Quotes of the Day:

I make no apologies to Leon Trotsky: "America may not be interested in irregular, unconventional, and political warfare but irregular, unconventional, and political warfare are being practiced around the world by those who are interested in them – namely the revisionist, rogue, and revolutionary powers and violent extremist organizations who want to create dilemmas for the United States and the free world. and attack the rules based international order."

• Revolution is an attempt to modify the existing political system at least partially through unconstitutional or illegal use of force or protest.

– (Page xvi) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/CasebookV2S.pdf

• Insurgency (or revolutionary warfare), then, is used to describe the means by which a revolution is attempted or achieved.

– (Page xvi) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/CasebookV2S.pdf

• Resistance is a form of conflict involving the collective and subversive efforts of participants against an authority or structure. Broad in conceptual scope, but also limited in reach, resistance can be carried out through either violent or nonviolent means (or both) on either an international or an intranational scale.

– (Page 7) https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/books/pdf/typology-resistance.pdf 

Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies

https://www.soc.mil/ARIS/aris.html

1. Pentagon seeks to expand special ops authorities for friendly nations

2. American Special Operations Forces Are At A Crossroads

3. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 13, 2024

4.Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 13, 2024

5. Philippines Probes Alleged Chinese Disinformation Campaign Over South China Sea

6. AI And Global Security Landscape: Opportunities, Challenges, And Urgent Need For Collaboration

7. Is China Grabbing The South China Sea?

8. Blinken Arrives in Ukraine to Boost Spirits, Funnel U.S. Military Aid

9. The Misfits Russia Is Recruiting to Spy on the West

10. The Biden Administration’s Commitment to Self-Sabotage

11.  Facing Russian Advance, a Top Ukrainian General Paints a Bleak Picture

12. U.S. threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says

13. File Not Found: Russia Is Hacking Evidence of Its War Crimes

14. Every Arsenal Needs Its Fans: The Missing Piece in the National Defense Industrial Strategy Is Voters

15. Understanding the Counterdrone Fight: Insights from Combat in Iraq and Syria

16. Harnessing GRAT for Irregular Warfare in Great Power Competition

17. Missing in Action: Western Minds

18. Why the Biden Administration's Iran Sanctions Waivers Are Futile

19. 

1. Pentagon seeks to expand special ops authorities for friendly nations

This seems like an explicit recognition by DOD of the importance of resistance (such as the resistance Operating Concept developed by SOCEUR and implemented in Ukraine). That is good news. I am curious as to who at DOD is proposing new definitions (especially for FID). 

But who is going to develop the campaign plan that will depend on implementing these authorities? Where are the irregular warfare competent campaign HQ? Resistance is a core element of irregular warfare (actually UW). And recall the original DODI 3000.7 for irregular warfare said the 5 IW missions were Unconventional Warfare, Foreign Internal Defense, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, and Stability Operations. Recall the UW is about enabling a resistance movement or insurgency - resistance is a core component of UW. None of this is new. We only have to read our doctrine and perhaps make some minor tweaks here and there.

Excerpts:

The proposal defines resistance operations as those in which “national security forces and the civilian government and populace of a country resist an invasion or occupation by an adversarial power.” It defines foreign internal defense operations as those “to protect a country and its populace from acts of subversion sponsored by a foreign country that pose a significant threat to the existing government.”

Below are the definitions of FID and resistance movement. What is wrong with them and why do they need to change?

foreign internal defense — Participation by civilian and military agencies of a government in any of the action programs taken by another government or other designated organization to free and protect its society from subversion, lawlessness, insurgency, terrorism, and other threats to its security. Also called FID. (JP 3-22)

resistance movement — An organized effort by some portion of the civil population of a country to resist the legally established government or an occupying power and to disrupt civil order and stability. (JP 3-05)

Pentagon seeks to expand special ops authorities for friendly nations

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · May 13, 2024

The Defense Department wants Congress to approve an expansion of special operations authorities to train and equip U.S.-aligned countries for irregular warfare against outside aggressors.

The Pentagon submitted a legislative proposal to Congress in April that would expand the scope of these authorities – usually reserved for counterterrorism, counternarcotics and border security activities – to include “resistance operations” and “foreign internal defense operations.”

“Investing in the capacity of Taiwan’s internal and layered defense apparatus is a significant effort; existing security cooperation operations, activities and investments only marginally address current needs,” the Defense Department argued in its proposal.

“Similarly, Scandinavian and Baltic countries in northeast Europe are at-risk due to possible Russian influence, incursion and conflict, and would be mutual benefactors with the U.S. of deliberate efforts to build partnership capacity for resistance operations to mitigate the threat from Russia and deter aggression.”

The proposal defines resistance operations as those in which “national security forces and the civilian government and populace of a country resist an invasion or occupation by an adversarial power.” It defines foreign internal defense operations as those “to protect a country and its populace from acts of subversion sponsored by a foreign country that pose a significant threat to the existing government.”

U.S. Special Operations Forces can already train and equip partner forces for certain missions under existing authorities.

For instance, Section 1202 authorities first established in the fiscal 2018 defense policy bill to respond to Russian’s support for Ukrainian separatists allow Special Operations Forces to arm proxies for irregular warfare in other countries. Those activities have so far largely been limited to intelligence-gathering operations.

The Pentagon proposal argues that adding “foreign internal defense operations” to irregular warfare authorities is needed “to address the relative instability of some African national security infrastructures.”

“Kenya is a prime example as their conventional and [Special Operations Force] units are growing in capacity, but their security infrastructure and institutional pillars are vulnerable to corruption, subversion, lawlessness, terrorism and civil war,” notes the Pentagon proposal.

The Biden administration has pledged $100 million for Kenya to lead multinational forces in Haiti as part of a bid to restore stability amid mounting gang violence. Kenyan forces are due in Haiti at the end of the month, but the Defense Department has yet to finish construction on a base for them, Politico reported in April.

The Pentagon estimates that its proposed expansion of irregular warfare authorities will cost roughly $1.3 million per year through FY29. Congress will consider the Pentagon’s legislative proposals as it marks up the FY25 defense policy bill in the weeks ahead.

About Bryant Harris

Bryant Harris is the Congress reporter for Defense News. He has covered U.S. foreign policy, national security, international affairs and politics in Washington since 2014. He has also written for Foreign Policy, Al-Monitor, Al Jazeera English and IPS News.

2. American Special Operations Forces Are At A Crossroads

US special operations forces are organized, trained, equipped, educated, and optimized to conduct irregular warfare (and Special Forces are optimized for unconventional warfare). Irregular warfare takes place across the spectrum of conflict to include before, during, and after large scale combat operations as well in the rear battlespace, on the flanks and peripheries and in disconnected regions wherever adversaries may have interests.  

Here are some of my thoughts excerpted from remarks I will give tomorrow at the Special Operations Medical Association Conference.

Here is a way to describe what is taking place in the 21^st Century. From the Gray Zone to Great Power struggle is a spectrum of cooperation, competition, and conflict in that space between peace and war. The U.S. seeks and desires cooperation, it has to be able to compete, and while avoiding conflict it must prepare for it. One of the important forms of conflict can be described by revolution, resistance, insurgency, terrorism, and civil war with adversaries from AQ to ISIS to the Russian Little Green Men to the Iran Action Network or China’s PLA and Unrestricted Warfare and the Guerrilla Dynasty and Gulag State of North Korea all executing strategies of modern unconventional warfare. Each has their own unique characteristics to include the application of conventional force, to exploit the conditions of political resistance to achieve their strategic political objectives. The U.S. must wage irregular warfare in this environment against these threats.

This is a way to characterize U.S. SOF in this environment: The U.S. faces competition, not only among state and non-state actors but also in two competing ideas - one is the national interest to maintain a stable international nation-state system based on respect for and protection of sovereignty.  This idea can be supported in part through the application of one of the major special operations activities: foreign internal defense in which SOF, conventional forces, and other U.S. government agencies seek to assist friends, partners, and allies in their own defense and development programs. This is to support them so they can defend themselves against lawlessness, subversion, insurgency, and terrorism that would threaten their sovereignty. The other idea is a fundamental human right which is the right of a people to seek self-determination of government. This can be supported by the one of the core special operations activities: the application of unconventional warfare. These two competing ideas must be reconciled through the correct application of national statecraft (e.g., political warfare), supported by SOF in the gray zone.

However, the bottom line problem is this: The U.S. faces threats from political warfare strategies supported by hybrid military approaches that exploit the political resistance found in the human domain. 

To be both blunt and bold this is what SOF operators need to be able to do – e.g., conduct IW that is informed by a UW mindset – against what the DOD now calls the “pacing threat” to the US – China. We are in strategic competition with China because, and I must repeat this because it is so important: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, and displace democratic institutions. Indigenous populations around the world, and especially those under the influence of China’s One Belt and One Road concept, must resist Chinese domination. This is unrestricted warfare but to us it is a UW fight. And I would argue that the SF philosophy and UW mindset can make important contributions to support the approaches to counter Chinese malign influence.

But let me add this concluding thought. While DOD calls China the pacing threat we cannot be myopically focused on China not on its geographic location and not solely on its activities. While China appears to be the 600 pound gorilla, there is a bigger threat. That might be called the Axis of dictators, authoritarians, totalitarians. The revisionist and rogue powers of China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea and violent extremist organizations that may be connected to them. If these countries work together they can generate severe dilemmas for the US, like minded democracies, and the free world and attack the rules based international order.

Strategic competition takes place in the gray zone between peace and war and includes political warfare (all elements of national power to achieve national security objectives short of war) conducted at the national level. Irregular warfare is the military contribution to political warfare. Special Warfare (the missions of unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, psychological operations, and civil affairs) is the special operations contribution to irregular warfare.

American Special Operations Forces Are At A Crossroads

Nowhere was the great pivot to near-peer threats clearer than at this year’s special operations convention in Tampa, Florida.

BYHOWARD ALTMAN|PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2024 2:20 PM EDT

twz.com · by Howard Altman · May 12, 2024

American special operations forces (SOF) are at something of a crossroads. After decades of low-intensity conflict, as well as counter-insurgency and counter-terror operations, they now face a very different kind of primary threat — state adversaries, some of which are near-peer status. Transitioning its focus to a high-end fight, potentially over an enormous geographical area, is a tall order, but it's one the SOF community is very engaged in at this time. This metamorphosis now underway was glaringly clear at the SOF Week convention this week in Tampa, Florida.

In particular, the biennial mock battle that raged Wednesday outside the convention was markedly different this time around for reasons that have everything to do with the changing future of American special operations.

Gone was Tampa's mayor being “kidnapped” by 'jihadis,' only to be 'rescued' and returned to the dock in a rigid hull inflatable boat (RHIB), surrounded by international special operations forces (SOF) troops as they blast a fusillade of machine gun blanks. Instead, during this year’s demonstration, "adversary" drones and Marine special operations paragliders soared overhead.

"We're just demonstrating some of what could be possible," Army Sgt. Maj. Jason Baker, a U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) spokesperson, told The War Zone on Wednesday. "And so, out there ... the notional adversary has an electronic warfare capability, [that is] shutting down our [communications]. And so [the MARSOC operators are] coming down and shutting down that."

That encounter portrayed MARSOC's use of counter-drone electronic warfare measures and other non-kinetic effects against the drones from new fictional enemy, the evil nation-state of St. Petersburg, named after the city located across Tampa Bay.

Sure, there were still explosions and helicopters and gunfire galore, and other new facets as well, including a pair of U.S. Air Force F-35s that screamed through the skies 'providing close air support,' as they could in a contested high-end battlespace. The updated scenario was designed to highlight the challenges U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is facing in a new era, its officials told The War Zone last week.

The biennial special operations capabilities demonstration in Tampa for the first time included paragliding Marines on a mock drone hunt. Jamie Hunter Jamie Hunter

After years of budgetary and personnel growth in the fight against the Taliban, al-Qaeda and other Islamic extremists, SOCOM’s Fiscal Year 2025 presidential budget request is relatively flat, despite inflation. The $9.687 billion request represents a small increase of about $11 million over last year and a drop of $240 million from Fiscal Year 2023. That comes amid an increasing emphasis on planning for potential conflicts with state adversaries, namely China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, while still retaining capacity to fight violent extremists.

SOCOM budget request for Fiscal Year 2025 is $240 million less than the Fiscal Year 2023 budget. OSD

The nature of warfare has changed since the last international SOF capabilities demo in May 2020. That was before Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine and his missiles detonated in population centers across the country. Now aerial and sea drones are ubiquitous, blasting civilian infrastructure, sinking ships, destroying armor and troops and making stealthy maneuver far more difficult. Meanwhile, both sides are playing cat and mouse games with their electronic warfare systems. Elsewhere, in the Middle East, Red Sea shipping and Israel have come under fire from Houthi missiles and drones and Iran has barraged Israel directly for the first time as the bloody Gaza war grinds on, roiling the region.

No longer on the ground in Afghanistan, there are still about 6,000 SOF troops operating in 80 nations, Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, SOCOM’s commander, said during his keynote speech Tuesday. They are still carrying out traditional SOF missions like foreign internal defense and civil affairs, helping partner nations build up their own security. The future role of U.S. SOF is a work in progress, however, after 20 years of fighting unsophisticated and relatively lightly armed insurgents with permissive airspace above. This threat picture is being replaced by a very different one thanks to adversaries like China.

“The challenge is even more with our hardware and tactics,” Fenton explained about how SOCOM will deal with plethora of ongoing and future problems.

U.S. Special Operations Command leader Gen. Bryan Fenton explained the challenges facing special operations forces in the future. (U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Brandon Julson)

“The PRC’s global corps, debt diplomacy, and cyber intrusions are common practice in their pursuit to rewrite the international order.” He added that Russia’s war in Ukraine, North Korea’s belligerence, Iran’s increased “leveraging” of proxies like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, as well as the ongoing fight against Islamic extremists like al-Qaeda and al-Shabab are adding to the challenge.

The Barbados-flagged cargo ship True Confidence seen adrift and reportedly on fire after being abandoned following a missile attack by Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi militants in the Gulf of Aden. Reports say that members of the ship's crew suffered serious injuries in the incident or were missing. CENTCOM

Given the 'tyranny of distance' and Beijing’s growing military might, a fight in the Pacific would be orders of magnitude more difficult for the U.S. and allied SOF troops operating in small numbers to help shape the battlefield and conduct irregular and unconventional warfare activities. It’ll be harder to move, hide, communicate, direct fires, securely link up with partners and achieve command and control on the battlefield. That’s the reality on which SOCOM officials, and the defense contractors vying to do business with them, are increasingly focused.

“We're seeing the character of war rapidly change with smaller, faster and cheaper unproved systems,” said Army Command Sgt. Maj. Shane Shorter, SOCOM’s senior enlisted leader, during his SOF Week keynote speech Tuesday morning. “Robotics, ubiquitous surveillance tools of every kind, and of course, artificial intelligence are all creating wicked problems.”

You can see a video of robotic warfare already taking place in Ukraine in this video below.

The show floors at SOF Week also reflected this. Expanded beyond the Tampa Convention Center to the J.W. Marriott by the Global SOF Foundation to accommodate more vendors, many of the offerings from defense contractors and suppliers were significantly different this year. Lessons from Ukraine loomed large, as did the community's pivot away from counter-insurgency and counter-terror operations.

"It is now a reality that being found on the battlefield is a lot more likely to happen than maybe we had assumed in the past, the volume of fires that you're going to face is much greater than we had assumed in the past, the electromagnetic spectrum is going to be far more contested than what we had assumed in the past," Anduril Chief Strategy Officer Christian Brose told The War Zone Wednesday at his company booth on the showroom floor.

Production in quantity will be key, he said.

A fight in the Pacific would be "a much larger sort of scaled up version of many of the problems that we've been seeing in other regions," Brose said. "So you have certainly a tyranny of distance. But it is a requirement that forces are going to have to operate in smaller distributed formations, but still, nonetheless be able to share information, work together, collaborate across those distributed formations. We cannot continue to field small numbers of very expensive, very exquisite things that are built by a handful of vendors in very artisanal ways that are very difficult to replace when you lose them. We have to do the opposite of that. We have to build far larger quantities of systems that are mass producible, where you drive complexity out of those systems, you can replace them when you lose them."

The massive need for data has many contractors shifting their offerings, Greg Celestan, founder and CEO of Tampa-based Celestar told The War Zone.

"There is a greater need for data scientists and analysts with experience with large data streams as opposed to personnel with experience tracking small terrorist cells," he offered as one example of how things have changed this year. "The conference has a larger number of vendors selling software and analytic tools than before."

At the same time, American special operations forces are already taking on new, or at least somewhat dormant missions potentially not exercised since the end of the Cold War. This includes everything from providing force protection to far flung, but highly strategic islands located near enemy territory to preparing for major operations against potential foes that have vast anti-access/area-denial capabilities.

East-Coast-based U.S. Naval Special Warfare Operators (SEALs) conduct a patrol on Shemya Island, Alaska, Sept. 4, 2023, as part of Operation POLAR DAGGER. During the operation, special operations forces projected the ability of U.S. forces to defend critical infrastructure, enhanced all-domain awareness, demonstrated operational reach, and strengthened our understanding of activity in the Arctic. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Matthew Dickinson)

The military’s plans to stay ahead of this major sea change in threat focus are outlined in a still-classified document called the Joint Warfighting Concept 3.0 (JWC 3.0). It was published on secure channels last year but has been several years in the making. Though just a very small fraction of the overall force, SOF remains a critical element in future fights as outlined in that document, which looks five to eight years over the horizon.

“The warfighting concept is not just about high-end kinetic action,” said Air Force Lt. Gen. Dagvin R.M. Anderson, Director of the Joint Staff’s Joint Force Development, during a panel on "SOF Roles in Great Power Competition." His office oversees development of that plan, which he said includes an examination of how SOF can continue to be a “key enabler.”

Air Force Lt Gen Dagvin Anderson, Director of the Joint Staff’s Joint Force Development Pentagon

The concepts aren’t revolutionary but are evolving against current and expected future threats.

“We won't have supremacy, like we have enjoyed since 1953, in the air, “ Anderson said. “We won't have the ability to dominate space or information. So how do we start looking at bringing these to bear in sequence in order to gain relative advantage, so that we can then maneuver into a denied environment and then create our fires?”

The answer, he said, was something called "pulsed operations," which the military describes as massing of joint forces across all domains "to generate or exploit our advantages over an adversary."

"We're looking at how do you put that into an operational level concept [for SOF] and create the effects you need to operate so you can then maneuver and then fire and then maneuver from that."

The U.S. military continues to evolve its existing special operations weapon systems like the Navy's stealthy Combatant Craft Heavy special operations boats, the Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment's (SOAR) H-6 Little Bird helicopters, and its troops' sniper rifles. And new capabilities are being added to give these legacy assets relevancy in a new era of 'great power competition, but a big part of SOF’s future goes beyond the strictly kinetic.

A fourth Combatant Craft Heavy stealthy special operations boat is now on order for the Navy. Vigor Industrial Vigor Industrial

“We're focused on the data piece,” said Anderson. That's "so you get targetable data to any site from any sensor to any shooter and to get that data to decision makers so they can process that and make decisions in a timely fashion so we can fully inform or best inform our civil civilian leaders to make decisions rapidly.”

JWC 3.0 is also looking at how SOF can “enable other domains like space and cyber,” Anderson explained. “There's a really interesting nexus that we see emerging of how SOF can work with that, and create strategic effects. And so how do we bring that together across the spectrum and not just focus on the CT [counter-terrorism], direct action piece?”

U.S. special operations service members conduct combat operations in support of Operation Resolute Support in Southeast Afghanistan, May 2019. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Jaerett Engeseth

China is already engaged in a level of “irregular warfare” against the U.S., said retired Army Lt. Gen. Ken Tovo, a former Green Beret who once ran Special Operations Command Central, overseeing non-Tier 1 spec op missions in the Central Command region. He was referring to actions taken to diminish an adversary's ability and will to fight. U.S. special operations forces have a history of carrying out these missions and constantly train for irregular warfare, which we have written about several times.

“I think everybody recognizes that great power warfare is going to be incredibly damaging and that the attrition will play on both sides,” he said on the same panel as Anderson. “And I don't think any nations want to go into that. But they still want to achieve their objectives. And that's what they’re using, these irregular warfare means.”

China is using those tactics to prepare for a potential future conflict, Tovo added.

They are doing “the intelligence gathering, you know, they're inside our networks to prepare options, so that they can take down the electrical grid and transportation systems and communication system to gum up the works, if, in fact, conflict comes,” Tovo explained. “But a lot of what they're doing is also really more shaping. And in the case of the Chinese, I think they truly believe” that “if you really shape the battlefield sufficiently, you will be able to achieve victory without fighting.”

Deputy Attorney General Jeffery A. Rosen listens to FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich talk about charges and arrests related to computer intrusion campaign tied to Chinese government the group called "APT 41" at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC on September 16, 2020. Photo by TASOS KATOPODIS/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

Russia and Iran are also carrying out similar hacking activities with the same goal as China, said Tovo.

As a result, he said that in the future, in addition to building partnerships with other nations, the U.S. and allies will eventually step up their irregular warfare activities against these adversaries.

“We're also the masters of these irregular warfare capabilities that right now seem to be used mostly by our adversaries against us,” he said. “But at some point, I expect that the West will get serious about competing in a more aggressive and offensive manner. And those irregular warfare capabilities will serve us well to create dilemmas for our adversaries, to create issues for them to deal with on our periphery.”

Members of the Lithuanian National Defence Volunteer Forces (KASP) and U.S. Army Special Forces conducted an exercise simulating irregular warfare in enemy occupied territory. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Karen Sampson)

China, Russia and Iran, “are autocratic nations, whose main objective is state survival, party survival, leadership survival, and the thing they fear most is internal instability,” said Tovo. He suggested the U.S. and allies use irregular warfare to “look for cracks that we can put a lever into” in an effort to sow confusion, discontent and unrest that threatens those governments.

While the Biden administration is likely not ready to go that route, it is the kind of operation that is a traditional SOF speciality. Given what we now know, the future of SOF looks to be a mix of well-established tactics like that and using long-baked-in skills in new, or at least revamped, ways, while adding entirely new capabilities and mission sets on top of it.

While the SOF community is known for its agility and responsiveness, such a major shift will take time. The goal, at least as it seems now, is to make sure core capabilities are ready to meet this new set of challenges as quickly as possible, in hopes that their existence alone will help deter aggression.

Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com

twz.com · by Howard Altman · May 12, 2024

3. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 13, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-may-13-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias, including Hamas, claimed an unusually high number of attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip, demonstrating that these militias remain combat effective and retain a significant force presence there.
• Iran: Iran is continuing to signal publicly that it could pursue a nuclear weapon.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to conduct a clearing operating in eastern Rafah and at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
• Political Negotiations: US President Joe Biden said that there would be a “ceasefire tomorrow” in the Gaza Strip if Hamas would release the remaining Israeli hostages.
• West Bank: The Israeli Tsav 9 group organized protesters to block humanitarian aid trucks bound for the Gaza Strip at a border crossing between Israel and the West Bank.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: A Lebanese newspaper reported that Hezbollah is evading Israeli air defenses by using drones in its attacks into northern Israel, citing Iranian-backed sources.
• Iraq: Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani requested that the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) permanently end its mission in Iraq by the end of 2025.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it intercepted a Houthi drone over the Gulf of Aden.

IRAN UPDATE, MAY 13, 2024

May 13, 2024 - ISW Press

Iran Update, May 13, 2024

Ashka Jhaveri, Kelly Campa, Annika Ganzeveld, Kathryn Tyson, Kitaneh Fitzpatrick, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00pm ET

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

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

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

Palestinian militias, including Hamas, claimed an unusually high number of attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip on May 13, demonstrating that these militias remain combat effective and retain a significant force presence there. This supports CTP-ISW’s assessment that Hamas and the other Palestinian militias remain active beyond just Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian militias claimed 33 attacks targeting Israeli forces in Jabalia, marking the most attacks claimed in a single day in 2024.[1]

Hamas has exploited Israeli withdrawals from the northern Gaza Strip to begin reconstituting there, which has in turn led Israeli forces to return to areas to re-clear them. Israeli forces moved back into Jabalia on May 11 after the IDF assessed that Hamas and other Palestinian militias were rebuilding their capabilities and networks there. There had been until now few claimed Palestinian attacks in Jabalia since January 2024 likely due to an absence of Israeli targets—rather than because the militias were destroyed.[2] Israeli forces have also launched a clearing operation into Zaytoun neighborhood on May 8, marking the third time that the IDF has conducted a clearing operation there.[3] Hamas exploits the fact that these Israeli clearing operations involve targeted raids. Hamas moves away into other areas during the Israeli operation, allowing Hamas to preserve some of its forces.[4] Hamas and the other Palestinian militias will almost certainly resume their reconstitution efforts in these neighborhoods after Israeli forces complete their current clearing operations there.

Senior US officials have indicated concerns that Hamas will survive in the Gaza Strip. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned on May 12 that without an alternative to Hamas, Israel will achieve unsustainable successes and ultimately Hamas would return to power.[5] US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told CNN that the United States doesn’t believe that Israel’s goal of a total victory over Hamas is ”likely or possible.”[6]

Iran is continuing to signal publicly that it could pursue a nuclear weapon. Strategic Foreign Relations Council Chairman Kamal Kharrazi stated during an annual Arab-Iranian dialogue conference on May 13 that Iran would need to change its nuclear doctrine if it faced threats from nuclear-armed countries.[7] This threat is particularly noteworthy given that Kharrazi is a senior adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Kharrazi similarly stated during an interview with al Jazeera on May 9 that Iran will have “no choice” but to change its nuclear doctrine if Israel threatened Iran existentially.[8] That Kharrazi made both comments to Arabic-speaking audiences suggests that he meant to signal to Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, in particular. CTP-ISW has observed that Iranian officials have normalized public discussion about pursuing a nuclear weapon in recent months.[9]

Key Takeaways:

• Northern Gaza Strip: Palestinian militias, including Hamas, claimed an unusually high number of attacks targeting Israeli forces in the northern Gaza Strip, demonstrating that these militias remain combat effective and retain a significant force presence there.
• Iran: Iran is continuing to signal publicly that it could pursue a nuclear weapon.
• Southern Gaza Strip: Israeli forces continued to conduct a clearing operating in eastern Rafah and at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt.
• Political Negotiations: US President Joe Biden said that there would be a “ceasefire tomorrow” in the Gaza Strip if Hamas would release the remaining Israeli hostages.
• West Bank: The Israeli Tsav 9 group organized protesters to block humanitarian aid trucks bound for the Gaza Strip at a border crossing between Israel and the West Bank.
• Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: A Lebanese newspaper reported that Hezbollah is evading Israeli air defenses by using drones in its attacks into northern Israel, citing Iranian-backed sources.
• Iraq: Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani requested that the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) permanently end its mission in Iraq by the end of 2025.
• Yemen: US CENTCOM reported that it intercepted a Houthi drone over the Gulf of Aden.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

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

Israeli forces continued to conduct a clearing operating in eastern Rafah and at the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on May 13. The IDF Givati Brigade launched a “targeted brigade attack” against Hamas in an unspecified area of eastern Rafah, killing several Palestinian fighters.[10] The IDF 401st Brigade raided military infrastructure and found weapons in a school.[11] Israeli forces reportedly advanced west of the Salah al Din Road in eastern Rafah.[12] Palestinian militias used a variety of weapons, including explosively-formed penetrators, against Israeli forces in eastern Rafah.[13] Hamas mortared Israeli forces at the Rafah border crossing, which caused 10 IDF casualties.[14] An Israeli Army Radio correspondent noted that Hamas often targets static Israeli positions and is seemingly trying to range these targets.[15]

The Israeli clearing operation into Rafah threatens the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, according to an unspecified senior Egyptian official speaking to the Associated Press.[16] The official said that Egypt informed the United States, European countries, and Israel of its position. The report follows growing tension between Egypt and Israel regarding Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip.[17] Egypt reportedly refused to coordinate with Israel on the entry of humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip via the now Israeli-controlled Rafah border crossing due to Israel’s “unacceptable escalation” in Rafah.[18] Two Egyptian officials and a Western diplomat previously told the Associated Press in February 2024 that Egypt may suspend the peace treaty if Israeli forces advance into Rafah.[19]

United Kingdom-based Sky News, citing an unnamed senior Palestinian source, reported on May 13 that Israel offered control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt to the Palestinian Authority (PA).[20] The PA replied that it would not agree to manage the crossing under the IDF and conditioned its management of the crossing on Israeli commitment to the Arab Six Party peace plan.[21]

US President Joe Biden said on May 11 that there would be a “ceasefire tomorrow” in the Gaza Strip if Hamas would release the remaining Israeli hostages.[22] Hamas condemned Biden over his comments, saying that Biden did not  acknowledge Hamas’ acceptance of the latest ceasefire proposal.[23] Hamas altered and then approved an Egyptian-proposed ceasefire agreement and framed the approval as if Hamas had accepted the original agreement.[24] US officials have previously reported during rounds of ceasefire talks that Hamas is responsible for preventing negotiations from advancing.[25]

The New York Times reported on May 13 how Hamas has historically used surveillance to suppress dissent in the Gaza Strip.[26] Israeli military intelligence sources provided the New York Times with documents from the Gaza Strip, detailing how Hamas’ General Security Service surveilled civilians. The unit spread Hamas propaganda and criticized domestic and foreign dissidents online. Hamas also used the unit to suppress political opposition. Anonymous Israeli intelligence authorities believe that the Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip, Yahya Sinwar, directly oversaw the unit.

Sinwar’s role in overseeing the General Security Service reflects his larger role in Hamas’ internal security apparatus. Sinwar previously headed Hamas’ internal security force, the al Majd and earned the nickname “butcher of Khan Younis” during his tenure.[27] Sinwar reportedly ordered an individual to bury their brother alive on allegations that the brother was an informant for a rival Palestinian faction.[28]

Palestinian militias have conducted two indirect fire attacks into Israel since CTP-ISW's information cutoff on May 13. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters fired unspecified projectiles at an IDF position.[29] Israeli Army Radio reported that Palestinian fighters fired a projectile at Netiv Haasara, but the projectile fell in an open area.[30]

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

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

• Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least three locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's data cut off on May 12.[31] PIJ claimed that it fired small arms targeting Israeli forces across the border in Israel and separately engaged Israeli forces at an Israeli military position in Jenin.[32]

The Israeli Tsav 9 group organized protesters to block humanitarian aid trucks bound for the Gaza Strip at a border crossing between Israel and the West Bank on May 13.[33] Tsav 9 is a group comprised of demobilized Israeli reservists as well as families of Israeli hostages and settlers. Online videos show the protesters unloading and damaging food aid from the trucks west of Hebron.[34] Israeli police arrested at least four of the protesters.[35] Tsav 9 has repeatedly disrupted the delivery of aid to the Gaza Strip since the Israel-Hamas war began. The group staged a three-day encampment at the Kerem Shalom border crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip, preventing over a hundred aid trucks from entering the strip in January 2024.[36] Tsav 9 seeks to end Israeli aid shipments to the Gaza Strip so long as Hamas holds Israeli hostages.[37]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

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

Iranian-backed militias, including Lebanese Hezbollah, have conducted at least eight attacks into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 12.[38] Hezbollah fired two drones targeting Israeli forces near Beit Hilel on May 13, marking the third Hezbollah drone attack targeting the area since May 11.[39]

A Lebanese newspaper reported on May 12 that Hezbollah is evading Israeli air defenses by using drones in its attacks into northern Israel, citing Iranian-backed sources.[40] Hezbollah has claimed 12 drone attacks targeting Israeli forces in northern Israel since May 1, which is as many drone attacks claimed during all of April 2024.[41] Hezbollah seeks to use greater quantities of drones to penetrate Israeli air defenses and cause greater damage and casualties, according to the sources.[42] The newspaper also reported that Hezbollah intends to withdraw some fighters from the Israel-Lebanon border while keeping reconnaissance units in the area

Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah gave a speech on May 13 discussing Hezbollah’s continued support for Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip.[43] Nasrallah said that ”the link between Lebanon and Gaza is final and recognized” and that Hezbollah will continue to conduct attacks targeting northern Israel in support of Palestinian fighters in the Gaza Strip. Nasrallah also denounced Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s claim on April 24 that the IDF has killed half of Hezbollah’s field commanders in southern Lebanon.[44] Nasrallah added that Israelis must “turn to their government until the aggression against Gaza stops” if displaced civilians want to return to northern Israel.

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani requested that the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) permanently end its mission in Iraq by the end of 2025.[45] Sudani made this request in a letter to UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres on May 8.[46] The United Nations established UNAMI in 2003 to promote political dialogue, judicial and legal reforms, human rights, and transparent and credible elections in Iraq.[47] UNAMI advises and helps the Iraqi Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) conduct elections.[48] UNAMI has monitored previous elections, including the October 2021 parliamentary elections, but the Iraqi federal government did not ask UNAMI to monitor the recent provincial council elections in December 2023.[49] Ending UNAMI’s supervision of Iraqi elections could cause future elections to be less free and fair. Sudani claimed in his letter to Guterres that there is “no need” for UNAMI to continue its mission in Iraq and asked UNAMI to focus solely on “economic reform, service provision, sustainable development, and climate change” for the remainder of its mission.[50] The Iraqi federal government sent a request to the UN Security Council in May 2023 to review UNAMI’s operations “in preparation for its final closure.”[51] US Ambassador to Iraq Alina Romanowski met with Iraqi Foreign Affairs Minister Fuad Hossein on May 13 to discuss the future of UNAMI operations in Iraq.[52]

Iraqi Interior Minister Abdul Amir al Shammari and Syrian Interior Minister Maj. Gen. Mohammad Khalid al Rahmoun signed a security agreement in Baghdad on May 12.[53] The agreement contains provisions for Iraq and Syria to strengthen border security, combat terrorism, and dismantle drug smuggling and human trafficking networks.[54] Rahmoun also met with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammad Shia al Sudani in Baghdad on May 12.[55] Sudani called for increasing communication and intelligence sharing between Iraqi and Syrian security institutions.[56] Iraqi Popular Mobilization Committee (PMC) Chairman Faleh al Fayyadh recently discussed counterterrorism cooperation with Syrian President Bashar al Assad in Damascus on May 6.[57]

Anti-Iranian regime outlet Iran International and an Israeli social media account published a joint investigation on May 13 detailing senior Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) officer Mohammad Reza Zahedi’s last movements in Iran and Syria before Israel killed him in Damascus on April 1.[58] The article claimed that Zahedi flew on an IRGC-affiliated aircraft from Tehran to the Russian-controlled Hmeimim Military Airport in Latakia on April 1. Zahedi traveled later that day from Latakia to Damascus and arrived approximately fifteen minutes before Israel conducted the airstrike that killed him. CTP-ISW cannot corroborate or verify these claims. Hmeimim Military Airport is Russia’s largest military base in Syria.[59] CTP-ISW previously reported that Iran and Russia are likely coordinating to transport Iranian materiel to Syria through Hmeimim Military Airport.[60] 

US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported that it intercepted a Houthi drone over the Gulf of Aden on May 12.[61] CENTCOM determined that the drone presented an imminent threat to US, coalition, and merchant vessels in the region.

Houthi-controlled media claimed that the United States and the United Kingdom conducted an airstrike targeting Hudayduh International Airport on May 13.[62] US CENTCOM has not commented on the claim at the time of this writing.

The Iranian Parliament approved a bill on May 12 to strengthen information security cooperation with Russia.[63] The bill contains provisions for Iran and Russia to cooperate against “cyber threats” and to exchange intelligence.[64] The Iranian parliament originally approved the bill in December 2023, but the Guardian Council—a regime body responsible for reviewing and approving legislation—subsequently made several unspecified changes to the bill. Parliament approved these changes on May 12.[65]

Senior Iranian regime officials have openly expressed discontent about Iran’s worsening economy. Supreme Leader Office Chief of Staff Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani lamented on May 10 that Western sanctions have made Iran’s economic situation “difficult.”[66] Senior Iranian clerics separately criticized Iran’s “rampant inflation” and “exchange rate fluctuations” during meetings with President Ebrahim Raisi in Qom on May 10.[67] Prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Makarem Shirazi listed high food and housing costs as among the most pressing issues facing Iranians during his meeting with Raisi.[68] Prominent Shia cleric Ayatollah Nouri Hamedani similarly told Raisi that “everywhere you go, people talk about how expensive and difficult life is.”[69] Hamedani previously called on the regime to listen to Iranians’ grievances during the Mahsa Amini protest movement.[70] Raisi’s official website did not include Shirazi and Hamedani’s criticisms about the economy in its official readouts of the meetings.[71] The Tehran Stock Exchange dropped by 32,000 points on May 13, and the Iranian rial reached a record low of 705,000 rials to one US dollar in mid-April 2024.[72]

Iran recorded a record-low turnout in Tehran for the second round of parliamentary elections on May 10.[73] Iranian state media reported an eight percent participation rate in Tehran, marking a four-percent decrease from the previous election.[74] Thirty-two hardliners, six moderates, and seven reformists won seats in the second round of parliamentary elections, according to Iranian state media.[75] Hardliners now comprise around 80 percent of Iran’s parliament.[76]

4. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 13, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-13-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces continued to make tactically significant advances north and northeast of Kharkiv City on May 13 and currently appear to be prioritizing the rapid establishment of a "buffer zone" along the international border over setting conditions for deeper penetrations into northern Kharkiv Oblast.
• Russian forces' relatively rapid rate of advances in Vovchansk and their reported destruction of several bridges across key waterways within the settlement suggest that Russian forces are prioritizing the creation of a "buffer zone" over a deeper penetration, as ISW previously assessed they would.
• Newly appointed Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu participated in his first Security Council meeting as secretary on May 13, amid continued reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin is focusing on mobilizing the Russian economy and defense industrial base (DIB) to support a protracted war in Ukraine.
• Putin's decision to remove Shoigu from the Russian MoD appears to have also opened the door for the departure of certain Shoigu affiliates from the MoD, likely one of the intended effects of Putin's recent cabinet reshuffles.
• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful missile strikes against a Russian air defense base in occupied Crimea and successful drone strikes against Russian energy infrastructure in Russia.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Lyptsi and Vovchansk in northern Kharkiv Oblast.
• The Russian military may be intensifying efforts to recruit conscripts through the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) as part of ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 13, 2024

May 13, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 13, 2024

Grace Mappes, Nicole Wolkov, Karolina Hird, and Frederick W. Kagan

May 13, 2024, 8:45pm ET 

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

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

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

Note: The data cut-off for this product was 2:45pm ET on May 13. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 14 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Russian forces continued to make tactically significant advances north and northeast of Kharkiv City on May 13 and currently appear to be prioritizing the rapid establishment of a "buffer zone" along the international border over setting conditions for deeper penetrations into northern Kharkiv Oblast. Geolocated footage published on May 13 shows that Russian forces have advanced into Hlyboke (north of Lyptsi) and raised a flag in the center of the village, but Russian sources claimed that Russian forces have not yet seized the entirety of Hlyboke and advanced west of the settlement along the west (left) bank of the Kharkiv River.[1] Additional geolocated footage shows that Russian forces advanced southwest of Oliinykove (northeast of Lyptsi) and north of Lukyantsi (northeast of Lyptsi and southeast of Oliinykove).[2] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces achieved unspecified tactical success near Lukyantsi.[3] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces entered Lukyantsi, but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[4] Russian forces also continued attacking in the Lyptsi direction near Pylna (northeast of Lyptsi and Oliinykove), and the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported that Ukrainian forces counterattacked near Hlyboke.[5]

Geolocated footage published on May 12 shows that Russian forces seized the Vovchansk Meat Processing Plant in northern Vovchansk, and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces also captured a shoe factory in northern Vovchansk on the morning of May 13 and advanced into central Vovchansk up to the northern (right) bank of the Vovcha River by the evening.[6] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are also clearing Starytsya and Buhruvatka (both west of Vovchansk on the C-210817 road) but that Russian forces do not control the settlements, and also advanced in a forest area further south of Ohirtseve (northwest of Vovchansk).[7] Russian forces also attacked on the Izbytske-Starytsya-Buhruvatka line west of Vovchansk and near Tykhe (east of Vovchansk), where the Russian MoD also reported Ukrainian counterattacks.[8] Russian sources claimed that fighting continued between the Lyptsi and Vovchansk salients near Zelene (on the international border between Lyptsi and Vovchansk) and that Ukrainian forces partially withdrew from Ternova (immediately southeast of Zelene).[9]

Russian forces' relatively rapid rate of advances in Vovchansk and their reported destruction of several bridges across key waterways within the settlement suggest that Russian forces are prioritizing the creation of a "buffer zone" over a deeper penetration, as ISW previously assessed they would.[10]  ISW has not yet observed claims or confirmation that Russian forces have crossed to the southern (left) bank of the Vovcha River in Vovchansk or its immediate environs. Russian forces notably conducted strikes against bridges over the Vovcha River immediately west and east of Vovchansk on May 12 and began targeting bridges over the river and logistics lines in Vovchansk itself on May 13, reportedly only leaving Ukrainian forces with two usable bridges over the Vovcha in Vovchansk.[11] It is unclear why Russian forces would largely target bridges they would need to cross and ensure stable logistics across the Vovcha River for offensive operations deeper into northern Kharkiv Oblast, so these strikes suggest that Russian forces may be prioritizing immediate gains in an unfortified area of northern Ukraine. Russian forces are also reportedly fielding armor in this area -- Russian sources reported that Russian forces conducted a mechanized attack with an unspecified number of tanks against Vovchansk on the night of May 12 and continued armored attacks during the day on May 13.[12] The deployment of armored assets in this area suggests that Russian forces are seeking to make rapid gains, but they do not appear to be setting conditions at this time for such gains to be on the southern side of the Vovcha River deeper into northern Kharkiv Oblast. These indicators collectively suggest that Russian forces are likely trying to create the promised "buffer zone" in the border area instead of pursuing deeper gains into Kharkiv Oblast or towards Kharkiv City.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin officials have frequently suggested that Russia establish a "demilitarized buffer zone" in occupied Ukraine to protect Russian territory from Ukrainian strikes, and Russian Ambassador to the United States Anatoly Antonov directly connected this buffer zone with intensified Russian offensive operations south of Belgorod Oblast on May 13.[13] Ukrainian and Western officials have also recently stated that Russian forces intend to establish a 10-kilometer buffer zone in Kharkiv Oblast, and ISW has recently noted that this buffer zone would simultaneously bring Russian forces within tube artillery range of Kharkiv City and remove major Russian logistics hubs from Ukrainian tube artillery range.[14] A Ukrainian battlefield commander recently expressed concern that Ukrainian fortifications in northern Kharkiv Oblast are not along the immediate international border area, enabling Russian forces' quick and relatively shallow advance.[15] More senior Ukrainian commanders have recently stated that Ukrainian forces have established a multi-layered defense-in-depth deeper in the oblast, which is congruent with the other battlefield commanders' reports.[16] The current pace of Russian advances on this axis is not necessarily indicative of the further offensive capabilities of the Russian forces conducting the offensive operations, although Russia reportedly retains considerable reserves available to exploit initial successes on this axis.

Newly appointed Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu participated in his first Security Council meeting as secretary on May 13, amid continued reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin is focusing on mobilizing the Russian economy and defense industrial base (DIB) to support a protracted war in Ukraine.[17] Kremlin Spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified that Shoigu will also be a "curator" of the Russian Military-Industrial Commission but will not lead it.[18] Russian opposition news outlet Meduza reported on May 13, citing its sources in the Russian government and presidential administration, that Shoigu's alleged criticisms of Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec General Director Sergei Chemezov for failing to provide a sufficient number of modern weapons to the Russian military for the past several months contributed to Shoigu's removal from the Russian MoD.[19] This claim further emphasizes that Putin is focused on improving the Russian DIB's capacity and ability to modernize and produce new technologies.[20] Several Russian milbloggers expressed hope that Shoigu's removal as defense minister and Andrei Belousov's appointment will improve the bureaucratic issues within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and the Russian DIB's efficiency.[21] Russian milbloggers also largely attempted to alleviate concerns that Belousov's lack of military experience would hinder his ability to effectively serve as defense minister and portrayed him as a competent manager who can root out corruption.[22] Belousov's lack of military experience is not anomalous in the context of Putin's ministerial management, and Shoigu also lacked military experience before becoming defense minister.[23] Putin has always appointed a civilian defense minister since firing Boris Yeltsin-appointed Defense Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev in 2001.[24]

Putin's decision to remove Shoigu from the Russian MoD appears to have also opened the door for the departure of certain Shoigu affiliates from the MoD, likely one of the intended effects of Putin's recent cabinet reshuffles. Several Russian milbloggers and insider sources claimed on May 13 that two deputy defense ministers—Ruslan Tsalikov and Alexey Krivoruchko—submitted their resignations to Shoigu a week before Putin removed Shoigu as defense minister.[25] Russian milbloggers claimed that Tsalikov was "Shoigu's right-hand man" for many years and oversaw troop support and the Russian MoD's department on information policy and information warfare.[26] Krivoruchko is also reportedly close with Shoigu and oversaw military-technical support, weapons development, special equipment, and the implementation of state defense orders.[27] Russian sources claimed that both Tsalikov and Krivoruchko were embroiled in corruption scandals, and one Wagner Group-affiliated milblogger noted that frontline troops directly suffered as a result of their corrupt practices.[28] Russian insider sources claimed that Russian authorities questioned Tsalikov over possible corruption charges in late April, and suggested at the time that Tsalikov would be forced into retirement.[29] Russian authorities recently removed former Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov, also a reported close Shoigu ally, from his position on corruption charges.[30] Tsalikov and Krivoruchko may have resigned in hope of receiving new positions outside of the MoD in order to avoid criminal prosecution on charges similar to Ivanov's charges. Kremlin-awarded milblogger suggested that Tsalikov will also take a new role in the Russian Security Council following Shoigu.[31] Russian insider sources speculated that Belousov, as new defense minister, will only want to leave a maximum of two to three officials affiliated with Shoigu in the Russian MoD, suggesting that more Shoigu affiliates may still resign or be fired in the coming weeks.[32] One Russian milblogger speculated that Shoigu and his affiliates were part of the alleged "pro-China" party in the Russian MoD and suggested that other MoD officials associated with Russia's China policy will be removed or resign alongside Shoigu, Ivanov, and others, although ISW cannot verify these speculations.[33] Putin likely used the constitutionally mandated ministerial resignations following his inauguration and subsequent nomination of new senior officials as a convenient moment to dismiss ineffective officials. Putin likely assessed that Shoigu's constitutionally mandated resignation, almost a year after deceased Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin's rebellion to remove Shoigu and Russian Chief of the Army General Staff Valery Gerasimov from power, was the appropriate time to remove Shoigu from the Russian MoD without appearing to give in to Prigozhin's demands.

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful missile strikes against a Russian air defense base in occupied Crimea and successful drone strikes against Russian energy infrastructure in Russia. Russian opposition news outlet Astra reported, citing a source in the Crimean occupation Ministry of Emergency Services, that Ukrainian forces struck a Russian air defense base of the 3rd Radio Engineering Regiment (Russian Aerospace Forces' [VKS] radio engineering troops) on Mount Ai-Petri in occupied Crimea on May 13, likely with several Storm Shadow missiles.[34] Astra reported that the strike killed an unspecified number of Russian personnel and likely the commander of the 3rd Radio Engineering Regiment. Ukrainian outlet Ukrainska Pravda reported on May 13 that one of its sources in the Ukrainian military confirmed the Mount Ai-Petri strike.[35] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces shot down four Storm Shadow missiles and seven drones over Crimea.[36] Ukrainian outlet Suspilne reported on May 13 that its sources in Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) stated that the SBU conducted a drone strike against the Oskolneftesnabzheniye oil depot near Stary Oskol, Belgorod Oblast, and the Yeletskaya electrical substation in Lipetsk Oblast, which supplies traction substations to Russian Railways, the Stanovaya oil pumping station, and transit between Lipetsk, Oryol, and Bryansk oblasts' power systems.[37] Lipetsk Oblast Governor Igor Artamonov claimed that Russian forces suppressed drones in Lipetsk Oblast and stated that a fire occurred at an electrical substation, presumably due to one of the Ukrainian drones.[38]

Breaking Defense reported on May 13 that Estonia may be considering sending its troops to Ukrainian rear areas in order to free up Ukrainian troops for redeployment to more critical areas of the theater.[39] National Security Advisor to the Estonian President, Madis Roll, told Breaking Defense that the Estonian government is "seriously" considering sending Estonian troops to western Ukraine to take over non-combat roles in the rear from Ukrainian troops, allowing Ukrainian forces to deploy to frontline areas. Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė noted on May 8 that the Lithuanian government has granted permission for Lithuanian troops to serve in similar non-combat rear area training roles in the future.[40]

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces continued to make tactically significant advances north and northeast of Kharkiv City on May 13 and currently appear to be prioritizing the rapid establishment of a "buffer zone" along the international border over setting conditions for deeper penetrations into northern Kharkiv Oblast.
• Russian forces' relatively rapid rate of advances in Vovchansk and their reported destruction of several bridges across key waterways within the settlement suggest that Russian forces are prioritizing the creation of a "buffer zone" over a deeper penetration, as ISW previously assessed they would.
• Newly appointed Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu participated in his first Security Council meeting as secretary on May 13, amid continued reports that Russian President Vladimir Putin is focusing on mobilizing the Russian economy and defense industrial base (DIB) to support a protracted war in Ukraine.
• Putin's decision to remove Shoigu from the Russian MoD appears to have also opened the door for the departure of certain Shoigu affiliates from the MoD, likely one of the intended effects of Putin's recent cabinet reshuffles.
• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful missile strikes against a Russian air defense base in occupied Crimea and successful drone strikes against Russian energy infrastructure in Russia.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances near Lyptsi and Vovchansk in northern Kharkiv Oblast.
• The Russian military may be intensifying efforts to recruit conscripts through the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) as part of ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.

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

• Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine (comprised of two subordinate main efforts)
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Push Ukrainian forces back from the international border with Belgorod Oblast and approach to within tube artillery range of Kharkiv City
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and encircle northern Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Subordinate Main Effort #3 – Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast
• Russian Supporting Effort – Southern Axis
• Russian Air, Missile, and Drone Campaign
• Russian Mobilization and Force Generation Efforts
• Russian Technological Adaptations
• Activities in Russian-occupied areas
• Ukrainian Defense Industrial Base Efforts
• Russian Information Operations and Narratives
• Significant Activity in Belarus

Russian Main Effort – Eastern Ukraine

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #1 – Kharkiv Oblast (Russian objective: Push Ukrainian forces back from the international border with Belgorod Oblast and approach to within tube artillery range of Kharkiv City)

NOTE: ISW is adding a section to cover Russian offensive operations along the Belgorod-Kharkiv axis as these offensive operations comprise an operational effort separate from Russian offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line. ISW may enlarge the scope of this section should Russian forces expand offensive operations along the Russian-Ukrainian international border in northeastern Ukraine.

See topline text.

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #2 – Luhansk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the remainder of Luhansk Oblast and push westward into eastern Kharkiv Oblast and northern Donetsk Oblast)

Russian forces continued offensive operations along the Kupyansk-Svatove line on May 13 but did not make any confirmed advances. The Ukrainian General Staff reported Russian ground attacks northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; east of Kupyansk near Petropavlivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Ivanivka and Berestove; northwest of Svatove near Stelmakhivka; and southwest of Svatove near Makiivka and Novoyehorivka.[41] Russian milbloggers posted footage of Russian dismounted infantry conducting an assault on trenches near Stelmakhivka under the cover of tank fire.[42]

Russian forces recently conducted an unsuccessful roughly reinforced platoon-sized mechanized assault west of Kreminna. Ukrainian sources posted footage of Ukrainian forces destroying five tanks (including one T-90) and five BMP infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) between Torske and Terny (both west of Kreminna).[43] A Russian milblogger confirmed that the assault happened near Torske and that Russian forces lost several tanks.[44] The milblogger also claimed that Russian forces marginally advanced in the area north of Torske and south of Yampolivka (also west of Kreminna).[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that there were 10 combat engagements in the Lyman direction west of Kreminna throughout the day.[46]

Ukrainian forces struck an ammunition depot in occupied Sorokyne (Krasnodon), Luhansk Oblast on May 13.[47] Kremlin newswire TASS and other Russian sources claimed that Ukrainian forces used at least three ATACMS missiles to strike an industrial zone, while Ukrainian sources noted that the strikes specifically hit an ammunition depot.[48] Sorokyne (Krasnodon) is notably 130 kilometers away from the frontline.

Russian Subordinate Main Effort #3 – Donetsk Oblast (Russian objective: Capture the entirety of Donetsk Oblast, the claimed territory of Russia’s proxies in Donbas)

Russian forces conducted limited offensive operations in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) on May 13 but did not advance. The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian ground attacks northeast of Siversk near Bilohorivka; east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske; southeast of Siversk near Spirne and Vyimka; and south of Siversk near Rozdolivka.[49] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Ukrainian forces counterattacked near Spirne and Rozdolivka.[50] Elements of the 2nd Artillery Brigade (2nd Luhansk People's Republic Army Corps [LNR AC]) reportedly continue operating near Spirne.[51]

Ukrainian forces recently regained a lost position northeast of Chasiv Yar while heavy fighting continued around Chasiv Yar on May 13. Geolocated footage published on May 12 shows Ukrainian forces seizing and clearing a Russian-held position in the forest area in southwestern Bohdanivka.[52] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are trying to develop offensive operations from the western outskirts of Bohdanivka towards Kalynivka (north of Chasiv Yar), presumably to set conditions to surround Chasiv Yar via its northern flank.[53] Russian sources also claimed that Russian forces are advancing on the southern flank of Chasiv Yar, particularly west of Ivanivske and in the Stupky- Holubovski 2 nature reserve area.[54] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces broke through Ukrainian defenses and entered Klishchiivka (southeast of Chasiv Yar), but another milblogger refuted this claim and noted that the purported Russian attack on Klishchiivka was unsuccessful and resulted in the loss of "almost the entire assault group."[55] ISW has not yet observed visual evidence of the purported Russian attack on Klishchiivka. The spokesperson for a Ukrainian artillery brigade operating in the Chasiv Yar area reported that there are up to 25,000 Russian personnel committed to the Chasiv Yar effort, including a mix of "elite" (likely airborne [VDV]) and mobilized personnel from the 1st Donetsk People's Republic Army Corps (DNR AC) and 2nd LNR AC.[56] The Ukrainian General Staff reported combat engagements north of Chasiv Yar near Hryhorivka; east of Chasiv Yar near Ivanivske; and southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[57] Elements of the Russian 98th VDV Division and BARS-13 (Combat Reserve) are reportedly operating near Chasiv Yar.[58]

Russian forces reportedly continued to advance west of Avdiivka on May 13. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced west of Ocheretyne (northwest of Avdiivka) towards Novooleksandrivka.[59] Some milbloggers also claimed that Russian forces advanced west of Semenivka (northwest of Avdiivka) and up to 1.13 kilometers deep along a 3.52-kilometer-wide front towards Umanske (west of Avdiivka).[60] ISW has not yet observed visual confirmation of these claims, however. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are generally attacking north of Avdiivka on the Arkhanhelske line; northwest of Avdiivka on the Solovyove-Novopokrovske line; west of Avdiivka towards Umanske; and southwest of Avdiivka on the Netaylove-Pervomaiske-Nevelske line.[61]

Russian forces reportedly continued to advance west and southwest of Donetsk City on May 13. Several Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing towards central Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City), with one milblogger claiming that Russian forces advanced up to three kilometers near Krasnohorivka.[62] One Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces are also advancing within and in fields south of Paraskoviivka (southwest of Donetsk City), although ISW has not observed visual confirmation of gains in this area.[63] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted 18 ground attacks in the Kurakhove (west of Donetsk City) direction, including near Krasnohorivka and Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[64] Elements of the Russian 238th Artillery Brigade and 20th Motorized Rifle Division (both of the 8th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) and the 5th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st DNR AC) reportedly continue to operate near and in Krasnohorivka.[65]

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

Positional engagements continued in western Zaporizhia Oblast on May 3, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in the area. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced northward within Robotyne and in fields east of Robotyne, although ISW has not yet observed visual confirmation of these claims.[66] Positional engagements also continued near Robotyne and Verbove (east of Robotyne).[67] Elements of the Russian 42nd Motorized Rifle Division (58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) reportedly continue operating near Robotyne.[68]

Positional engagements continued in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, including near Krynky, on May 13.[69]  A Russian soldier reportedly operating on an island in the Dnipro River Delta claimed that Russian forces are often unable to evacuate wounded personnel from these islands due to ongoing problems with Russian boats in Kherson Oblast and extensive Ukrainian drone coverage in the area.[70]

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

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an investigation on May 13 detailing how Ukrainian shoot-down rates for Russian drones and missiles have dramatically decreased in the past six months due to more frequent Russian strikes, increasingly diverse Russian strike packages, and a shortage of US-provided air defense systems.[71] WSJ found that Ukrainian forces have intercepted 46 percent of Russian missiles over the past six months, compared to the 73 percent interception rate from the previous six-month period, and that the interception rate dipped to 30 percent over the past month. WSJ also reported that Russian forces have fired 45 percent more drones and missiles over the past six months than the previous six months, including double the number of Shahed drones. WSJ found that ballistic missiles and converted S-300/400 surface-to-air missiles are much harder for Ukrainian forces to shoot down, noting that Ukrainian forces have intercepted 10 percent of ballistic missiles and none of the S-300/S-400s. WSJ's findings are consistent with ISW's assessment that Ukrainian forces have had a much lower interception rate, particularly since mid-March 2024, largely due to dwindling stocks of US-provided Patriot air defense systems.[72] ISW has also closely tracked how Russian forces are experimenting and adapting their strike packages to best exploit weaknesses in Ukraine's air defense umbrella, consistent with WSJ's reporting.[73]

Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reported on May 13 that the Russian 22nd Guards Heavy Bomber Aviation Division, particularly its 121st and 52nd heavy bomber aviation regiments, are responsible for several missile strikes on Ukraine.[74] The GUR stated that the 121st and 52nd regiments operate from Engels Air Base (Saratov Oblast) and Shaykovka Air Base (Kaluga Oblast). The GUR noted that Russian forces operate Tu-95MS and Tu-160 strategic bombers, which fire Kh-101/555/55 cruise missiles, from Engels Air Base and Tu-22M3 long-range bombers, which fire Kh-22/32 cruise missiles, from the Shaykovka Air Base.

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

The Russian military may be intensifying efforts to recruit conscripts through the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) as part of ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts. DOSAAF Chairperson Army General Alexander Dvornikov (former Southern Military District commander and failed Russian theater commander in Ukraine from April-May 2022) announced on May 13 that DOSAAF is lowering its membership age from 18 to 14.[75] DOSAAF trains citizens aged 17 to 30 years preparing for professional military service in military specialties and trains civilians aged 18 to 65 who are part of the general mobilizable reserve (“personnel mobilization resource” or zapas). DOSAAF also provides military-patriotic education and teaches military skills to Russian youth and youth in occupied Ukraine.[76] ISW assessed in February 2024 that Dvornikov’s selection to head DOSAAF suggests that the Russian military leadership may be setting conditions to reconstitute a conscript recruitment pipeline using DOSAAF’s educational and recruitment infrastructure.[77] DOSAAF may have lowered its membership age to increase the number of militarily-trained youth that the Russian military can later conscript and then mobilize, without having to call additional waves of partial mobilization.

Russian military personnel in the recently dissolved Donetsk People's Republic's (DNR) Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) “Kaskad” Operational Combat Tactical Formation appealed to Russian President Vladimir Putin over a lack of monetary and veteran social benefits associated with the ongoing dissolution of the Kaskad formation. Kaskad personnel recorded a video message to Putin and claimed that they had only received 100,000 rubles (about $1,100) between January and May 2024 despite continuing to operate in Ukraine.[78] The Kaskad personnel claimed that prior to January 2024 they received monthly salaries of about 245,000 rubles (about $2,675) from the Russian government and the DNR. They also claimed that Kaskad formally ceased to exist on April 30, 2024, and that they do not have enough money to return home. The Kaskad personnel further claimed that Russian military authorities refuse to issue them combat veteran certificates, thereby prohibiting them from receiving veterans' social and health benefits. ISW reported in December 2023 that the Russian military disbanded Kaskad, likely as part of Russia's ongoing force formalization campaign.[79]

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

Russian defense company "PPSh Laboratory" General Director Denis Oslomenko claimed on May 13 that Russian forces have started using robotic drone suppressors based on Triton electronic warfare (EW systems) to cover military personnel in contested "grey zones" while they evacuate wounded and dead personnel from the battlefield in Ukraine.[80] Oslomenko stated that Russia hopes to more widely produce and distribute these systems to the Russian military.

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

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

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

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

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

See topline text.

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

Belarus and the People's Republic of China (PRC) continue to intensify bilateral cooperation. The Minsk City Executive Committee's Press Service reported on May 13 that a committee delegation visited Beijing and signed an agreement on technology and information cooperation between 2024-2026 with Beijing City officials.[81]

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

5. Philippines Probes Alleged Chinese Disinformation Campaign Over South China Sea

Philippines Probes Alleged Chinese Disinformation Campaign Over South China Sea

 May 14, 2024  0 Comments

By BenarNews

eurasiareview.com · May 13, 2024

The Philippines said Monday it was officially investigating allegations that Chinese embassy staff in Manila had engaged in a disinformation campaign related to the South China Sea.

The move followed a call by the Philippine national security adviserurging the government to expel embassy staffers for allegedly recording a phone conversation with a senior Filipino commander about military resupply missions to a disputed shoal.

“The Department of Foreign Affairs will look into any reports of illegal and unlawful activities by diplomatic officials, and undertake necessary action in line with existing laws and regulations,” the department said in a statement Monday.

While foreign diplomats are “accorded necessary liberties” in conducting their duties, they are expected to perform them “with the highest standards of integrity” and professionalism, it said.

Last week, top Philippine defense and security officials demanded an investigation into whether China had violated Manila’s wiretapping laws during the alleged phone call between a Chinese official and the Filipino government military commander, Vice Adm. Alberto Carlos, who oversees the defense of Second Thomas (Ayungin) Shoal, among other contested South China Sea features.

Carlos, the head of the Philippine military’s Western Command (WESCOM), allegedly agreed with an unidentified Chinese official to a “new model” for arranging for notifications of resupply missions to Ayungin Shoal, according to a transcript released by the Chinese embassy to select news outlets.

Last week, Philippine officials announced that Carlos had gone on leave and was temporarily replaced.

Manila maintains the BRP Sierra Madre, an old ship grounded at Ayungin Shoal, to serve as the country’s outpost in the contested region. It is critical because Ayungin lies near Mischief Reef, an artificial island where Beijing built a naval base in the 1990s.

WESCOM oversees Manila’s defense of the Palawan and Kalayaan islands, including the disputed Spratly chain.

On Friday, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry hit back at the call from Eduardo Año, the Philippine national security adviser, that Chinese embassy staffers be expelled.

“The Philippines’ response shows exactly their guilty conscience in the face of facts and evidence and how exasperated and desperate they have become,” spokesman Lin Jian said during a regular press conference.

“We ask the Philippines to ensure that Chinese diplomats can carry out their duty normally, and to stop provocations and infringements,” he said. “The Philippines needs to quit denying the facts and must not make reckless moves that will only backfire on the Philippines itself.”

Civilian mission

Against the backdrop of this controversy, a civilian coalition, Atin Ito! (This Is Ours!), was preparing for a sea voyage this week where a convoy of boats would deliver supplies to Filipino fishermen at Scarborough Shoal (known as Bajo de Masinloc in the Philippines).

The shoal, located 125 nautical miles (232 km) from the west coast of Luzon – the largest of the Philippine islands – has effectively been under China’s control since 2012 and despite a 2016 international arbitration ruling that dismissed Beijing’s sweeping historical claims to most of the South China Sea.

Filipino fishermen who venture out into the rich fishing ground at Scarborough Shoal are routinely harassed by the Chinese.

Rafaela David, chief convenor of the Atin Ito! coalition, said they remained undeterred despite several recent incidents between Philippine and Chinese ships in the disputed waters.

“China’s actions are failing to intimidate Filipinos,” David said in a statement. “Instead, they are only uniting us and inspiring us to go further in defending our rights.”

Atin Ito! is a broad grouping of nationalist individuals and civilian organizations. It launched its first mission last December to deliver supplies and Christmas gifts to Filipino troops stationed aboard the BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal.

That mission was forced to change its route and detour to less controversial parts of the disputed waterway. The convoy was subsequently forced to turn back to shore after four Chinese vessels started shadowing its lead ship.

This week’s convoy is scheduled to set sail for Scarborough Shoal on Wednesday morning from Masinloc town in Zambales province, a voyage that is expected to take two days.

Ray Powell, who heads Stanford University’s Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation that monitors activities in the South China Sea, said on X that a huge Chinese force appeared to be preparing to intimidate the Filipino civilian mission.

“This will be by far the largest blockade I’ll have ever tracked at Scarborough,” Powell said.

The Filipino sea convoy will be escorted by the Philippine Coast Guard.

Jonathan Malaya, assistant director general at the National Security Council, said Monday that the upcoming trip to Scarborough Shoal would be “civilian” in nature.

“It is the government’s responsibility to ensure maritime safety. We need to make sure that our fellow Filipinos who are joining that trip and the foreign nationals that they have invited are safe because that mission is within our 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone,” Malaya told a news briefing.

“The objective of this mission is to help our fishermen in that part of the [West Philippine Sea] – that’s why they are bringing supplies,” Malaya said.

Jason Gutierrez and Jojo Riñoza reported from Manila.

eurasiareview.com · May 13, 2024

6. AI And Global Security Landscape: Opportunities, Challenges, And Urgent Need For Collaboration

Collaboration and cooperation are tough in today's strategic environment.

AI And Global Security Landscape: Opportunities, Challenges, And Urgent Need For Collaboration – OpEd

 May 12, 2024  0 Comments

By Simon Hutagalung

eurasiareview.com · May 12, 2024

Deep within the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US military an extensive network of bureaucracy thrives. Diplomats and military personnel both in uniform spend their in days interconnected cubicles, engaging in discussions about security via a seamless broadband connection that links them to external advisers across the nation.

During one such conversation, the topic shifts to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in global security. A Senior military officer maintains a calm demeanor as they contemplate the use of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with AI capabilities that can be controlled remotely from campaign bases. These UAVs the possess ability not only to locate enemies but also to eliminate them. However, is acknowledged that this new paradigm has the potential to to lead unforeseen global crises. The impact of AI-assisted automation on modern warfare as Arkin has consistently argued significant is: “Wars are more than ever, by influenced AI-assisted automation.”

This essay aims to delve the into impact of artificial intelligence on national security. The focus will be on categorising different AI groups providing examples specific to each category and examining their respective tasks and responsibilities. Additionally, an exploration of the technologies developed by these groups and their current utilization will be conducted along with an assessment of how these technologies have affected the physical and natural environment. Furthermore, an outline of plans for each AI group will be presented.

Regarding international security, there is a slow convergence of the applications of AI. For instance, the United States, boasting the military largest and financial resources globally, supports staunchly the use of AI for international security, as maintaining military supremacy is one of its primary objectives. Conversely developing countries like Indonesia and the Philippines lack the funds to invest in AI and rely on support from countries such as the US. It is a common occurrence for the country the with greatest resources to have an advantage conflicts in. Consequently, concerns arise that if the US aids these countries in AI development they may employ it destructively warfare in. Hence developing countries advocate for international regulations regarding AI and usage in the context international of security.

Furthermore, Europe approaches AI and international security cautiously prioritising ethical considerations and responsible utilisation. They have already implemented regulations governing the development of AI in this context. Each country is at a different stage in implementing AI for international security with the US currently leading the pack due to its access to resources research and manufacturing capabilities poses several threats to international security. The foremost concern relates to autonomous weapons which the possess capacity to make independent judgments. This raises ethical significant dilemmas and may potentially a constitute breach of international law. The second threat pertains to the impact of AI on cyber warfare and espionage as well as the concern of weapons of mass disruption. The risk AI poses to international security covers the entire spectrum of weaponization.

The use of AI in cyber warfare and espionage introduces complexities in attribution, making it challenging to identify the source of AI-enabled breaches. Furthermore, AI presents a dual threat by mass influencing public opinion and causing havoc. This not only involves the ability manipulate to democratically elected leadership and government legitimacy but also has the potential to create chaos. By generating persuasive deepfakes of authentic speeches from world leaders AI can delegitimise governments and undermine international relations. It is important to note that AI itself not is inherently dangerous. However, its application in security carries global implications that require a comprehensive assessment collaboration, and clear guidelines. Scholars widely acknowledge the impact of AI on international security and advocate for action across various disciplines. The initial steps to address this issue could include prohibiting certain forms of AI development and establishing guidelines for AI-enabled behavior particularly in attacks cyber. Attaining a global consensus the on ethical and legal uses of AI in security policy is crucial.

To conclude striking a balance between international security and preventing AI-fuelled conflicts of is utmost importance. Measures must be taken to self-regulate AI weaponry and AI cyber operations while also prioritizing transparency. This will help prevent an AI arms race and counter information campaigns with truth.

The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own.

References

1. Arkin, W. M. (2005). The Case for Autonomous Weapons. Foreign Affairs, 84(4), 94-105.

• Discusses the ethical implications of autonomous weapons and the need for international regulation.

1. Biddle, S., Horowitz, J. B., & Lewis, J. A. (2016). AI and U.S. Foreign Policy: Principles and Policy Options. Center for a New American Security.
2. Provides an overview of AI’s role in foreign policy and offers policy recommendations.
3. Brundage, M., Danks, D., Anderson, M., & Greenberg, M. (2018). The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence: Forecasting, Prevention, and Mitigation. Future of Life Institute.
4. Focuses on the potential misuse of AI in malicious activities and proposes mitigation strategies.
5. Chalk, P. (2017). Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity: A Roadmap for the Development of AI in the Field of Cybersecurity. RAND Corporation.
6. Offers a roadmap for integrating AI into cybersecurity efforts.
7. Drell, G. S., Feigenbaum, E. A., & Nye, J. S. (2016). Artificial Intelligence and National Security. Hoover Institution.
8. Examines the intersection of AI and national security, including the implications for warfare and diplomacy.
9. Fink, C. (2019). The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Modern Warfare. Council on Foreign Relations.
10. Discusses the role of AI in modern warfare and its implications for international security.
11. Goodman, B. (2019). Deepfakes and Democracy: The Coming Infodemic. World Economic Forum.
12. Explores the impact of deepfake technology on democracy and international relations.

eurasiareview.com · May 12, 2024

7. Is China Grabbing The South China Sea?

Is China Grabbing The South China Sea? – OpEd

 May 10, 2024  0 Comments

By IDN

By Jonathan Power

eurasiareview.com · May 9, 2024

By Jonathan Power

Napoleon warned us that China was a sleeping giant best left, undisturbed. No longer. As is clear from the visit of President Xi Jinping to France this week, the giant is well awake, even happy to pay a ceremonial visit to Napoleon’s tomb, affirming its self-confidence.

Not only has the West disturbed China, often for very selfish motives, but many of the West’s elite also appear to fear the result. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the debate about China’s growing naval power and in particular its attitude towards China’s claim for sovereignty over the South China Sea, to which other bordering nations—the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, Brunei, Indonesia and Malaysia—also claim rights.

Long before Napoleon, China had Admiral Zheng He in the fifteenth century led large fleets as far away as Africa. But unlike his European contemporaries, Zheng He and his emperor voyaged mainly out of curiosity. They possessed no idea of subjugation, slavery or colonisation. They were not on any mission to “civilize”. Only in the most recent years has China given its navy prominence and even today its expenditure on naval power compared with the US or Europe is small.

Last week, ships of the Chinese Coast Guard showered with high-powered water jets Philippine fishing boats. For years there have been on-and-off clashes with the Philippines and Vietnam over territorial water rights.

It’s all been going on for a long time. Ten years ago, a Philippine warship found Chinese fishing boats close to the Scarborough Reef, a submerged shoal of rocks that the Philippines claim. The fishermen called in two Chinese civilian patrol boats. Beijing persuaded the Philippines to withdraw their warship and replace it with a civilian coast guard ship. However, China did not withdraw its fishing boats or its patrol boats. “Chicken can be a dangerous game”, The Economist editorialised.

Neighbouring countries have rushed to occupy as many of the sea’s land spots as possible. Today China controls the entire Paracel Islands and 15 reefs and shoals within the Spratlys. Both islands probably have in their waters large deposits of oil, gas and minerals. Since 2007 China has repeatedly warned foreign oil companies that cooperating with Vietnam would affect their business in China.

Historic map and the UN’s Law of the Sea Treaty

Beijing insists that its historic map, claiming the whole South China Sea, is a valid territorial claim. It argues that this has been so since the 15th century. But its contours are vague and not recognised under international law.

Contradicting this claim, China has ratified the UN’s Law of The Sea Treaty. The treaty compels states to surrender most of their historical claims in favour of the maritime zones awarded under the convention—particularly a 200-kilometre offshore economic zone. (But the US has not, shooting itself in the foot.)

The other countries involved have not stood still. The Philippines proposes that ASEAN (the regional cooperation body) set aside their disputes and form a united front to force Beijing to clarify its aims. The US has reiterated UN policy that there must be freedom of navigation in the sea and, according to a report by the International Crisis Group, Beijing is worried that US involvement will internationalize the disputes, isolating China.

The report also points out that “the proliferation of domestic actors and the complicated structure behind Chinese management of the issue has often been described with reference to the traditional myth of nine dragons stirring up the sea.”

In Beijing, there is a bulky bureaucracy which includes 11 ministerial-level government agencies, all of which have some say on sea matters. Then there are the powerful national oil companies.

Apparently, the politburo for years has not given any directives and the foreign ministry lacks the clout to bring them into line, although it has to carry the can when dealing with the outside world. Its work is complicated by the lack of legal clarity, growing nationalist opinion within China, the belief that economic growth and political stability at home outweigh foreign policy and that a vociferous military outranks the foreign ministry, even not reporting some of its decisions to the politburo.

China loses much credibility with its refusal to take the dispute to the International Court of Justice. A few years ago Nigeria took the issue of its dispute with neighbouring Cameroon over the oil-rich Bokassa peninsula to the Court. It lost and President Olusegun Obasanjo gracefully turned over the territory to Cameroon. China also refuses to use the arbitration mechanisms of the Law of the Sea.

China should lose no time in sorting out its conflicting priorities and take the Law of the Sea issues to the International Court of Justice as Nigeria did or make use of the Law of the Sea’s dispute procedures. It cannot win its case by intimidation

eurasiareview.com · May 9, 2024

8. Blinken Arrives in Ukraine to Boost Spirits, Funnel U.S. Military Aid

A change in objectives from President Zelensky? Or just an articulation of the short term critical goal?

Excerpts:

“We can clearly see how the enemy acts and their intent to stretch our forces thin,” Zelensky said on the eve of Blinken’s visit. “Our task is crystal clear: to thwart Russia’s attempt to expand the war.”

Ukraine will probably be able to prevent a breakthrough around Kharkiv but faces a serious challenge along many parts of the front, said David Lewis, professor of global politics, from the University of Exeter. “It needs to balance the defense of territory around Kharkiv with the need to contain Russian advances further south in the Donbas.”

To help stem the offensives, the U.S. has been rushing in conventional artillery rounds, interceptors, and the ATACMS, which stands for Army Tactical Missile System, which can hit any Russian target inside Ukraine, a senior U.S. official said. 

Blinken Arrives in Ukraine to Boost Spirits, Funnel U.S. Military Aid

A resurgent Russian military is pressing hard before Ukrainians can rearm

https://www.wsj.com/world/blinken-arrives-in-ukraine-to-boost-spirits-funnel-u-s-military-aid-6a7d77a6?mod=hp_lead_pos3

By Alan Cullison

 and Isabel Coles

Updated May 14, 2024 12:20 am ET

Secretary of State Antony Blinken arriving in Kyiv on Tuesday. PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

KYIV, Ukraine—Secretary of State Antony Blinken began a two-day visit to Ukraine to buttress the morale of the government in Kyiv and help channel the delivery of $60 billion in newly approved U.S. aid to help resist a grinding Russian offensive. 

The question now, though, is whether the aid, which languished for months before Congress approved it in April, is enough to daunt a resurgent Russian military that the U.S. and Blinken himself had derided as all but washed up last year. 

“I returned to Kyiv today to demonstrate our unwavering support for Ukraine as they defend their freedom against Russian aggression,” Blinken wrote on X.

With Russian forces simultaneously pushing toward the major city of Kharkiv near the Russian border and attacking Ukrainian defenses in the eastern provinces of Ukraine, “We’re obviously in a very difficult moment,” said a senior U.S. official. 

A Ukrainian tank near a front line in the Donetsk region on Sunday. PHOTO: VALENTYN OGIRENKO/REUTERS

Distracted by the outbreak of fighting in Gaza, Blinken hasn’t visited Ukraine since September, although he had promised to visit regularly. He has visited the Middle East seven times since Hamas launched its attack on Israel on Oct. 7. 

While in Kyiv on Tuesday, Blinken is expected to meet with Ukraine’s prime minister and later with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

A key objective of Blinken’s visit will be to discuss “how our supplemental assistance is going to be executed in a fashion to help shore up their defenses and enable them to take back the initiative on the battlefield,” the official said. 

That initiative could be drawing out of reach. After Russian forces breached defenses near Kharkiv last week, seizing several villages and opening a new front in the third year of the war, Ukraine was forced to funnel reinforcements to the region over the weekend. 

That could jeopardize other parts of Ukraine’s front, especially the already-strained forces in the east of the Donbas. Having seized the advantage on the battlefield, Moscow appears to be redoubling efforts before the arrival of U.S. aid, which will presumably help Ukraine stiffen its resistance, military analysts say. The senior U.S. official said that some of the new aid from the U.S. is already arriving on the front lines.

“We can clearly see how the enemy acts and their intent to stretch our forces thin,” Zelensky said on the eve of Blinken’s visit. “Our task is crystal clear: to thwart Russia’s attempt to expand the war.”

Ukraine will probably be able to prevent a breakthrough around Kharkiv but faces a serious challenge along many parts of the front, said David Lewis, professor of global politics, from the University of Exeter. “It needs to balance the defense of territory around Kharkiv with the need to contain Russian advances further south in the Donbas.”

To help stem the offensives, the U.S. has been rushing in conventional artillery rounds, interceptors, and the ATACMS, which stands for Army Tactical Missile System, which can hit any Russian target inside Ukraine, a senior U.S. official said. 

Ukraine has long pleaded for long-range precision artillery to break up Russian military logistics and attack forces before they can reach the front lines. 

But U.S. officials say that a paucity of weaponry on the front line is only part of the problem, as Ukraine is also facing a Russian military that appears to have learned from its mistakes early in the war and is now showing signs of innovation and resurgence. 

After Ukrainian successes against Russian invaders last year, Blinken gave a speech in Finland calling Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a “strategic failure” and saying that Russia’s army was badly degraded.

“The Kremlin often claimed it had the second-strongest military in the world, and many believed it,” Blinken said then. “Today, many see Russia’s military as the second-strongest in Ukraine. Its equipment, technology, leadership, troops, strategy, tactics, and morale, a case study in failure.” 

Earlier this year, U.S. officials began saying that Russia has—with the help of China, Iran and North Korea—rebuilt its military much faster than expected, and that it is now larger than it was before the onset of its invasion in 2022 and better adapted to fighting in Ukraine. 

Despite unprecedented sanctions from the U.S. and its allies, Moscow has expanded military production, and has been able to arrange workarounds for high-tech components for its weaponry, U.S. officials say.

While in Ukraine, Blinken is expected to deliver a corollary to the speech he gave in Finland and talk about Ukraine’s own effort to revamp its defense industry, which before the war made it the fourth-largest arms exporter in the world. 

Write to Alan Cullison at alan.cullison@wsj.com and Isabel Coles at isabel.coles@wsj.com

9. The Misfits Russia Is Recruiting to Spy on the West

Now every misfit will be a suspect. But someday misfits will be a protected class. (note sarcasm)

The Misfits Russia Is Recruiting to Spy on the West

Young people hired in Poland, seeing chance for ’easy money,’ take part in Russian sabotage in Europe

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/the-misfits-russia-is-recruiting-to-spy-on-the-west-7417b2b5?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Karolina Jeznach, Thomas Grove

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 and Bojan Pancevski

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Updated May 14, 2024 12:05 am ET

The Polish capital Warsaw, where leaders have supported Ukraine’s effort to fight off the Russian invasion. PHOTO: JAAP ARRIENS/ZUMA PRESS

WARSAW—Low on cash and out of his most recent minimum-wage job, Ukrainian refugee Maxim Leha, then 22, had just found a new way to make ends meet in his newly adopted home of Poland.

The job advertised on the Telegram messaging app in early 2023 didn’t appear to demand much: Spray-paint graffiti on remote fences and highway underpasses for $7 a pop. When Leha answered, a man who identified himself as Andrzej wrote back. Within days, Andrzej had upped the ante: Leha was fixing cameras along railroad lines carrying Western military aid to neighboring Ukraine.

Weeks later, Leha and 15 others were arrested in the biggest publicized spy case in Poland’s history. Andrzej, it turned out, was a front for a Russian intelligence unit that was recruiting people such as Leha—drifters looking to make a quick buck—for spying and espionage jobs since late 2022.

Late last year, Leha received a six-year sentence on espionage charges, after a trial in which he was painted as a ringleader.

“It was easy money,” Leha recently said from a jail in the Polish city of Lublin, his lanky frame under the red jumpsuit given to detainees considered most dangerous.

It is unclear whether the information provided by Leha and the other recruits directly led to Russian strikes on the shipments of Western weapons that have regularly transited into Ukraine since Russia’s February 2022 invasion.

But Western officials say Russia has successfully combined camera footage with more sophisticated efforts such as satellite surveillance to trace shipments of hardware and ammunition from Poland and elsewhere to secret warehouses in Ukraine, where they have been hit by drones and guided missiles.

“These cheap and seemingly bumbling efforts are nothing to be sneered at,” a senior Western military intelligence official said. “They are part of a large toolbox of intelligence gathering that has helped Russia destroy key materiel with minimum investment.”

The Russian Embassy in Helsinki, as Finland expelled diplomats following the invasion of Ukraine. PHOTO: JUSSI NUKARI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

A low-risk strategy

The case of the Polish spy ring opens a window onto Moscow’s renewed efforts to boost its espionage capabilities in Europe as the Kremlin is settling into a long confrontation with the West. Part of their network was hit when more than 600 Russian diplomats were expelled in the wake of the 2022 invasion. The U.K. has said that two thirds of those expelled from Europe were likely spies.

Now Russia is using chat platforms such as Telegram to recruit young, marginalized people, often immigrants and mostly men, to undertake mundane yet damaging acts of spying and sabotage. The approach—low-cost and low-risk for Moscow’s spy services—allows Russia to stoke anti-Western sentiment and reap potentially important intelligence while letting their recruits take the fall.

“Now they are trying to reconstruct their capabilities,” said Jacek Dobrzynski, spokesman for Poland’s special services coordination.

Recent weeks have seen a spate of similar spy cases. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization this month called out “an intensifying campaign of activities which Russia continues to carry out across the Euro-Atlantic area.”

British police arrested five men in April for burning down a warehouse connected with Ukraine and helping Russia identify other possible sabotage targets. That followed the arrest last year of Bulgarian spies allegedly surveilling U.K. military installations. A few weeks ago, authorities in Germany arrested two German-Russian nationals accused of passing on photographs and videos of military infrastructure.

German police detained two dual German-Russian nationals in Bayreuth last month on suspicion of spying for Moscow and seeking to disrupt Western military aid to Ukraine. PHOTO: DPA/ZUMA PRESS

Western security officials suspect Russia is responsible for the destruction of undersea internet cables and natural-gas pipelines, attacks on railroads and plans to strike military compounds.

The Kremlin didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A new recruit

This account of the Polish case, assembled from hundreds of pages of documents from the investigation and an interview with Leha, offers a rare window into Russia’s new campaign.

Leha crossed the border into Poland in late 2021, five months before the Russian invasion. He found work as a supermarket cashier, but soon looked for easier ways of making quick cash.

After a short stint driving undocumented migrants through Hungary, a job he found on Telegram that earned him three months in a Hungarian jail, he came across Andrzej’s ad.

Leha said he suspected he was part of a Russian intelligence effort. But he had a rudimentary education and a growing criminal record, and the cash helped him ignore qualms about betraying his homeland.

Andrzej paid Leha to spray slogans such as “Stop NATO” hundreds of times. After each job, Andrzej paid him in bitcoin or Ethereum.

Soon Andrzej had a bigger job: Start a fire near a Ukrainian transport company in Poland’s eastern city of Biala Podlaska. But when Leha arrived at the site, he recalled his father’s advice not to “build his happiness on someone else’s misfortune.”

Instead, he rubbed charcoal on the fence to make it appear damaged by fire, took a photo and sent it to Andrzej.

As the requests piled up, Andrzej promised Leha a car and transferred several hundred dollars in cryptocurrency that Leha used to buy a Mazda 6 GG.

Andrzej remained a cipher. He spoke with Leha in both Russian and Ukrainian, but Leha assumed he was Ukrainian from his colloquial use of the language. During phone calls, Leha gleaned that Andrzej was two hours ahead of Poland, placing him in the Moscow time zone.

When Leha said he wanted to meet and asked what he looked like, Andrzej shot back: “Like your new car.”

When he asked if he was helping the Russians, Andrzej replied, “It’s a Polish thing.”

“And what is it in reality?” Leha responded.

“It is an international thing,” he wrote back. “The goal is to show that people are bored with this war and cause a major resonance within the society.”

Polish rail networks have been a feature of surveillance efforts by alleged spies for Russia. PHOTO: ALEKSANDER KALKA/ZUMA PRESS

Watching the trains

Meanwhile, Andrzej was recruiting other young immigrants in Poland.

One was Maxim Sergeyev, a 20-year-old who had come from a town from outside Moscow to play hockey for the local Zaglebie Sosnowiec hockey team. People who knew him said he had learned almost flawless Polish and had befriended most of the team since he arrived in 2021. When Russia invaded Ukraine the next year, he signed a statement disavowing the war.

Like many young hockey players in Poland, Sergeyev was chronically short of cash. A job as a food courier ended in a bike accident. When he was arrested several months later, police found a group chat with Andrzej and dozens of pictures and videos on his cellphone of two major Warsaw train stations, cities in eastern Poland and the Malhowice-Nizankowice border crossing.

Andrzej also recruited a female student from Belarus and a teen from Ukraine. Another member of the ring, Oleksii Pronkin, a young Ukrainian, was tasked with collecting photos of the Polish Naval Academy in the coastal city of Gdynia and a nearby naval base on the Baltic Sea. He also sent Andrzej pictures of a commercial port terminal and a nearby ammunition depot. In December, Pronkin was sentenced to two years and two months in prison on charges of espionage and belonging to a criminal group.

Almost everyone who answered the job advertisement first talked with Andrzej, who would guide them through their tasks or pass them off to someone else.

Some of those who spoke with Andrzej said he sounded young; others described him as middle-aged and with a deep voice. In the end, it was never clear if he was the same person or a group of Russian intelligence officers handling the group.

Military supplies are loaded onto a plane at Poland’s Jasionka airport, a transit point for U.S. aid to Ukraine. PHOTO: CHRISTOPH SOEDER/DPA/ZUMA PRESS

For Leha’s last job, Andrzej paired him with Artem Averba, a 19-year-old Ukrainian refugee. He told them to set up cameras along the train routes carrying Western military aid into Ukraine.

To introduce the two, Andrzej set up a group Telegram chat named “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas” in late February 2023.

“Just so we’re all on the same page and that there’s no confusion among you guys,” Andrzej wrote.

The young men picked their own code names. Leha was Karim. Averba chose Erewan, or Yerevan, in English. Andrzej dropped location pins where they were meant to place the solar-powered cameras along Poland’s eastern border with Ukraine.

While on the road, Leha said he felt uneasy with Averba, driving silently while the teen spoke nonstop.

First they stopped at Jasionka, the airport outside of Rzeszow and the transit point for much of the U.S. aid bound for Ukraine. In the forest outside the airfield, Leha attached a camera to a tree with duct tape, its lens facing the runway. Averba later told police that he stayed in the car, while Leha did the work.

A few miles further east, they fixed another camera on the train tracks between Rzeszow and the Medyka border crossing “to record military aid going to Ukraine,” Averba said later in an interrogation. The two then shared the camera’s account data with Andrzej over a shared MyHome app, giving all three access to watch the footage in real time.

Driving back to Warsaw, Leha said he felt increasingly uneasy and considered quitting.

“But I didn’t tell the other guys, I didn’t trust them,” Leha, now 23, said in the Lublin jail.

On his last trip on March 3, to set up cameras around the city of Kazimierz Dolny, he parked his Mazda near the city’s old Jewish cemetery. As he was walking back to his car, at least seven counterintelligence officers swooped in and detained him.

Of the 16 arrested, 14 have reached plea deals, confessing to espionage charges in exchange for prison sentences from nine months to six years. One was placed in a correctional facility for minors.

Leha refused the plea bargain in hopes of getting a lighter sentence for what he calls his cooperation with authorities. The first hearing of his appeal is planned for next week.

When asked whether he felt remorse for working for the Russians, he stayed quiet for a moment and then said flatly: “I feel very badly about what I have done.”

“I don’t think it is fair I was painted as the head of the operation. I think they needed a scapegoat,” he added.

As he was led back by officers in riot gear to a tiny jail cell that he now shares with a convicted murderer, a guard on the other side of the glass said: “Nobody likes a traitor.”

Write to Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com and Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

Appeared in the May 14, 2024, print edition as 'The Drifters Russia Recruits for Espionage'.

10. The Biden Administration’s Commitment to Self-Sabotage

The Biden Administration’s Commitment to Self-Sabotage

Noah Rothman

May 13, 2024 2:13 PM

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-biden-administrations-commitment-to-self-sabotage/?bypass_key=OGQ1RUZaR0RkVDNGTFA5Ky92c29IQT09Ojpka3RJTW1aQldXTjVSakpCWlV0QlVYTnVSREp1UVQwOQ%3D%3D

Jim Geraghty’s stirring Morning Jolt today examined from all angles the incomprehensible political stupidity, moral vacuity, and strategic imbecility associated with the Biden administration’s attempt to promulgate the notion that it was withholding from Israel intelligence on high-ranking Hamas targets. The goal of this approach, as reported by the Washington Post, is to compel Israel to back away from an assault on Rafah in exchange for information that would lead to the neutralization of terrorists who killed and captured not only Israelis but Americans, too.

The claims retailed by at least “four people familiar with the U.S. offers” represent such a brazen abdication of presidential responsibility that it’s reasonable to question the Post’s reporting. Is the president really holding back information that could contribute to the decimation of a State Department–designated terrorist group? According to Democratic representative Adam Smith (Wash.), the answer is no.

“The crucial thing about that story is that there’s no evidence whatsoever that it’s true,” Smith said in an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “I don’t see evidence of that.” That’s a risky position for the former House Armed Services Committee chair to take as unequivocally as he did if the congressman wasn’t certain of the facts.

But Smith might have been confused. After all, the Democratic congressman also criticized Joe Biden for failing to be “as clear as he should have been” regarding the withholding of certain ordnance from Israel so as to punish Jerusalem for ordering the incursion into Rafah. Smith emphasized that the administration is merely holding back 2,000-pound “dumb bombs” that the president believes should not be introduced in Rafah, which is partly true. It is, however, also “slow-walking” the disbursement of JDAM kits that transform gravity bombs into guided munitions, which suggests that the administration is as leery of indiscriminate bombing in Gaza as they are of the more discriminating sort.

If Representative Smith is confused, he is in good company. In a bizarrely self-contradictory display in two interviews on Sunday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken rattled off a litany of grievances with the Israeli government that, taken together, make little sense. He insisted that the Israeli campaign in Gaza is a failure because “Hamas is coming back” in areas previously cleared by the Israel Defense Forces. While he remains ostensibly committed to a “shared objective to defeat Hamas,” he appeared to suggest that goal was unachievable “no matter what they do in Rafah, or if they leave and get out of Gaza, as we believe they need to do.”

Blinken confirmed Benjamin Netanyahu’s assessment that, despite Hamas’s best efforts to put human shields in harm’s way, vastly more terrorist operatives have been neutralized in Israel’s operation in Gaza than civilians. But he also stood by what he sheepishly emphasized was only a preliminary State Department report establishing Israeli conduct that is not “consistent with international humanitarian law.” He was not prepared to draw any “definitive conclusions,” though. “Our assessments will be ongoing,” Blinken added.

If you’re confused, imagine how it must feel to be a member of this administration right now. But while our confusion comes to us organically, theirs is the full flowering of a plan — convoluted though it may be. In much the same way the Biden administration was so consumed by the fear of escalation in Ukraine that its policy in support of Kyiv’s independence became internally contradictory, the White House cannot stomach the prospect of an Israeli victory that it ostensibly supports.

On Israel, the administration speaks not in one voice but in a cacophony of asynchronous soloists, all of whom likely have reason to believe their policy preferences are shared by the president and his cabinet. The result has been a muddle. Americans who support Israel today have every reason to believe Joe Biden doesn’t share their objective. Likewise, the minority who would prefer to see Israel lose the war imposed on it on October 7 have no reason to think the president has joined their cause. Both sides of the conflict are possessed of a fierce urgency they do not see reflected in the administration’s policy. In trying to please everyone, the Biden White House has achieved the opposite.

Joe Biden never wanted to be a wartime president. It is because he so desperately sought to mollify the world’s bad actors that he projected a provocative weakness, contributing to the proliferation of hot conflicts all the world over. This White House cannot envision victory, either for America or its allies. It sees only the prospect of ambiguous outcomes, to which it can muster the contribution of only half measures. And like all who fear success, the administration has embarked on a campaign of self-sabotage.

11. Facing Russian Advance, a Top Ukrainian General Paints a Bleak Picture

Facing Russian Advance, a Top Ukrainian General Paints a Bleak Picture

Ukraine’s forces are stretched thin and have minimal reserves to draw on, the chief of military intelligence said, in addition to shortages of weapons.

By Constant Méheut, Maria Varenikova and Michael Schwirtz

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

May 14, 2024, 3:31 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by Maria Varenikova · May 13, 2024

Moscow’s forces have captured at least nine villages and settlements near Kharkiv in a push that analysts say is intended to stretch Ukrainian troops and divert them from fighting elsewhere.

Listen to this article · 5:44 min Learn more

Residents from the village of Liptsi, in northeastern Ukraine, arriving at an evacuation point as they made their way to Kharkiv on Sunday.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

May 13, 2024, 9:41 a.m. ET

Ukrainian soldiers were engaged in fierce fighting on Monday in their country’s northeast, trying to fend off an advance by Russian forces who surged across the border last week to open a new line of attack near the city of Kharkiv.

Russian airstrikes on Monday were pounding Vovchansk, a small town about five miles from the border, according to Denys Yaroslavsky, a Ukrainian officer currently fighting there.

“They’re dropping five to seven bombs every three minutes,” Mr. Yaroslavsky said in a phone interview on Monday, referring to the Russian bombardment.

Vovchansk had a prewar population of about 17,000 people, and local officials have been scrambling to evacuate the estimated 200 to 300 remaining residents. Hryhoriy Shcherban, a volunteer who was in Vovchansk on Monday morning, said that he had received more than 200 requests for evacuation overnight.

Evacuees from the Ukrainian town of Vovchansk and nearby villages registering at a shelter in Kharkiv. The local authorities were said to have evacuated nearly 6,000 people since Friday.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

“We are driving around trying to find the addresses. Russia is shelling the evacuation road,” he said. “You can hear explosions all the time.”

The advance on Vovchansk followed weeks of warnings from Ukrainian officials that Russia was massing forces on the border with the aim of launching a new offensive in the northeast. Those warnings became a reality early Friday morning when Russian troops streamed across the border along two main lines — one immediately north of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, after the capital Kyiv, and the other about 12 miles to the east, around Vovchansk.

Here’s what to know about the current situation.

Rapid gains

The Ukrainian military acknowledged early Monday that Russian forces had seized a number of settlements in a rapid offensive.

“The enemy is currently achieving tactical success,” the General Staff of Ukraine said in a statement.

Russian forces have so far managed to capture at least nine villages and settlements, pushing about five miles into Ukrainian territory and seizing some 50 square miles of land, according to online maps of the battlefield posted by the Institute for the Study of War, a Washington-based think tank.

Residents from Vovchansk arriving at an evacuation point in Kharkiv. The authorities said that between 200 and 300 residents remained in Vovchansk, which had a prewar population of about 17,000.Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

Military experts and Ukrainian officials say that the Russian troops have so far mostly advanced through lightly defended and largely depopulated territory, explaining the relatively quick progress. The border in northeastern Ukraine has been subject to regular Russian shelling throughout the war, they note, which has made it difficult to establish fortified positions and has driven many civilians to flee.

Still, Russian forces are approaching more populated areas, and the fight may increase in intensity. The local authorities have already evacuated close to 6,000 people since Friday, according to Oleh Syniehubov, head of the Kharkiv region’s military administration.

What’s the goal?

Ukrainian forces were already stretched thin trying to defend a 600-mile front line running from the east of Kharkiv to the city of Kherson on the Black Sea. With the new offensive, the Russian Army is trying to further strain the Ukrainian lines and eventually break through, military experts say.

Franz-Stefan Gady, a Vienna-based military analyst, said that Russia was trying to divert Ukrainian troops from the southeastern Donbas region to make it easier for Russian troops to capture territory there.

Russia’s main objective, according to Mr. Gady, is to draw forces away from Chasiv Yar, a Ukrainian stronghold that Russian forces have been assaulting for weeks. The town lies on strategic high ground and is key to defending the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Donbas.

Ukraine has already sent reinforcements to the northeast, including from the 92nd Assault Brigade, according to Pasi Paroinen, an analyst from the Black Bird Group, an organization based in Finland that analyzes satellite imagery and social media content from the battlefield.

That unit has recently been fighting in Chasiv Yar, according to Mr. Paroinen, who said it was possible that Ukraine had drawn from elements of the brigade that were resting in Kharkiv, their home garrison.

Mykhailo Samus, the deputy director of the Ukrainian Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, a military research organization in Kyiv, said the situation had “as of now stabilized,” with Ukrainian forces managing to slow down the Russian advance.

But Mr. Samus and Mr. Paroinen both said that Russia had yet to commit large numbers of troops to the offensive — probably deploying just a few thousand soldiers — and that much would depend on Moscow’s next move.

What’s happening elsewhere?

Russian forces have in recent days also made marginal gains in southeastern Ukraine, entering the town of Krasnohorivka last week, Ukrainian officials said.

They have also slightly expanded their control over villages surrounding the city of Avdiivka, which fell to Russia in February. Experts say Russian forces might look to exploit their gains in that area to move further north toward Chasiv Yar, which is about 25 miles away, in a pincer movement.

Wounded Ukrainian soldiers near the eastern city of Avdiivka in May.Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

Elsewhere, the Russian authorities said on Monday that Ukrainian shelling had killed 19 civilians in the Belgorod region of Russia, across the border from Kharkiv.

In one particularly deadly incident, the Russian Defense Ministry said fragments from an intercepted Ukrainian missile had struck an apartment building in the region on Sunday. Vyacheslav Gladkov, the Belgorod governor, said that 15 bodies had been found in the rubble. The claims could not be independently verified; Ukrainian officials denied firing on residential areas.

Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people. More about Constant Méheut

Maria Varenikova covers Ukraine and its war with Russia. More about Maria Varenikova

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War

The New York Times · by Maria Varenikova · May 13, 2024

12. U.S. threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says

EXCLUSIVE

U.S. threats led to rupture of vital military ties, Nigerien leader says

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/14/us-threats-led-rupture-vital-military-ties-nigerien-official-says/

In an exclusive interview, Prime Minister Zeine blamed the U.S. for the breakdown in bilateral relations, culminating with the planned ouster of American troops.

By Rachel Chason

May 14, 2024 at 2:00 a.m. EDT

Demonstrators in Agadez, Niger, last month demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. (Issifou Djibo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

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NIAMEY, Niger — A crucial military relationship between the United States and its closest West African ally, the country of Niger, ruptured this spring after a visiting U.S. official made threats during last-ditch negotiations over whether American troops based there would be allowed to remain, according to the country’s prime minister.

In an exclusive interview, Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine put the blame for the breakdown squarely on the United States, accusing American officials of trying to dictate which countries Niger could partner with and failing to justify the U.S. troop presence, now scheduled to end in the coming months. Niger has been central to efforts to contain a growing Islamist insurgency in West Africa.

The rift between the former allies has created an opportunity for Russia, which has moved quickly to deepen its relationship with Niger, dispatching troops to the capital, Niamey, last month to train the Nigerien military and supplying a new air defense system. Russian and U.S. troops now occupy opposite ends of an air base.

After a military coup d’état ousted Niger’s democratically elected president last year, the United States froze security support as required by U.S. law and paused counterterrorism activities, which had involved intelligence gathering on regional militant activities from a massive drone base in the country’s north. The United States has kept more than 1,000 military personnel in place while negotiating with Niger over their status and urging the junta to begin restoring democracy.

“The Americans stayed on our soil, doing nothing while the terrorists killed people and burned towns,” Zeine said. “It is not a sign of friendship to come on our soil but let the terrorists attack us. We have seen what the United States will do to defend its allies, because we have seen Ukraine and Israel.”

Prime Minister Ali Mahaman Lamine Zeine in Niger's capital, Niamey, in December. (Balima Boureima/Anadolu/Getty Images)

Niger’s insistence that American troops depart culminated in the U.S. announcement last month that it would withdraw them. The pullout, which two U.S. officials said would begin in coming months, represents a significant setback for the Biden administration and will force it to reconfigure its strategy for countering Islamist extremists in the volatile Sahel region.

Though tense discussions between U.S. and Nigerien officials have been previously reported, Zeine’s remarks revealed the extent of the disconnect between the two countries. While the Americans were pressing their counterparts over democracy and their relations with other countries, Niger was asking for additional military equipment and what it considered a more equitable relationship between the two forces, according to his account. He also revealed just how exasperated the Nigeriens had become with the United States.

Relations with the United States have been strained since the junta took power, appointing Zeine, an economist, as prime minister two weeks later. The U.S. government condemned the coup and called for the release of President Mohamed Bazoum, who was put under house arrest.

Zeine said leaders of Niger’s new government, known as the National Council for Safeguarding the Homeland, or by its French initials CNSP, were bewildered that the United States had frozen military support while insisting on keeping the troops in the country without justifying their continued presence. The American response in the wake of Niger’s coup contrasted sharply with that of other nations, including Russia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, he said, which have welcomed the new Nigerien leaders with “open arms.”

He said the Nigerien leaders took particular umbrage at remarks by Molly Phee, the State Department’s top official for African affairs, who he said had urged the government during a March visit to Niamey to refrain from engaging with Iran and Russia in ways objectionable to Washington if Niger wanted to continue its security relationship with the United States. He also said Phee had further threatened sanctions if Niger pursued a deal to sell uranium to Iran.

“When she finished, I said, ‘Madame, I am going to summarize in two points what you have said,’” recounted Zeine, who has led negotiations with the United States. “First, you have come here to threaten us in our country. That is unacceptable. And you have come here to tell us with whom we can have relationships, which is also unacceptable. And you have done it all with a condescending tone and a lack of respect.”

A protest in Niamey last month to demand that American soldiers leave Niger. (AFP/Getty Images)

In response to Zeine’s comments, a U.S. official said: “The message to the CNSP in March was a coordinated U.S. government position, delivered in a professional manner, in response to valid concerns about developments in Niger. The CNSP was presented with a choice, not an ultimatum, about whether they wished to continue their partnership with us, respectful of our democratic values and national security interests.

“In the coming months, we will work with the CNSP to draw down U.S. forces in an orderly fashion and ultimately reposition them elsewhere, consistent with U.S. security interests,” added the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Since 2012, the United States has maintained a military presence in Niger, with most U.S. personnel stationed at the Agadez drone base, which cost about $110 million to build. That base has been “impactful” for counterterrorism efforts across the region, said Gen. Michael E. Langley, who heads U.S. military operations in Africa. In an interview earlier this year, Langley warned that the U.S. losing its footprint in Niger would “degrade our ability to do active watching and warning, including for homeland defense.”

Before ­­­the July 26 coup, in which Bazoum was ousted by the head of his presidential guard, Abdourahmane Tchiani, U.S. soldiers were providing training, intelligence and equipment to Nigerien troops. After the coup, activities were limited to those needed to ensure the safety of American troops.

American and Nigerien flags fly side by side at the base camp for personnel supporting the construction of an air base in Agadez, Niger, in 2018. (Carley Petesch/AP)

Zeine said his attempts to meet with officials in Washington were rebuffed for months. He said Salifou Modi, a former army chief now serving as vice president, drafted a new status-of-forces agreement to govern the presence of U.S. troops, but it was rejected. Still, he said, Nigerien officials had remained hopeful that the United States might provide more assistance to respond to extremist attacks, which spiked following the coup.

Shortly after the coup, Niger’s new government directed more than 1,500 French soldiers who had been stationed in Niger to leave but left open the possibility that the Americans could remain.

When Phee first arrived in Niger in December, Zeine said, he showed her photographs of Nigeriens waving American flags during protests against France, Niger’s former colonial power. While protesters set fires and smashed windows at the French Embassy, he noted, they left the U.S. Embassy untouched.

“Nigeriens were saying, ‘Americans are our friends, they will help us this time to annihilate the terrorists,’” said Zeine. “But there was radio silence.” He added that Niger would have not looked to Russia and other countries for help if the United States had responded to requests for more support, including for planes, drones and an air defense system.

Phee said in a previous interview that American officials “made the choice as stark and clear” as they could during the December meeting, emphasizing that U.S. assistance would remain suspended until Niger set a timeline for restoring democracy.

When Phee returned to Niamey in March, Zeine said, he asked Modi whether he knew how many Americans were in the country and what exactly they were doing. “He said ‘No,’” said Zeine, who recalled turning back to Phee and asking, “Can you imagine the same thing happening in the United States?”

Boys on top of a car display the flags of Niger, Burkina Faso and Russia during a protest for the immediate departure of U.S. soldiers in Niamey last month. (AFP/Getty Images)

That visit proved a turning point, he said, in large part because Phee, in hour-long opening remarks, accused the Nigerien government of reaching an agreement to sell uranium mined in Niger to Iran, which could use it for its nuclear program. He called the allegation untrue. Zeine, who was received by President Ebrahim Raisi and other senior Iranian officials in Tehran in January, said that “absolutely nothing” has been signed with Iran, adding that if a deal had been signed, it would have “not been under the table … but in front of cameras.”

He accused the United States of using the same tactics employed by George W. Bush’s administration before the invasion of Iraq in citing later-discredited intelligence information saying Saddam Hussein’s government had tried to buy uranium from Niger to use in a nuclear weapons program.

A few days after the March meeting, a junta spokesman appeared on Nigerien state television declaring the American military presence illegal. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials continued negotiating, seeking to determine what, if any, security relationship could continue.

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But concern mounted last month, when a senior U.S. Air Force leader at the base in Niger alleged that the troops there had been left in limbo and put at risk. When Zeine traveled to Washington last month, he met again with Phee and Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell, who promised Zeine that the United States would withdraw.

Although Niger is insisting that the U.S. military leave, Zeine said that his government wants to continue economic and diplomatic relations with the United States and that “no Nigerien considers the United States as the enemy.” He said he told Phee and Campbell that Niger would rather have American investors than soldiers.

“If American investors arrived, we would give them what they wanted,” he recounted telling the States Department officials. “We have uranium. We have oil. We have lithium. Come, invest. It is all we want.”

13. File Not Found: Russia Is Hacking Evidence of Its War Crimes

Conclusion:

“Winning” a war in the 21st-century will not look the same if post-conflict justice processes are sullied with suspicion and war crimes perpetrators can evade prosecution. As Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine put it: “You need to understand that the cyber war will not end even after Ukraine wins on the battlefield.” Given this, the United States, Ukraine, and its allies need to be prepared to defend against malicious cyber attacks after atrocities.

File Not Found: Russia Is Hacking Evidence of Its War Crimes - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Rhiannon Neilsen · May 14, 2024

It is often quipped that history is written by the victors. But, as the bloodshed in Ukraine drags into a third year, Russian President Vladimir Putin does not have to win his unjust war to rewrite the events of the conflict and undermine post-war justice. Russian hackers from the Federal Security Services and Main Intelligence Directorate are reportedly targeting the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, the entity responsible for documenting war crimes committed by Russian combatants on Ukrainian soil. At the same time, the International Criminal Court declared that it had been hacked, having “detected anomalous activity” in its systems. The hackers’ aim? To obtain — even delete — evidence of war crimes and help Russians arrested in Ukraine to “avoid prosecution and move them back to Russia.” Russia’s interest in meddling with the prosecution of alleged war crimes is blatant. The International Criminal Court has a current arrest warrant out for Putin himself for the forcible transferal of Ukrainian children to Russia (a violation of the genocide article of the Rome Statute). It also has ongoing investigations regarding Russian war crimes in both Ukraine and Georgia. Russia is no stranger to doctoring its official records. For example, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin famously blotted out from photographs those whom he ordered to be purged. But that was Moscow manipulating itsown records. Today, Russia is waging cyber attacks against others’ systems in order to alter evidence of its atrocities and thus subvert war crime tribunals.

Russia’s breach of the digital depositories of war crime evidence highlights two new, troubling realities of 21st-century wars. First, it is widely recognized that perpetrators are using cyberspace and social media to organize, fund, execute, and celebrate their atrocities. Indeed, Russia has consistently deployed cyber attacks as part of its unjust war against Ukraine. Some claim that such operations have had little effect and are even backfiring. Others maintain that, despite their lack of “shock and awe”, Russia’s persistent cyber attacks form a strategically valuable part of Putin’s offense. Either way, this recent revelation signals a worrying development: Perpetrators of atrocities are likely to employ offensive cyber operations to cover up their battlefield crimes. Second, war crime trials are already fraught with complexity, accusations of victors’ justice, legal exasperation, perfunctory showmanship, abortive reconciliation, and issues regarding postwar stability. Cyber operations that contaminate evidence are yet another hurdle in the broader pursuit of justice — and they will continue after the bullets stop flying.

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Lies, AI, and Tainted Trials

Russia’s cyber incursions into war crime databases are alarming. If the Russian hackers can retrieve information pertinent to war criminal cases, their goal (according to the Office of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General) will be to extradite accused Russian-affiliated perpetrators to escape prosecution.

However, there is an even scarier prospect that is not being reported. If Russian hackers obtain access to sensitive evidence of war crimes, they can not only steal it, but also delete, manipulate, and supplant it with fictitious, AI-generated evidence — entirely unbeknownst to system operators. Via the application of AI, individuals can “manipulate images, video, audio and text in such a way that even the keenest observers can be deceived.” A prime example is deepfakes. There are already widespread calls around the dangers of deepfakes in war — including in the Russo-Ukrainian conflict itself (although this quickly became a notorious failure).

Less has been said about deepfakes postwar and in war crime tribunals. The hackers — once in the system — could plant false (AI-generated) images, videos, and audios that cast doubt on whether war crimes were committed by Russian combatants. Or deepfakes could make it appear as though Ukrainian forces were perpetrating war crimes: mutilation of Russian corpses, rape of Russian soldiers, or torturing Russian prisoners of war. Depending on quality and quantity, the fake photos or videos could muddy the waters about what is true and what is false. The potential damage of misleading AI-generated content — especially audio deepfakes, which may be harder to verify — is serious, and automatic deepfake detectors are still in development.

Even breaching the database without making any changes, or just the public sense that the database could hypothetically be breached (even if there is no evidence of sabotage), could raise questions about the validity of the evidence. Russian disinformation campaigns are designed to elicit public division and distrust — including when there is no viable proof of the claims being made. At the very least, hacking these systems could lead to tribunal cases being painstakingly drawn out, delaying the justice owed to victims and their families. Worse still, hacked information could lead to false accusations, acquittals, and cases being thrown out altogether due to insufficient, unclear, or tainted evidence.

Digital evidence pertinent to atrocities and violations of international humanitarian law, by any party to an armed conflict, is strictly off limits. This is especially the case given states’ duties under customary international law to investigate and prosecute violations of the laws of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The preservation of war crime data repositories is therefore critical to facilitate such obligations.

Of course, this does not mean that all covert cyber operations are inherently wrong. According to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Handbook on Psychological Operations, information operations that “influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp adversarial human and automated decision making” can be “conducted … at all levels of war”. Elsewhere, I have argued for hacking into adversaries’ networks and clandestinely tampering data resident in those systems to preventatrocities. Specifically, I suggested manipulating atrocity perpetrators’ information so that it delays their operations. This includes subtly misrouting weapons shipments, editing concentration camp blueprints (such that they cannot be properly built), or slightly altering orders in a way that does not “raise suspicion, but are sufficient to redirect, forestall, or confuse [the enemy’s] subordinates.” Further, I have suggested that cyber enabled psychological operations — like the Ukrainian hacktivists’ “Patriotic Photoshoot” campaign last year — may be morally preferable to kinetic uses of force because they are less harmful (although I also raised questions over who is a liable target in such cyber operations). Furtive hacking operations and (dis)information campaigns are an easier and quicker way to thicken the fog of war than human intelligence operations — and, as others have highlighted, ambiguity can be an asset.

Crucially, to reiterate, the cyber operations I defend are to help parry the commission of atrocity crimes — not obfuscate them. Russia, by contrast, is employing cyber operations to dodge accountability for its grave abuses — torture, sexual assault, indiscriminate killing, inhumane treatment, and summary executions — of Ukrainians.

All of this is occurring against the backdrop of social media companies deleting videos and photos of potential war crimes uploaded by victims, witnesses, activists, journalists, and even the perpetrators themselves (often as “trophies”). For years, corporations like Meta, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube have been using AI to rapidly removeposts that violate their standards regarding gratuitous, gory, and gruesome content. But they have not been archiving this evidence. Crucial content that could help hold perpetrators to account is lost.

The War After the War

The fight for justice is as important as the fight with tanks, drones, and bombs. In light of Russia’s hacks, three responses are urgently required.

First, to the best extent possible, the United States and its allies should raise awareness regarding Russia’s attempts to interfere with Ukraine’s and the International Criminal Court’s databases. As part of this, greater attention needs to be afforded to the cyber defense of specifically those digital depositories. It is of paramount importance to preserve the integrity of war crime evidence to facilitate justice for lives lost and egregious rights violations. No one — especially not the accused — can be allowed to tamper with such sensitive information.

Second, social media corporations need to improve how they balance deleting graphic content and archiving evidence. As Alexa Koenig has argued, Big Tech corporations, collaborating with humanitarian and human rights organizations, need to develop what she calls “evidence vaults” or “evidence lockers” for this reason. Despite early interest from social media companies, little progress has been made. Indeed, three months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, four legislators in the U.S. Congress called on the heads of TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Meta to preserve and archive possible evidence of war crimes in Ukraine.

This is not to say that corporations are uninvolved in protecting certain cyber infrastructures amidst the war. Far from it. For instance, very early on in the conflict, Microsoft helped Ukraine upload critical government data to the cloud. This was crucial because “the Ukrainian government still operated exclusively on servers located in major government buildings” which are “extremely vulnerable to missile attacks and their physical destruction could paralyze the entire work of the country’s top leadership.” But, as of late November last year, social media platforms have yet to establish a repository specifically for war crime evidence. Given the escalation of violent conflict in Ukraine and in Gaza, the need is even more apparent.

Third, as part of its defensive war, Ukraine should continue to proactively prevent Russian hackers from breaching its digital databases via what the United States would regard as cyber-enabled “persistent engagement,” “defending forward,” and “integrated deterrence.” Moreover, while Ukrainians did not believe Russia’s deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy calling for the cessation of hostilities, more should be done to develop technologies to identify deepfakes and “cheap fakes” (easily edited or manipulated videos, such by cropping footage). Additional Ukrainian public messaging could also help “inoculate” individuals from disinformation via “prebunking” (as opposed to debunking). Ukraine should also continue to consistently remind its citizens that Russian propaganda will aim to weaken public resolve to defend themselves.

Knowing that these efforts are now part of Putin’s war strategy, irrespective of whether he is victorious, means Ukraine’s own war strategy should shift. Previously, there has been a strict delineation between the collection, retention, and protection of war crime evidence and the war itself. No more. Not in cyberspace.

“Winning” a war in the 21st-century will not look the same if post-conflict justice processes are sullied with suspicion and war crimes perpetrators can evade prosecution. As Yurii Shchyhol, the head of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine put it: “You need to understand that the cyber war will not end even after Ukraine wins on the battlefield.” Given this, the United States, Ukraine, and its allies need to be prepared to defend against malicious cyber attacks after atrocities.

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Rhiannon Neilsen, Ph.D. is the Cyber Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, Stanford University. She has recently published on cyber and atrocity crimes, the Russo-Ukraine war, psychological operations, and covert cyber-operations. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, a research consultant for the Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict at the University of Oxford, and a visiting fellow at the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Rhiannon Neilsen · May 14, 2024

14. Every Arsenal Needs Its Fans: The Missing Piece in the National Defense Industrial Strategy Is Voters

Excerpts:

Conclusion

America’s arsenal needs fans. It needs the equivalents to Arsenal’s RedAction, voters willing to do the hard work of reaching out to people, organizing meetings, and talking with defense insiders and, more frequently, defense outsiders, about America’s arsenal. It needs supporters who can comfortably speak with their neighbors about why the arsenal matters and how transforming it will make a positive impact for the nation, their community, their families, and them as individuals.

Activating such fans requires political infrastructure, the spaces and organizations where people connect, build relationships and skills, and mobilize for advocacy and electoral purposes. And as with sports, mobilizing fans requires an intentional strategy that harnesses the infrastructure for coordinated action. Arsenal Football Club had to make a strategic commitment to working with and empowering its most ardent fans in order to unleash their full potential.

The defense industry and its civil society partners should make a similar commitment today. Right now, America’s defense sector has the best players and the finest coaches in the league. But the greatest championship teams, those that don’t just win but dominate the competition, need more. They need die-hard fans.

Every Arsenal Needs Its Fans: The Missing Piece in the National Defense Industrial Strategy Is Voters - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Dan Vallone · May 14, 2024

In 2022, Arsenal Football Club witnessed something it had not seen in years: rambunctious fans riling up the stadium for the entire game. Anchored by fan groups such as RedAction and the Ashburton Army, games at Emirates Stadium transformed from staid events, where the atmosphere was compared to that of a library, to wild, raucous contests where fans never stopped rallying the club. This transformation benefited from strong performances on the field, but the switch flipped when the club cultivated and supported its hardcore fans, those who wanted to make the games as fun as possible but lacked resourcing and access. Arsenal, it turns out, needed to activate its fans to truly take off.

Such is the case with America’s arsenal as well. That the arsenal for democracy needs a dramatic transformation is clear. Policy experts, military officials, and political leaders from both sides of the aisle have all called for urgent reforms to the nation’s defense-industrial base. And there has been progress — the Department of Defense recently released its first ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, for example. But among the many challenges this strategy faces, one weakness stands out: the absence of any deep public support for reinvigorating the arsenal.

This reflects both short- and long-term developments. More recently, domestic considerations have dominated electoral politics, reducing the incentive for political actors to prioritize defense spending as a campaign or governing issue. The longer-term drivers include the consolidation of the defense industry and the professionalization of the national security sector, trends that have (inadvertently) rendered defense policy debates less accessible for the citizenry at large.

Specifically, there is little political infrastructure to organize and mobilize voters across the political spectrum to support the “generational change” called for in the National Defense Industrial Strategy. Political infrastructure in this context refers to organizations and associations that connect Americans for collective political action. The defense sector’s political infrastructure is thin and highly professional, concentrated narrowly among defense insiders, with few organizations that interface with Americans outside the sector at any kind of scale. This makes for an effective lobby able to skillfully advocate on Capitol Hill, but not a movement able to activate legions of committed supporters.

The private sector should step in and create political infrastructure that can drive dramatic improvements to the defense-industrial base. This will involve thickening existing infrastructure, creating new civic and political organizations, and channeling the public towards sustained engagement in budget and policy debates. The public sector lacks the capabilities for this kind of cross-partisan public engagement, but American business, philanthropy, trade associations, think tanks, and existing civil society groups can lead the way and activate die-hard fans for America’s arsenal.

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The Thinning Out of Defense Political Infrastructure

In his March 1983 address to the nation on defense, President Ronald Regan described his defense plans, and specifically the Strategic Defense Initiative, by saying: “My fellow Americans, tonight we’re launching an effort which holds the promise of changing the course of human history.” The same ambition is needed today for a once-in-a-generation initiative to transform the defense-industrial base. This will involve increasing the budget by 50 percent or more and require prioritizing America’s arsenal over compelling policy alternatives. Yet absent from most analyses of the situation and from the broader policy discussion is any real plan for generating the public support necessary to drive this kind of a commitment.

This is a major challenge. While 77 percent of American adults said they support increased government spending on the military, national security is ranked as a top concern by few Americans. Only 1 percent of Americans had national security as the top concern in the latest Gallup data and only 40 percent of Americanstold the Pew Research Center that strengthening the military should be a top priority compared with 73 percent who said strengthening the economy should be the top issue. This data suggests that while Americans might support increased defense spending in the abstract, there is no mass constituency demanding major reforms, especially when presented with competing demands.

Indeed, Americans are just as likely to support cuts to the defense budget as they are increases. Americans are also more likely to prioritize a range of other policy issues, such as immigration, the economy, and the budget deficit. While recent polling suggests Americans might be paying more attention to foreign affairs, there is no evidence to suggest voters will support a massive effort to invigorate the arsenal. If anything, worsening fiscal constraints — this year debt payments are set to exceed outlays for defense — could make Americans even less inclined to increase the defense budget.

It would be easy to attribute the public opinion challenge to more recent developments. Frustrations with “endless wars” caused many Americans to turn more inward. A hyper-polarized politics may have distracted from substantive issues such as defense. Then the worst inflation in 40 years held voters’ attention even as the national security environment worsened dramatically.

But there are also longer-term societal shifts that have changed the defense sector’s political infrastructure and, as a consequence, made the defense-industrial base a priority issue for fewer Americans. The first of these trends is the reduction in the number of people, places, and businesses directly impacted by the military and defense industry.

In 1985, for example, at the height of America’s last peacetime transformation of its arsenal, approximately 3.1 million Americans worked in defense-related industry. As the National Defense Industrial Strategy notes, there are now 1.9 million fewer people working in the industry, even though the total population has increased by almost 100 million. Similarly, over the same time period, the active-duty force has dropped from over 2 million to approximately 1.3 million.

This decline tracks the reduction of physical settings or places directly connected to the defense budget. Over the past half-century, more than 100 major installations closed as part of the Base Realignment and Closure Commission process. As a result, whole sections of the country lost geographic connection to the defense sector.

Finally, the presence of businesses that serve the defense sector has shrunk over time. This reflects both consolidation and geographic concentration. While there are benefits to creating defense-industrial clusters or hubs, the net effect of these changes has been to dramatically reduce the proportion of voters who regularly take part in or directly experience defense spending conversations and decisions.

Imagine looking at a map of the country that had a small light showing every household where America’s arsenal was a kitchen table issue. Going from 1985 to the present would show a steady march towards darkness. There would be a brief explosion of light during the height of the war on terror, but relatively quickly the lights would start disappearing again. By the time you got to the present, there would be bright spots around places like Washington D.C., Huntsville, San Diego, Norfolk, and Dallas, among others, but most of the country would be dark.

Figure 1. Department of Defense Contract Spending by State, FY2022. Source: Congressional Research Service, “The U.S. Defense Industrial Base: Background and Issues for Congress”.

As challenging as such a map is for public engagement, it’s not the only obstacle. Just as defense conversations have grown more remote for most Americans, they have also become much less accessible. Driven in part by technological innovation, but even more so by the overall professionalization of the national security sector, defense policy debates now feature much greater technical sophistication than in earlier periods. This shift has yielded many advantages, but it has also led to political infrastructure focused on winning narrow (if important) policy disputes among professionals versus mobilizing the mass public.

The story of how a highly specialized national security profession came to dominate defense conversations does not have a defined starting point, but it would be reasonable to trace it to the development of atomic weapons in the 1940s. As Morris Janowitz articulated in 1960 with The Professional Soldier, atomic weapons were a catalyst for both technological and organizational revolutions in warfare, with specialists and managers assuming positions of greater importance. By 1960, this was already evident among defense contractors. Whereas the arsenal that won World War II was built primarily by Americans with little to no prior military training or expertise, the arsenal that won the Cold War was built by Americans whose experience was almost exclusively with the defense establishment.

The story extends far beyond the defense–industrial base, however. National security studies as an academic discipline took off in the aftermath of World War II. The National Security Act of 1947 codified into a law a more defined and civilianized defense establishment. In the same time period, universities opened new, security-focused graduate programs and journals. In 1948, RAND became an independent organization and helped usher this new field into being. Over the ensuing decades, the national security profession has continued to grow. As exemplified by this media platform, there is now a global ecosystem of professionals able to discuss, debate, develop, invest in, and otherwise take action on highly specialized national security ideas, strategies, and technologies.

The professionalization of the defense sector reflects a broader pattern in American civil society. A recent study of organizations that provide civic opportunity found that over the past half-century, civil society has become dominated by issue-specific and professional organizations, which frequently offer less opportunities for Americans who lack subject-matter expertise to build civic skills. While further study is needed, such findings support the idea that the defense sector has grown increasingly professional and insular.

The benefits of this development are enormous. Deep reservoirs of specialized knowledge and experience enabled America’s Offset Strategy so pivotal to ending the Cold War. Professionalization helped reduce barriers to participating in national security and enabled the field to harness the talents and contributions of a much wider array of scholars, entrepreneurs, scientists, servicemembers, and civil servants. Finally, it fortified American civil-military relations through all the tumult of the past several decades.

Yet the professionalization of the defense sector has also come with costs, many of which have grown more acute in the post-Cold War era. Over the past several decades, liberals and conservatives have grown more polarized in their views and Congress has become more divided in how it acts on legislation. This same time period has also seen a decline in Americans’ trust in a variety of institutions and in how honest or ethical they perceive various professions to be. This landscape increases the risks any major national policy effort faces, as it is now easier to frame an issue as partisan or as a project of elites.

The defense sector is highly vulnerable to such risks. Much of the defense conversation now plays out in academic journals and other outlets with paywalls or via think tank activities that require familiarity with a highly technical vocabulary prone to jargon. Lobbying and advocacy related to the defense budget is primarily the terrain of a narrow set of industry and political organizations staffed by experts. And unless someone serves in the military or takes specialized courses in college or graduate school, there are few opportunities in American life to gain the familiarity with the defense space necessary to effectively influence policy debates.

This setup leads to a paradoxical situation, where the defense sector’s political infrastructure can successfully lobby and advance meaningful reform, but it cannot drive transformational change. This was evident with the FY2024 appropriations as well as with President Joe Biden’s FY2025 budget. One of the highlights from the appropriations was an $800 million increase to the budget for the Defense Innovation Unit. This is an important improvement to America’s arsenal that had the support of well-positioned expert advocates — in this case the Silicon Valley Defense Group, among others — but the overall budget was only $27 billion greater than FY2023 funding, far from a revolutionary shift. The FY2025 budget proposal, operating under caps imposed by the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, actually reflects negative real growth over the past two years when factoring in inflation.

Achieving the defense-industrial domination called for in the National Defense Industrial Strategy will require new political infrastructure that engages the mass American public. Forging such networks is an urgent challenge — and opportunity — that the private sector should take up.

How The Private Sector Can Generate Fans for America’s Arsenal

A successful, privately led effort to mobilize support for reviving the defense-industrial base should have three layers. First, thickening existing political infrastructure. Second, creating new political infrastructure that connects with Americans who lack a direct relationship with the defense sector. Finally, forging an intentional political strategy, with clear goals, plans, and compelling narratives.

If we think back to the map showing where Americans regularly engage with the defense sector, thickening political infrastructure is about making bright spots brighter. The goal is to ensure that as many people as possible who have a direct connection to the arsenal are also connected to organizations that can move them towards political action. For example, Department of Defense Manufacturing Innovation Institutes have over 2,000 member organizations and in just one year they had over 80,000 Americans interact with them. Are all these organizations and individuals connected to a membership or advocacy organization focused on defense policy? Could a campaign in support of America’s arsenal easily reach all these people? What about parents of students involved in programs funded through the Department of Defense’s STEM Strategic Plan? Or the more than 360 organizations participating in the Microelectronics Commons initiative? Thickening political infrastructure is about making sure the answer to all these questions is yes.

Creating new infrastructure is about turning dark spots on our map bright. This work will look differently across populations and will include both online and offline efforts. Examples of new political infrastructure could be defense industry clubs at graduate business, computer science, or engineering schools or new skilled trades programs that introduce people to defense contractors. But new infrastructure can also have a lighter touch. It could be discussion groups within religious communities that bring in speakers from the defense sector or volunteers committed to sharing news and information about the defense-industrial base on community social media pages. The entry points will be varied. The key is to reach beyond defense insiders, which requires meeting people where they are and offering programming and experiences that speak to their immediate needs, interests, and identities. Over time, this new infrastructure builds skills and relationships critical for individuals to feel part of the defense movement.

The final piece is an intentional political strategy that mobilizes the infrastructure to influence policy and electoral outcomes. The key elements for this piece are policy goals (the “what”), advocacy and electoral plans (the “where” and “how” of influence), and bold narratives (the “why”) that cut through today’s fractured information landscape.

The narrative piece is critical. America’s arsenal needs stories that go beyond the text of policy and tell us who we are, why this matters, and what it will feel like when we succeed. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative provides an example of how the private sector can create such narratives. First, over the course of the 1970s and early 1980s, businesses, most notably technology firms in the recently named Silicon Valley, forged new political infrastructure tied to America’s arsenal and created an optimistic narrative about technology’s potential for improving human society. Then in 1982, as part of a broader initiative on national security, the Heritage Foundation published “High Frontier: A New National Strategy.” This report tapped into the existing political infrastructure to offer a new story about America’s defense-industrial base.

The “High Frontier” story had three key narrative elements. First, it offered a new framework — “assured survival” — to replace “mutual assured destruction.” Second, it positioned potential space systems as fundamentally defensive in nature. Finally, it established a historical context, branding the flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia “a new era of human activity on the High Frontier of space.” Reagan picked up on all three of these elements in his 1983 address to the nation.

A comparable effort is needed today to discern, craft, and elevate compelling narratives for the defense sector. Rather than attempt to generate such narratives ex ante, a better approach is to surface ideas through conversations with regular Americans from outside the defense space. Finding calls to action that are neither hyper-partisan nor blandly consensus-oriented will not be easy, but the best source for inspiration is the American people themselves.

All of these actions, from making existing political infrastructure denser and standing up new organizations to moving the whole network towards a coherent political strategy, are ones the private sector can lead. The defense ecosystem, including partners in philanthropy, think tanks, and civil society, should provide the leadership, resources, and support necessary to turn this sketch into reality and light up the map.

Conclusion

America’s arsenal needs fans. It needs the equivalents to Arsenal’s RedAction, voters willing to do the hard work of reaching out to people, organizing meetings, and talking with defense insiders and, more frequently, defense outsiders, about America’s arsenal. It needs supporters who can comfortably speak with their neighbors about why the arsenal matters and how transforming it will make a positive impact for the nation, their community, their families, and them as individuals.

Activating such fans requires political infrastructure, the spaces and organizations where people connect, build relationships and skills, and mobilize for advocacy and electoral purposes. And as with sports, mobilizing fans requires an intentional strategy that harnesses the infrastructure for coordinated action. Arsenal Football Club had to make a strategic commitment to working with and empowering its most ardent fans in order to unleash their full potential.

The defense industry and its civil society partners should make a similar commitment today. Right now, America’s defense sector has the best players and the finest coaches in the league. But the greatest championship teams, those that don’t just win but dominate the competition, need more. They need die-hard fans.

Become a Member

Dan Vallone is principal at Polarization Risk Advisory, a research and strategy consulting firm focused on helping institutions manage risks from polarization. Dan is a former Army officer.

Image:Wikimedia

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Dan Vallone · May 14, 2024

​15. Understanding the Counterdrone Fight: Insights from Combat in Iraq and Syria

Excerpts:

As a reminder, the experience of 2/10 was purely a defensive fight. The challenges of performing C-UAS in the offense for a mobile fight are amplified. The current arsenal of missile interceptors, radars, directed-energy lasers, and nonkinetic defeat systems were only tested in fixed-site settings. The notion of establishing a layered air defense against Group 2 and 3 OWAUAS for major attacks like a wet gap crossing would require significant adaptations to the methods developed by 2/10 in OIR.

Still, static defense against OWAUAS will also remain relevant in future conflicts. Key theater support nodes like airports and seaports of debarkation will always serve as high-payoff targets within range of drone attacks. The UAS variants intercepted by 2/10 were often launched hundreds of kilometers from their intended targets. Attack drone ranges and payloads will continue to increase over time, so no matter how mobile frontline troops are in a LSCO fight, rear areas will need robust C-UAS defenses as well.

The C-UAS fight in CJTF OIR was a true example of what the chief of staff of the Army describes as transforming in contact. Consistent evaluation and testing by leaders across the tactical level was critical. Junior leaders found creative ways to isolate variables and test them. They could not just trust that the “green” status on a dashboard was good enough. They had to anticipate the next threat, then start adjusting and understanding their equipment. When select outstations began discovering new solutions, the unit organized weekly review sessions over secure teleconference video calls to spread lessons across the formation. It became a race for information as the enemy continually adapted against our defensive measures in real time.

The defense by 2/10 against more than 170 attacks from state-sponsored militia groups can help orient leaders to the challenges that the US military will face in future conflicts. Combat will continue to evolve, but the principles and insights outlined above are meant to accelerate the learning curve and highlight concerns for maneuver formations as our enemies push us toward a multidimension fight.

Understanding the Counterdrone Fight: Insights from Combat in Iraq and Syria - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by D. Max Ferguson, Russell Lemler · May 14, 2024

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Between August 2023 and April 2024, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division was deployed across Iraq and Syria in support of Operation Inherent Resolve. During that time, state-sponsored militia groups launched over 170 attacks against a small network of coalition bases that 2/10 was responsible for defending. The brigade’s deployment represents the most recent and direct experience of any US Army unit defending against drone attacks and, consequently, an important set of lessons on countering and defending against rockets, missiles, and drones of all sizes.

The soldiers of 2/10 experienced a wide range of enemy attacks against conventional munitions, from rockets and mortars to cluster munitions and short-range ballistic missiles. But the enemy’s weapon of choice was the one-way attack unmanned aircraft system (OWAUAS). These drones were mostly little, propeller-driven, fixed-wing craft made of carbon fiber, metal, and plastic. They flew low, sometimes less than a hundred feet off the ground, and depending on the type, their wingspan was a few feet to a few meters. Their US military equivalents are between a Scan Eagle and a Shadow. These systems have no landing gear because they’re designed to land on their noses with a bang.

Figure 1. Group 1–5 Unmanned Aircraft System Overview

The low-flying, low-cost, highly accurate, and prolific drones are irresistibly effective. Despite their small size, one-way attack drones on the battlefield today have tremendous range. Small to mid-sized one-way attack OWAUAS can travel as far as 2,500 kilometers, distances more akin to land attack cruise missiles and ballistic missiles than any tube-based artillery. Their versatility, reach, cost, and precision will increasingly make them appealing options for any modern combatant, no matter its global stature or military size.

Drawing out the Lessons for Large-Scale Combat Operations

In one sense, 2/10 experienced an unprecedented number of air attacks. In a few short months, 2/10 accumulated more combat experience in defending against OWAUAS than any unit in the Army. Yet this experience may soon seem miniscule compared to future conflicts. The number of attacks 2/10 handled over four months could conceivably occur in just a few days—or less. In Ukraine, for example, Russia has launched dozens of drones in single strikes. The US Army should prepare to encounter this frequency and scope of attacks in a future large-scale combat operations (LSCO) fight.

Context matters. The soldiers of 2/10 were employed in a very distinct role, defending from established fixed sites with reliable connectivity, hardened bunkers, and air mobility that was limited by electromagnetic interference, adversary surface-to-air weapons, and political constraints but still only partially contested. Most importantly, 2/10’s fight was a purely defensive one. Even when some of the counter–unmanned aircraft systems (C-UAS) capabilities were designed to be mobile, they were employed as part of a static defense. The base defense operations centers were well established and operated in controlled environments.

The attacks were continual but measured, nothing like the artillery barrages that Russia employs in Ukraine or what we know is possible for drone swarms from a well-supplied enemy. The OWAUAS salvos against 2/10 came mostly in singles and doubles. Rockets and missiles came in sporadic batches, sometimes a little over a dozen at a time. The consistent but low volume attacks were by the enemy’s design under the unique circumstances of the conflict. Thomas Friedman described the conflict as a “shadow war” and “the most dangerous game of chicken going on anywhere on the planet today” after visiting several CJTF-OIR (Combined Joint Task Force–Operation Inherent Resolve) outstations with the commander of US Central Command in February 2024. Escalation was carefully managed on all sides to apply pressure as part of a campaign of coercion. The types of attacks that 2/10 experienced were distinct to this particular conflict, which itself does not represent what the US Army will face during LSCO.

Still, we must pull lessons where we can, not least because artillery and aerial attacks will dominate in the next fight. Sifting through the unique characteristics of the C-UAS fight that 2/10 experienced in OIR reveals fundamental characteristics about C-UAS operations that need to be captured and applied to US Army operations.

The Three Types of Defenses: Kinetic, Nonkinetic, and Shelter

At the end of the day, there are three ways to defend against one-way attack drones: you can shoot them down, you can hit them with electronic interference, or you can seek shelter and absorb the hits.

Shooting a drone down using kinetic defeat comes in the form of missiles, guns, and directed energy lasers. Nonkinetic electronic defeat options vary depending on how the drone is controlled. The effects vary as well. If the drone is actively piloted, you can target the link between the ground control station and the aircraft. If the drone is GPS-guided, you can target the link between the GPS and the satellite. The enemy is constantly adapting technology and probing vulnerabilities in sensors and radar coverage. In just nine months, 2/10 saw advances in attack vector choice, GPS hardening, and other adaptations.

Seeking shelter varies by type of operation. In a deliberate defense, it means going to reinforced bunkers. On the offense or a hasty defense, shelter might vary from a rapidly dug foxhole to occupying a hard clad building or commandeering a basement or cellar.

All of these methods of defense rely first and foremost on detection. Bunkers only work if you’re inside one. You can only alert personnel to occupy a bunker if your sensors detect the threat with ample time and your alerts systems are working properly. The earlier you detect a threat (drone, rocket, missile, or artillery), the sooner you can alert the force to seek shelter while the air defense operators work to employ their systems to defeat the threat.

Overall, like any other battle plan, C-UAS operations are a multilayered multifaceted defense in depth. The best way to protect the force is through a combination of both active and passive defensive measures. Below are some observations on these different measures for leaders to consider.

Kinetic Defeat Considerations

Each kinetic option has limitations and constraints, just like any other weapon system. Missiles are most effective at range and provide standoff distance, but different systems have different time requirements to engage a threat. Patriot batteries have the best range and altitude but are designed for ballistic missiles and defense against high-performance aircraft (jets and Group 4–5 drones).

There are smaller missiles designed specifically for low- to mid-altitude drones (Group 1–3) and low-performance, principally propeller-driven aircraft. These drone interceptors range beyond ten kilometers with the right terrain and radar coverage. Initial missile variants took an uncomfortable amount of time to spin up before being ready to launch. But when these missiles do find their targets, they produce impressive displays of aerial acrobatics and precision.

These short-range air defense missiles were lifesavers for 2/10’s C-UAS fight, but they have important limitations in a LSCO context. Producing these missiles is a sophisticated and labor-intensive effort. Current missile variants can cost upwards of $100,000 each, about ten times the cost of each drone they defeat. Manufacturing outputs are sufficient for the consumption rates in OIR, but a future conflict could see an exponential demand for such systems on a global scale.

Guns, like the C-RAM (Counter Rocket, Artillery, Mortar), are more responsive and cost efficient than missiles, but their range is uncomfortably close. The Land Phalanx Weapon System (LPWS) fires 20-millimeter self-detonating rounds from a six-barrel Gatling gun. The LPWS is a variant of the Navy’s Phalanx Close-In Weapon System originally designed in the 1970s. As the name implies, it is only capable of defending against immediate threats (roughly within one kilometer). The LPWS operates on a trailer, with a limited mobile application, and is best used to defend key nodes rather than mobile troop formations at the edge of battle.

Directed-energy weapons are steadily emerging on the battlefield to complement traditional kinetic defeat options. During its deployment, 2/10 tested and employed several early variants of these short-range, directed-energy systems as both fixed-site and mobile platforms. They are futuristic and impressive in concept but work more as a slow burn than a Star Wars weapon. A laser might knock a drone out of the sky or deflect it enough to miss the intended target, but it might also just singe the paint off the drone before it dives into its destination. The drone’s distance, speed, and construction material, combined with the laser’s power output, time of acquisition, and target-lock capability, will determine effectiveness.

The US Army will face constraints with the employment of lasers in a LSCO environment. The amount of available power is important, so austere sites and mobile systems for land applications will require more technological advancements. Moreover, directed-energy weapons are hard to ruggedize and rely on sensitive components to concentrate the energy for effects.

Therefore, lasers have a promising future in the Army’s C-UAS arsenal, but they are still in the early stages of development and fielding. Their dispersion across the battlefield will depend on advancements in mobile power generation and whether the systems can be built to withstand the rough-and-tumble nature of combined arms maneuver.

Nonkinetic Defeat Considerations

There are several benefits to nonkinetic electronic warfare (EW) systems in the C-UAS fight, but these also have several important limitations and nuances. Electronic defeat equipment works by disrupting the link between the drone and the control station or by interfering with the drone’s navigation. Operationally, 2/10 found these systems most effective against smaller drones, especially commercially developed quadcopters and reconnaissance drones controlled by a ground station. When OWAUAS are guided by preprogrammed waypoints, some electronic countermeasures might still work, but kinetic defeat options are currently more effective.

A key consideration that 2/10 faced when employing various forms of EW was the secondary effect some electronic weapons can have on friendly communication systems. Some EW platforms use radar detections to target specific drones or interrupt select frequencies to redirect or disable drones outright. If these precision options are not available or not effective, other EW countermeasures include broad electromagnetic interference capabilities. Like any other electronic countermeasure system—for example, Duke systems designed to defend against improvised explosive devices—C-UAS EW platforms require regular updates and new fills to stay up with the regional threats.

Note that while more powerful EW measures can achieve the desired results, the effects sometimes come at a cost. Emitting a powerful electromagnetic interference (EMI) burst can be like chemotherapy for the radio waves. Some systems can zap everything in range and may just as readily interfere with friendly electronic and communication devices as with enemy signals. If the base or site’s sense-and-warn systems rely on wireless signal traffic, an electromagnetic interference burst may sever the signal to alert friendly forces of the incoming threat.

As these electronic countermeasures continue to transform, their effectiveness will ebb and flow, and opponents will evolve their shielding against electromagnetic interference. The frequencies and terminal guidance methods will change. It will be no different than the twenty years of improvised explosive device adaptations that the US Army defended against in Iraq and Afghanistan. It will be the same game, but with the threat now coming from the sky, not the ground.

Seeking Shelter: A Matter of Bunkers and Warnings

Despite all the expensive technology involved in defeating drone threats, some of the simplest and cheapest options—like sandbags and concrete—are still among the best protection measures. Bunkers remain an essential component to static defenses. The men and women of 2/10 can attest that as crude as they are, they work—as long as people were inside them.

The members of OIR spent considerable time in bunkers during 2/10’s deployment—sometimes multiple times a day or for hours at a time, depending on the threat. Seeking shelter became instinctive when the initial static was heard from base speakers. Soldiers and civilians came to accept the process, because these bunkers were 100 percent effective at saving lives, including instances where bunkers took direct hits from OWAUASs.

The combination of bunkers and radars were sometimes as important as concrete T-walls to 2/10 in the C-UAS fight. T-walls contain an unexpected blast from spreading and interfere with flight paths but offer no overhead coverage. Overhead protection, including reinforced bunkers and pre-detonation roofing on select buildings, were extremely important as attacks became more precise and targeted toward high-occupancy areas and key command nodes.

Bunkers came in various styles and designs, but most were concrete “C-channels” averaging six feet high and eight inches thick.

On their own, these three-sided structures are insufficient against most OWAUAS warheads and 107-millimeter rockets. Sandbag parties became the norm to reinforce C-channel bunkers with layers of sandbags or HESCO barriers. When available, the end caps were protected with welded steel doors or surrounded by mid-height concrete barriers. If you can see out of the bunker, the shrapnel can find its way in.

A good radar network tied to an effective sense-and-warn system provides advanced warning of a threat for personnel to seek shelter. On fixed sites, sense-and-warn systems can include speaker towers and indoor speaker boxes; audible coverage should be sufficient to alert someone in the shower or wake up sleeping personnel in all occupied zones of the base. In an offensive maneuver scenario, radio calls and mobile speaker boxes may need to suffice, but the expectation for rapid notification across the formation must remain the same.

Notification times will vary based on the threat. Some of the larger, fixed-wing drones were detected several minutes out, allowing sufficient time to seek shelter. Some threats get masked by terrain or hidden within a congested air picture (especially by airfields). In such instances, incoming drones were detected just seconds away from the base, providing time only to brace for immediate impact. Quadcopters and other small drones may be launched near a base to close in on a target in seconds. It may seem minor but the specific terms used by the system to communicate the threat are important and must clearly and immediately indicate what action personnel must take—whether to brace for immediate impact or seek shelter, for instance.

Notification systems provide other uses. “Big voice” systems help transmit guidance to sheltered personnel who lack any other means of communication. Announcements can instruct personnel to remain in bunkers, prepare to defend against a ground attack, deploy select response personnel, or begin unit accountability protocols. Like a fire drill in school, people go to shelter as they are, at whatever moment the alert is triggered. They might not have communication devices. They might not have pants. So sense-and-warn systems become an essential command-and-control feature in C-UAS fights.

The Limitations of Dismounted Systems

There are several dismounted systems available for both kinetic and nonkinetic defeat. These can fill critical gaps for the close-combat force but there are some important limitations to recognize about deploying these systems to defeat UAS threats.

Dismounted kinetic options include man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS) such as shoulder-fired Stinger missiles. It is important to weigh whether a dismounted Stinger team has the right training, equipment, and situational awareness to be effective against a drone attack. For example, does the MANPAD includes a day and a night sight? Soldiers may improvise by zip-tying a thermal optic to the Stinger, but that is a hasty measure at best. It is also important to understand how portable missile systems acquire and lock onto targets. Stingers are heat-seeking missiles designed to destroy helicopters and airplanes. Smaller drones may not produce the requisite heat signature to acquire “tone” with a Stinger. Also, it is important to appreciate the different variants of surface-to-air missiles. Common Stinger variants are point-detonation weapons while others are air-burst munitions. It is less likely that a point-detonated Stinger will intercept a small, low-heat-producing drone.

Nonkinetic choices available today produce directed electronic interference and defeat options with portable devices that often give off strong Starship Trooper vibes. Current “shoulder-fired” systems are useful for intercepting small quadcopters loitering overhead and conducting observation but dismounted nonkinetic C-UAS systems have limited effectiveness in defeating fast-approaching attack drones.

There are several risks to deploying dismounted teams to defeat drones. If these soldiers are not integrated with a radar network and are reliant on visual target acquisition, the risk of hitting a friendly aircraft by mistake increases. This is especially high when operating near airfields or friendly air corridors. Ideally, C-UAS systems will advance to the point where dismounted troops at the front edge of battle can employ MANPADS as part of an integrated radar network that covers the friendly force. Until then, leaders should be clear-eyed about what they may achieve (or risk) by deploying Stinger teams against OWAUAS threats. Having dismounted teams on the berm, rather than in bunkers, may feel prudent without actually being effective. Commanders must carefully consider the characteristics of the handheld equipment available to ensure it matches the anticipated drone threats.

The Engagement Process

Employing these air and missile defense systems follows all the same fundamentals of any traditional defense in depth, just with a few added variables. Success depends on a unit’s ability to find and characterize threats with sufficient time to employ a hodgepodge of layered defense systems. That activity is best understood through the C-UAS process of detect, identify, decide, and defeat.

Redundant and overlapping radar systems detect air tracks as far out as possible. Battle captains then establish positive identification (typically through digital means, as most tracks populate beyond the visual range) and decide on one or more kinetic or nonkinetic means of defeating the threat.

Figure 2. The Counter-UAS Process

In the current base-centric OIR mission, this process is conducted solely by the base defense operations center (BDOC), defined in joint doctrine as “a [command-and-control] facility established by the base commander as the focal point for [force protection], security, and defense within the base boundary.” The BDOCs operated by 2/10 at multiple bases throughout Syria and Iraq proved the value of having established crews in hardened command posts with connectivity and access to multiple intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance platforms. The BDOC construct is effective at employing the C-UAS process; static and redundant radar systems enable early detection and positive identification of threats, rapid decision about engagement platform, and successful defeat by missile, LPWS, laser, or EW. In a LSCO fight, ground force commanders must maximize their ability to not only command and control their formations, but also execute this ever-changing air defense battle drill with varying systems.

The transitions from base commander to maneuver commander, from base boundary to area of operations, and from fixed-site command post to mobile command post are worth contemplating. The Army is fielding several movable radar and interceptor systems and actively developing new systems to be tested soon. Regardless of what equipment shows up on the hand receipt, we would be wise to understand, implement, and test to provide feedback and tailor the tools to our mission end states.

The personnel and equipment requirements for the C-UAS battle drill are in direct conflict with the understandable pressure on ground force commanders to reduce the size and electromagnetic signatures of their command posts. Even a reduced battalion or brigade command post typically encompasses multiple vehicles, generators, antennae, and tentage or shelters. At a minimum, the C-UAS fight means additional data entering the existing command post, and an added layer of decision requirements and stress.

Dispersion complicates the issue further; much of 2/10’s C-UAS success was a direct result of colocating a team of nine or more BDOC personnel to monitor multiple radar systems, clear air, communicate across a base (and report upward), and conduct emergency response. A unit in LSCO may not have the luxury of colocating such teams.

Observations from Transforming in Contact

Counter-UAS systems will continue to transform and adapt for years to come. The soldiers of 2/10 lived through the experience of transforming in contact and gained some important insights worth sharing. The vignettes below describe specific issues that may not be precisely replicated in future operational environments, but they are shared to highlight some of the subtle challenges that transforming in contact creates.

Testing New Equipment on the Real McCoy

Prototype equipment was regularly tested by 2/10 during the deployment, including directed-energy lasers and various C-UAS missile systems. Live-fire tests involved model Group 1–3 UAS test drones. The bodies of these drones were not made of the same materials as enemy drones. Live-fire experiments gave a false sense of confidence in the effectiveness of the prototype weapons because these friendly UAS were easier to shoot down than the enemy drones. It is important that validation test fires include replicas of enemy systems to ensure that the prototype equipment has the desired effects.

Bearing, Altitude, Range, and Speed

The contact report in a C-UAS fight is called “BARS”—referencing the bearing, altitude, range, and speed of a suspected track. Radar systems often provide this data well before a unit can gain visual identification with current camera systems. The combination of these four elements helps leaders and operators distinguish between birds, balloons, OWAUAS, and friendly aircraft. Sometimes the altitude is the critical factor (only certain airframes can fly at thirty thousand feet) or the speed is too slow to be a fixed-wing drone. Range helps leaders understand time available to react. BARS needs to become a familiar concept the same way SALT and SALUTE reports became common knowledge across the Army.

Fourteen Clicks

Early versions of the radar software included cumbersome interfaces. Radar operators found themselves needing to perform up to fourteen clicks of a mouse to interrogate suspected tracks and deploy countermeasures during an engagement sequence. Such a laborious interface would create a deadly flaw against a swarm scenario. As operators identify these sorts of inadvertent inefficiencies built into the software, development engineers need to be informed to quickly update programs.

Knowing the Default Settings on Systems

For several months, close engagements ended prematurely with missiles terminating before hitting targets because OWAUAS were getting too near to the base. C-UAS missiles were self-detonating or refusing to launch altogether based on default engagement settings programmed into the software. Such well-intended safety features created by software engineers were not well communicated to commanders in the early stages of the conflict because the issue had never arisen before. Once the settings were explained and understood, commanders were able to adjust them on a case-by-case basis based on the commander’s risk considerations. This greatly improved the kill ratio of the C-UAS engagements afterward. As new systems are fielded, programmers and operators need to know which software features are fixed and which are adjustable. Theater commanders should have the knowledge, authorities, and technicians available to adjust settings as needed. As enemy tactics and weapons evolve, commanders need expedited flexibility to make the risk-reward calculus for system modifications.

System Performance Analysis

Program engineers from the Joint Analysis Team in Huntsville, Alabama routinely provided critical after-action feedback on the performance of missiles and radars during operations. These engineers could determine the effectiveness of radar placements and diagnose issues when missiles failed to hit targets. Though the quality of their work was first class, they were far from the battlefield and access to their teams was at times delayed. The Army needs to ensure support teams are sufficiently staffed and accessible to meet the demands of battlefield commanders. If that means deploying engineers and software design teams forward, the Army should do so, especially for novel systems still undergoing field testing and evaluation. This is literal rocket science after all, and the fight evolves at combat speed. The whole team needs to be together to stay ahead of the enemy.

An Overreliance on Field Service Representatives

The other side to continually testing and evaluating systems is the over reliance on field service representatives (FSRs) for many of these new systems. Some FSRs are barely more knowledgeable than soldiers on the equipment, but contracts required FSRs to perform installation, maintenance, and reloading operations. Soldiers, not civilian contractors, should be installing, fixing, and reloading equipment in combat—especially in large-scale combat operations. Yet reducing FSR reliance is easier said than done. We have all felt the pain of training a soldier to understand a new Army system, only to lose the capability to another unit before knowledge proliferates. Civilian FSRs are sometimes more permanent than military personnel and can be better resourced and trained to maintain and improve complex systems. Technical equipment requires formal education and hours of hands-on learning in the field, something most units struggle to sustain. We owe units a sound plan for fielding and maintaining C-UAS systems, and acquiring the skill to employ them effectively before they end up permanently parked in the motor pool.

The recent combat experience gained in Iraq and Syria remains the most significant US C-UAS fight to date even, if it will one day seem miniscule compared the future LSCO fight. Therefore, like a preseason matchup, any good sports team would use the experience to prepare for the long season ahead. And because the attacks 2/10 faced came repeatedly over a four-month period, across a variety of locations, each with different characteristics, the value of the empirical and quantitative data collected by the brigade makes the experience truly valuable to share with the force across operational domains.

As a reminder, the experience of 2/10 was purely a defensive fight. The challenges of performing C-UAS in the offense for a mobile fight are amplified. The current arsenal of missile interceptors, radars, directed-energy lasers, and nonkinetic defeat systems were only tested in fixed-site settings. The notion of establishing a layered air defense against Group 2 and 3 OWAUAS for major attacks like a wet gap crossing would require significant adaptations to the methods developed by 2/10 in OIR.

Still, static defense against OWAUAS will also remain relevant in future conflicts. Key theater support nodes like airports and seaports of debarkation will always serve as high-payoff targets within range of drone attacks. The UAS variants intercepted by 2/10 were often launched hundreds of kilometers from their intended targets. Attack drone ranges and payloads will continue to increase over time, so no matter how mobile frontline troops are in a LSCO fight, rear areas will need robust C-UAS defenses as well.

The C-UAS fight in CJTF OIR was a true example of what the chief of staff of the Army describes as transforming in contact. Consistent evaluation and testing by leaders across the tactical level was critical. Junior leaders found creative ways to isolate variables and test them. They could not just trust that the “green” status on a dashboard was good enough. They had to anticipate the next threat, then start adjusting and understanding their equipment. When select outstations began discovering new solutions, the unit organized weekly review sessions over secure teleconference video calls to spread lessons across the formation. It became a race for information as the enemy continually adapted against our defensive measures in real time.

The defense by 2/10 against more than 170 attacks from state-sponsored militia groups can help orient leaders to the challenges that the US military will face in future conflicts. Combat will continue to evolve, but the principles and insights outlined above are meant to accelerate the learning curve and highlight concerns for maneuver formations as our enemies push us toward a multidimension fight.

Lieutenant Colonel D. Max Ferguson is a career infantry officer with six deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, and West Africa with both conventional and special operations units. He earned a PhD in public policy from the University of Texas at Austin as a Goodpaster scholar with ASP3. He currently commands 2-14 IN, 2nd BCT, 10th Mountain Division and commanded FOB Union III in Baghdad, Iraq in support of CJTF-OIR from August 2023 to April 2024.

Lieutenant Colonel Russell Lemler is a career field artillery officer with experience in Afghanistan, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Gabon. He previously served in West Point’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership and holds a PhD in management from Columbia Business School. He commands 2-15 FA, 2nd BCT, 10th Mountain Division and commanded al-Asad Airbase, Iraq in support of CJTF-OIR from August 2023 to April 2024.

Authors’ note: Members of 2/10 have produced a volume of C-UAS lessons learned and technical details of the systems and tactics developed by the different outstations in OIR at the secret level of classification, including numerous C-UAS white papers and a forty-five-minute video focused on BDOC engagements. These products, along with the missile and radar data from all of the OWAUAS engagements, are now located on the Center for Amy Lessons Learned SIPR page. These products will be most valuable to units preparing to deploy now or in the years ahead, but like early smartphones and computers, the C-UAS systems tested and fielded in 2023 and 2024 will soon become obsolete and replaced by updated versions. Still, the archive of information, data, and insight to early combat applications of C-UAS will remain available for researchers, software engineers, and tactical leaders to analyze years from now. Leaders can find these documents on SIPR at https://dod365sec.spo.microsoft.scloud/teams/Army-TRADOC-CenterforArmyLessonsLearned.

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

Image credit: Spc. Christopher Brecht, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by D. Max Ferguson, Russell Lemler · May 14, 2024

​16. Harnessing GRAT for Irregular Warfare in Great Power Competition

GRAT = government responses to asymmetric threats. That is a new acronym to me.

Excerpts:

This type of warfare includes managing internal conflicts—usually insurgencies—where great powers intervene to shape outcomes in their favor. Another is terrorism. U.S. and allies’ inability to work effectively with partners in Africa to contain the proliferation of terrorism in the Sahel region has created an opening for Russia to step in and exploit natural resources to help finance the war in Ukraine. Managing IW in a way that reflects U.S. strategic goals requires prioritization of interests, appropriate allocation of resources, and interagency cooperation. Equally important is understanding which past and current efforts have been effective, under what conditions they succeeded, and what remains unaddressed or poorly understood.

To support both practitioners and scholars the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, has developed an online knowledge and data portal on Global Responses to Asymmetric Threats (GRAT). This online resource, built on extensive coding and analysis of empirical and policy literature from 2002-2022, serves as an important tool for understanding government responses to asymmetric threats and refining strategic approaches to irregular warfare. This article discusses the portal’s utility and showcases how GRAT has already enhanced our organization’s work, thus providing an example of the benefits of leveraging historical and current IW research to inform policy decisions in great power competition.

Harnessing GRAT for Irregular Warfare in Great Power Competition - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Elizabeth Radziszewski · May 14, 2024

In a recent Irregular Warfare Initiative podcast, Dr. Jake Shapiro and Dr. Frances Brown highlighted the critical role of irregular warfare (IW) in great power competition. They emphasized the risk of neglecting IW, noting that from 1975 to 1991, irregular conflicts comprised 87 percent of all armed conflicts, with great powers involved in most of them. This historical context suggests that for the US to compete effectively with Russia and China, focusing solely on conventional military strength is inadequate. Strategic advantage in great power competition is likely to be achieved by also emphasizing competence in IW.

This type of warfare includes managing internal conflicts—usually insurgencies—where great powers intervene to shape outcomes in their favor. Another is terrorism. U.S. and allies’ inability to work effectively with partners in Africa to contain the proliferation of terrorism in the Sahel region has created an opening for Russia to step in and exploit natural resources to help finance the war in Ukraine. Managing IW in a way that reflects U.S. strategic goals requires prioritization of interests, appropriate allocation of resources, and interagency cooperation. Equally important is understanding which past and current efforts have been effective, under what conditions they succeeded, and what remains unaddressed or poorly understood.

To support both practitioners and scholars the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, has developed an online knowledge and data portal on Global Responses to Asymmetric Threats (GRAT). This online resource, built on extensive coding and analysis of empirical and policy literature from 2002-2022, serves as an important tool for understanding government responses to asymmetric threats and refining strategic approaches to irregular warfare. This article discusses the portal’s utility and showcases how GRAT has already enhanced our organization’s work, thus providing an example of the benefits of leveraging historical and current IW research to inform policy decisions in great power competition.

The Portal’s Value to Researchers and Educators

The GRAT portal can assist in improving our understanding of how governments respond to asymmetric threats across three types of irregular warfare: insurgency, information operations, and terrorism. It helps identify research gaps in the literature more efficiently. The portal features a searchable data tool where users can find relevant insights using keyword searches, such as specific methodologies, state power levers, response targets, or geographical areas. Keywords are based on variable coding in academic articles or the main focus in non-academic texts. Users can also search by author names.

GRAT’s first database focuses on counterinsurgency (COIN) and is currently available to the public. A second database focusing on information operations is in development and set to launch in late summer, with a third on counterterrorism expected by the end of 2024.

Using GRAT’s filtering system, researchers can access a wealth of analytical data about selected articles, including findings, key variables, methodologies, and hypotheses. The findings highlight the relationship between key variables and discuss the outcome of hypothesis testing with an explanation of the logic behind each finding. For pieces with case studies, the findings provide enough depth that users can rely on them as examples to apply to their own research and teaching needs. For policy pieces, the findings are framed as a recommendation to a problem statement that is also noted for the relevant piece.

The portal can be used to provide insights on a variety of research and policy questions that can assist with research and teaching development. For example, users can rely on it to identify existing studies’ findings on the impact of innovation/adaptability on COIN success and conditions under which the value of such innovation increases as they develop literature reviews for their own articles or to situate their own ideas within past frameworks. Educators interested in sharing with their students the examples of cases where indiscriminate use of force helped counterinsurgents and when it worked against them, can use the portal’s keyword filtering system and methodology filter to obtain a set of case studies. Browsing through the description of case study findings can then enable them to select relevant examples. In addition to the database component, the portal also features reports highlighting general and more specific analyses of the insights coming from the literature.

Application: Insights on the Effectiveness of Military COIN Approaches

In a recent START article titled Government Responses to Asymmetric Threats: The State of the Literature on Counterinsurgency, 2002-2022—the Military Lever of Power, I used the GRAT portal to analyze how factors related to the government’s use of the military lever of power were employed in COIN. After I sorted independent and dependent variables into overarching categories, I found that over 41% of studies focused on COIN tactics, indicating dominant interest in this area. However, aspects like military leadership, culture, and the dynamics between external interveners and host governments remain underexplored, representing only 4.1% of all studied variables. The literature is most interested in linking these factors to explain COIN outcomes, such as victory/defeat or success/failure.

Within the Tactics and COIN outcomes categories, I identified the top 10 most frequently studied tactics and relied on portal-provided descriptions of findings to determine if the tactics’ impact was positive, negative, mixed, or had no impact. The top 10 ten most frequently analyzed tactics in empirical studies include:

1. The use of armed non-state actors (private military & security companies, mercenaries, militias, civilian defense forces)

2. Military presence/use of kinetic operations/use of conventional forces

3. Use of indiscriminate violence or repressive force

4. Forced population resettlement

5. Provision of security to the public

6. Restraint and legitimacy in the use of force

7. Cordon & search operations

8. Use of special forces

9. Use of air power

10. Use of former insurgents as forces

There are more positive than negative findings on the value of each of these tactics except for the use of indiscriminate/repressive force and the use of air power, both of which are more likely associated with COIN loss than victory. In most instances, the positive contribution of a given tactic depends on the presence of specific conditions. For example, forced population resettlement conducted with care for the population is linked to COIN success but not when done merely as a tool of relocation. However, the analysis of existing research revealed that many of the insights on these tactics are based on a single-case study, and some of the tactics are understudied despite making it into the top 10 most frequently analyzed list. A notable exception to this is the work on governments’ use of armed non-state actors, with a solid depth of findings derived from over 20 qualitative and quantitative studies based on small and large samples.

Working with the portal deepened my understanding of the current research on military responses to asymmetric threats in insurgencies. It also set the stage for proposing directions for future studies. Extending the analysis to a global sample of cases and relying on statistical approaches would significantly improve the generalizability of the findings.

For case studies, there is a need to move beyond Afghanistan and Iraq; these two countries have been the focus of over 42 percent of all pieces (empirical and non-empirical) that explore state use of its military lever of power in COIN. Despite the prevalence of insurgencies in sub-Saharan Africa and South America, only Nigeria, Kenya, Colombia, and El Salvador made it to the top 15 most frequently analyzed countries. Finally, my analysis of tactics demonstrated some overlooked areas within this specific category. Mainly limited focus on empirical testing of the benefits garnered by the military’s adoption of new technologies in gaining advantage over the insurgents and the impact of women in COIN-relevant leadership positions on strategic and tactical outcomes.

As demand grows to leverage IW tools for strategic advantage, it is crucial to identify and synthesize existing findings and pinpoint gaps in previous research. The GRAT portal is an important resource, helping scholars and practitioners deepen their understanding and refine their approaches to IW. By employing this tool, users can effectively expand their repertoire and address the evolving challenges of IW.

Dr. Elizabeth Radziszewski is an associate research scientist at START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland, where she leads the Irregular Warfare and Conflict Assessment Group. She is the author of Private Militaries and the Security Industry in Civil Wars: Competition and Market Accountability (Oxford University Press, 2020) and Social Networks and Public Support for the European Union (Routledge, 2013).

This article is based on research conducted for the Global Responses to Asymmetric Threats: Irregular Warfare Net Assessment Data Structure project, which is part of the Asymmetric Threat Analysis Center (ATAC), a joint program between START and the University of Maryland’s Applied Research Lab for Intelligence and Security (ARLIS). ATAC is funded by the Department of Defense.

Views expressed in this article solely reflect those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

Main Image: A U.S. Air Force pararescueman, 83rd Expeditionary Rescue Squadron, scans for ground threats during a mission on November 7, 2012, over Afghanistan. (Jonathan Snyder via DVIDS)

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

17. Missing in Action: Western Minds

Excerpts:

But the real reason is fear of escalation. Western public opinion dislikes anything that looks like warmongering or brinkmanship. Voters also dislike any foreign policy that comes with costs. Already any American visiting Russia is at risk of state-sanctioned kidnap. Crank up the pressure on the Kremlin, and any European visiting will also be a potential target. Far worse than hostages is the thought that confronting Russia risks a nuclear war.

An adage attributed to Vladimir Lenin advises, “Probe with bayonets: if you find mush, push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” Putin is pushing and sees no reason to stop. Restoring deterrence will be far costlier and riskier than maintaining it would have been.

Missing in Action: Western Minds

Attitudes to Russia’s war in Ukraine are shamefully complacent.

cepa.org · by Edward Lucas · May 12, 2024

Outside Russia’s London embassy this week, I joined protestors celebrating the imminent departure of the defense attaché, Colonel Maxim Elovik. The British government expelled him for “malign activity,” and removed diplomatic privileges from two Russian properties. One is a “trade” mission on a hill in north London (mainly used for collecting electronic intelligence). The other is a lavish mansion in the countryside (mainly used for entertaining and then blackmailing potential intelligence sources). It is amazing that both facilities have been allowed to continue operating for so long.

The belated move seems to be a response to a series of Russian intelligence operations in Britain, including an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned business. Other countries are complaining too. summoned Russia’s top diplomat in Tallinn to protest the jamming of GPS signals which have led to Finnair stopping its service to the country’s second city, Tartu. Following a cyber-attack, Germany’s foreign ministry has recalled its ambassador from Moscow for “consultations” (suggested topic: how did we get our Russia policy so wrong?). said it had been targeted by a Russian hacking attack. The Czechs protested after uncovering a Russian-run online media outlet that tried to bribe European politicians.

But these reactions are just scratching the surface of the problem. Russia’s GRU — military intelligence — is waging war on European countries. It uses not only its own officers but also proxies: gangsters, far-right extremists, and assorted riff-raff. Attacks include assassination, arson, sabotage, and also other covert operations — such as using graffiti to inflame tensions.

Yet NATO’s collective defense budget is three-and-a-half times more than Russia and China combined. How is it that Russia, a country with an Italy-sized economy, is able to attack the entire West with impunity?

The answer is that Russia does not take us seriously. Decision-makers in Moscow are not scared of our reaction. It is not the size of the dog in the fight that matters, but the size of the fight in the dog. Russia is willing to kill people, destroy property, and then lie about it. And we are not.

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The usual Western response to these attacks is imposing more diplomatic and financial sanctions. We pretend that these work. We know that they don’t. Russia dodges sanctions with the help of countries such as China and India. It can survive fine without a military attaché to Britain.

We can boost our information operations: supporting independent media outlets or broadcasters such as the BBC World Service or Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. These might have worked a few years ago. They do not work in Russia as it is now, gripped by nationalist hysteria.

We could be tougher. We could bribe Russian gangsters to murder senior members of the Putin regime. We could finance Russian far-right extremists to wreak havoc. But we don’t. One reason is that these measures might be ineffective. Another is that it would drag down our behavior to our enemies’ level.

But the real reason is fear of escalation. Western public opinion dislikes anything that looks like warmongering or brinkmanship. Voters also dislike any foreign policy that comes with costs. Already any American visiting Russia is at risk of state-sanctioned kidnap. Crank up the pressure on the Kremlin, and any European visiting will also be a potential target. Far worse than hostages is the thought that confronting Russia risks a nuclear war.

An adage attributed to Vladimir Lenin advises, “Probe with bayonets: if you find mush, push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” Putin is pushing and sees no reason to stop. Restoring deterrence will be far costlier and riskier than maintaining it would have been.

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.

Europe's Edge

CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.

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cepa.org · by Edward Lucas · May 12, 2024

18. Why the Biden Administration's Iran Sanctions Waivers Are Futile

Why the Biden Administration's Iran Sanctions Waivers Are Futile

The Islamic Republic also has a history of diverting resources intended for humanitarian purposes.

by Janatan Sayeh Follow @JanatanSayeh on TwitterL Behnam Ben Taleblu Saeed Ghasseminejad L

The National Interest · by Janatan Sayeh · May 10, 2024

After years of fighting in the shadows against Israel, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) crossed the threshold. On April 13, the IRGC undertook an overt and direct attack from its own territory against Israel, launching over 300 projectiles, including one-way attack drones, land-attack cruise missiles, and even nuclear-capable medium-range ballistic missiles. The IRGC’s barrage raises the urgency of cracking down on any form of financing that underwrites the Guard Corps’ capabilities.

Only a few days prior to the attack, a Biden administration appointee publicly acknowledged the regime’s exploitation of humanitarian funds for nefarious purposes. On April 9, U.S. Treasury Deputy Secretary Wally Adeyemo testified that Tehran exploits fungible humanitarian assistance and noted that “any dollar they have will go towards violent activity before they deal with their people.” Adeyemo’s attestation raises serious concerns over the Biden administration’s policy of retaining several Iran sanctions waivers.

Almost all statutory sanctions measures have waivers, allowing for transactions that would otherwise be prohibited should they meet certain requirements. In the Iranian context, one reason these waivers are issued is to ensure that there are economic arteries to purchase and deliver humanitarian aid. However, the issuance of waivers can be as political as it is technical because waiver issuance can indirectly ease sanctions and macroeconomic pressure on a target and impact foreign policy towards a third-party country.

For example, from 2018 to 2023, the State Department issued sanctions waivers allowing Iraq to import electricity from Iran provided that all payments were kept in an escrow account in Baghdad, thereby denying Iran access to the revenue. But last summer, the Biden administration changed that waiver to allow Iraq to transfer $10 billion to Iran and to deposit future payments into Iranian bank accounts in Oman. The new policy also allowed Iran to convert the money from Iraqi dinars to euros. Iran could then process euro-based transactions for imports and debt payments out of the accounts in Oman.

Prior to this, in the fall of 2023, the Biden administration unfroze $6 billion of Iranian assets in South Korea that were converted to euros before being sent to Qatar. The administration claimed that this money would only be available for humanitarian transactions.

The allegation that America’s Iran sanctions cause humanitarian suffering has long been a staple talking point by opponents of pressure on the Islamic Republic despite evidence to the contrary. For example, during the height of COVID-19 in Iran, many Western media outlets citing sanctions skeptics claimed that U.S. sanctions exacerbated humanitarian challenges in Iran by directly contributing to drug shortages across the country. Even international bodies such as the United Nations and the European Union (EU) have reaffirmed this notion that U.S. sanctions inhibit Iran’s ability to import medical goods.

In contrast to these claims, U.S. law specifically exempts humanitarian aid. For instance, sanctions targeting the Central Bank of Iran, as stipulated by Section 1245 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, exempt “transactions for the sale of food, medicine, or medical devices.” Sector-based sanctions imposed by statute and executive orders likewise exempt such transactions. Similarly, the Trade Sanctions Reform and Export Enhancement Act (TSRA) of 2000 exempts medicine, medical devices, and food from U.S. sanctions as well.

Despite assertions that U.S. sanctions exacerbated the COVID-19 epidemic in Iran, trade data indicated that sanctions did not restrict Iran’s ability to import pharmaceutical goods. Moreover, the U.S. and EU took various measures to maintain the humanitarian trade, such as establishing a Swiss banking channel that facilitates the flow of humanitarian goods into Iran. In 2019, Human Rights Watch published a report blaming the maximum pressure campaign for the shortage of drugs in Iran. However, FDD’s research showed that Iran’s imports of pharmaceutical products from the European Union declined only 5 percent in 2019 compared to 2018.

The Islamic Republic also has a history of diverting resources intended for humanitarian purposes. In July 2019, President Hassan Rouhani’s administration reported that $186 million in hard currency allocated for importing medicines and essential goods was spent on cigarettes and tobacco. In 2018, a Treasury Department investigation demonstrated that the regime fronted an Iranian medical and pharmaceutical company (Tadbir Kish) to facilitate the IRGC Quds Force’s illicit payments to Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Russia.

In the years leading up to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Turkish banks helped channel billions of dollars in illicit transactions using fraudulent invoices for fictitious humanitarian goods and even foodstuffs to bypass sanctions. Earlier in 2012, Iran’s health minister complained that subsidized Iranian government monies were spent on luxury car imports rather than on meeting medical import needs. Her criticism of Iran’s banking policies cost the minister her job.

In light of this track record, coupled with recent statements from the Treasury Department, it is increasingly apparent that Tehran will continue to divert funds gleaned from sanctions waivers to bolster the IRGC indirectly. The Biden administration should, therefore, take this opportunity to work with, rather than against, Congress and restrict Iranian access to frozen funds and ensure that any waivers issued are not being used by the regime to fund its terrorist apparatus.

Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic’s regional malign influence. Follow him on X: @JanatanSayeh.

Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at FDD, where he focuses on Iranian security and political issues. Behnam previously served as a research fellow and senior Iran analyst at FDD.

Dr. Saeed Ghasseminejad is a senior Iran and financial economics adviser at FDD specializing in Iran’s economy and financial markets, sanctions, and illicit finance. Follow him on X: @SGhasseminejad.

All of the authors contribute to FDD’s Iran Program and the Center on Economic and Financial Power (CEFP). FDD is a Washington, DC-based, non-partisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Image: Shutterstock.com.

The National Interest · by Janatan Sayeh · May 10, 2024

19.

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