especially keen on meeting with her. As Henry Montor, the executive vice president of the United Jewish Appeal, a Zionist organization, recalled, Meir was, to his mind, “an impecunious, unimportant representative, a schnorrer—Yiddish for beggar or layabout.

Meir, for her part, was terrified. On the one hand, she knew that war in the Middle East was imminent, and she had no choice but to bring home money for much-needed weapons—or there wouldn’t be any Israel. On the other hand, she understood all too well that there was, among some upper-crust American Jews, a wariness of the idea of a Jewish state—a desire, often unstated, not to appear too Jewish.

In any event, Montor managed to carve out a little time for Meir to speak at the Council’s luncheon on January 25, 1948, at the Sheraton.

She later recalled: “I was terribly afraid of going to these people who didn’t know me from Adam. I admit I was shaking. I had no idea what was going to happen.”

But providence, or something like it, called her that day. And the effect was historic. The audience was on its feet immediately after she finished. Her goal had been to raise $25 million in America. She came away with $50 million—aid that would prove critical in the months ahead.

According to those present, Meir went to the stage with her hair severely parted, absolutely no makeup, and with no notes to speak from—her preferred habit. The pauses in her speech seem to have been as important as the words themselves. She seemed to be feeling the words, weighing up the words, and judging, by the second, their effect on her audience.

She spoke for some 35 minutes.

Friends was the term she chose to address her audience.

“The mufti and his people have declared war upon us,” she said. “We have no alternative but. . . to fight for our lives.”

She told the audience about the thirty-five Jews who “fought to the very end” on the road to Kfar Etzion and of the last one killed. He had run out of ammunition but died with a stone in his hand, prepared to continue fighting.

And she paraphrased the famous words of Winston Churchill: “We will fight in the Negev and will fight in Galilee and will fight on the outskirts of Jerusalem until the very end.”

She added: “I want you to believe me when I say that I came on this special mission to the United States today not to save 700,000 Jews. During the last few years the Jewish people lost six million Jews, and it would be audacity on our part to worry the Jewish people throughout the world because a few hundred thousand more Jews were in danger. That is not the issue.”

The issue, she explained, “is that if these 700,000 Jews in Palestine can remain alive, then the Jewish people, as such, is alive and Jewish independence is assured. If these 700,000 people are killed off, then for many centuries, we are through with this dream of a Jewish people and a Jewish homeland.”

This was the spirit—the moral vision—that compelled Golda Meir, like so many Israelis after her, to do what other people thought could not be done.

To be sure, Meir had her blind spots. Not long after Senator Biden, then 30, visited Israel along with other U.S. officials, in 1973, Egypt and Syria simultaneously attacked Israel—in what became known as the Yom Kippur War. Israel was nearly destroyed, and Meir’s reputation for being Israel’s Iron Lady was badly undermined (and Israeli politics were transformed forever, laying the groundwork for many of today’s thornier issues). But the Jewish state fought back, and it accomplished what appeared, for a while, impossible: victory.

That victory was critical not simply because it restored Israel’s territorial integrity, but because it was part of a much bigger effort to force the surrounding Arab states—however reluctantly, however glacially—to come around to accepting that Israel was not going anywhere.

Iran, as we know, is still learning that lesson.

The mullahs in Tehran, if they are wise, will take a look at Meir’s 1948 speech in Chicago, when she did what no one thought could be done—and inspired so many Israelis, present and future, to follow in her footsteps.

“Much must be prepared now so that we can hold out,” Meir told her audience on that snowy day in Chicago. “There are unlimited opportunities, but are we going to get the necessary means?”

She went on: “Is it possible that time should decide the issue not because Palestinian Jews are cowards, not because they are incapable, but merely because they lack the material means to carry on?”

Then, she said: “I have come to the United States, and I hope you will understand me if I say that it is not an easy matter for any of us to leave home at present. To my sorrow, I am not in the front line. I am not with my daughter in the Negev or with other sons and daughters in the trenches. But I have a job to do.”

To listen to Douglas read parts of Golda Meir’s 1948 speech, click below:

Douglas will be back in your inbox next Sunday. His last column was about Napoleon’s chief nemesis, William Pitt the Younger. To learn more about Douglas and support his work, visit DouglasMurray.net.

11. The American Myths Dividing Contemporary Politics

A thought provoking read (if read objectively with an open mind).

1. National myths are essential to the culture that supports a nation-state.

2. Three of these myths are central to the MAGA movement.

3. MAGA’s rationale for political violence becomes clear when we focus on its incorporation of the gun rights movement.

4. Since the 1970s, the left and center-left have lacked a version of national myth that would similarly root their programs in historical tradition, and offer a clear vision of future destiny.

5. The passions and beliefs that divide the American public are deeply rooted in our history.

The American Myths Dividing Contemporary Politics

nextbigideaclub.com · by Richard Slotkin

Richard Slotkin is a historian of American culture and author. He is the Olin Professor of English and American Studies, Emeritus at Wesleyan University since 2010. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Below, Richard shares five key insights from his new book, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. Listen to the audio version—read by Richard himself—in the Next Big Idea App.

1. National myths are essential to the culture that supports a nation-state.

We are born to our families and home communities. We must learn to see ourselves as members of a national community, who have a shared history. Myths are the traditional stories through which that history is remembered and communicated.

National myths are developed over generations through every medium of cultural expression: histories, textbooks, newspapers, sermons, political speeches, popular literature, and movies. They tell us who can share American identity and what the purposes of our government should be.

They also enable us to turn history into an instrument of political power. In any major crisis, one of our cultural reflexes is to scan our memory archives, our lexicon of myths, for analogies that will help us interpret the crisis, and precedents on which to model an action-script for dealing with it. When President Bush compared 9/11 to Pearl Harbor he was invoking the Myth of the Good War, and the public was prepared for the war that would follow. When a January 6th rioter yelled “It’s 1776” he was framing his insurrection as a repetition of the American Revolution.

Four mythologies have been central to the development of American nationality:

The Myth of the Frontier is our oldest myth. It traces our cultural origin to the savage racial wars of settlers and Indigenous peoples and our phenomenal economic growth to the exploitation of abundant natural resources.
The Myth of the Founding deals with the establishment of national independence and the twin pillars of our national creed: the revolutionary principles of the Declaration of Independence and the limited government structures of the Constitution.
The Myth of the Civil War arose from the existential crisis that overtook the nation in the 1860s over slavery and Southern secession. It has three variants: the Liberation Myth, centered on Lincoln and the “new birth of freedom” produced by emancipation; the White Reunion Myth, which emphasizes the post-war coming together of Whites from North and South; and the Lost Cause Myth, which sanctifies the Confederate cause and the post-war struggle to restore White supremacy in the South.
Finally, the Myth of the Good War emerged in the 1940s as the nation, for the first time, embraced its racial and ethnic diversity to unite its people in a struggle for the Free World.

The irony and peril of our situation is that the myths that have traditionally united Americans have become the slogans of a cultural civil war. On the Right is the “Make America Great Again” or MAGA movement—on the Left is a “Blue” coalition of liberals, moderates, and progressives. Each appeals to a different version of American history and of the stories through which we have remembered that history.

2. Three of these myths are central to the MAGA movement.

The flags flown by the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 bore symbols of the myths that shape their consciousness. The classic “Betsy Ross” flag, with its circle of thirteen stars, and the “Gadsden Flag,” yellow with a coiled rattlesnake and the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” invoke the Myth of the Founding. These flags identified the rioters as Revolutionary patriots.

Cowboy and coonskin hats and gun rights banners evoke the Myth of the Frontier. Its symbolism sanctifies its assertion of American exceptionalism, its laissez-faire economics, its commitment to the unregulated exploitation of natural resources, its glorification of racial conflict, and its vigilante code of justice.

“These flags identified the rioters as Revolutionary patriots.”

The “Stars and Bars” flag invokes the Lost Cause Myth, which is central to MAGA’s racial symbolism and its political action script. The 19th-century proponents of the Lost Cause asserted that racial equality and political liberalism threatened civilization itself; therefore, the most extreme measures were justified to restore White supremacy, including segregation, lynching, and one-party rule.

Donald Trump’s calls for “retribution” and rooting out “communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs and vermin within the confines of our country” are straight out of the Lost Cause playbook. Destroying the so-called vermin “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

In all of these MAGA myths, the action script calls for political violence.

3. MAGA’s rationale for political violence becomes clear when we focus on its incorporation of the gun rights movement.

This movement uses a version of the Myth of the Founding that justifies anti-government and vigilante violence. The gun rights movement has adopted the so-called “palladium” or “insurrectionary theory” of the Second Amendment, first set forth by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1833. It holds that the Second Amendment authorizes states to form militias so they can deter or resist any tendency to tyranny by the central government.

During the 1980s and 90s, this doctrine was altered by New Right ideologists into a new rationale for anti-government action. Where Story vested the right of resistance in well-regulated state militias, exponents of the New Right assert it as the right of private individuals and unofficial paramilitary associations. NRA spokesman Fred Romero made the point explicit in 1991: “The Second Amendment is there as a balance of power. It is literally a loaded gun in the hands of the people held to the heads of government.”

By the end of President Clinton’s administration, the NRA had made its interpretation of gun rights an integral part of the conservative “culture war” agenda. By the start of President Obama’s second term, calls for political violence became applause lines at Republican rallies. Armed men appeared at public meetings, calling for “Second Amendment Remedies” to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

The logical consequences of the insurrectionary theory became visible on January 6, 2021, when a mob supported by paramilitary organizations stormed the Capitol to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. In that scene, the action scripts of the Myth of the Founding and the Lost Cause came together.

When we analyze MAGA’s use of myth, we can see that it has developed a distinctly American approach to fascism: more neo-Confederate than neo-Nazi, combining American exceptionalism, racial and ethnic bigotry, political violence, Christian nationalism, and neoliberal economics. Its myths energize the movement’s followers by giving them the sense of riding a wave of historical destiny.

4. Since the 1970s, the left and center-left have lacked a version of national myth that would similarly root their programs in historical tradition, and offer a clear vision of future destiny.

In the 2020 presidential campaign, the Blue coalition highlighted two historical narratives that had not hitherto functioned as national myths: the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement. The New Deal, as such, has never produced the kind of sustained story-telling that characterizes national myths. Its principles were subsumed in the Good War Myth, which identified the war effort with a fight for social justice, but its own storylines, such as the struggle of labor unions against corporate power, were never developed in popular culture. The Civil Rights Movement became the myth of choice for identity-based advocacy, emphasizing minority rights, ethnic identity, and greater “diversity” in all institutions. It was also associated with a radical critique of America’s national history of racial injustice and Indigenous dispossession.

The New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement symbolize the ideological split that has divided liberal politics since the 1970s. The policy program adopted by the Biden administration attempts to integrate them. It invokes New Deal symbolism to highlight the centrality of labor and makes reform of labor-capital relations the core of the political agenda. It invokes the Civil Rights Movement in framing its approach to voting rights and equity in the distribution of federal benefits. Its cultural program is nationalistic in insisting that reform depends on the patriotic solidarity of Americans—an echo of the Good War Myth.

“The New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement symbolize the ideological split that has divided liberal politics since the 1970s.”

The Blue coalition has also drawn on traditional national myth in its invocation of Lincoln and the Emancipation version of the Civil War—most notably in its support for removing Confederate monuments and renaming military bases named for Rebel generals. The project was not only embraced by liberals, but by commanders of the armed forces. In the war of symbols, it represented a direct repudiation of the Lost Cause Myth favored by MAGA and provoked a strident reaction from then-President Trump. Later, state governments opposed history courses that addressed issues of slavery and race as so-called “critical race theory.”

The basic elements of a “Blue” national myth are in place, tracing a path from Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” and Reconstruction to the New Deal’s grand but imperfect project of economic and social reform to the triumphs of the Good War, Great Society, and the Civil Rights Movement. If such a myth were to become popular, it would provide the left and center-left with something it has lacked since the 1970s: a narrative that roots its ideology and political program in history.

But would such a myth provide the basis for an inclusive concept of American nationality? Or would it only provide the Blue coalition with greater ideological coherence in its ongoing struggle against MAGA?

5. The passions and beliefs that divide the American public are deeply rooted in our history.

The election of 2024 is seen as an existential crisis for American democracy. Supporters of the Blue coalition point to Donald Trump’s authoritarian intentions and racist rhetoric. MAGA advocates see diversity and cultural liberalism as a menace to Christian civilization. Outright civil war is unlikely. But with the government deadlocked, and politics increasingly tribal, we face the likelihood of a “culture war-between-the-states.”

Red and Blue legislatures are adopting different laws on such fundamental structures as voting rights, gun rights, health care, abortion, and sexuality—and antithetical ways of telling and teaching the American story. We are, therefore, in danger of losing the sense of common nationality without which no nation-state can successfully function.

To listen to the audio version read by author Richard Slotkin, download the Next Big Idea App today:

nextbigideaclub.com · by Richard Slotkin

12. Give Me Liberty or Give Me … What?

Another thought provoking read for a Sunday.

Excerpts:

“Civil War” is not ripped from the headlines as much as it is stitched from history; it is not a vision of what might happen in America but a collage of what already has happened, some here and much elsewhere.

...

Marche hopes that America will regain its swagger and reinvent its politics, but the estrangement he sees offers little encouragement. “Each side accuses the other of hating America,” he writes, “which is only another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America.”

The debate over what kind of America we want is vital and unceasing. But when it shifts from the universal to the personal, from what kind of America we want to what kind of American we’ll accept, then we have moved from conversation to interrogation, from inquiry to tragedy. You don’t have to believe that a new civil war is coming to understand the dangers of the question — “What kind of American are you?” — and to realize that the more answers we grasp for, the weaker we become.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me … What?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/21/opinion/civil-war-liberty-america.html

April 21, 2024, 1:00 a.m. ET

Credit...Christopher Anderson/Magnum Photos

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By Carlos Lozada

Opinion Columnist

If the American experiment finally decides to call it quits, how might a national breakup begin?

Perhaps California moves toward secession after the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the state’s strict gun control measures. Or Texas rebels when disputes over abortion laws grow deadly and the state’s National Guard remains loyal to the second Texan republic. Or a skirmish over the closure of a local bridge by federal inspectors escalates into a standoff between a beloved sheriff and a famous general, and the rest of the country takes sides. Or it’s the coordinated bombing of state capitols timed to the 2028 presidential transition, with right-wing militias and left-wing activists blaming one another.

In other words: It’s not you, it’s me hating you.

These scenarios are not of my own creation; they all appear in recent nonfiction books warning of an American schism. The secessionist impulses take shape in David French’s “Divided We Fall,” which cautions that Americans’ political and cultural clustering risks tearing the country apart. (French published it before becoming a Times columnist in 2023.) The statehouse explosions go off in Barbara F. Walter’s “How Civil Wars Start,” which notes that when democratic norms erode, opportunistic leaders can more easily aggravate the ethnic and cultural divides that end in violence. The Battle of the Bridge is one of several possible Sumter moments in Stephen Marche’s “The Next Civil War,” which contends that our great divorce would flow from irreconcilable differences over what America stands for.

These authors offer examples of what could happen, not predictions of what will. Their point is that our politics and culture are susceptible to such possibilities. “The crisis has already arrived,” Marche writes. “Only the inciting incidents are pending.”

It is precisely the absence of inciting incidents that makes the writer-director Alex Garland’s much-debated new film, “Civil War” (its box-office success resulting in part from the multitude of newspaper columnists going to see it), such an intriguing addition to this canon. We never learn exactly who or what started the new American civil war, or what ideologies, if any, are competing for power. It’s a disorienting and risky move, but an effective one. An elaborate back story would distract from the viewer’s engagement with the war itself — the bouts of despair and detachment, of death and denial — as lived and chronicled by the weary journalists at the center of the story.

Even the choice of journalists as the film’s protagonists creates an additional layer of remove, especially because, weirdly, these journalists rarely discuss the origins of the conflict or question its politics, even among themselves. (“We record so other people ask,” a veteran photographer reminds her protégée.) The story is built around their travels from New York to Washington, where they hope to score one last presidential interview before the capital falls.

“Civil War” is a road trip movie, if your trip occurs somewhere between the dislocation of “Nomadland” and the dystopia of “The Road.” If you’re trying to see the national monuments before they turn to rubble. If stopping for gas involves Canadian currency and scenes of torture. If stadium camps and mass graves have become standard features of America the beautiful.

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In this telling, California and Texas have both seceded and somehow allied together. They are battling the remnants of the U.S. armed forces as well as some loyal Secret Service agents and die-hard White House staffers, all of whom serve the same purpose as the expendable ensigns on a “Star Trek” landing party. There is also something called the Florida Alliance, which has been trying to persuade the Carolinas to break away from Washington, too.

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But the most memorable fighters in this war are the informal militias found across the country, whose motives for violence range from self-defense to self-indulgence. One fighter explains, with an annoyed air, why he’s taking aim at a sniper: “Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.” Another exudes slow-motion glee while executing his uniformed, hooded prisoners. Another militant mumbles that he’s strung up a local looter in part because the guy had ignored him in high school, a casual malevolence that brought to mind Shad Ledue, the murderous handyman from Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here.” Once Ledue gains a little power — just enough — over his kindly but oblivious former employers, his enduring resentment fuels his vengeance.

Civil conflicts are sustained by different groups’ belief that their “position and status in society” have been downgraded, Walter writes. Whether that erosion is real can be less relevant than the feelings of oppression and loss, and the chance to blame and punish someone for it. Once the door has opened just a crack, high school slights and condescending bosses become good excuses — precisely because they’re so petty — for violence.

The power of “Civil War” is that the snippets of context deepen the film’s ambiguity, as well as its realism. The president, we learn in passing, is serving a third term, and the action begins with him rehearsing his lies before addressing the nation. (So was secession a reaction to an authoritarian leader, or was his extended tenure itself a response to regional rebellion?) The president made controversial decisions, like deploying airstrikes against U.S. citizens (a plot point that reminded me of the U.S. killing of the radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011) and disbanding the F.B.I. (which evoked the fateful U.S. decision to dissolve the Iraqi military in 2003). The war photographer at the heart of the movie, played by Kirsten Dunst, gained fame in college for snapping a “legendary” photo of something called the Antifa Massacre. (I immediately thought of the indelible Kent State photograph from 1970, also taken by a collegiate photographer, though whether this new massacre was supposedly perpetrated by or against Antifa activists is unclear.)

“Civil War” is not ripped from the headlines as much as it is stitched from history; it is not a vision of what might happen in America but a collage of what already has happened, some here and much elsewhere.

In that sense, the film is reminiscent of Omar El Akkad’s 2017 novel “American War,” which imagines a new civil conflict late in the 21st century, after climate change has remade the country and a federal prohibition on the use of fossil fuels prompts an uprising by Americans clinging to their guns and gas guzzlers. El Akkad, a journalist who has covered terrorism, military tribunals and mass migration around the world, decides to put them all in one place, a future America where principle has given way to retribution. “This isn’t only about secession anymore,” someone explains after the fighting begins. “This is about avenging our dead.” It’s a book-length rebuttal of American exceptionalism.

“Civil War” issues a similar rebuttal in a lament by Dunst’s character, who struggles with flashbacks from the many conflicts she’s covered and also can’t quite accept that it’s happening here. “Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo,” she says, “I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this. But here we are.”

The missing back story in “Civil War” does not obviate any consideration of how such a war could have begun; it forces viewers to realize that many different roads could get us there. We don’t have to be the United States from the 1850s or the Balkans from the 1990s; we can choose our own misadventure.

Of course, not everyone chooses sides. Political violence does not necessarily depend on mass mobilization but on just the right mix of minority zealotry and majority indifference, or perhaps fear. In “Civil War,” the journalists come upon a time warp of a town, sprinklers still spraying and shops still open, seemingly insulated from the mayhem. One resident explains that she sees the war on television but would rather just “stay out.” The coexistence of brutality and normality is a recurring feature of war, and I can picture many Americans getting through an actual civil war with similar distance. (Maybe they’d call it self-care.) But I suspect that more than enough of us would feel what Marche calls “the pleasure of contempt.” That pleasure is everywhere in “Civil War,” no less than in the Abu Ghraib-style photo that slowly develops in the closing credits.

In “How Civil Wars Start,” Walter points to the breakdown of a unified national identity as a precursor of strife. In Iraq, she writes, people began to ask who was Shiite and who Sunni; in Bosnia, the distinction among Serb, Croat and Muslim identities overpowered all else. One of the most disturbing moments in “Civil War” shows a camouflage-clad fighter threatening the journalists. When they insist they are Americans, he asks, “What kind of American are you?” At gunpoint, they answer, and the fatal exchange shows that the definition of America is no longer found in the creed of liberty, equality and opportunity but in the sludge of blood, soil and language.

The quest for a cohesive national definition comes up in these recent books warning of our deepening divides. Walter compares the political tensions of our time to the 1850s and the 1960s. “Both times, the country’s political parties had radically different visions of America’s future. What could the country be? What should the country be?” She hopes that America’s enduring ideals and shared history can inspire us to “fulfill the promise of a truly multiethnic democracy.” In “Divided We Fall,” French imagines but does not expect that we might draw on our federalist tradition to let different states live as they choose while preserving individual rights, not to mention the union.

Such outcomes would require the acceptance of those shared ideals and history, a semblance of consensus around what kind of country we want to be. This is harder in an America of proliferating identities and symbols, a country where group rights and grievances risk trumping the commonalities and compromises that bind us together. “Identity-based parties make it impossible for voters to switch sides,” Walter writes. “There is nowhere for them to go if their political identity is tied to their ethnic or religious identity.”

Marche hopes that America will regain its swagger and reinvent its politics, but the estrangement he sees offers little encouragement. “Each side accuses the other of hating America,” he writes, “which is only another way of saying that both hate what the other means by America.”

The debate over what kind of America we want is vital and unceasing. But when it shifts from the universal to the personal, from what kind of America we want to what kind of American we’ll accept, then we have moved from conversation to interrogation, from inquiry to tragedy. You don’t have to believe that a new civil war is coming to understand the dangers of the question — “What kind of American are you?” — and to realize that the more answers we grasp for, the weaker we become.

"We're Going To Lose A Major War": US Navy Deletes Photo Of Ship Commander Shooting Rifle With Backwards Scope

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/were-going-lose-major-war-us-navy-deletes-photo-ship-commander-shooting-rifle-backwards#google_vignette

BY TYLER DURDEN

THURSDAY, APR 11, 2024 - 06:11 AM

Cmdr. Cameron Yaste, the Commanding Officer of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), was recently photographed shooting a 5.56×45mm M4 carbine with the optics installed backward.

The now-deleted image and press release on the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service website featured Yaste shooting the M4 with the Trijicon VCOG scope installed backward while pointed at a giant target balloon.

Here's what the press release said before it was deleted:

Boeing Whistleblower Says He's Saving Lives

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Cmdr. Cameron Yaste, the Commanding Officer of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS John S. McCain (DDG 56), fires at the "killer tomato" during a gun shoot. The ship is in US 7th Fleet conducting routine operations. 7th Fleet is the US Navy's largest forward-deployed numbered fleet, and routinely interacts and operates with Allies and partners in preserving a free and open Indo-Pacific Region.

Here's how to properly use the scope...

The website Internet Archive saved a snapshot of the press release:

Netizens mocked the Navy commander, and that's probably why the service deleted the image and text.

Here's what the internet had to say:

Yaste merely shows how the US Navy is unprepared to fight the next major conflict. Sigh...

14. Northern Virginia serves as the world’s internet hub. Its neighbors are paying a price.

Northern Virginia as a target (in more ways than one - sabotage, subversion, espionage, cyber attacks, theft of information, etc).

Graphics and maps the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2024/data-centers-internet-power-source-coal/?itid=hp_only-from-the-post_p004_f001

They are building a new Amazon data center less than a mile from our neighborhood.

Northern Virginia serves as the world’s internet hub. Its neighbors are paying a price.

Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: CoalInternet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal

By Antonio Olivo

April 17, 2024 at 6:05 a.m.

CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — A helicopter hovers over the Gee family farm, the noisy rattle echoing inside their home in this rural part of West Virginia. It’s holding surveyors who are eyeing space for yet another power line next to the property — a line that will take electricity generated from coal plants in the state to address a drain on power driven by the world’s internet hub in Northern Virginia 35 miles away.

There, massive data centers with computers processing nearly 70 percent of global digital traffic are gobbling up electricity at a rate officials overseeing the power grid say is unsustainable unless two things happen: Several hundred miles of new transmission lines must be built, slicing through neighborhoods and farms in Virginia and three neighboring states. And antiquated coal-powered electricity plants that had been scheduled to go offline will need to keep running to fuel the increasing need for more power, undermining clean energy goals.

“It’s not right,” said Mary Gee, whose property already abuts two power lines that serve as conduits for electricity flowing toward the biggest concentration of data centers — in Loudoun County, home to what’s known as Data Center Alley. “These power lines? They’re not for me and my family. I didn’t vote on this. And the data centers? That’s not in West Virginia. That’s a whole different state.”

Richard Gee and his wife, Mary, walk along their property with daughters Isabella, 14, and Maria, 16, with transmission lines that abut their land shown behind them in Charles Town, W.Va., in January. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Solar panels in Charles Town are part of an effort to bring more green energy to the struggling power grid. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

An orange marker placed by the city is seen on the property of the Gee family. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Horses pasture under transmission lines in Charles Town. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The $5.2 billion effort has fueled a backlash against data centers through the region, prompting officials in Virginia to begin studying the deeper impacts of an industry they’ve long cultivated for the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenue it brings to their communities.

Critics say it will force residents near the coal plants to continue living with toxic pollution, ironically to help a state — Virginia — that has fully embraced clean energy. And utility ratepayers in the affected areas will be forced to pay for the plan in the form of higher bills, those critics say.

But PJM Interconnection, the regional grid operator, says the plan is necessary to maintain grid reliability amid a wave of fossil fuel plant closures in recent years, prompted by the nation’s transition to cleaner power.

legend

Transmission

line proposal

Expand lines along existing right of way

Rebuild lines along existing right of way

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A map depicting the proposed transmission line expansion in West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia

York

First Energy

502 Junction Substation

PENNSYLVANIA

Fort Martin power station

Longview

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plant

Cumberland

Morgantown

Hagerstown

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Harrison

power plant

Frederick

Charles

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power plant

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VIRGINIA

Annapolis

D.C.

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Harrisonburg

VA.

Fredericksburg

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Charlottesville

Focus on Loudoun/Waterford

Urbana

Brunswick

Harpers Ferry

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Town

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VA.

Poolesville

Purcellville

Leesburg

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LOUDOUN

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MONTGOMERY

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High density of

data center

facilities

VA.

Herndon

Middleburg

Dulles

Int’l

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CO.

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Riding

FAUQUIER

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Chantilly

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Centreville

Gainesville

10 miles

Power lines will be built across four states in a $5.2 billion effort that, relying on coal plants that were meant to be shuttered, is designed to keep the electric grid from failing amid spiking energy demands.

Cutting through farms and neighborhoods, the plan converges on Northern Virginia, where a growing data center industry will need enough extra energy to power 6 million homes by 2030.

With not enough of those green energy facilities connected to the grid yet, enough coal and natural gas energy to power 32 million homes is expected to be lost by 2030 at a time when the demand from the growing data center industry, electric vehicles and other new technology is on the rise, PJM says.

“The system is in a major transition right now, and it’s going to continue to evolve,” Ken Seiler, PJM’s senior vice president in charge of planning, said in a December stakeholders’ meeting about the effort to buy time for green energy to catch up. “And we’ll look for opportunities to do everything we can to keep the lights on as it goes through this transition.”

A need for power

Data centers that house thousands of computer servers and the cooling equipment needed for them to run have been multiplying in Northern Virginia since the late 1990s, spreading from the industry’s historic base in Loudoun County to neighboring Prince William County and, recently, across the Potomac River into Maryland. There are nearly 300 data centers now in Virginia.

With Amazon Web Services pursuing a $35 billion data center expansion in Virginia, rural portions of the state are the industry’s newest target for development.

The growth means big revenue for the localities that host the football-field-size buildings. Loudoun collects $600 million in annual taxes on the computer equipment inside the buildings, making it easier to fund schools and other services. Prince William, the second-largest market, collects $100 million per year.

An Amazon Web Services data center is located within about 50 feet of some residential homes in the Loudoun Meadows neighborhood in Ashburn, Va. A Microsoft data center is under construction at top right. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

An Amazon Web Services data center, top center, has been built near residential neighborhoods in Manassas, Va. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)

But data centers also consume massive amounts of energy.

One data center can require 50 times the electricity of a typical office building, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Multiple-building data center complexes, which have become the norm, require as much as 14 to 20 times that amount.

The demand has strained utility companies, to the point where Dominion Energy in Virginia briefly warned in 2022 that it may not be able to keep up with the pace of the industry’s growth.

The utility — which has since accelerated plans for new power lines and substations to boost its electrical output — predicts that by 2035 the industry in Virginia will require 11,000 megawatts, nearly quadruple what it needed in 2022, or enough to power 8.8 million homes.

The smaller Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative recently told PJM that the more than 50 data centers it serves account for 59 percent of its energy demand. It expects to need to serve about 110 more data centers by July 2028.

Meanwhile, the amount of energy available is not growing quickly enough to meet that future demand. Coal plants have scaled down production or shut down altogether as the market transitions to green energy, hastened by laws in Maryland and Virginia mandating net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045 and, for several other states in the region, by 2050.

Dominion is developing a 2,600-megawatt wind farm off Virginia Beach — the largest such project in U.S. waters — and the company recently gained state approval to build four solar projects

But those projects won’t be ready in time to absorb the projected gap in available energy. Opponents of PJM’s plan say it wouldn’t be necessary if more green energy had been connected to the grid faster, pointing to projects that were caught up in bureaucratic delays for five years or longer before they were connected.

A PJM spokesperson said the organization has recently sped up its approval process and is encouraging utility companies and federal and state officials to better incorporate renewable energy.

About 40,000 megawatts of green energy projects have been cleared for construction but are not being built because of issues related to financing or siting, the PJM spokesperson said.

Once more renewable energy is available, some of the power lines being built to address the energy gap may no longer be needed as the coal plants ultimately shut down, clean energy advocates say — though utility companies contend the extra capacity brought by the lines will always be useful.

“Their planning is just about maintaining the status quo,” Tom Rutigliano, a senior advocate for clean energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said about PJM. “They do nothing proactive about really trying to get a handle on the future and get ready for it.”

‘Holding on tight’ to coal

The smoke from two coal plants near West Virginia’s border with Pennsylvania billows over the city of Morgantown, adding a brownish tint to the air.

Nearby sits the 502 Junction substation, connected to those plants and a third one about 43 miles away via existing power lines, which will serve as a terminus for a western prong of the PJM plan for new lines that will extend to another substation in Frederick, Md., then south into Northern Virginia.

The 502 Junction substation, to which transmission lines are connected, in Mount Morris, Pa. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

A pile of coal is seen at the Longview power station in Maidsville, W.Va., in February. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The Longview, left, and the Fort Martin power stations in Maidsville, W.Va. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

The owner of one of the Morgantown-area plants, Longview LLC, recently emerged from bankruptcy. After a restructuring, the facility is fully functioning, utilizing a solar farm to supplement its coal energy output.

The other two plants belong to the Ohio-based FirstEnergy Corp. utility, which had plans to significantly scale down operations there to meet a company goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly a third over the next six years.

The FirstEnergy plants are among the state’s worst polluters, said Jim Kotcon, a West Virginia University plant pathology professor who oversees conservation efforts at the Sierra Club’s West Virginia chapter.

The Harrison plant pumped out a combined 12 million tons of coal pollutants like sulfur and nitrous oxides in 2023, more than any other fossil fuel plant in the state, according to Environmental Protection Agency data. The Fort Martin plant, which has been operating since the late 1960s, emitted the state’s highest levels of nitrous oxides in 2023, at 5,240 tons.

After PJM tapped the company to build a 36-mile-long portion of the planned power lines for $392 million, FirstEnergy announced in February that the company is abandoning a 2030 goal to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions because the two plants are crucial to maintaining grid reliability.

The news has sent FirstEnergy’s stock price up by 4 percent, to about $37 a share this week, and was greeted with jubilation by West Virginia’s coal industry.

(Hadley Green/The Washington Post)

“We welcome this, without question, because it will increase the life of these plants and hundreds of thousands of mining jobs,” said Chris Hamilton, president of the West Virginia Coal Association. “We’re holding on tight to our coal plants.”

Since 2008, annual coal production in West Virginia has dipped by nearly half, to about 82 million tons, though the industry — which contributes about $5.5 billion to the state’s economy — has rebounded some due to an export market to Europe and Asia, Hamilton said.

Hamilton said his association will lobby hard for FirstEnergy’s portion of the PJM plan to gain state approval. The company said it will submit its application for its power line routes in mid-2025.

More than 200 miles to the east in Maryland, environmental groups and ratepayer advocates are fighting an effort by PJM to extend the life of two more coal plants — Brandon Shores and Herbert A. Wagner — just outside of Baltimore, which were slated to close by June 2025.

The Brandon Shores Power Plant, located in Anne Arundel County outside of Baltimore. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Darrell Abed, left, president of the board of directors for the Stoney Beach condo association, speaks with resident John Garofolo near the Herbert A. Wagner Generating Station. “We’re concerned about the air we’re breathing here,” Garofolo says. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

PJM asked the plants’ owner, Texas-based Talen Energy Corp., to keep them running through 2028 — with the yet-to-be determined cost of doing so passed on to ratepayers.

That would mean amending a 2018 federal court consent decree, in which Talen agreed to stop burning coal to settle a lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club over Clean Water Act violations. The Sierra Club has rejected PJM’s calls to do so.

“We need a proactive plan that is consistent with the state’s clean energy goals,” said Josh Tulkin, director of the Sierra Club’s Maryland chapter, which has proposed an alternative plan to build a battery storage facility at the Brandon Shores site that would cut the time needed for the plants to operate.

A PJM spokesperson said the organization believes that such a facility wouldn’t provide enough reliable power and is not ruling out seeking a federal emergency order to keep the coal plants running.

With the matter still unresolved, nearby residents say they are anxious to see them closed.

“It’s been really challenging,” said John Garofolo, who lives in the Stoney Beach neighborhood community of townhouses and condominiums, where coal dust drifts into the neighborhood pool when the facilities are running. “We’re concerned about the air we’re breathing here.”

Sounding alarms

Keryn Newman, a Charles Town activist, has been sounding alarms in the small neighborhoods and farm communities along the path of the proposed power lines in West Virginia.

Newman, who in the late 2000s waged a successful campaign to stop a plan for a 765-kilovolt line extending through the area into Maryland before the data center boom, sees the battle in terms of the more affordable, quieter lifestyle she and her neighbors cherish.

Transmission lines run by Pam Gearhart's property in Harpers Ferry, W.Va. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Pam Gearhart, left, speaks with activist Keryn Newman as she explains how close the transmission lines are to her Harpers Ferry property. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

A bird flies near transmission lines in Charles Town, W.Va. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Solar panels lined up in Charles Town. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Because FirstEnergy prohibits any structure from interfering with a power line, building a new line along the right of way — which would be expanded to make room for the third line — would mean altering the character of residents’ properties, Newman said.

“It gobbles up space for play equipment for your kid, a pool or a barn,” she said. “And a well or septic system can’t be in the right of way.”

A FirstEnergy spokesperson said the company would compensate property owners for any land needed, with eminent domain proceedings a last resort if those property owners are unwilling to sell.

Some have accepted that more power lines will come through and seem open to selling to FirstEnergy and moving away.

Robin Huyett Thomas reaches out to her horse, Lydia, on her property in Charles Town. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Pam and Gary Gearhart fought alongside Newman against the defeated 765-kilovolt line, which would have forced them to move a septic system near FirstEnergy’s easement. But when Newman showed up recently to their Harpers Ferry-area neighborhood to discuss the new PJM plan, the couple appeared unwilling to fight again.

Next door, another family had already decided to leave, the couple said, and was in the midst of loading furniture into a truck when Newman showed up.

“They’re just going to keep okaying data centers; there’s money in those things,” Pam Gearhart said about local governments in Virginia benefiting from the tax revenue. “Until they run out of land down there.”

In Loudoun County, where the data center industry’s encroachment into neighborhoods has fostered resentment, community groups are fighting a portion of the PJM plan that would build power lines through the mostly rural communities of western Loudoun.

The lines would damage the views offered by surrounding wineries and farms that contribute to Loudoun’s $4 billion tourism industry, those groups say.

Bill Hatch owns a winery that sits near the path of where PJM suggested one high-voltage line could go, though that route is still under review.

“This is going to be a scar for a long time,” Hatch said.

Reconsidering the benefits

Amid the backlash, local and state officials are reconsidering the data center industry’s benefits.

The Virginia General Assembly has launched a study that, among other things, will look at how the industry’s growth may affect energy resources and utility rates for state residents.

But that study has held up efforts to regulate the industry sooner, frustrating activists.

“We should not be subsidizing this industry for another minute, let alone another year,” Julie Bolthouse, director of land use at the Piedmont Environmental Council, chided a Senate committee that voted in February to table a bill that would force data center companies to pay more for new transmission lines.

Loudoun is moving to restrict where in the county data centers can be built. Up until recently, data centers have been allowed to be built without special approvals wherever office buildings are allowed.

“They’re great neighbors, great taxes, all that sort of thing,” Phyllis Randall (D), chair of the county board, said about the industry before a February vote to set that plan in motion. “But somehow, someway, it started to get away from us.”

“These power lines? They’re not for me and my family. ... And the data centers? That’s not in West Virginia. That’s a whole different state,” says Mary Gee, right, with daughter Maria. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

But such action will do little to stem the worries of people like Mary and Richard Gee.

As it is, the two lines near their property produce an electromagnetic field strong enough to charge a garden fence with a light current of electricity, the couple said. When helicopters show up to survey the land for a third line, the family’s dog, Peaches, who is prone to seizures, goes into a barking frenzy.

An artist who focuses on natural landscapes, Mary Gee planned to convert the barn that sits in the shadow of a power line tower to a studio. That now seems unlikely, she said.

Lately, her paintings have reflected her frustration. One picture shows birds with beaks wrapped shut by transmission line. Another has a colorful scene of the rural Charles Town area severed by a smoky black and gray landscape of steel towers and a coal plant.

“It feels like harassment,” Gee said. “But there’s no one we can call for help.”

Mary Gee's artwork depicts birds caught in power lines near her Charles Town farm. (Antonio Olivo/The Washington Post)

CORRECTION

A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Prince William County receives $400 million annually in taxes on the computer equipment inside data centers. It receives $100 million annually. In addition, the article incorrectly stated that two FirstEnergy plants in West Virginia have been equipped with carbon-capturing technology. They do not have such technology in place, The article has been corrected.

About this story

Map sources: Proposed transmission line data provided by Piedmont Environmental Council based on information made available by PJM. The transmission line plan depicts general paths selected by PJM; the final routes will be determined by the utility companies. Existing transmission lines via the EIA U.S. Energy Atlas. Data center locations in Virginia provided by the Data Center Map. Other cartographic data via U.S. Geological Survey and OpenStreetMap.

Story editing by Jennifer Barrios. Copy editing by Thomas Heleba and Shay Quillen. Design and development by Carson TerBush. Design editing by Christian Font and Betty Chavarria. Photo editing by Mark Miller. Visual editing by Tara McCarty. Maps by Laris Karklis. Graphics editing by Kate Rabinowitz.

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Antonio Olivo

Antonio Olivo covers government, politics and other issues in Northern Virginia. He has also reported from Afghanistan and Mexico after joining The Washington Post in 2013.@aolivo

15. Blinken will be the latest top US official to visit China in a bid to keep ties on an even keel

Does China evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of talks, discussions, and meetings the same way we do in the US? (Rhetorical question). I think we want it more than China does. We think they are necessary while China knows it never has to pursue talks because the US will always come to them. And these talks are always "one way." It is always the American leaders going to China.

Blinken will be the latest top US official to visit China in a bid to keep ties on an even keel

AP · April 20, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Antony Blinken will travel to China this coming week as Washington and Beijing try to keep ties on an even keel despite major differences on issues from the path to peace in the Middle East to the supply of synthetic opioids that have heightened fears over global stability.

The rivals are at odds on numerous fronts, including Russia’s war in Ukraine, Taiwan and the South China Sea, North Korea, Hong Kong, human rights and the detention of American citizens. The United States and China also are battling over trade and commerce issues, with President Joe Biden announcing new tariffs on imports of Chinese steel this past week.

The State Department said Saturday that Blinken, on his second visit to China in less than a year, will travel to Shanghai and Beijing starting Wednesday for three days of meetings with senior Chinese officials, including Foreign Minister Wang Yi. Talks between Blinken and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected, although neither side will confirm such a meeting is happening until shortly before it takes place.

The department said in a statement that Blinken would “discuss a range of bilateral, regional, and global issues,” including the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

He will also talk about progress made in “resuming counternarcotics cooperation, military-to-military communication, artificial intelligence, and strengthening people-to-people ties” and will reaffirm how important it is for the U.S. and China to be “responsibly managing competition, even in areas where our two countries disagree,” State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said.

The trip follows a phone call this month between Biden and Xi in which they pledged to keep high-level contacts open, something they had agreed to last year at a face-to-face summit in California. Since that call, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has visited China and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has spoken by phone with his Chinese counterpart. Meetings at lower levels also have taken place.

Despite those encounters, relations are rocky. The U.S. has recently become more vocal in its calls for China to stop supporting Russia’s military-industrial sector, which Washington says has allowed Moscow to boost weapons production to support the war against Ukraine.

“We see China sharing machine tools, semiconductors, other dual-use items that have helped Russia rebuild the defense industrial base that sanctions and export controls had done so much to degrade,” Blinken said Friday. “Now, if China purports on the one hand to want good relations with Europe and other countries, it can’t on the other hand be fueling what is the biggest threat to European security since the end of the Cold War.”

Blinken also has pushed for China to take a more active stance in pressing Iran not to escalate tensions in the Middle East. He has spoken to his Chinese counterpart several times since the Israel-Hamas war began six months ago as he has sought China’s help in getting Iran to restrain proxy groups it has supported, armed and funded in the region.

That topic has taken on new urgency since direct back-and-forth attacks by Iran and Israel on each other’s soil in the past week.

Also high on the agenda for Blinken will be Taiwan and the South China Sea.

The U.S. has strongly condemned Chinese military exercises threatening Taiwan, which Beijing regards as a renegade province and vowed to reunify with the mainland by force if necessary. Successive U.S. administrations have steadily ramped up military support and sales for Taipei, much to the anger of Chinese officials.

In the South China Sea, the U.S. and others have become increasingly concerned by provocative Chinese actions in and around disputed areas. In particular, the U.S. has voiced objections to what it says are Chinese attempts to thwart legitimate activities by others in the waterway, notably the Philippines and Vietnam.

That was a major topic of concern earlier this month when Biden held a three-way summit with the prime minister of Japan and the president of the Philippines.

AP · April 20, 2024

16. Are Iran’s leaders losing their grip on reality — and the country?

I hope so.

Excerpts:

The Israeli reprisal has blunted much of the Islamic Republic’s messaging.

Tehran’s blustering bravado was intended to prevent any retaliation. It failed, but most in senior positions want to avoid a wider escalation lest it destabilise the republic. Instead, the regime is left to invent its own Orwellian reality in which the Israeli attack is dismissed as an impotent irrelevance that can comfortably be ignored.

Most Iranians are not so easily fooled.

As one noted political commentator protested in disbelief, the crisis of authority afflicting the Islamic Republic, its contempt for the people and its failure of leadership at all levels, is a self-inflicted catastrophe of extraordinary proportions. After 45 years there is only one thing, he concluded, that modern Iran has proven itself to be truly expert in: making enemies.

Are Iran’s leaders losing their grip on reality — and the country?

The Times · by Ali Ansari · April 21, 2024

Israel’s decision to retaliate after Iran’s attack last weekend will have surprised few in Tehran, but the speed and nature of the response was bolder and more pointed than many had anticipated.

The targeting of Iranian assets in Iraq and Syria was expected. The assault on an airbase in Isfahan, in the heart of Iran itself, was more striking, because it exposed the inability of the Iranians to defend their own airspace and because it may have been initiated by Israeli assets inside Iran.

This will have been a deliberate calculation by the Israelis to feed the paranoia of the political-military establishment in Iran.

An intercepted ballistic missile that fell near the Dead Sea in Israel

ITAMAR GRINBERG/AP

A disenchanted public

The Iranian authorities dismissed Israel’s actions as an irrelevance not worthy of a response. This looks like the political establishment attempting to reassure itself.

Most Iranians — struggling to cope with rampant inflation and a sliding currency — are barely paying attention. The economy remains their single most important preoccupation and its failure is ascribed to regime mismanagement and incompetence.

The average monthly salary in Iran is the equivalent of about $172. The average daily wage barely stretches to half a kilo of lamb (the price of which has quadrupled in price in two years). The average worker could buy the cheapest car available, a Kia Pride, whose price has risen by 164 per cent over the past two years, if he saved for 19 months and bought nothing else.

Disenchantment with the kleptocracy that governs Iran was recently witnessed in the disgust directed at a senior cleric who allegedly acquired property by illicit means. People mocked Kazem Sadeghi’s protestations of innocence, and attendance evaporated at Tehran’s Friday prayers, at which he officiated.

Then, a week ago, after the missile and drone attack on Israel, the authorities were keen to show the joy of Iran’s citizens at what was being touted at home as a military triumph. Crowds gathered “spontaneously” to rejoice at the news that at last Israel had been “punished”, although the choreography left much to be desired.

Ordinary Iranians, though genuinely surprised that the regime had decided to put its head above the parapet, remained nonplussed, uninterested and underwhelmed. Graffiti and street posters soon emerged disowning the attack, pointing out that war was the expedient choice for states in crisis.

Most Iranians are keen to avoid adding to their already significant economic difficulties with a fresh conflict in which they have no interest but for which they are likely to bear the cost. The regime’s struggle with Israel and the wider western world reflects an ideological conviction to which many cannot relate, and a vision for the future they do not want. Their demands are simpler: good governance, a sound economy and a secure existence in which Iran is integrated into the world and life can proceed with a degree of stability and normalcy that many of us in the West take for granted.

Israel’s anti-missile system easily saw off Iran’s attempted airstrikes

REUTERS

Divergent narratives

There has been a striking dissonance between the narratives the Islamic Republic has sought to present at home and abroad about the attack on April 13 and the Israeli retaliation.

Abroad, the impression has been given of a limited, almost symbolic, Iranian strike, intended to send a message. The regime — or at least elements within it — was keen to limit the fallout. This was especially apparent when the Iranian mission at the UN, in its notice justifying the attack, asserted, as the missiles and drones were still en route, that they considered the matter “concluded”.

Even the messaging from the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was haphazard, incoherent and confused, with three rewrites of the official announcement of the attack and an assertion that targets had been hit well before any missiles had actually arrived.

However, this was not the image that was initially presented to Iranians watching the attack unfold on TV. According to official news sources, there was little doubt that terrific damage was being done not only to the Israeli war machine but also to the country’s wider society and morale. At one stage, Iranians were being told that 50 per cent to 70 per cent of targets had been hit. Videos, since revealed as fake, were shown of people running for their lives and “settlers” scrambling to get on the last flights out.

These narratives were so divergent that it would have been difficult for anyone with an internet connection not to have noticed the disparity. More damaging than the failure to penetrate Israel’s Iron Dome defences was the fact that about 50 per cent of Iran’s missiles either failed to launch or landed far short of their targets.

Wider anxieties can be deduced from some of the absurd commentaries from regime spokesmen. Mohsen Rafiqdoust, a senior member of the political establishment, announced that people should not worry about being attacked because if it happened, Iran would swiftly dispatch all the “hostages” it currently holds, adding for good measure that he hoped such a situation would be realised and that the hostages could indeed be dispatched.

His interviewer appeared unnerved by his remarks and unsure how to respond, not least because it was unclear whether the “hostages” were westerners held in Iranian prisons or Israelis held by Hamas, which has strong links to Iran. As to the cost of the attack, there was nothing to worry about — since, according to another television anchor, this could easily be recouped by seizing the odd tanker in the Persian Gulf.

The brutal death of a young woman in the custody of the morality police led to mass protests in 2022

GETTY IMAGES

Crackdown at home

Early indications that this messaging was falling flat — including widespread mockery of the supposed telegraphing of the attack to Israel beforehand — came when the authorities swiftly issued a notice that anyone criticising the IRGC attack or defending Israel would be arrested.

This curtailed much of the public criticism, but far from all of it. Mobina Rostami, who plays for the national volleyball team, openly criticised the attack on her Instagram page, adding that she felt ashamed. She has since been arrested.

As part of what is being seen as a wider attempt to terrorise the population into submission, the regime has also redeployed its morality police to the streets. Now equipped with bulletproof vests, officers are violently abducting women across the country. One woman has already been killed. Social commentators note that the operation cannot but end in failure.

Less than two years ago, mass protests erupted following the brutal murder of Mahsa Jina Amini by the morality police. Discontent has continued to simmer and there remains vast opposition to the hijab laws.

Attempting to put the genie back in the bottle risks further provocation. One person noted that even if only 15 per cent of the adult female population did not adhere to the hijab rules, that would mean about 15,000 morality officers dealing with upwards of 5 million women. Such a situation, he noted with understatement, was unsustainable, all the more so when one considers the suggestion made by one cleric that the parents of wayward women might also usefully be arrested.

The Revolutionary Guards issued three official versions of an announcement of the attack on Israel

AFP

Commentators became increasingly critical last week of what has been described as a war by the state against its own people, noting that the regime’s security apparatus might as well be an army of occupation.

The surprising revelation of the Swiss ambassador (who also represents US interests) being summoned at 3am last Sunday to the IRGC’s headquarters rather than the foreign ministry (to be told, reportedly, that Iran would set the region alight if the Israelis retaliated) led some to wonder whether the attack on Israel was cover for a power grab.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been supreme leader since 1989

REUTERS

An invented reality

The Israeli reprisal has blunted much of the Islamic Republic’s messaging.

Tehran’s blustering bravado was intended to prevent any retaliation. It failed, but most in senior positions want to avoid a wider escalation lest it destabilise the republic. Instead, the regime is left to invent its own Orwellian reality in which the Israeli attack is dismissed as an impotent irrelevance that can comfortably be ignored.

Most Iranians are not so easily fooled.

As one noted political commentator protested in disbelief, the crisis of authority afflicting the Islamic Republic, its contempt for the people and its failure of leadership at all levels, is a self-inflicted catastrophe of extraordinary proportions. After 45 years there is only one thing, he concluded, that modern Iran has proven itself to be truly expert in: making enemies.

Ali Ansari is the director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews

The Times · by Ali Ansari · April 21, 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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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1. National myths are essential to the culture that supports a nation-state.

2. Three of these myths are central to the MAGA movement.

3. MAGA’s rationale for political violence becomes clear when we focus on its incorporation of the gun rights movement.

4. Since the 1970s, the left and center-left have lacked a version of national myth that would similarly root their programs in historical tradition, and offer a clear vision of future destiny.

5. The passions and beliefs that divide the American public are deeply rooted in our history.

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1. National myths are essential to the culture that supports a nation-state.

2. Three of these myths are central to the MAGA movement.

3. MAGA’s rationale for political violence becomes clear when we focus on its incorporation of the gun rights movement.

4. Since the 1970s, the left and center-left have lacked a version of national myth that would similarly root their programs in historical tradition, and offer a clear vision of future destiny.

5. The passions and beliefs that divide the American public are deeply rooted in our history.

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Northern Virginia serves as the world’s internet hub. Its neighbors are paying a price.

Internet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: CoalInternet data centers are fueling drive to old power source: Coal

A need for power

‘Holding on tight’ to coal

Sounding alarms

Reconsidering the benefits

Blinken will be the latest top US official to visit China in a bid to keep ties on an even keel

Are Iran’s leaders losing their grip on reality — and the country?

A disenchanted public

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Divergent narratives

Crackdown at home

An invented reality