Quotes of the Day:

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human"

– Aldous Huxley

"Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning."

– Albert Einstein

"The salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human meekness and human responsibility."

– Vaclav Havel

1. The Indigenous Approach Podcast: The Great Philosopher Robin Sage and his Green Beret training applied to 3d Grade, College English class, Business, and Special Forces

2. Retired Army general says employment struggles for military spouses are part of being a family in the service

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 15, 2024

4. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 15, 2024

5. The Gates of Gaza

6. U.S. Africa Command Launches Multi-Nation Special Warfare Exercise

7. Taiwan Is the New Berlin

8. The new world (dis)order: A clash of values - opinion

9. A lesson from World War II: Appeasement never works

10. Exclusive: US intelligence spotted Chinese, Iranian deepfakes in 2020 aimed at influencing US voters

11. How Will Taiwan’s New President Handle China?

12. Crink: the new autocractic 'axis of evil'

13. US to Boost Output of Bombs Designed to Hit Underground Nuclear Facilities

14. US military says Gaza Strip pier project is completed, aid to soon flow as Israel-Hamas war rages on

15. Mystery in the Alps: A Chinese Family, a Swiss Inn and the World’s Most Expensive Weapon

16. For China, Russia Is Both a Partner and a Predicament

17. As Hamas returns to the north, Israel’s Gaza endgame is nowhere in sight

18. Putin and Xi deepen partnership and scold the United States

19. The Army has stepped up its training for tunnel warfare, a dangerous — and growing — form of combat

20. Exclusive: Driver’s Attempt at Breaching Quantico Gate Echoes Deadly Incidents at White House, U.S. Military Bases

21. U.S. lays out plans for withdrawing troops from Niger

22. Opinion | The West Doesn’t Understand How Much Russia Has Changed

23.  How, exactly, is TikTok a threat to national security?

24. Chinese Perspectives on the “Indo-Pacific” as a Geostrategic Construct - Mapping China's Strategic Space

25. Techcraft on Display in Ukraine

26. Multi-Dimensional Modeling for Irregular Warfare

1. The Indigenous Approach Podcast: The Great Philosopher Robin Sage and his Green Beret training applied to 3d Grade, College English class, Business, and Special Forces

The wisdom of Robin Sage.

This is an outstanding podcast on a number of levels. For anyone who has gone through Special Forces training you will slap your forehead and say that explains what I knew to be true in my gut. Although there is a heavy focus on Special Forces this is really about the Army and beyond. This is useful for anyone who thinks about creativity, leadership, AND education and training.

Listen to the podcast here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/creativity-and-leadership/id1534621849?i=1000647212731

It is very much worth the 1 hour to listen to it. (and then listen to it again. I did).

Dr. Fletcher mentions the field guide he developed for CGSC. Here is a link to the 131 page guide. https://www.technicalanalysts.com/download/Field_Guide.pdf

Creative Thinking: A Field Guide to Building Your Strategic Core

Dr. Angus Fletcher, PhD

Professor, The Ohio State University

for US Army Command & General Staff College

Creativity and Leadership

The Indigenous Approach

• Government

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

In this episode, Lt. Col. Thomas Gaines and Dr. Angus Fletcher discuss creativity and leadership. Lt. Col. Gaines is the command's G6 and Dr. Fletcher is a Story Science Professor from Ohio State University. Together the two have done quite a bit of research on creativity and leadership. Enjoy the episode. It's a great one and an interesting conversation

2. Retired Army general says employment struggles for military spouses are part of being a family in the service

I think the Congressman/General could be accused of being tone deaf (at least). I do not think his message will help recruiting or retention.

Retired Army general says employment struggles for military spouses are part of being a family in the service

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · May 15, 2024

Spouses and family members from the 606th Air Control Squadron listen to a brief during a spouse day in 2019, at Aviano Air Base, Italy. (Heidi Goodsell/U.S. Air Force)

A retired Army general now serving as a House lawmaker argued Wednesday that a military spouse’s struggle to have a fulfilling career is just part of the sacrifice of a family in the service and doesn’t need protection.

“We cannot fashion our decisions on national security based on the individual needs of people that signed up of their own volition for a job that they wanted to pursue,” Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., said during a hearing of the House Oversight Committee. “We’re happy that they want to serve. We’re happy that they want to sacrifice, but that’s what comes with the territory. If that’s not for you, we need insurance salesmen and we need people to clean pools and we need all kinds of things in America.”

Perry, whose district includes the Army’s Carlisle Barracks, made the comments during the committee’s debate about a bill that would offer military spouses working for the federal government flexibility during military-mandated moves. He first enlisted in the Army in 1980 and retired in 2019 as a one-star general in the Pennsylvania National Guard.

Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas, a committee member who sponsored the bill alongside Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said she expected the committee would at least agree with the idea of supporting military families.

“We need to do everything that we can for the best military that we have, and that means supporting them in whatever capacity we can, and it starts with this bill,” she said.

The Resilient Employment and Authorization Determination to Increase National Employment of Serving Spouses Act, or READINESS Act, allows for spouses preparing to move with their service member to request a determination about whether their job can be completed remotely on a temporary basis, be reassigned to the new duty station or be transferred to a comparable job.

If none of these options fit, the bill allows the employee to go into nonpay status for up to six months. The spouse would retain their nonfinancial benefits while their employer would be allowed to fill the position. The measure would also apply to spouses of foreign service employees.

Other opposition, all of which came from Republicans on the committee, included an argument from Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, that this bill only helps “government bureaucrats.”

“I think we’re going down a dangerous precedent when we begin to say that federal bureaucrats’ jobs are guaranteed for life,” he said.

Maria Donnelly, an Army spouse who has worked with other spouses to get this bill into Congress, watched the hearing online and said Perry’s comments are built upon harmful and outdated stereotypes, while Cloud ignored the hundreds of spouses who work as Defense Department civilians supporting warfighting efforts.

“We marry our spouses because we love them and supporting them should not come at an unmanageable cost,” she said. “Most families in the United States need two incomes to survive, and military families are no different. Moreover, employing spouses is a much easier, much cheaper way to help military families — the other option to retain military service members is retention bonuses or increased pay.”

Emmalee Gruesen, a Navy spouse also involved with the bill, said they plan to reach out to Perry’s office to discuss the importance of financial stability for military families.

“The service chiefs have repeatedly tied service members’ familial stability to their military readiness, whether it be spouse employment, child care, housing, health care, etc. The READINESS Act is therefore aptly titled,” she said.

Unemployment among military spouses is about 21%, according to the Defense Department. It’s hovered at about that mark for more than a decade, despite millions of dollars spent to address the issue. The White House estimated about 16,000 military spouses work for the federal government, though the statistic is not well tracked.

Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, said just because a military spouse is not currently a federal employee doesn’t mean the benefit would never apply to them.

“Just because you’re not using a particular benefit at a particular time, doesn’t mean that the benefit is not available to you,” he said. “It seems to me that the logic of the legislation is airtight. It’s for people who are being suddenly and often involuntarily deployed or redeployed around the world — who make the decision to serve the country in this way — to allow their spouses to continue to pursue their employment, their livelihood and support their families.”

The bill passed through the committee Wednesday on a vote of 30-13, with all Democrats in support alongside 10 Republicans, including Committee Chairman James Comer of Kentucky.

However, Cloud and other Republicans were able to add an amendment to exempt any employees working in a diversity, equity and inclusion office from receiving the benefit. Crockett called the amendment a “poison pill.”

The bill now awaits a vote from the full House or possible addition to the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation to outline defense spending and priorities. A companion bill was introduced in December in the Senate.

“Despite some attempts from the other side to inject politics into an issue with broad bipartisan support, this vote is a victory not just for our military and foreign service spouses, but to our service members, our military readiness and our national security,” Crockett said in a statement after the hearing. “In what is perhaps the most dangerous moment in geopolitical history since the Cold War, any issues that lead to poor retention in our armed forces and foreign service should be considered a matter of utmost priority.”

Stars and Stripes · by Rose L. Thayer · May 15, 2024

3. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The tempo of Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast continues to decrease after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian officials have now confirmed were less defended.
• The US Helsinki Commission stated that the US should allow Ukraine to conduct strikes against military targets in Russia's border areas amid an ongoing Russian offensive operation into Kharkiv Oblast from Russia, although US officials continue to express unwillingness to support such strikes.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to publicly prioritize the further mobilization of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) while also attempting to assuage possible domestic fears about the negative effects of increased Russian defense spending.
• Putin specifically noted that the Russian DIB must increase the quality of Russian weapons.
• Putin is likely concerned about the economic and diplomatic implications of decreased Russian arms exports.
• The Kremlin confirmed the appointments of the newly formed Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) and other military district commanders on May 15.
• Russian sources speculated that the May 13 detention of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov is only the beginning of a wider effort to root out corruption within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).
• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced during a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on May 15 that the US will provide a two billion dollar "defense enterprise fund" to Ukraine.
• Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reportedly struck a Russian fuel depot in Rostov Oblast on the night of May 14 to 15.
• The Kremlin continues to add European officials to Russia's wanted list as part of Russia's efforts to assert the jurisdiction of Russian federal law over sovereign NATO member states.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances in northern Kharkiv Oblast, near Siversk, and west of Donetsk City.
• Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Lytyvyenko assessed on May 15 that Russian forces will have enough tanks and armored fighting vehicles for the next year and half of fighting in Ukraine at their current operational tempo.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 15, 2024

May 15, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 15, 2024

Christina Harward, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Riley Bailey, and Frederick W. Kagan

May 15, 2024, 7:35pm 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 1:15pm ET on May 15. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 16 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

The tempo of Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast continues to decrease after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian officials have now confirmed were less defended. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Ukrainian military officials stated that Ukrainian forces have partially stabilized the situation in northern Kharkiv Oblast bordering Russia.[1] Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn stated that Russian forces are attempting to make tactical gains near Lukyantsi and Vovchansk to create footholds for future advances, but that Ukrainian counterattacks and artillery and drone strikes are preventing Russian forces from gaining a foothold in these areas.[2] Kharkiv Oblast Administration officials stated on May 15 that constant Russian shelling makes it impossible for Ukrainian forces to establish fortifications within three to five kilometers of the international border in Kharkiv Oblast and that Ukrainian forces constructed the first and second lines of defense about 12 to 13 kilometers and 20 kilometers from the international border, respectively.[3] ISW currently assesses that Russian forces have advanced no more than eight kilometers from the international border in northern Kharkiv Oblast. Russian forces operating in Russia could easily conduct artillery strikes against Ukrainian defensive positions close to the international border, and Western prohibitions on the use of Western-provided weapons systems for strikes against rear Russian areas across the border make potential fixed Ukrainian defensive positions close to the international border vulnerable and possibly indefensible. Russian forces have been able to make tactical advances in northern Kharkiv Oblast since May 10 in areas where Ukrainian forces purposefully did not establish significant defensive lines and currently appear to be prioritizing the creation of a "buffer zone" over a deep penetration into Kharkiv Oblast.[4]

The US Helsinki Commission stated that the US should allow Ukraine to conduct strikes against military targets in Russia's border areas amid an ongoing Russian offensive operation into Kharkiv Oblast from Russia, although US officials continue to express unwillingness to support such strikes. The US Helsinki Commission stated on May 15 that the US should "not only allow but encourage" Ukrainian forces to strike Russian forces firing and staging in Russia's border areas as part of Russia's offensive operations into northern Kharkiv Oblast.[5] US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated earlier on May 15 that the US has not "encouraged or enabled" Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory but noted that Ukraine must decide how to conduct this war.[6]  Politico reported on May 14, citing two unnamed US officials, that the Biden Administration's policy prohibiting Ukraine's use of US-provided weapons to strike Russian territory has not changed.[7] Politico's sources stated that US military assistance to Ukraine is "for the defense and not for offensive operations" into Russian territory. A Ukrainian operation to strike systems in Russia that are directly supporting Russia's offensive ground operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast would be an inherently defensive effort and to characterize such an effort as "offensive" would be inaccurate. ISW recently assessed that US limitations on Ukraine's ability to strike military targets in Russia have created a sanctuary in Russia's border areas from which Russian aircraft can conduct glide bomb and missile strikes against Ukrainian positions and settlements and where Russian forces and equipment can freely assemble before entering combat.[8] This US policy is severely compromising Ukraine's ability to defend itself against Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast.[9]

Russian President Vladimir Putin emphatically downplayed the threat of Ukrainian counterattacks along the entire frontline, further indicating that he assesses that Ukraine cannot and will not be able to liberate territory seized by Russian forces and that this will allow Russian forces to pursue creeping advances indefinitely. Putin stated on May 15 in a meeting with Russia's military district commanders that Russian forces are repelling all Ukrainian counterattacks and that Russian forces are constantly improving their positions in all directions in Ukraine.[10] The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence's (ODNI) 2024 Annual Threat Assessment reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin "probably believes" that Russian forces have blunted Ukrainian efforts to retake significant territory and that US and Western support for Ukraine is "finite."[11] Limited Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast suggest that Putin and the Russian military command may be evaluating the risks, prospects, and timeline of offensive operations based on the assumption that Russian forces will be able to advance in any area of the front and consolidate any gains without having to account for Ukrainian tactical counterattacks or a significant Ukrainian counteroffensive operation in the future.[12]

Putin likely has made this assumption based on months of gradual grains throughout eastern Ukraine, but this calculus fundamentally misjudges the tactical capabilities that Ukrainian forces will have once US security assistance begins to arrive to the front at scale. The New York Times reported on May 15 that US officials have expressed confidence that the arrival of US security assistance to Ukrainian forces at scale by July 2024 will likely allow Ukrainian forces to reverse many of the tactical gains that Russian forces have achieved in recent weeks.[13] US officials were reportedly hesitant to discuss how US security assistance may facilitate Ukrainian counteroffensive operations in 2025, however.[14] It is imperative for Ukrainian forces to be able to pursue large-scale counteroffensive operations that liberate Russian-occupied territory as soon as conditions permit, otherwise Putin will likely continue to believe that he can pursue grinding offensive operations indefinitely and force Ukraine into the strategic defense until achieving victory.[15]

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to publicly prioritize the further mobilization of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) while also attempting to assuage possible domestic fears about the negative effects of increased Russian defense spending. Putin met with the commanders of the Russian military districts and with officials involved in the Russian DIB on May 15 and focused both meetings on the need to develop the Russian DIB and economy.[16] Putin appointed Russian Presidential Aide Alexei Dyumin and Minister of Industry and Trade Anton Alikhanov to the supervisory board of state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec and specifically tasked Dyumin with assisting Russian efforts to provide the Russian military with the necessary weapons and equipment.[17] Putin stated that Russia's "cumulative defense and security spending" in 2024 will be about 8.7 percent (likely referring to defense spending as percentage of GDP), but noted that although this amount is significant, it is much less than Soviet defense spending in the mid-1980s of about 13 percent.[18] Russian business journalists estimated in November 2023 that Russian authorities planned to spend about 39 percent of the 2024 federal budget on defense and law enforcement, and Reuters reported in October 2023 that the 2024 Russian federal budget would allocate 29.4 percent to national defense.[19] Putin attempted to downplay the negative effects of increased defense spending on civilians' lives while also claiming that increased defense spending will boost the civilian sector of the economy. Putin stated that even as Russian defense spending grows, the Russian state must fulfill all its social obligations to Russian citizens and develop Russian social spheres, such as education, healthcare, support for veterans, and pensions. Putin claimed that increased Russian defense spending is connected to various civilian production sectors and boosts overall industrial development and job creation. Putin's continued focus on social spending indicates that Putin remains concerned about Russian domestic opinion and is unwilling to rapidly put the Russian economy on a full wartime footing in a way that generates fundamental economic disruption.

Putin specifically noted that the Russian DIB must increase the quality of Russian weapons. Putin stated that "whoever masters the latest means of armed struggle faster, wins" and called for the Russian defense industry to "double, triple" production and create more effective, accurate, and powerful weapons in order to decrease Russian losses.[20] Putin's focus on how technology can facilitate victory is likely a response to Ukrainian officials' recent discussions about how Ukraine needs to innovate technologically in order to beat a numerically superior Russian force.[21] Putin's emphasis on producing higher quality weapons is likely a direct response to Ukraine's higher-quality Western weapons and equipment. Ukrainian officials have noted recently that although Russian artillery supplies have greatly outnumbered those of Ukrainian forces, Ukrainian artillery is more precise than Russian artillery.[22] Although Russian forces have been able to exploit under-provisioned Ukrainian forces and make tactically significant advances along several sectors of the front recently, Russian forces have been unable to make operationally significant gains with their numerical manpower and materiel advantages alone.[23] Putin has consistently indicated that he is unwilling to transfer Russia to a full wartime economy, and a Russian DIB on a full wartime footing would likely still suffer from limiting factors, such as continued labor shortages in Russian defense industrial enterprises and the lack of the domestically produced goods required for advanced systems, and would likely not be able to produce the quantity of all types of weapons and equipment required to sustain Russian operations in Ukraine for years.[24]

Putin is likely concerned about the economic and diplomatic implications of decreased Russian arms exports. Putin thanked former Defense Minister and current Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu for reshaping the Russian military in recent years and claimed that no one, including Russia, understood the "modern methods of conducting armed struggle" before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine — a likely attempt to soften the blow of Shoigu's de facto demotion. Putin stated that Shoigu will work with the Military-Industrial Complex Commission under the Presidential Administration as well as the Federal Service for Cooperation with Foreign Countries.[25] Putin stated that Russia must ensure its contractual obligations to supply weapons and military equipment to foreign countries but noted that the Russian military's needs are the first priority. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reported in March 2024 that Russia exported major arms to 31 countries in 2019 and only 12 in 2023 with Russian arms exports falling by 53 percent between 2014-2018 and 2019-2023.[26] Putin's renewed emphasis on arms exports is likely due to concerns about how the continued loss of federal budget revenue from arms exports will affect the Russian government's ability to sustain or even increase defense spending. Putin's statement about arms exports also suggests that Putin is concerned with how Russia's inability to fulfill arms export contracts since the start of the war in Ukraine has negatively affected Russia's bilateral relations, particularly with non-Western countries with which Russia is trying to curry favor in hopes that these countries will join Russia's imagined wide coalition opposing the collective West. Russia, for example, reportedly delayed the delivery of air defense systems to India, and Indian government sources have previously stated that India wants to distance itself from Russia because the war in Ukraine has limited Russia's ability to provide India with munitions.[27]

The Kremlin confirmed the appointments of the newly formed Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) and other military district commanders on May 15. Putin met with the Russian military district commanders and senior Russian defense officials on May 15 thereby confirming that former Russian Ground Forces Commander Colonel General Alexander Lapin became LMD commander and former Southern Military District (SMD) Colonel General Sergei Kuzovlev became MMD commander.[28] The Kremlin meeting also confirmed that Lieutenant General Alexander Sanchik replaced Colonel General Sergei Kuzmenko as acting Eastern Military District (EMD) commander, that Colonel General Gennady Anashkin replaced Kuzovlev as acting Southern Military District (SMD) commander, and that Colonel General Andrey Mordvichev will remain Central Military District (CMD) commander.[29] A Russian insider source, who has routinely been accurate about past Russian military command changes, correctly reported on these command changes in early May.[30] ISW has routinely observed that Putin regularly rotates officials and military commanders in and out of favor with the aim of incentivizing different factions to strive to accomplish his objectives and continues to assess that the Kremlin may have decided to change the leadership of the military districts in preparation for its expected summer offensive effort, which is forecasted to begin in late May or in June.[31]

Russian sources speculated that the May 13 detention of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov is only the beginning of a wider effort to root out corruption within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD). A Kremlin-affiliated Russian milblogger claimed on May 15 that Kuznetsov's detention and the April 24 detention of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Timur Ivanov on charges of accepting bribes prompted rumors that Russian authorities may arrest other unspecified corrupt officials serving in the Russian MoD's Main Operational-Mobilization Directorate, Main Directorate of Combat Training, and other high-level directorates.[32] The milblogger noted that bribery schemes have been incredibly common and pervasive in Russia over the last 15 years and that Russian authorities may limit their efforts to corruption cases that have caused tangible issues with Russian forces' combat effectiveness or operational security. Several Russian milbloggers lamented the pervasiveness of corruption and ineptitude among the Russian high command, and one Russian milblogger called on the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and Investigative Committee to "shake out" all of the corrupt officials within the Russian MoD.[33]

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced during a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on May 15 that the US will provide a two billion dollar "defense enterprise fund" to Ukraine.[34] Blinken stated that the fund has three components: assisting Ukraine in acquiring needed weapons, investing in Ukraine's defense industrial base (DIB), and helping Ukraine purchase military equipment and weapons from the US and other countries.

Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reportedly struck a Russian fuel depot in Rostov Oblast on the night of May 14 to 15.[35] Ukrainian outlet Suspilne reported that its sources stated that GUR attacked a fuel depot in Proletarsky Raion, Rostov Oblast with drones and that a fire broke out at the facility.[36] Suspilne's sources added that Russian forces used the fuel depot for military purposes.[37] Rostov Oblast Governor Vasyl Golubev stated that two Ukrainian drones caused explosions at the facility but denied that there was a fire at the facility.[38]

The Kremlin continues to add European officials to Russia's wanted list as part of Russia's efforts to assert the jurisdiction of Russian federal law over sovereign NATO member states. Russian opposition outlet Mediazona published an updated review of the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs' (MVD) wanted list on May 15 and noted that the Russian MVD added several dozen more Lithuanian, Latvian, Estonian, Czech, and Polish officials to the wanted list since February 2024.[39] Mediazona reported that there are currently 88 Latvian and 66 Lithuanian politicians from various government levels; five Polish mayors; an unspecified number of former and current council members of several Czech municipalities; and four current and former Estonian officials, including current Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas and Minister of Internal Affairs Lauri Laanemets, on Russia's wanted list. Mediazona noted that the Russian MVD also recently added and removed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, as ISW previously reported.[40] ISW continues to assess that the Kremlin's efforts to assert the jurisdiction of Russian law in sovereign European states are intended to set information conditions justifying possible future Russian aggression against NATO.[41]

Key Takeaways:

• The tempo of Russian offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast continues to decrease after Russian forces initially seized areas that Ukrainian officials have now confirmed were less defended.
• The US Helsinki Commission stated that the US should allow Ukraine to conduct strikes against military targets in Russia's border areas amid an ongoing Russian offensive operation into Kharkiv Oblast from Russia, although US officials continue to express unwillingness to support such strikes.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to publicly prioritize the further mobilization of the Russian defense industrial base (DIB) while also attempting to assuage possible domestic fears about the negative effects of increased Russian defense spending.
• Putin specifically noted that the Russian DIB must increase the quality of Russian weapons.
• Putin is likely concerned about the economic and diplomatic implications of decreased Russian arms exports.
• The Kremlin confirmed the appointments of the newly formed Moscow and Leningrad military districts (MMD and LMD) and other military district commanders on May 15.
• Russian sources speculated that the May 13 detention of Russian Deputy Defense Minister Lieutenant General Yuri Kuznetsov is only the beginning of a wider effort to root out corruption within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD).
• US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced during a joint press conference with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on May 15 that the US will provide a two billion dollar "defense enterprise fund" to Ukraine.
• Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) reportedly struck a Russian fuel depot in Rostov Oblast on the night of May 14 to 15.
• The Kremlin continues to add European officials to Russia's wanted list as part of Russia's efforts to assert the jurisdiction of Russian federal law over sovereign NATO member states.
• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances in northern Kharkiv Oblast, near Siversk, and west of Donetsk City.
• Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Lytyvyenko assessed on May 15 that Russian forces will have enough tanks and armored fighting vehicles for the next year and half of fighting in Ukraine at their current operational tempo.

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.|

Russian forces continued to make tactical advances in the Lyptsi direction (north of Kharkiv City) as of May 15. Geolocated footage published on May 15 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced east of Hlyboke (north of Lyptsi) and along the east bank of the Travyanske Reservoir (northwest of Lyptsi).[42] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces seized Hlyboke and Lukyantsi (northeast of Lyptsi).[43] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that Russian elements of the 18th Motorized Rifle Division (11th Army Corps, Leningrad Military District [LMD]) seized Lukyantsi on March 13 and that Ukrainian forces recently pushed Russian forces out of Zelene (northeast of Lyptsi).[44] Lyptsi Village Military Administration Head Serhiy Kryvetchenko stated Russian forces have entered Lukyantsi.[45] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces repelled Russian assaults between Borysivka (northeast of Lyptsi) and Neskuchne (northeast of Lyptsi).[46]

Russian forces recently made further tactical advances near Vovchansk (northeast of Kharkiv City). Geolocated footage published on May 14 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced in northern Starytsya (southwest of Vovchansk).[47] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces seized Starytsya, while others claimed that fighting continued in the settlement.[48] Ukrainian MoD Spokesperson Dmytro Lazutkin stated that Russian forces entered Vovchansk and that small Russian infantry groups are trying to gain a foothold in the northern part of Vovchansk.[49] Vovchansk City Military Administration Head Tamaz Gambarashvili stated that small arms battles are ongoing on the northern outskirts of Vovchansk and that small Russian sabotage and reconnaissance groups are trying to establish positions within the settlement.[50] Ukrainian General Staff Spokesperson Dmytro Lykhovyi also stated that Ukrainian forces moved to more advantageous positions in unspecified areas near Vovchansk to save the lives of Ukrainian personnel.[51] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced within Vovchansk and continued ground attacks southwest of Vovchansk near Izbitske and Buhruvatka.[52]

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-Kreminna line on May 15, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Russian forces continued ground assaults northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka and Petropavlivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Pishchane, Kotlyarivka, Ivanivka, Berestove, Krokhmalne, and Stelmakhivka; west of Svatove near Miasozharivka; southwest of Svatove near Novoyehorivka and Tverdokhlibove; northwest of Kreminna near Makiivka, Novosadove, and Terny.[53] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced from Kolomyichykha towards Andriivka (both west of Svatove), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[54] A Russian source claimed that Ukrainian forces with armored vehicle support initially advanced to the northern outskirts of Kyslivka (southeast of Kupyansk), but that Russian forces later repelled the assault.[55] Elements of the Russian 47th Tank Division (1st Guards Tank Army, Moscow Military District) are reportedly operating near Kyslivka.[56]

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

Ukrainian forces recently marginally advanced in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) amid continued Russian assaults in the area on May 15. Geolocated footage published on May 14 indicates that Ukrainian forces recently marginally advanced in a forest area between Vesele and Spirne (both southeast of Siversk).[57] Russian forces continued ground assaults east of Siversk near Verkhnokamyanske, southeast of Siversk near Ivano-Darivka and Spirne, and south of Siversk near Rozdolivka.[58] Elements of the Russian "Alexander Nevsky" Brigade are reportedly operating near Soledar (north of Bakhmut).[59]

Russian forces continued ground assaults near Chasiv Yar on May 15, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces advanced into Kalynivka (just north of Chasiv Yar) from the southeast and gained a foothold in the settlement.[60] The milblogger claimed that most of eastern Kalynivka is a contested "gray zone" that neither Russian nor Ukrainian forces control. ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these Russian claims. Several Russian milbloggers denied claims that Ukrainian forces transferred elements of three brigades from Chasiv Yar to the Kharkiv direction and called such claims "deliberate misinformation."[61] Russian forces continued assaults northeast of Chasiv Yar near Bohdanivka; in the Novyi Microraion in eastern Chasiv Yar; east of Chasiv Yar near Ivanivske; southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka, Andriivka, and Kurdyumivka; and south of Chasiv Yar near Bila Hora.[62] Elements of the Russian 98th Airborne (VDV) Division are reportedly operating in the Chasiv Yar direction.[63]

Russian forces reportedly advanced near Avdiivka on May 15, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces seized Umanske (west of Avdiivka) and advanced near Netaylove, Nevelske, and south of Pervomaiske (all southwest of Avdiivka).[64] ISW has not observed visual confirmation of Russian forces operating in western Umanske nor of further Russian advances near Netaylove, Nevelske, and Pervomaiske. One Russian milblogger noted that the pace of Russian offensive operations in the Avdiivka direction has significantly slowed in recent days.[65] Russian forces continued assaults northwest of Avdiivka near Kalynove, Novooleksandrivka, Sokil, Yevhenivka, Soloyove, Novoselivka Persha, and Novopokrovske and west of Avdiivka near Yasnobrodivka.[66] Elements of the Russian 74th Motorized Rifle Brigade (41st Combined Arms Army [CAA], Central Military District [CMD]) are reportedly operating near Berdychi (northwest of Avdiivka).[67]

Russian forces recently marginally advanced west of Donetsk City amid continued fighting west and southwest of the city on May 15. Geolocated footage published on May 15 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced within Krasnohorivka (west of Donetsk City).[68] Ukrainian sources stated that Russian forces recently conducted a roughly reinforced company sized mechanized assault near Novomykhailivka (southwest of Donetsk City) and that Ukrainian forces destroyed four Russian tanks and six infantry fighting vehicles during the Russian assault.[69] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced to the southern outskirts of Paraskoviivka (southwest of Donetsk City).[70] Russian forces also continued assaults west of Donetsk City near Heorhiivka and southwest of Donetsk City near Vodyane and Kostyantynivka.[71] Elements of the "Russkiye Yastreby" (Russian Hawks) Detachment and the 110th Motorized Rifle Brigade (1st Donetsk People's Republic [DNR] Army Corps [AC]) are reportedly operating near Krasnohorivka.[72]

Russian forces recently marginally advanced in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area amid continued fighting in the area on May 15. Geolocated footage published on May 15 indicates that Russian forces recently marginally advanced within Urozhaine (south of Velyka Novosilka).[73] Russian forces continued assaults south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske.[74] Elements of the Russian 14th Spetsnaz Brigade (Russian General Staff's Main Directorate [GRU]) are reportedly operating near Urozhaine.[75]

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

The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed that Russian forces completely seized Robotyne on May 15, but there were no confirmed advances in western Zaporizhia Oblast.[76] Ukraine's Southern Operational Command and Navy Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk stated that Russian claims about the seizure of Robotyne are untrue.[77] One Russian milblogger initially claimed that Russian forces seized a stronghold in northern Robotyne and suggested that Russian forces seized the settlement.[78] The milblogger later claimed, however, that elements of the Russian 71st Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Brigade, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District) that are reportedly operating within Robotyne claimed that Ukrainian forces are still present in northern Robotyne and that it is not clear if Russian forces have consolidated positions in eastern Robotyne.[79] Other Russian milbloggers also expressed doubt about the Russian MoD's claim.[80] Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne) and south of Hulyaipole (east of Orikhiv), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[81] Russian forces continued offensive operations near Robotyne and Verbove.[82] Elements of the Russian 38th Motorized Rifle Brigade (35th CAA, Eastern Military District) are reportedly operating near Hulyaipole; elements of the 392nd Motorized Rifle Regiment (likely a reformed Soviet-era unit) are operating in the Zaporizhia direction; and elements of the 42nd Motorized Rifle Brigade's 70th and 291st motorized rifle regiments are operating east of Robotyne and in southern Robotyne, respectively.[83]

Positional engagements continued near Krynky in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast on May 15.[84] A Russian milblogger amplified complaints from a Russian servicemember reportedly operating on islands in the Dnipro River Delta about the lack of Russian electronic warfare (EW) systems and trained personnel.[85] Another Russian milblogger amplified a report from a Russian servicemember reportedly operating near Krynky about how Russian artillery is accidentally striking Russian forces in friendly fire incidents.[86]

Ukrainian forces likely conducted an ATACMS strike on Belbek Airfield in occupied Crimea on the night of May 14 to 15. Russian sources posted footage reportedly of the Ukrainian strike on Belbek.[87] Ukrainian journalist Yuriy Butusov reported that Ukrainian forces destroyed a MiG-31 aircraft, two air defense systems, and a radar system and damaged three Su-27 aircraft at Belbek Airfield.[88] The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces shot down 10 ATACMS missiles over Crimea on the night of May 14 to 15.[89] Sevastopol occupation governor Mikhail Razvozhaev identified the missiles as the cluster munitions equipped version of the ATACMS missiles.[90] A prominent Russian milblogger claimed that Ukrainian forces launched up to 16 ATACMS against Belbek Airfield and that Russian forces downed about 13 missiles.[91]

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

Russian forces conducted a series of limited missile strikes against Ukraine on May 14 and 15. Kharkiv Oblast Police Chief Volodymyr Tymoshko reported that Russian forces struck Kharkiv City with two S-300 missiles on the evening of May 14.[92] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted a strike on Mykolaiv City with unspecified missiles on May 15, and Ukraine's Southern Operational Command stated that Russian forces struck an automotive service station in Mykolaiv.[93] Ukrainian Dnipropetrovsk Oblast Military Administration Head Serhiy Lysak reported that Russian forces struck infrastructure in Dnipro City with an unspecified number of missiles, and Ukraine's Eastern Air Command reported that Ukrainian forces shot down a Russian Kh-59/69 cruise missile over Dnipropetrovsk Oblast.[94]

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

Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksandr Lytyvyenko assessed on May 15 that Russian forces will have enough tanks and armored fighting vehicles for the next year and half of fighting in Ukraine at their current operational tempo.[95] Russia is relying on vast Soviet-era stores of vehicles and other equipment to sustain operations and losses in Ukraine at a level far higher than the current Russian defense industrial base (DIB) can offset.[96] Russian forces reportedly removed 25 to 40 percent of its tank strategic reserves, depending on the model, from open-air storage facilities since 2022 as of March 2024.[97] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets reported on February 4 that the Russian defense industry can produce 250–300 “new and thoroughly modernized” tanks per year and can repair around 250–300 additional damaged tanks per year.[98] The Russian DIB's constrained ability to produce new tanks and the large but finite number of Soviet stocks means that there is a limit to the duration of regular Russian mechanized assaults in Ukraine at the current scale.

Kalashnikov Concern, a subsidiary of the Russian state-owned defense conglomerate Rostec, reportedly assumed control over St. Petersburg-based optics manufacturer JSC Lomo.[99] Kremlin newswire TASS reported on May 14 that Russian DIB sources stated that JSC Lomo had been jeopardizing defense orders for years but still produces items that are extremely important for Russian forces.[100] TASS' sources reported that Kalashnikov Concern actively uses JSC Lomo's products in sniper rifles and precision weapons and made the decision to assume control of JSC Lomo to reduce costs.[101]

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

Nothing significant to report.

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

Ukrainian defense enterprises continue to expand domestic production and produce technologically advanced systems for use on the frontline. The head of Ukraine's state-owned defense enterprise manager Ukroboronprom, Herman Smetanin, stated on May 8 that Ukroboronprom's production volume has increased by a factor of three and that the company aims to increase production in some areas up to 10 times in 2024.[102] Smetanin stated that Ukraine has significantly increased the production of artillery ammunition and is gradually moving to the production of 60mmm artillery shells.[103] The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense (MoD) reported on May 11 that it has approved nine domestically produced land-based robotic systems for operation by Ukrainian forces and that these systems can conduct combat operations with small arms, evacuate wounded, and demine areas.[104]

The US approved the emergency sale of three additional HIMARS systems to Ukraine for an estimated $30 million on May 10.[105] The US Defense Security Cooperations Agency and German Defense Minister Boris Pistorious noted that Germany would be purchasing the HIMARS systems from the US on Ukraine's behalf.[106] Ukrainian forces have previously used HIMARS systems to significant effect, particularly contributing to the Russian withdrawal from the west (right) bank of Kherson Oblast in November 2022, and continue to use HIMARS to strike Russian force concentrations in rear and deep rear areas in occupied Ukraine.[107]

Western partners continue to pledge air defense assets for Ukraine. Canadian Defense Minister Bill Blair stated on May 10 that Canada will contribute $55.7 million to a German-led initiative to provide UA with air defense systems.[108] The German MoD stated on May 11 that Canada will finance the purchase of IRIS-T air defense systems for Ukrainian forces.[109] French Defense Minister Sebastien Lecornu stated during a hearing at the national assembly on March 15 that France will send a second batch of Aster missiles for the SAMP/T air defense system to Ukraine but did not specify the size or value of the package.[110]

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

Russian President Vladimir gave an interview to People's Republic of China (PRC) state outlet Xinhua News Agency on May 15, in which he promoted the PRC's vague peace plan and longstanding Kremlin information operations about negotiations.[111] The Kremlin has routinely feigned interest in meaningful negotiations while placing the onus for negotiations on the West in an effort to prompt the West to make concessions on Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty.[112] Putin likely hopes that these information operations may generate interest in the PRC's relatively stagnating effort to portray itself as a credible mediator for the war in Ukraine and set conditions for negotiations more favorable to Russia.

Kremlin officials continue to portray the West and the US as seeking to destabilize Georgia amid continued protests in Tbilisi against Georgia's Russian-style "foreign agents" bill. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stated on May 14 that Georgia’s Kremlin-style “foreign agents” bill would move Georgia further away from the values of the European Union (EU) and NATO, prompting Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) Spokesperson Maria Zakharova to accuse the US of "openly threatening" Georgia.[113] Georgian Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili recently reiterated a series of standard anti-Western and pseudohistorical Kremlin narratives during his first public speech since announcing his return to Georgian politics, and both Kremlin actors and select Georgian officials will likely increasingly malign the West as attempting to interfere in Georgian affairs amid the ongoing protests.[114] Members from the ruling Georgian Dream party likely intend to purposefully derail long-term Georgian efforts for Euro-Atlantic integration, which plays into continued Russian hybrid operations to divide, destabilize, and weaken Georgia.[115]

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)

Belarusian opposition railway workers stated on May 15 that they have noticed increased measures to cover up preparations for the movement of Russian military equipment and personnel between Belarus and Russia.[116] Belarusian opposition railway workers stated that there has been an increase in communications between the Russian and Belarusian ministries of defense (MoD) and Belarusian railway operators but did not confirm that Russian forces will resume transporting materiel and personnel on Belarusian railways.[117] Russian forces previously used contingents in Belarus to leverage Belarusian training capacity and to fix Ukrainian forces to the Belarusian-Ukrainian border, and the Kremlin may hope to once again achieve these effects with renewed limited deployments to Belarus.[118]

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.

4. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-may-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Post-War Plan for the Gaza Strip: Senior Israeli officials are publicly disagreeing over a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip. The Israeli defense minister demanded a post-war plan from Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the IDF chief of staff called current Israeli operations a “Sisyphean task” unless a post-war plan is established.
• Military action should be designed and executed with a defined political end state to guide military operations and avoid actions that will undermine the successful achievement of the political end state. Destroying Hamas is a military task, but it is not necessarily a political end state without a vision for the post-war Gaza Strip.
• CTP-ISW continues to assess that there is no sustainable end to this conflict if Hamas remains a political and military entity in the Gaza Strip. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power would serve Hamas’ purposes by allowing the group to prepare for the next round of fighting.
• Jordan: Jordanian security services arrested several Jordanians of Palestinian descent and seized a weapons cache that Iranian-backed militias had smuggled from Syria into Jordan with the involvement of the apprehended Jordanians. The Brotherhood cell members reportedly intended to use the weapons to conduct “acts of sabotage” to destabilize Jordan.
• Iran: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s understanding of Iranian "nuclear ambitions" has deteriorated, according to the IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report. The IAEA Director General said that Iranian officials “must stop” normalizing discussions about procuring a nuclear weapon
• Lebanon: The IDF killed a senior Hezbollah field commander in a drone strike in Tyre, southern Lebanon, on May 14.

IRAN UPDATE, MAY 15, 2024

May 15, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Iran Update, May 15, 2024

Brian Carter, Johanna Moore, Alexandra Braverman, Kathryn Tyson, Kelly Campa, and Annika Ganzeveld

Information Cutoff: 2:00 pm ET

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

CTP-ISW defines the “Axis of Resistance” as the unconventional alliance that Iran has cultivated in the Middle East since the Islamic Republic came to power in 1979. This transnational coalition is comprised of state, semi-state, and non-state actors that cooperate 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.

The Israeli defense minister publicly called on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to define a political end state in the Gaza Strip. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on May 15 that “governance by non-Hamas Palestinian entities, accompanied by international actors, is in Israel’s interest.”[1] Gallant added that he rejected Israeli civil or military governance in the Strip. Gallant said that his statement was necessary because “the gains of the war are being eroded and Israel’s long-term security is at stake.”[2] Gallant was responding to an earlier statement by Netanyahu in which Netanyahu argued that it would be irrelevant to discuss the post-war plans until Hamas is destroyed.[3]

This public disagreement between Netanyahu and Gallant comes after IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi privately demanded a post-war plan from Netanyahu and called current Israeli re-clearing operations a “Sisyphean task.”[4] Halevi made these comments during a cabinet meeting sometime between May 10 and 12.[5] The Washington Post reported that Halevi’s private comments reflected the opinions of “many Israeli security officials.”[6] Other senior IDF officials also demanded ”political leaders...make decisions and formulate a strategy,” according to Israeli media.[7] Israeli media also reported that Israeli cabinet officials told the prime minister that his failure to make decisions was ”risking lives.”[8] These disagreements come as the IDF reentered Zaytoun, a neighborhood in southern Gaza City, for the third time since February 2024 and other IDF units began a major, division-sized operation in Jabalia.[9] The IDF previously fought in Jabalia in December 2023 before withdrawing.[10]

Military action should be designed and executed with a defined political end state to guide military operations and avoid actions that will undermine the successful achievement of the political end state. This is particularly important when the requirement for a military operation’s success is the development and stability of a new government in the area of operations. The political echelon should define a political end state to enable military commanders to design military operations to successfully meet the political end. Military commanders planning operations that lack a political end state will be unable to plan and execute effective operations because the commanders will not understand how their mission fits into the political objective of eliminating Hamas’ government. Destroying Hamas is a military task, but it is not necessarily a political end state without a vision for the post-war Gaza Strip. Some actions that could destroy Hamas’ military capabilities may fail to support the establishment of a new government. Other actions could ultimately undermine Israel’s ability to replace Hamas with a new governing authority in the Gaza Strip. The articulation of a political end state is important to avoid the risks of such outcome.

CTP-ISW continues to assess that there is no sustainable end to this conflict if Hamas remains a political and military entity in the Gaza Strip. Hamas aims to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamist Palestinian state controlling all Israeli territory. Hamas has said publicly that it can “accept the interim liberation of parts of Palestine” and an “interim truce” but that these interim steps only “serve as a warrior’s rest stop.”[11] ”Parts of Palestine“ in this context refers to the Gaza Strip. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power would serve Hamas’ purposes by allowing the group to prepare for the next round of fighting. Hamas started the current war by breaking a period of relative calm between itself and Israel on October 6, and there is no reason to believe Hamas will honor a future “truce.”

Reuters reported on May 15 that Jordanian security services thwarted an attempt by Iranian-backed militias in Syria to smuggle weapons to a Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood cell in Jordan in late March 2024.[12] Jordanian security services arrested an unspecified number of Jordanians of Palestinian descent who were “members of the Brotherhood cell” and seized a cache of unspecified smuggled weapons, according to two anonymous Jordanian sources. The Brotherhood cell members intended to use the weapons to conduct “acts of sabotage” to destabilize Jordan, according to the sources. The unspecified Jordanian sources also claimed that the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood cell is linked to Hamas’ military wing. An anonymous senior Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood representative claimed that senior Hamas leader Saleh al Arouri—who the Israelis killed in January 2024—recruited the arrested cell members.[13] Hamas denied on May 15 that it planned to stoke instability in Jordan.[14] The Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood acknowledged that Jordanian security forces arrested some of its members and that these members possessed smuggled weapons but claimed that Brotherhood leadership did not approve the smuggling of weapons to Jordan.[15] It is nonetheless notable that Iranian-backed militias and a senior Hamas leader were able to recruit and then smuggle weapons to a cell in Jordan.

The Iranian-backed attempt to arm a Muslim Brotherhood cell in Jordan supports CTP-ISW's previous assessments that Iran is adopting a more confrontational approach towards Jordan in its regional strategy.[16] Jordan has thwarted numerous attempts in recent months by Iran and its partners to smuggle weapons—including Claymore mines, C4 and Semtex explosives, Kalashnikov rifles, and 107mm Katyusha rockets—to the West Bank and Jordan.[17]

Bloomberg reported on May 15 that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s understanding of Iranian "nuclear ambitions" has deteriorated, citing the IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report.[18]. The IAEA released the report to diplomats who will attend the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna on June 3. The report stated that the IAEA's understanding of Iran’s production and inventory of centrifuges, rotors and bellows, heavy water, and uranium ore concentration has decreased despite an eight percent increase in the number of IAEA inspections in Iran in 2023. IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi stated in the report that there has been little progress in resolving outstanding safeguards issues. Grossi added that the IAEA cannot provide ”assurances about the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program” unless Iran resolves the outstanding safeguards issues. Iran’s stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium increased by 145 kilograms in the last quarter.

Grossi separately stated on May 15 that Iranian officials “must stop” normalizing discussions about procuring a nuclear weapon. Some Iranian officials have warned in recent weeks that Iran could change its nuclear doctrine, as CTP-ISW has repeatedly noted.[19] Grossi stated that Iran must "meaningfully engage” with the IAEA so that the IAEA can guarantee that the Iranian nuclear program is exclusively peaceful in nature.

Key Takeaways:

• Post-War Plan for the Gaza Strip: Senior Israeli officials are publicly disagreeing over a post-war plan for the Gaza Strip. The Israeli defense minister demanded a post-war plan from Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the IDF chief of staff called current Israeli operations a “Sisyphean task” unless a post-war plan is established.
• Military action should be designed and executed with a defined political end state to guide military operations and avoid actions that will undermine the successful achievement of the political end state. Destroying Hamas is a military task, but it is not necessarily a political end state without a vision for the post-war Gaza Strip.
• CTP-ISW continues to assess that there is no sustainable end to this conflict if Hamas remains a political and military entity in the Gaza Strip. A ceasefire that leaves Hamas in power would serve Hamas’ purposes by allowing the group to prepare for the next round of fighting.
• Jordan: Jordanian security services arrested several Jordanians of Palestinian descent and seized a weapons cache that Iranian-backed militias had smuggled from Syria into Jordan with the involvement of the apprehended Jordanians. The Brotherhood cell members reportedly intended to use the weapons to conduct “acts of sabotage” to destabilize Jordan.
• Iran: The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)’s understanding of Iranian "nuclear ambitions" has deteriorated, according to the IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report. The IAEA Director General said that Iranian officials “must stop” normalizing discussions about procuring a nuclear weapon
• Lebanon: The IDF killed a senior Hezbollah field commander in a drone strike in Tyre, southern Lebanon, on May 14.

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

The IDF 98th Division continued clearing operations in the center of Jabalia camp on May 15. Israeli forces engaged “dozens” of Palestinian fighters while operating in Jabalia.[20] Palestinian militias have claimed 34 attacks targeting Israeli forces operating near Jabalia camp since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 14.[21] Palestinian militias have claimed 120 attacks (averaging 30 attacks per day) targeting Israeli forces since the IDF advanced into eastern Jabalia on May 11.[22] This marks the highest rate of claimed attacks per day in Jabalia since the war began.

Israeli forces continued a re-clearing operation in Zaytoun on May 15. The Nahal Brigade killed Palestinian fighters and seized small arms, explosives, and Hamas intelligence documents.[23] Hamas fighters targeted Israeli forces in Zaytoun with rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire.[24] Israeli forces also located a rocket manufacturing facility near a school in Zaytoun.[25] The Nahal Brigade withdrew from Zaytoun on May 15 and began preparing for future ”offensive operations.”[26] The 2nd Reservist Infantry Brigade will remain in Zaytoun and continue clearing operations.

The IDF 162nd Division continued clearing operations east of Rafah city on May 15.[27] Palestinian militias, including Hamas, targeted Israeli forces east of Rafah city with RPGs, sniper rifles, and improvised explosive devices.[28] Three Palestinian militias also mortared Israeli forces near Rafah crossing and in eastern Rafah.[29] Israeli forces destroyed militia infrastructure.[30]

The Givati Brigade (162nd Division) raided a Hamas training facility in Rafah.[31] The training facility contained models of Israeli Merkava tanks and armored personnel carriers. Israeli forces killed Palestinian fighters, seized weapons and intelligence material, and destroyed buildings.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) posted footage on May 14 showing unspecified armed Palestinian fighters near an UNRWA logistics facility in eastern Rafah.[32] The Palestinian fighters were loitering near UN vehicles and moving outside the building. The footage also appears to show the Palestinian fighters threatening unspecified individuals at the facility. The IDF also reported that the Palestinian fighters fired small arms.[33] The IDF called on the United Nations to conduct an investigation into the incident.[34]

The IDF issued evacuation orders on May 15 for civilians in Menasheya and Sheikh Zayed in the northern Gaza Strip.[35] Israeli forces will conduct operations in the evacuation zones ”immediately” to target Palestinian fighters operating in and launching rockets from the area. The IDF ordered civilians to evacuate to shelters in western Gaza City.

The IDF released documents describing the activities of Hamas’ General Security Service in the Gaza Strip.[36] The IDF obtained documents detailing the names of operatives working for Hamas’ General Security Service, their handlers, and the reports that the operatives and handlers submitted to the service. The IDF explained that the head of Hamas in the Gaza Strip Yahya Sinwar and a Hamas Political Bureau member, Rawhi Mushtaha, helped established the General Security Service to secure Hamas’ control over the Gaza Strip. The IDF said that Hamas recruited informants in Gazan mosques and elsewhere in communities to report activities that challenge Hamas The IDF added that Hamas also planted “agents” within other Palestinian militias, including PIJ, to interfere in their internal affairs. The IDF reported that the General Security Service has also threatened journalists and human rights activists who speak out against Hamas.

Palestinian fighters conducted at least five rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on May 14.[37] The IDF Air Force attacked Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters who launched a rocket attack from the northern Gaza Strip targeting Sderot on May 14[38]

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

The al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades fired small arms and detonated an improvised explosive device targeting Israeli forces during Israeli operations in Nablus on May 15.[39]

The Palestinian Authority claimed that Israeli forces shot and killed a student during a march for Nakba Day in al Bireh, near Ramallah, on May 15.[40] Palestinian media reported that West Bank residents held a funeral service for the student.[41] The IDF has not commented on the incident at the time of this writing.

Israeli forces detained ten wanted individuals and confiscated military equipment during raids across the West Bank on May 15.[42]

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 six attacks into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 14.[43]

The IDF killed a senior Hezbollah field commander in a drone strike in Tyre, southern Lebanon, on May 14.[44] The IDF said that Hussein Ibrahim al Makki helped plan and execute attacks targeting Israel. The IDF added that Makki previously served as the commander of Hezbollah’s “coastal sector.”[45] Hezbollah mourned the death of Makki on May 14.[46] Israeli sources reported that Makki served as a coordinator and liaison between Hezbollah and the IRGC Quds Force in Syria and had a ”special relationship” with senior IRGC officer Brig. Gen. Mohammad Reza Zahedi.[47] Zahedi, who died in the Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, commanded the IRGC Quds Force unit responsible for overseeing operations in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and the Palestinian Territories.[48] Israeli media said that Makki was responsible for ”arming and equipping [Hezbollah] and the supply line from Iran,” citing unspecified media sources.[49] Israeli media added that Makki was a ”strong arm” in Syria for Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah.[50]

Lebanese Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah hosted a Hamas delegation in Beirut on May 15.[51] Deputy Hamas leader in the Gaza Strip Khalil al Hayya led the delegation.[52] Hamas Political Bureau member Mohammed Nasr and Hamas' senior representative to Lebanon Osama Hamdan also attended the meeting. Nasrallah and the Hamas officials discussed recent developments in the Gaza Strip, the “various support fronts,” and the status of recent negotiations between Israel and Hamas.[53]

The Metulla Council head said on May 15 that communities in northern Israel will permanently relocate if schools remain closed for another year.[54] The council head’s comments follow demonstrations on May 14 against the Israeli government's inability to return displaced Israeli civilians to northern Israel.[55] Residents began planning protests after Israeli media reported on May 10 that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dismissed concerns that residents may not be able to return to northern Israel before the school year begins in early September.[56]

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

Iranian officials are unapologetically defending the type of violent behavior against Iranian women that triggered the Mahsa Amini protest movement in September 2022. Social media users circulated a video on May 14 of the Iranian morality patrol forcing a woman who defied the mandatory veiling law into a van in Iran.[57] The video shows the morality patrol covering the woman’s head with a blanket. Iranian Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi claimed on May 15 that the morality patrol acted ”according to regulations” by covering the woman’s head with a blanket. This incident follows a sharp increase in violent arrests of unveiled women by the Iranian Law Enforcement Command (LEC) following the resumption of enforced mandatory veiling in Iran in mid-April 2024.[58] The LEC separately fired an officer for assaulting an unveiled woman on May 14.[59] The LEC fired this officer after footage of the LEC acting inappropriately surfaced on social media.

Iranian Law Enforcement Commander Brig. Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan and Vietnamese Public Security Minister To Lam signed a memorandum of understanding in Hanoi, Vietnam, on May 14 to increase law enforcement cooperation.[60] The agreement includes provisions for Iran and Vietnam to increase information sharing and cooperation to combat organized crime, terrorism, cybercrime, drug smuggling, arms trafficking, and illegal immigration. Radan traveled to Hanoi on May 13 for a four-day visit. Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh called for increasing economic, commercial, law enforcement, and educational cooperation during a meeting with Radan on May 13. Radan previously traveled to Russia in June 2023 and to China in January 2024.[61]

Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force Commander Brig. Gen. Esmail Ghaani reiterated the Iranian regime’s claim that Iran's April 13 drone and missile attack targeting Israel was a success.[62] Ghaani emphasized Iran's military during a speech on May 15 commemorating former IRGC Quds Force Coordination Deputy Brig. Gen. Mohammad Hadi Haj Rahimi. Rahimi died in the Israeli airstrike in Damascus, Syria, on April 1. Ghaani claimed that Israel, the United States, and the West are “too small” to face Iran and its Axis of Resistance. Ghaani stated that Israel and the United States knew when Iran would launch its retaliatory attack against Israel. This statement is consistent with IRGC Quds Force Coordination Deputy Brig. Gen. Eraj Masjedi’s statement on May 14. Masjedi noted that it is difficult for Iran to maintain the element of surprise when attacking Israel directly due to the distance between the two countries.[63] Ghaani threatened that the full effects of both the April 13 attack and Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel have not yet been fully seen.[64] Ghaani claimed the success of the April 13 attack is not due to the volume of missiles Iran launched but due to "many secrets" hidden in this operation. Ghaani claimed that the United States defends Israel more than any other country.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—has claimed three attacks targeting Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cut-off on May 14. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed a drone attack targeting an unspecified “military target” in Eilat on May 14.[65] The group also claimed two “Arqab” cruise missile attacks targeting unspecified “vital targets” in the Jericho Valley and the Nevatim airbase near Beer Sheva on May 15.[66] The IDF reported that its fighter jets intercepted two drones that entered Israeli airspace from the east on the night of May 14 to 15.[67]

Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom announced on May 15 that its CEO, Alexei Miller, met with Iranian First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber and Oil Minister Javad Owji in Tehran.[68] Gazprom did not specify what these officials discussed, and Iranian media has not reported on Miller’s visit to Iran at the time of this writing. Owji met with representatives from Gazprom on the sidelines of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum in Algiers, Algeria, in early March 2024.[69] The National Iranian Oil Company and Gazprom signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2022 that includes provisions for Gazprom to help Iran develop the Kish and North Pars gas fields and to increase gas pressure at the South Pars gas field.[70]

The Houthis claimed on May 15 that they launched an anti-ship ballistic missile targeting the USS Mason in the Red Sea on an unspecified date.[71] CENTCOM reported that the USS Mason intercepted a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile on May 13.[72] The Houthis also claimed on May 15 that they fired unspecified weapons targeting a vessel identified as the Destiny in the Red Sea.[73] The Houthis claimed that the Destiny concealed its destination while transiting via the Red Sea en route to Eilat in April 2024 to avoid a Houthi attack. [74]

5. The Gates of Gaza

A lot of food for thought here.

Excerpts:

Then came the paragliders over Israel’s smart fence. If one designed a military paradigm specifically with the intention of duping the Israelis, one could have done no better than Star Wars. The paradigm played to their vanity. It told them, subliminally, that the activities at which they naturally excelled (special operations and clandestine intelligence collection), the institutions that they most revered (Mossad, the Air Force, and Special Forces), and all the ventures that made them as rich as Europeans (high-tech startups)—are precisely the elements that gave them, like Samson, superhuman strength. The Air Force, intelligence services, and special forces have long been the glittering stars of the national security culture of the Start-Up Nation. The Star Wars paradigm taught that it is the stars who win the wars—and virtually no one else was necessary.

The healthy alternative to the Star Wars paradigm, which has so visibly and spectacularly failed to assure Israel’s security, is “Mad Max.” This alternative paradigm states that new and old weapon systems will merge, thanks to innovative concepts of operations. Mad Max understands that the twenty-first century battlefield is home to T-64 tanks, which fought their first battles in the early 1960s, as well as state-of-the-art cyber-electronic warfare. Mini drones that are commercially available across the globe can spot for Cold War-era artillery.

Never underestimate technologically inferior adversaries, the Mad Max paradigm counsels. High-tech tools and weapons will never be the sole or even the primary factor determining the winner of wars. This dictum is especially true for the wars of the Middle East, where great powers external to the region determine the balance of power on the ground.

...

The digital revolution has enhanced the powers of technologically advanced countries in many ways, but it has also exposed them to new risks while also delivering surprising new tools to underdogs. Even the poorest of powers, thanks to the internet and smartphones, now enjoy a bonanza of open-source intelligence that just a few years ago was not available to even the richest of states. Cheap drones purchased off the shelf can offer startling reconnaissance capabilities to Ukraine against Russia. Cyber-enabled supply chains and GPS present an otherwise ragtag group like the Houthis opportunities to disrupt global commercial shipping. The list goes on.

The Star Wars paradigm also rests on the assumption, often unstated, that taking and holding territory has somehow become a secondary part of warfighting. While it is certainly possible to name wars that have been won without territorial conquest, they are few and far between. Almost inevitably, the magnitude of such victories is small, because victors who impose their will from over the horizon—from the air, sea, or through economic leverage—lack the physical presence on the ground that is necessary to shape a new political order.

The Mad Max mentality cultivates a heightened sensitivity to the phrase “on the ground.” With minor exceptions, armies translate battlefield victories into lasting changes either by seizing territory or threatening persuasively to do so. In the brave new digital world, traditional warfighting assets—large combat formations, replete with artillery, rocket systems, engineering units, and heavy armor—will not disappear, because only they can take and hold territory decisively.

...

When Moshe Dayan delivered his eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg, Israel had already fought the War of Independence against Egypt, not to mention the other Arab states. Before making peace, Egypt would fight four more major wars against Israel, including the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That conflict opened with a major and devastating surprise attack. Then, too, Israel failed to see the Egyptians coming, because it believed that its military advantages made it impervious to attack by a technologically inferior foe.

Properly understood, this war is the second major Israel-Iran war—the 2006 Lebanon war being the first. It is also in a sense a second War of Independence. Israel’s wars with Iran, like the wars with Egypt, will be many in number. Preparation for the long contest with Iran will force the Israelis to undergo a self-transformation more than a little reminiscent of 1948.

On October 7, the residents of Nahal Oz and the rest of Israeli society paid a price far beyond their imagining for abandoning the kind of vigilance that Dayan sought to summon at Ro’i Rothberg’s funeral. In the years to come, Israelis will rediscover the steely-eyed and unsentimental attitudes that Dayan displayed in his eulogy—or else they will die. “This is the fate of our generation,” Dayan said. “This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

The Gates of Gaza

Israel must abandon the failed idea that technological wizardry will guarantee its security.

Michael Doran & Can Kasapoğlu

hudson.org · by Paul Sracic

On April 29, 1956, two assassins, an Egyptian and a Palestinian, ambushed Ro’i Rothberg, the security officer of kibbutz Nahal Oz. Luring him into the fields, they shot him off his horse, beat him, and shot him again, ending his life. They then dragged his lifeless body as a gruesome trophy back to Gaza, where it was desecrated. Unlike Iran and its proxies today, however, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who ruled Gaza at the time, did not ransom Israeli corpses. The day after Rothberg’s murder, the Egyptian authorities transferred his mutilated remains to United Nations mediators who, in turn, passed them back to Israel for burial.

Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan delivered the eulogy at the funeral. Steely-eyed and unsentimental, Dayan attributed Rothberg’s death to the victim’s own lack of vigilance, which, he suggested, was symptomatic of a laxness in the whole society. Craving peace and normalcy, the Israelis were allowing themselves to imagine that their neighbors shared the same aspirations. “Let us not cast blame on his murderers today,” Dayan said. “It is pointless to mention their deep-seated hatred for us.” There was nothing the Israelis could do to make the Gazans willingly accept the establishment of the Jewish State. “Ro’i [Rothberg]—the light in his heart blinded him to the gleam of the knife. The longing for peace deafened him to the sound of the murders lying in wait.”

The residents of Nahal Oz, Dayan said, carry “the heavy gates of Gaza on their shoulders, gates behind which hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands pray that we will weaken so that they may tear us to pieces—have we forgotten that?”

On October 7, when Hamas paragliders sailed over Israel’s 40-mile “smart fence” with its state-of-the-art radar systems, remote control machine guns, and underground sensors, they encountered on the other side no meaningful forms of military resistance from what is often accounted to be the fourth most powerful military force on earth. Instead of being greeted by tanks, helicopters, and heavily armed brigades, the Hamas invaders found themselves among young revelers at the Nova music festival, whom they slaughtered like lambs.

Following the attack, both friends and foes of Israel greeted the absence of any organized military response, which lasted for many hours, with incredulity. As news spread of lightly-armed Hamas forces penetrating beyond the immediate border areas to major Israeli population centers like Ashkelon, everyone wondered: What happened to the IDF?

The answer is that, over the prior two decades, Israel’s military had deliberately remade itself by stripping away exactly the kinds of conventional force assets—large combat formations, overwhelming firepower, and heavy armor—that could be expected to repel a large-scale cross-border attack. Israel had replaced its old army with a new one, based on new theories of warfighting that had become current in the West since 9/11. In place of its former doctrines and force structure, Israel had adopted a more modern military approach favoring a “small and smart” force reliant on precision airpower, special forces, and technology-centric intelligence. As a result, almost without exception, Israel’s leaders failed to foresee not only October 7, but also the kind of war the military is now fighting: Not quick, surgical strikes lasting for several days at most, but a multi-front conflict requiring the taking and holding of contested land positions over the course of months and possibly years.

For seven months now, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been fighting simultaneously on seven fronts (in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen). In Gaza they have deployed large, mechanized formations into urban areas. With respect to the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, they have readied themselves to do the same should circumstances demand it. No one planned for this kind of war. As a result of this lack of vision and forward planning, Israel does not have the right force structure, defense technological industrial base, or alliances to ensure a longer-term victory.

Some part of the debate inside Israel around these realities surfaced in early April when Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote a letter to the prime minister withholding his support for a $9.5 billion purchase of a squadron of F-35 aircraft and a squadron of F-15 aircraft. Smotrich refused to approve the purchase until the government convened the finance committee to examine the security budget. “The war challenges many basic assumptions in the security budgets and requires renewed thought. Following the war, the defense establishment requires huge budget additions and the Finance Ministry’s position is that fundamental assumptions and priorities need to be revised accordingly,” Smotrich wrote.

Unfortunately for Israel, weapons systems, force structures, and established alliances cannot be remade in a day. In that respect, the military paradigm resembles a network of railway tracks with a limited array of switches. The tracks assist the IDF in moving forward, but they also constrain it, sending it down predetermined lines regardless of whether those lines lead to the destination that is most desirable strategically. Laying new tracks will cost Israel time, measured in years; money, measured in untold billions of dollars; but also lives, measured in the thousands.

Some of the flaws in Israel’s “small and smart” paradigm came emblazoned with a “Made in Israel” stamp, but just as many were imported from the West, particularly from the American war colleges where Israel has long sent its professional officer corps for training. The Israelis have borrowed liberally from the Americans and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who, for some two decades before the Ukraine war, endorsed the belief that large-scale and prolonged wars between states were a thing of the past.

The “War on Terror,” with its focus on substate actors clearly influenced this thinking, which persisted even as Russia intervened in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, in Syria, together with Iran, in 2015, and in Libya in 2017. It persisted even as China engaged in the largest and fastest military buildup in history. “We are working to build deeper and more effective partnerships with other key centers of influence—including China, India, and Russia,” says the U.S. National Security Strategy, published by the Obama administration in May 2010. “[W]e want to see a true strategic partnership between NATO and Russia, and we will act accordingly, with the expectation of reciprocity from Russia,” stated NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept. This document remained the authoritative statement of NATO strategy until 2022, when the alliance began to depict China, Russia, and Iran as more threatening.

So long as “partnership” was the watchword when describing the West’s relations with China, Russia, and Iran, then it seemed obvious that the scale of warfighting would shrink. “State-on-state conflict will not disappear, but its character is already changing,” stated an authoritative British strategy document in 2010. “Asymmetric tactics such as economic, cyber and proxy actions instead of direct military confrontation will play an increasing part, as both state and non-state adversaries seek an edge over those who overmatch them in conventional military capability,” it continued. In other words, warfare as we commonly imagine it—that is, as two big armies facing off against each other for months or years on the battlefield, like we see in Gaza and Ukraine today—had all but disappeared. A series of running battles, short and sharp, had replaced it.

Note the causal explanation in the quote above. Big wars will not happen, so the thinking went, due to the technological superiority of the Western countries. The assessment rests on two key assumptions, namely, that technological advantages deter states; and that technological superiority itself can be the sole determinant of victory in war.In recognition of this assumption, we will name this military paradigm—the one that most NATO powers and the Israelis adopted—“Star Wars.”

The Star Wars paradigm fosters the misguided belief that the new renders the old obsolete. Emerging technologies, such as algorithmic warfare, eclipse traditional warfighting assets, like tanks and howitzers. Because it replaces traditional combat formations, which are bulky and expensive, with small, agile forces, bureaucrats, ever on the search for ways to cut budgets, found the Star Wars paradigm inherently attractive. Generals, for their part, were drawn to the paradigm, because the new tools, in addition to their inherent effectiveness, were also much sexier than the traditional instruments of war. Generals gravitated to conferences in Silicon Valley, where they secured lucrative consulting careers, after retirement, with high-tech companies. If given the choice, who wouldn’t prefer to log their training hours in virtual reality simulations rather than dragging howitzers through the mud in the freezing rain?

Indeed, the new Silicon Valley tools were supposedly turning the howitzer into a weapon of yesteryear—in part by enhancing deterrence through improved intelligence. According to the Star Wars paradigm, technologically inferior forces had no chance of winning against technologically superior powers, because the great electronic eye in the sky never sleeps; it sees all. On the computer screens of high-tech militaries, enemy forces would stand out like sharks in a well-lit aquarium: fearsome in appearance but visible from all sides and at all times. Technological advancements generated an intelligence officer’s wet dream: total battlefield transparency married to flawless information superiority over the adversary.

Then came the paragliders over Israel’s smart fence. If one designed a military paradigm specifically with the intention of duping the Israelis, one could have done no better than Star Wars. The paradigm played to their vanity. It told them, subliminally, that the activities at which they naturally excelled (special operations and clandestine intelligence collection), the institutions that they most revered (Mossad, the Air Force, and Special Forces), and all the ventures that made them as rich as Europeans (high-tech startups)—are precisely the elements that gave them, like Samson, superhuman strength. The Air Force, intelligence services, and special forces have long been the glittering stars of the national security culture of the Start-Up Nation. The Star Wars paradigm taught that it is the stars who win the wars—and virtually no one else was necessary.

The healthy alternative to the Star Wars paradigm, which has so visibly and spectacularly failed to assure Israel’s security, is “Mad Max.” This alternative paradigm states that new and old weapon systems will merge, thanks to innovative concepts of operations. Mad Max understands that the twenty-first century battlefield is home to T-64 tanks, which fought their first battles in the early 1960s, as well as state-of-the-art cyber-electronic warfare. Mini drones that are commercially available across the globe can spot for Cold War-era artillery.

Never underestimate technologically inferior adversaries, the Mad Max paradigm counsels. High-tech tools and weapons will never be the sole or even the primary factor determining the winner of wars. This dictum is especially true for the wars of the Middle East, where great powers external to the region determine the balance of power on the ground.

Because war remains today what it has always been, a political activity, we cannot gauge the true advantage of any weapon—be it new and technologically advanced or old and rusty—without first considering the political-military strategy that it serves. Victory comes not to him who kills the most enemy soldiers or who fries the most motherboards but to him who converts what transpires on the battlefield into the most beneficial political arrangements. Losers on the battlefield frequently win wars, by bleeding giants until they are too exhausted to continue fighting. For example, in Vietnam, the second Iraq War, and Afghanistan, the U.S. repeatedly outmatched its adversaries militarily but lost the wars, nevertheless.

The digital revolution has enhanced the powers of technologically advanced countries in many ways, but it has also exposed them to new risks while also delivering surprising new tools to underdogs. Even the poorest of powers, thanks to the internet and smartphones, now enjoy a bonanza of open-source intelligence that just a few years ago was not available to even the richest of states. Cheap drones purchased off the shelf can offer startling reconnaissance capabilities to Ukraine against Russia. Cyber-enabled supply chains and GPS present an otherwise ragtag group like the Houthis opportunities to disrupt global commercial shipping. The list goes on.

The Star Wars paradigm also rests on the assumption, often unstated, that taking and holding territory has somehow become a secondary part of warfighting. While it is certainly possible to name wars that have been won without territorial conquest, they are few and far between. Almost inevitably, the magnitude of such victories is small, because victors who impose their will from over the horizon—from the air, sea, or through economic leverage—lack the physical presence on the ground that is necessary to shape a new political order.

The Mad Max mentality cultivates a heightened sensitivity to the phrase “on the ground.” With minor exceptions, armies translate battlefield victories into lasting changes either by seizing territory or threatening persuasively to do so. In the brave new digital world, traditional warfighting assets—large combat formations, replete with artillery, rocket systems, engineering units, and heavy armor—will not disappear, because only they can take and hold territory decisively.

Under the influence of Star Wars, Israel neglected its role by allowing its land forces to atrophy. In 2018, Brigadier Roman Goffman, who was then the commander of the 7th Armored Brigade, took the extraordinary step of airing his concerns about this issue openly before the senior leadership of the IDF at a command conference. “Chief of Staff,” Goffman said, referring to his senior most commander, General Gadi Eisenkot, “I first want to tell you that we [in armored units] are ready to fight. There is one problem. You don’t activate us… [T]here is a very problematic pattern that is developing here, namely, the avoidance of the use of ground forces.”

Eisenkot sat in the front row of the audience flanked by the top leaders of the IDF. Behind them sat hundreds of senior officers who greeted Goffman’s remarks with smirks. But he continued undeterred. The non-deployment of ground forces, he argued, “ultimately affects the will to fight. What makes us into combat commanders over time is friction with the other side.” Absent friction with the enemy, he continued, the military enters a state of “clinical death.”

On October 7, the Israelis tasted what Goffman meant by “clinical death.” The Israeli military had at its disposal a glittering arsenal of exquisite weapons, including a large squadron of radar-proof F-35s, whose capacities previous generations would have considered to be the stuff of science-fiction. As it turned out, however, none of these weapons were of the slightest use against terrorist bands, armed mainly with Kalashnikovs, who were intent on murdering, raping, and kidnapping civilians.

With its 2022 Strategic Concept, NATO began the arduous and ongoing process of abandoning the faulty notions that major conflict between states is over, that wars will be short and asymmetrical, and that holding territory with large, mechanized forces is no longer central to warfighting. But the Strategic Concept still has some surprising deficiencies, not least of which is its treatment of Iran—or, more accurately, it’s telling non-treatment. The document only briefly addresses Iran’s missiles in a lone passage on weapons of mass destruction.It contains no mention, for example, of Iran’s attack drones, which had been upsetting the military balance in the Middle East for years—and which in the months following the document’s publication began striking targets in Ukraine daily.

While the Israelis had a much deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the Iranian threat, thanks to their Star Wars assumptions they, too, failed to develop a military paradigm that grappled successfully with it in all its dimensions. As Iran now matches off against Israel directly, it possesses four advantages that, each on its own, surprised Israeli war planners. When merged into one, they present a threat to Israel of a magnitude that the country has not faced since the days of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser—an existential threat.

The first of these is an advantage in political warfare. American elites, particularly young elites, have grown increasingly hostile to Zionism. Traditional voices of support for Israel (and for Jews) no longer receive a sympathetic hearing in cultural and educational institutions. Thoroughly steeped in progressivism, these institutions catechize the young to regard Zionism as racism. Iran clearly recognizes this development as an opportunity. The digital revolution and the spread of smart phones provide it, not to mention China and Russia, with new, cheap, and highly effective means to disseminate propaganda in real time to Western media and social media personalities and institutions who enthusiastically spread it, often without the slightest inkling of its origins, directly to an unsuspecting public. For a significant segment of the public, globally, the conflict in Gaza is war between the Israel Defense Forces and Palestinian babies. Western powers and Israel have been slow to recognize the threat, let alone to combat it.

Second, Iran’s Resistance Axis, for the first time ever, is now behaving as something close to a military coalition working toward the united goal of saving Hamas and weakening Israel. The IDF had long assumed that the Resistance Axis would remain what it had always been: a disaggregated network of actors each of which operated according to the restraints dictated by its immediate environment. The assumption of disaggregation allowed the IDF to approach the Iran threat as four discrete challenges: 1) Disrupting the Iranian and Iranian-backed forces on the ground in Syria; 2) Delaying Iran’s nuclear weapons program; 3) Deterring Lebanese Hezbollah; and 4) Deflecting Hamas from a resumption of terror attacks. Missing entirely from this list are the Iran-backed militias in Iraq and, especially the Houthis, the deterrence of which Israel has no apparent solution. But most important of all, what is Israel’s plan to fight the Resistance Axis as a unit? It has none.

Third, Iran has created what military analysts call an “offense-dominant” military regime, a balance of power that favors offensive action.What, precisely, is “offense dominance”? Imagine that you have a Kevlar vest, a top-of-the-line product, which costs two thousand dollars. And imagine that I, your enemy, have an old revolver that shoots six bullets, at two dollars each. I empty the cylinder of my revolver into your vest, which stops five of the six bullets. With an 83.3% interception rate, your vest performed even better than advertised by the manufacturer. This happy fact would give you reason to celebrate, if you weren’t dead, laid to rest by my sixth bullet.

Like a cheap revolver against an expensive vest, Iran’s drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles give it an offensive advantage. When combined in the same strike packages, those weapons can overwhelm the finest missile defenses in the world—a capability that Iran demonstrated on April 13, when it launched over 300 warheads at Israel.

Many analysts presented the attack as a great failure by Iran and a great success by Israel and its coalition partners. Some of Iran’s weapons failed to launch or went astray, so the argument goes. The synchronization of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles left much to be desired. Israel and its coalition partners, therefore, shot down almost all the munitions that were on track to hit their targets. The four Iranian ballistic missiles that did manage to penetrate the net failed to do significant damage. No one died. Then, with great economy of force, Israel responded on April 19 by taking out an Iranian air defense system protecting the Natanz nuclear facility near Esfahan. The Israelis, the argument continues, demonstrated to Iranian “Supreme Leader” Ali Khamenei that his bullets cannot penetrate their vest, and that they are armed with better guns. He, therefore, was supposedly wowed and deterred.

To be sure, the Israelis and their coalition partners, showcased impressive capabilities. And the poor performance of Iran’s weaponry very likely disappointed Khamenei. But before exaggerating the significance of his disappointment, let’s observe that this entire line of analysis is rooted in the dubious Star Wars assumption that we can glean the power and effectiveness of a low-tech adversary’s weaponry by comparing them to our high-tech equivalents. To repeat: the Mad Max mindset reminds us that the true power of a weapon can only be understood in the context of a larger political-military strategy.

Khamenei is conducting an exhaustion strategy that seeks to embroil Israel in a long war of attrition. At the same time, he is driving a wedge between Jerusalem and Washington. Whereas the Star Wars analysis invites us to see the April exchange as a single boxing match to which there will be no sequel, it is more helpful to understanding to see it as but one bout in a lengthy series of bouts with no obvious end in sight.

In several areas, the trend lines are working against Israel, starting with the rising lethality of Iranian drone and missile capabilities. Two decades ago, the mere mention Iran’s missile program elicited giggles from Western analysts. Today, no one is laughing. In the last decade, Iranian weapons systems have increased by leaps and bounds, a trend that the military cooperation with Russia is only accelerating.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is sharing technology with Khamenei, including critical subsystems for drones and missiles, that are elevating Iran’s weapons to a new level. The data that Iran is gathering from the Russo–Ukrainian War is also helping it to improve its Shahed loitering munitions, which are already getting stealthier. When they first appeared over the skies of Kyiv, the Ukrainians had a near perfect interception rate. Today the rate has dropped to eighty percent.Meanwhile, the endurance of the Shaheds will soon increase, as will their size and versatility.

In the April 13 attack on Israel, Khamenei did not make use of at least two lethal assets. His next barrage that he launches might include, for example, two missiles that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps unveiled last year: the Khorramshahr-4 and the Fattah 1. The Khorramshahr comes with a massive, almost 4,000-pound-weighted warhead. The Fattah 1 has a design philosophy that enables it to maneuver both in and out of the atmosphere, not to mention other features that will likely stress Israel’s air and missile defense system.

“Stress” is the key word. While the missile barrage that Khamenei launched on April 13 may have killed no one, it stressed his adversaries in several ways, including economically. Informed observers estimate that on that night Israel alone spent over a billion dollars—a hefty bill for just a few hours work. We have no information about the cost to the entire coalition, but Biden administration officials have testified before Congress that the United States Navy has spent nearly a billion dollars over the last six months intercepting missiles and drones lunched by the IRGC and its terrorist proxies.

The defense economics skew in favor of Iran. Its attack drones cost $20,000 apiece. A David’s Sling Stunner interceptor is estimated to cost $1 million, while a Patriot MSE interceptor is at least $3 million. Iran’s weapons are also plentiful. Its arsenal of drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles is massive, one of the largest in the world.

Playing catch with terrorists is a sucker’s game. To avoid loss, the Israelis must intercept everything lobbed in their direction. Iran risks nothing by attacking and needs only one lucky shot—against, say, HaKirya, Israel’s Pentagon in downtown Tel Aviv; or Dimona, its nuclear reactor in the Negev—to inflict on Israel a national tragedy. Therefore, Israel’s “success” on April 13 was misleading. The circumstances were as optimized for high interception rate as they will ever be. Seeking international legitimacy for its planned attack, Iran telegraphed its intentions, allowing the United States and Israel to prepare in advance. In the future, Iran may seek the element of surprise. In the meantime, it weapons will do nothing except grow more lethal.

Because Iran depends on no outside power for its defense industrial production, it has total freedom of action. Autarky affords Iran what we will call “operational sovereignty,” the ability to decide entirely on its own which risks to incur. Thanks to his sovereign defense industrial base, Khamenei, if he chose to do so, could probably launch a massive barrage at Israel every night for two weeks straight.

Israel, by contrast, suffers from diminished operational sovereignty—because of its dependence on the United States, which scrutinizes every step that Israel takes toward Iran. The IDF cannot flawlessly defend the nation against Iran’s “defective,” “unreliable,” “substandard,” and “inaccurate” weapons without the help of USCENTCOM, the combatant command that organized the coalition defense of Israel. Moreover, Israel co-manufactures the interceptors in its Iron Dome system in the United States, giving Washington the option of withholding resupply to influence Israeli policy.

Which brings us to the fourth surprising advantage that Iran enjoys in its contest with Israel—namely, a beneficent American policy. In some pro-Israeli and Israeli circles, the word “beneficent” in this context will raise hackles. It smacks of ingratitude and comes across as an unwarranted polemical attack. Biden, so his supporters argue, has backed Israel’s war against Hamas, Iran’s proxy. He has dispatched aircraft carrier groups to the Middle East to deter Iran and its surrogates. He has ordered the American military to carry out punitive raids in Iraq and Yemen. He is promoting Saudi-Israeli normalization, and on April 13 he presided over a major coalition effort to defend Israel from an historically unprecedented barrage of missiles and drones. Biden did all of this, moreover, while turning a deaf ear to those in his party who have demanded that he take a tougher line against Israel. How could any fair-minded person look at this set of actions and see it as beneficial to Iran?

The beneficence derives not from Biden’s feelings and intentions toward Israel or Iran, whatever they may be, but how his policies objectively help Khamenei to advance Iran’s exhaustion strategy—objectively, based on the fundamentals of military science. The president restrained Israeli and American responses to acts of aggression by Iran’s Resistance Axis. By now, the press has reported on these restraints so extensively as to leave us with no doubt. A partial list of Biden’s red lines toward Iran include the following:

1. After Hezbollah attacked Israel on October 8, 2023, the Biden administration pressed Israel immediately to respond proportionately and not to escalate, and it has frequently repeated the message.
2. The administration encouraged Israel not to attack the Houthis, Iran’s proxies in Yemen, in response to their attacks on Israel.
3. In response to Houthi attacks on international commercial shipping and on American naval vessels, the administration refused to attack Iran directly, and avoided attacking Iranian liaison officers in Yemen.
4. President Biden pressured Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu not to launch a preemptive strike on Iran as it readied its missiles to attack Israel on April 13.
5. President Biden urged Israel not to launch a counterattack after the April 13 barrage.
6. In response to hundreds of attacks by Iranian proxies from Iraq and Syria on American forces, including an attack that killed three Americans in Jordan, the administration refused to attack Iran directly and ensured that the punitive strikes that were carried out against Iran’s proxies did not target Iranians.
7. The administration has, through lax enforcement, effectively lifted sanctions on Iranian oil sales to China and has refused to reverse course in response to Iranian aggression against Israel or American forces.

The scholar and strategic analyst Edward Luttwak quipped that these seven red lines spell out a Biden Doctrine: Iran is free to attack any country with missiles and drones but no country, including the United States, is allowed to attack it back.

Seen from Tehran, the Biden Doctrine announces with a bullhorn that the U.S. steadfastly refuses to hold Iran responsible for orchestrating a seven-theater war against Israel, a war which has, among other things, killed three American soldiers, wounded dozens more, and interdicted shipping through the Suez Canal.

The Biden Doctrine has grave implications with respect to military science. An axiom of deterrence teaches that it is impossible to counter an offense-dominant capability with purely defensive measures. Only offensive action can redress the balance. Kevlar vests can shield you from an attack, but to deter one you must wield a gun and convince your would-be attacker that you won’t hesitate to pull the trigger. To prevent Iran from shooting drones and missiles—directly or indirectly through its proxies—Netanyahu must convince Supreme Leader Khamenei that Israel will attack back, and that Iran will lose things it holds dear if its aggression continues. The restraint that Biden places on Israel, however, renders Netanyahu’s threats unconvincing.

“Take the win,” Biden reportedly told Netanyahu after the successful interception of Iranian missiles and drones on April 13. However, from Khamenei’s perspective, Israel did not win the exchange. On April 13, Iran changed the rules of engagement with Israel without suffering any meaningful consequences whatsoever. Israel’s “counterattack” was a mere gesture. Iran took the shot, but Israel, despite its high-tech Kevlar vest and gleaming guns, did not.

Over the last 68 years, Israel’s essential security challenges have changed less than its miraculous economic and technological advances would suggest. Deterring Israel’s enemies and gaining great power support—or, to state it another way, insulating the country from great power pressure—remain the two essential tasks of national security. The architects of Israel’s Star Wars paradigm created a military that is technologically astounding but that is not optimized for either of these tasks in a Mad Max world.

The simple truth is that just eight years after winning its independence, Israel, a fledgling state with a tiny economy, enjoyed more operational sovereignty than it does today. At the end of October and beginning of November in 1956, the IDF conquered Gaza in just eight days, while taking the entire Sinai Peninsula at the same time. A few months later, President Eisenhower threatened Israel with economic sanctions if it refused to withdraw. Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff, told David Ben Gurion, the prime minister, that the Israeli military had enough food, fuel, and ammunition to withstand an international embargo for six months. Today, the IDF has taken over seven months just to conquer Gaza, and the job is still incomplete. Could today’s Israel, either the military or the home front, survive for six months under international embargo, let alone while fighting a war?

To be sure, comparing capabilities in 1956 and 2024 is a case of apples and oranges. In the battlefield geometry of Gaza in 1956, the Egyptians presented Israel with no subterranean warfare capabilities. Even if today’s IDF had been fully expecting a long ground war and had tailored the force for that specific purpose, the tunnel dimension of the contemporary conflict would make it impossible to defeat Hamas in just eight days. Nevertheless, the Star Wars paradigm has fostered an Israeli way of war that has severely circumscribed the IDF’s operational sovereignty.

The primary weaknesses of the current Israeli way of war include, first, an overreliance on air and missile defense, high-end precision strike capabilities in surgical attack roles, and an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capacity that is chiefly technology-centric. Overconfidence in this suite of assets lulled the IDF into accepting as normal the routine launching of rockets into Israel by Hamas and the expansion of the Lebanese Hezbollah’s arsenal without either of these developments triggering a ground incursion by Israel. More generally, the IDF failed to take the full measure of the offense-dominant regime that Iran has developed thanks to its disruptive military capabilities. Iran has grown especially adept at building mixed strike packages that, by combining missile warfare assets together with drone warfare assets, saturate and overwhelm the sensors and interceptors of air warfare systems.

As a result of these and other disruptive capabilities, Iran and its Arab minions have garnered an achievement unmatched by any of Israel’s earlier enemies: they have imperiled the normal life of civilian communities inside Israel—in the north along the Lebanon border and in the south in the Gaza periphery. Despite Israel’s high-tech military capacity (or perhaps because of it), the IDF failed to disrupt this threat until it was too late. This failure to appreciate the gathering storm led the IDF to content itself for years with punishing Hamas and Iran’s Syrian proxies almost exclusively from the air, while avoiding direct conflict with Hezbollah and Iran itself.

Iran will gleefully battle Israel to the last Palestinian or Syrian fighter. The only way to deter the Islamic Republic is to take the fight to Iran itself and to its most treasured asset, Hezbollah. But Israel’s principal ally and great power patron, the United States, strongly opposes any such approach. Therefore, an additional deficiency in the existing Israeli military paradigm is the overdependence on the United States. Israeli combat plans and doctrines take for granted Washington’s near-unconditional support—a commodity that, as any newspaper reader can plainly see, does not exist. Since the start of the conflict, Biden prioritized restraining the Israeli military operations directed at Iran and its proxies over deterring Iranian aggression.

For months, rumors circulated in Jerusalem that the Biden team, aiming to restrain Israeli military operations, was withholding, or threatening to withhold ammunition. Whether those rumors were true in the past, we now know that they true in the present, having been verified by the president himself. “I made it clear that if [the Israelis] go into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem,” Biden said on May 8 in an interview with CNN.

Rafah is the final stronghold of Hamas that has not fallen to the Israelis, and it guards the passages, official and unofficial, to Egypt, the main arteries of the Gazan economy. Unless Israel takes Rafah, it cannot decapitate Hamas, destroy it as a military organization, or lay the basis for an economy that is not entirely under the control of Hamas. It cannot, in a word, win. Biden’s policy, therefore, is laying the groundwork for the survival of Hamas, and with it, of Iranian influence.

Given Biden’s use of military aid as a straight jacket, the Israeli reliance on the American defense sector as its principal supplier of warfighting equipment and ammunition is fast becoming a liability. Can any Israeli leader honestly affirm to the Israeli voters that the United States would never withhold, say, critical air and missile defense interceptors, to force Israel to stand down against Iran– a bit less gently than it did on April 13, 2024?

The Star Wars paradigm told us that technologically advanced powers will ride roughshod over their technologically disadvantaged enemies. The Ukraine war and the fighting in Gaza are crystal balls that belie this view. Future wars will resemble the First World War more than anything we have seen in the last century. They will be long, costly, and bulky: long, because defenses like Hamas’s tunnels and Russia’s trenches are hard to overcome by attackers who are visible to cheap, commercially available drones; costly, because the tempo of warfighting will be intense, consuming tons upon tons of munitions; and they will be bulky, because they will require traditional warfighting capacities such as artillery firepower, heavy armor, and large combat formations that can seize territory.

Disruptive military technologies, like man portable air defense systems and anti-tank guided munitions—to say nothing of the drone, rocket, and missile warfare assets of the kind that Iran deploys and transfers to its proxies—are becoming widely available and ever more lethal. These technologies deny territorial control to small and moderately-sized combat formations. Because the complete suppression of them is very challenging, nearly impossible, they allow disadvantaged belligerents to bleed larger powers asymmetrically.

Battlefields are increasingly urbanized, making the suppression of disruptive military technologies ever more complicated. Engineering units, therefore, will play major roles, in building and destroying subterranean warfare complexes and in hardening and breaching lines of defense.

All of this is unwelcome news for Israel. The structure of Israel’s society and economy predisposed the IDF to build a “small and smart” army. Israel’s expenditure on research and development as a proportion of GDP is one of the highest in the world, amounting to some five percent annually. Between 1999 and 2014, some 10,000 start-ups mushroomed. In 2021, investments in Israeli startups rose to $26 billion. The most basic instincts of a tech-savvy society militated in favor of thinking that Star Wars would work—by using Israel’s high-tech complex as a massive force-multiplier.

Sound economic thinking based on demographic realities also pushed the Israelis in the direction of the “small and smart” military. The IDF warfighting doctrine calls for a blitz strategy implemented with air assets and special forces. The Israeli way of war calls for delivering maximum firepower by the smallest number of people. The diminutive country cannot field large combat formations without mobilizing reserves. But mobilizations deliver two blows to the economy: they burn public monies at a very high rate while simultaneously removing the most productive members of the economy from the workplace.

There is no magic bullet solution to Israel’s predicaments, which are structural in nature. Nonetheless, the contours of a viable strategy are available. In the coming years, Israel by necessity will switch to a hybrid model that maintains the most lethal elements of the Star Wars military while conducting Mad Max reforms, which will prioritize a partial return to large combat formations capable of taking and holding territory, particularly in southern Lebanon.

“Operational sovereignty” will form the basis for testing the usefulness of any reform. Will a proposed new program or asset enhance Israel’s capacity to fight under conditions of embargo or will it increase Israel’s vulnerability to outside political pressure, including, especially, from the United States?

Israel will therefore diversify its defense technological and industrial base, allocating and funding to expendable and cheap weapons that best serve long-war situations. For example, to keep the upper hand over the rising Iran threat, Israel will produce, on its own and in huge numbers, the interceptors for its air and missile defense systems that are currently co-produced with the United States. At the same time, it will devote more attention to developing—again, on its own—offensive assets, including missiles designed to give Iran and its proxies a taste of their own medicine.

Israel will also boost its defense industrial production of principal warfighting equipment, such as 120-mm class main battle tank rounds, 155-mm class artillery shells, heavy mortars, and anti-tank guided missiles. Moreover, these munitions, and the defense industrial base to produce them, will prioritize cheap and plentiful solutions over expensive and exquisite state-of-the-art weapons. These reforms will come at a cost to the Start-Up Nation. Money and man hours that currently fuel the high-tech economy will be transferred to defense industries that will drain the public purse while producing no indirect benefits to the export economy.

In addition to being long, costly, and bulky, wars will also be broadcast instantaneously. In a digitalized information environment, political warfare, which accompanies actual conventional warfighting, now has many more images to work with and many more agents to manipulate those images. This, too, is unwelcome news for Israel, which has a very large number of enemies who seek to drive a wedge between it and the United States. Israel and its friends, therefore, will begin fighting the information war as if it were a real war, devoting large assets to not just explaining and justifying Israel’s actions but also to delegitimating and neutering its detractors.

When Moshe Dayan delivered his eulogy for Ro’i Rothberg, Israel had already fought the War of Independence against Egypt, not to mention the other Arab states. Before making peace, Egypt would fight four more major wars against Israel, including the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That conflict opened with a major and devastating surprise attack. Then, too, Israel failed to see the Egyptians coming, because it believed that its military advantages made it impervious to attack by a technologically inferior foe.

Properly understood, this war is the second major Israel-Iran war—the 2006 Lebanon war being the first. It is also in a sense a second War of Independence. Israel’s wars with Iran, like the wars with Egypt, will be many in number. Preparation for the long contest with Iran will force the Israelis to undergo a self-transformation more than a little reminiscent of 1948.

On October 7, the residents of Nahal Oz and the rest of Israeli society paid a price far beyond their imagining for abandoning the kind of vigilance that Dayan sought to summon at Ro’i Rothberg’s funeral. In the years to come, Israelis will rediscover the steely-eyed and unsentimental attitudes that Dayan displayed in his eulogy—or else they will die. “This is the fate of our generation,” Dayan said. “This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

Read in Tablet.

hudson.org · by Paul Sracic

6. U.S. Africa Command Launches Multi-Nation Special Warfare Exercise

I have noticed in the past couple of weeks the Department of Defense has been using "Special Warfare" to describe SOF activities.

U.S. Africa Command Launches Multi-Nation Special Warfare Exercise

defense.gov · by Matthew Olay

U.S. Africa Command's largest annual special operations exercise kicked off Monday with an opening ceremony in Côte d'Ivoire, the Pentagon announced today.

Press Briefing

Pentagon Press Secretary U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder conducts a news briefing at the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., May 14, 2024.

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Photo By: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Alexander Kubitza

VIRIN: 240514-D-PM193-1136

Exercise Flintlock 24, which runs through May 24th, will see forces from U.S. Special Operations Command Africa, or SocAfrica, partnering with nearly 30 nations and approximately 1,300 personnel in locations hosted by Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire.

"Flintlock is U.S. Africa Command's premiere and largest annual special operations forces exercise that works to strengthen combined partner force collaboration in Africa alongside international and NATO international special operations forces," Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder told reporters during a briefing.

Spotlight: NATO

In late February through early March of this year, SocAfrica and Ghana Armed Forces completed a final planning event for Flintlock 24. The event held sessions on the rule of law; civil affairs activities; air operations; and women, peace and security, according to a SocAfrica press release on the event.

"The partnerships that we forge here will allow us to address the threats on the continent. It's a collective group effort," U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Ronald A. Foy, SocAfrica commander, said.

"That's the value of this exercise. And as we go forward in the future, we expand on these relationships.

"Flintlock's a mechanism that opens doors for all international [special operations forces] allies and partners to come together, to train together, to live together, to learn from each other," U.S. Army Maj. Adam DeMarco, SocAfrica Flintlock 24 lead planner, said.

"And it really builds enduring and sustainable partnerships that will last the test of time, whether it's in Flintlock or in real-world operations," Demarco continued.

"We have five out of seven continents represented here at Exercise Flintlock and that partnership is only growing."

Elsewhere in the Africom area of responsibility, Exercise Obangame Express 2024 has been ongoing since May 6 throughout Africa's west coast, namely in and around the host nation of Gabon, Ryder said.

30:12

Sponsored by Africom and conducted by U.S. Naval Forces Africa, Obangame Express is a 13-nation maritime interdiction training taking place in the Ghanaian city of Sekondi through May 17.

Spotlight: Value of Service

"Through Obangame Express, U.S. forces work alongside participating nations to improve combined maritime law enforcement capacity, promote national and regional security in West Africa, and increase interoperability [among] the U.S., African and multinational partners," Ryder said, adding that the U.S. routinely exercises with our African partners to build strong relationships and to ensure the security and safety of the region's maritime environment.

"The exercises are incredibly important and they are enduring," Ryder responded when asked about the efficacy of U.S.-led exercises throughout Africom's area of responsibility.

"Certainly," he continued, "when it comes to things like counterterrorism, or addressing regional threats, or humanitarian crisis-types of situations, those exercises are central to enabling our forces to not only interoperate, but to understand one-another, and to have those kinds of relationships that — on that day you need them most — they're there."

Spotlight: U.S. Africa Command Spotlight: U.S. Africa Command: https://www.defense.gov/Spotlights/US-Africa-Command/

defense.gov · by Matthew Olay

7. Taiwan Is the New Berlin

Excerpts:

Ultimately, there can be no détente with China without the creation of a figurative “wall” across the Taiwan Strait. This would require the United States to position significant munitions—anti-ship missiles, mines, coastal and air defense batteries throughout the region and on Taiwan itself—enough to convince China that any attempt to take the island would prove futile. In addition, the United States must focus on increasing its economic leverage over China, and decreasing China’s over the United States, in key areas such as semiconductors, critical minerals, AI, biotech and synthetic biological products, space technology and green energy. Beijing must understand that even if it could somehow achieve a military victory over Taiwan, such a takeover would come at a devastating cost to China’s economy and prosperity. Once again, the United States’ strategy in this new cold war must be to convince the other side that an unsatisfactory status quo—in which the fate of Taiwan’s independence undetermined but which nevertheless contributes to peace and coexistence—is preferable to a potentially existential conflict.

But arriving at the détente the Soviet Union and the United States reached in the 1970s took time—something U.S. leaders came to realize in the early stages of the Cold War. The Chinese Communist Party’s rule over China may last for generations. Even if the Chinese government becomes more democratic, many of Washington’s conflicts with Beijing will not disappear, just as the fall of the communist regime in Moscow did not ease all the serious conflict between the United States and Russia.

Stalling can, once again, be a winning strategy. Slowing China’s advance down a month here and a year there is critical, as is letting China make its own mistakes. As it did during the Berlin crisis, the United States must now walk an incredibly thin, delicate line. By investing rapidly in military and economic deterrence without triggering a full decoupling from China, U.S. policymakers must make sure that Chinese leaders wake up and think, “Today is not the day to invade Taiwan”—but also imagine that tomorrow could be, so that they wake up one morning years from now with the same conclusion at which Khrushchev arrived in August 1961 about Berlin: the window to invade has closed entirely.

Just as it was during the Cold War, time is on Washington’s side. And if the United States can avoid a crisis over Taiwan in the next few years, China’s economic and demographic weaknesses will likely force Beijing into making more and more compromises, just as the Soviet Union did during the 1970s and 1980s. But the United States must use that time wisely. Fortunately, it has a historic blueprint.

Taiwan Is the New Berlin

A Cold War Lesson for America’s Contest With China

By Dmitri Alperovitch

May 15, 2024

Foreign Affairs · May 15, 2024

American histories of the Cold War tend to depict the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the era’s worst depredations. In doing so, however, Americans forget the complexity of the 15-year crisis over the status of Berlin that preceded the wall’s 1961 construction—a nuanced story that holds powerful lessons for today’s great-power struggle. In fact, U.S. President John F. Kennedy was relieved when the wall began to go up in 1961, a stark contrast with President Ronald Reagan, who 25 years later powerfully exhorted the Soviet Union to “tear down this wall.” Between the end of World War II and the early 1960s, the question of who would control Berlin—the Americans and their allies or the Soviets—had been the Cold War’s most dangerous flash point, threatening to escalate the two countries’ rivalry into a hot or even a nuclear war. Presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Kennedy managed this crisis deftly. The city’s partition was an enormous human tragedy for the people of East Germany. But it also represented the end of the Cold War’s riskiest phase.

As the United States now accelerates its plunge into a dangerous rivalry with China, U.S. policymakers must not forget the lessons of the Berlin crisis—lessons about how two sparring superpowers tiptoed back from war and ultimately arrived at an uneasy détente. Today’s new global battle for hegemony and influence has an analog to Berlin: Taiwan. There are, of course, key differences between the two. Taiwan is more strategically important to China than Berlin ever was to the Soviet Union, both symbolically and geopolitically. The United States’ official policy toward Taiwan’s defense has been one of strategic ambiguity, unlike Kennedy’s explicit commitment to defend West Berlin at all costs—although President Joe Biden has repeatedly proclaimed his intent to defend Taiwan. But the similarities are more meaningful. The United States’ competition with China is a sprawling, multifaceted struggle that bears remarkable similarities to the Cold War: it is a race for diplomatic and economic influence, a conventional and nuclear arms race, a space race, a scramble to establish military bases in Africa and East Asia, an ideological struggle between authoritarianism and democracy, a tech and economic war, and an espionage war.

Taiwan, like West Berlin, is small, but it is the only place in the world where that competition risks sparking a hot conflict and, indeed, the only place where both countries are actively preparing for war. There is little real chance that either the United States or China will commit themselves to risking nuclear war over the small reefs in the East China and South China Seas. Taiwan, like Berlin, also has a powerful symbolic value—as a strategically vital semiconductor-manufacturing powerhouse and, more generally, as an example of a democratic and free China. It is also a geopolitically crucial place that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, in the 1950s, called an “unsinkable aircraft carrier.”

If U.S. policymakers revisited and learned from the Cold War’s Berlin crisis and its role in midwifing the United States’ 1970s détente with the Soviet Union, they would better understand how to navigate their strategic predicament when it comes to managing the current geopolitical confrontation with China. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders made multiple early attempts to improve relations, from the 1950s meetings between Eisenhower and Nixon and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the 1961 Vienna summit between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Yet the Soviets’ ongoing threat to end West Berlin’s status as a free capitalist enclave stymied all those efforts. Only when Washington was able to convince Moscow that it was serious about defending the city did the Soviets blink and pull back from confrontation. And only when the construction of the Berlin Wall commenced in August of 1961 did an opportunity arise to hold a hot war at bay and stave off some of the era’s most catastrophic potentials, including a nuclear holocaust. Today, a similarly muscular deterrence strategy to convince China that an invasion of Taiwan would trigger catastrophic consequences is the United States’ best chance to achieve a similar détente with China.

HOW TO CARRY A BIG STICK

After World War II ended in Europe in May 1945, the war’s victors—the Allied powers and the Soviet Union—divided conquered Berlin into sectors that each side would administer. Almost immediately, however, the city became a tinderbox for tensions between the Soviets and the West. In 1948, threatened by the Allies’ efforts to create a separate West German state with a new currency and a capitalist economy, the Soviet Union tried to shut off access to West Berlin. Recognizing that West Berlin had come to represent a “symbol of the American intent” and that remaining in Berlin was “essential” to the United States “prestige in Germany and in Europe”—as General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the American area of Berlin, put it—the Truman administration opted for a strategy of strong support for the embattled city, launching the legendary Berlin airlift.

Although the Soviets lifted the blockade in mid-1949, tensions over Berlin never fully abated. Khrushchev understood that West Berlin was strategically important to the Soviet Union, too, as a capitalist territory inside the communist camp that was compelling a very visible brain drain out of East Berlin. So he chose a confrontational tack. Soviet troops were still arrayed around the isolated city, and European, Soviet, and U.S. leaders knew that in a conventional battle, communist forces could easily seize West Berlin.

Throughout the 1950s, as the rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States escalated into a proxy war in Asia, a nuclear arms race, and a full-blown struggle for ideological influence worldwide, West Berlin—and particularly its symbolism as an example of the success of the capitalist model—remained a critical point of confrontation. The United States believed that working to preserve the balance of power in Europe was worth risking a war with the Soviets. Losing West Berlin would be seen as a major defeat for the United States and might embolden Moscow to be more aggressive worldwide. But European and Soviet leaders also always wondered what the United States would actually sacrifice to protect the city. Would—or should—a U.S. president and NATO go to war for the freedom of the people living in West Berlin?

Kennedy showed his determination to defend U.S. interests in Europe, even at an unimaginable cost.

In the late 1950s, as millions of East Germans fled to West Germany, the conflict over Berlin came to a head. In November of 1958, Khrushchev issued an ultimatum to the United States and its allies, demanding they pull their troops out of West Berlin within six months. But Eisenhower resisted the blackmail attempt and Moscow blinked, withdrawing the demand. Three years later, at the 1961 summit in Vienna, Kennedy hoped to agree on a balance of power in Europe with Khrushchev, but the summit broke down and failed to arrive at a resolution on the status of West Berlin. On July 25 of that year, Kennedy delivered a televised address from the Oval Office to alert the American public that the situation in Berlin risked escalating into war. “We have given our word that an attack upon that city will be regarded as an attack upon us all,” he said. “We cannot and will not permit the Communists to drive us out of Berlin, either gradually or by force.” Warning that the conflict could even devolve into a nuclear exchange, he directed Congress to allocate $207 million to, in part, identify and mark existing spaces for nuclear fallout shelters across the United States and to improve the country’s air raid and fallout detection systems.

Kennedy’s determination to defend American strategic interests in Europe, even at an unimaginable cost, caused the Soviets to blink once again and abandon their ambitions to extinguish freedom in West Berlin. Just a little over two weeks after Kennedy’s address, East Germany—under orders from the Soviet Union—began the massive operation to erect the barrier that would end up dividing Berlin for more than a quarter of a century. In Washington, Kennedy expressed a reaction that may surprise Americans who grew up learning about the Berlin Wall’s evils: relief. “Why would Khrushchev put up a wall if he really intended to seize West Berlin?” he wondered privately to his aides. He deduced that erecting the wall was Khrushchev’s way of de-escalating the conflict. “It’s not a very nice solution,” Kennedy concluded, “but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”

THE TAIWANESE TINDERBOX

Kennedy’s intuition proved correct. Although the Cold War dragged on for three more decades, the de-escalation of tensions over Berlin and the building of the wall represented a turning point. The struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States would provide many more tense moments, including the 13-day Cuban missile crisis that emerged, in part, from Khrushchev’s frustration at losing the confrontation over West Berlin a year earlier. But never again did it approach the extreme danger of the period between 1961 and 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union were able to find a sustainable détente undergirded by more clearly articulated arms control agreements and spheres of influence that each side could live with. Almost certainly, there would never have been a Cold War détente had the Berlin Wall not been built, an act that reduced the threat to West Berlin.

Today, the United States is again embroiled in a great-power rivalry whose extraordinary complexities are coalescing in a pitched struggle over the future of a territory barely larger than the U.S. state of Maryland. The Berlin crisis shows just how dangerous such flash points can be in a global competition between two large nuclear powers. During the 1950s, Soviet leaders wondered how much the United States really cared about Berlin and looked for ways to test American resolve. Similarly, today, many wonder whether the United States would truly defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

But the United States can no more draw back from the Taiwan conflict than it could abandon West Berlin. If China is permitted to conquer Taiwan without the United States coming to the island’s aid, it would be a disaster for the Taiwanese people. In the summer of 2022, Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, declared that China intends to “re-educate” the Taiwanese population “to eliminate separatist thought and secessionist theory.” A white paper on Taiwan policy that the Chinese government released shortly afterward—leaving open the possibility of an extended military occupation of the island—made it clear that Lu’s statement was no mere bluster. China would surely do to Taiwan what it has done to Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong: attack human rights and suppress liberties such as the right to peaceful assembly, the freedom of speech, and the freedom to practice one’s religion.

Today, many wonder whether the United States would defend Taiwan against a Chinese invasion.

More broadly, a Chinese conquest of Taiwan would rapidly reconfigure the geopolitical power structures across Asia and the Pacific and beyond by establishing a Chinese sphere of influence over East Asia. The United States’ ability to guard trade routes to secure its economic growth, protect allies from Chinese military and economic coercion, and project its power across Asia would drastically decline, because a Taiwan controlled by China would become a strategically vital naval, missile, and radar base that would pose a stark risk to the U.S. Navy’s operations in the Western Pacific. And many countries throughout Asia and the Indo-Pacific, and even worldwide, would lose their faith in the United States’ security guarantees. Economically important nations such as Japan, the Philippines, and South Korea would have to shift their national security policies to accommodate China, the new regional superpower, much as states in Central Asia must accommodate Russia and its interests.

Newly emboldened by its seizure of Taiwan and its increased strategic influence in East Asia, China’s bellicosity would likely grow dramatically, as appetite tends to grow with eating. China’s takeover of Taiwan would create a world in which, as Zbigniew Brzezinski suggested in 1997, corporate and world leaders would ask themselves before making a decision, “What would Beijing think of this?” rather than “What would America think of this?” Recall the efforts made by corporations such as the NBA to stay on China’s good side, and imagine these amplified a hundredfold.

BUILD THAT WALL

During the Berlin crisis, U.S. leaders realized that there could be no détente with the Soviet Union without forcing Moscow to back off its threats to destroy freedom in West Berlin. To do so, they had to stand strong and commit to the outpost’s defense against bullying and coercion from the Kremlin, without going so far as to trigger a conflict themselves. The United States must learn from this dance that Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy performed. These leaders preserved West Berlin’s position as a beacon of democracy while avoiding provoking a devastating global conflagration until an era of stability could take hold.

Ultimately, there can be no détente with China without the creation of a figurative “wall” across the Taiwan Strait. This would require the United States to position significant munitions—anti-ship missiles, mines, coastal and air defense batteries throughout the region and on Taiwan itself—enough to convince China that any attempt to take the island would prove futile. In addition, the United States must focus on increasing its economic leverage over China, and decreasing China’s over the United States, in key areas such as semiconductors, critical minerals, AI, biotech and synthetic biological products, space technology and green energy. Beijing must understand that even if it could somehow achieve a military victory over Taiwan, such a takeover would come at a devastating cost to China’s economy and prosperity. Once again, the United States’ strategy in this new cold war must be to convince the other side that an unsatisfactory status quo—in which the fate of Taiwan’s independence undetermined but which nevertheless contributes to peace and coexistence—is preferable to a potentially existential conflict.

But arriving at the détente the Soviet Union and the United States reached in the 1970s took time—something U.S. leaders came to realize in the early stages of the Cold War. The Chinese Communist Party’s rule over China may last for generations. Even if the Chinese government becomes more democratic, many of Washington’s conflicts with Beijing will not disappear, just as the fall of the communist regime in Moscow did not ease all the serious conflict between the United States and Russia.

Stalling can, once again, be a winning strategy. Slowing China’s advance down a month here and a year there is critical, as is letting China make its own mistakes. As it did during the Berlin crisis, the United States must now walk an incredibly thin, delicate line. By investing rapidly in military and economic deterrence without triggering a full decoupling from China, U.S. policymakers must make sure that Chinese leaders wake up and think, “Today is not the day to invade Taiwan”—but also imagine that tomorrow could be, so that they wake up one morning years from now with the same conclusion at which Khrushchev arrived in August 1961 about Berlin: the window to invade has closed entirely.

Just as it was during the Cold War, time is on Washington’s side. And if the United States can avoid a crisis over Taiwan in the next few years, China’s economic and demographic weaknesses will likely force Beijing into making more and more compromises, just as the Soviet Union did during the 1970s and 1980s. But the United States must use that time wisely. Fortunately, it has a historic blueprint.

• DMITRI ALPEROVITCH is Chairman of Silverado Policy Accelerator, host of the podcast Geopolitics Decanted, and the author of World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century.

Foreign Affairs · May 15, 2024

8. The new world (dis)order: A clash of values - opinion

 A global ideological conflict that is a competition over values?

The new world (dis)order: A clash of values - opinion

Since World War II, we have been experiencing significant political, social, and economic changes across the globe. The Zoom in/Zoom out framework explains this phenomenon in 4 steps.

By SHLOMO MAITAL

MAY 14, 2024 09:27

Jerusalem Post

Let’s face it. Israel and the whole world are in a huge mess.

Mess? That’s an understatement.

Can we make sense of this balagan – a state of chaos, disarray, and confusion? Can we figure out where it may be headed, and find light and hope for the future? My friend, co-author, and former student Arie Ruttenberg, adviser to prime ministers and co-founder of Israel’s leading ad agency, has a possible solution. He invented a structured framework for coming up with world-changing innovative ideas, called Zoom in/Zoom out, and applied it with great success in business. We explained it in our 2014 book Cracking the Creativity Code.

Here is how it works.

• Identify a problem – e.g., global shortage of clean drinking water.
• Zoom in on the problem, to understand it in every detail. Do not leap to solutions too soon. First, analyze it in depth.
• Next, zoom out to possible creative solutions. Seek wild ideas. You can’t solve problems with the same thinking that created them.

We know there is always water in the air, even in dry desert air. We call it humidity. Why not capture it?

Next, zoom in again. Analyze the ideas and test their feasibility and robustness. Reject many. If needed, zoom out again. Continue the process until you converge on a viable solution.

For instance, Watergen, an Israeli company based in Petah Tikva, produces a device that extracts drinking water from the air, everywhere, including, parched deserts. It is used worldwide, including, in the past, in Gaza. Let us apply Zoom in/Zoom out to make sense of the current global disorder and to understand how Israel can navigate it.

1. Zoom in: The October 7 earthquake

The entire world, including Israel, sits atop a set of moving plates known as tectonic plates. These plates have been slowly shifting under our feet for 3.4 billion years. There are places where two tectonic plates meet and collide. Israel lies atop one of them, known as the Syrian-African Rift.

Colliding tectonic plates create stored-up energy that builds and is eventually released as earthquakes. Geologists say Israel is due for a big earthquake one of these days, but they don’t know when.

Politically, socially, and economically, the world is experiencing a tectonic shift. The post-World War II global financial and economic ecosystem is undergoing massive, rapid change. It is not an exaggeration to call it a global earthquake. Once orderly, today the world is in disarray.

Israel’s own earthquake shattered our lives on October 7. The proximate cause was a somnolent army and bumbling government, whose overconfidence and negligence led to disaster.

But there was a deeper cause: a global clash of basic human values between Western liberal democracy and fundamentalist, autocratic values violently hostile to it. These two tectonic plates smashed together – on Israel’s borders, and within Israel, at one and the same time.

Choose life, our Torah says. Seek death, preach our enemies. They indoctrinate small children, giving them tiny mock suicide vests to emulate their vicious elders. This collision of opposing values is playing out all over the world, but lately most violently on Israel’s borders.

2. Zoom out: A history of new world orders

There is a long history of new world orders. President Woodrow Wilson of the US initiated one, the League of Nations, founded on January 10, 1920. It failed.

The disastrous 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed huge war reparations on Germany, impoverished it, and led to the rise of the Nazis and World War II.

In July 1944, in the midst of war, a US-led gathering of Allies at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, built a new world order, based on free trade; Marshall Plan aid to Europe oiled the wheels. Post-war trade and economic growth soared. Asia in particular reaped benefits.

On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, leading to unification of the two Germanies and, ultimately, fostering the European Union. When Mikhail Gorbachev dissolved the Soviet Union on December 26, 1991, a new world order of peace and stability was born. The vision was that when countries grow wealthy together, they will not go to war. And it worked. Almost.

In 1981, over 40 percent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. Fast forward 43 years. Only eight percent of the world’s population is still in extreme poverty, and by some estimates half the world is middle class.Alas, it did not last. Russia’s Vladimir Putin sought to restore past power and glory and attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022. China and Iran joined Russia in an anti-Western bloc. North Korea, too.

Welcome to the New World Disorder!

Rational human beings do not scrap a win-win world order and replace it with lose-lose. But that is exactly what happened. Russia’s economy is limping. China’s economic growth has halved. World GDP growth will be a weak 2.4% this year – half what it was during some years of prosperity.What went wrong?

3. Zoom in: Clash of values

Values are defined as our preferences about what is important and how we should act. They reflect our sense of right and wrong and what ought to be. They are the glue that holds societies together.

Underlying the global balagan lies a fierce, often violent, clash of basic human values. It is particularly violent on the borders of Israel.

There is a terrible, cruel asymmetry in this global clash of values. It is highlighted by Metulla, a once-pastoral Israeli town on a finger of land jutting up toward Lebanon, in Israel’s North.

On October 6, some 1,800 people lived there. Today, it is a ghost town. Many of its houses have been destroyed by lethal Russian anti-tank Kornet rockets, fired from Lebanese hilltops just over the border. Its inhabitants have been evacuated, among thousands from 25 other communities near the border; a skeleton crew of defenders remains. Hezbollah regularly targets Metulla. Most recently, on March 6, Hezbollah dispatched a suicide drone against it. Across the Lebanese border lie several Lebanese villages. Among them, Kfar Kila, high on a 700-meter hill that overlooks Metulla. There are reports that villagers there who fled earlier have returned home and stroll with confidence in their fields and streets.

Metulla is in the crosshairs of Kornet squads in Kfar Kila and nearby villages. Hezbollah and Hamas also target Israeli civilians with impunity. In contrast, Israel and IDF are expected – demanded – by the world not to harm a hair on a civilian’s head – and are hauled before The Hague on genocide charges, despite strenuous IDF efforts to spare civilians.

IDF soldiers patrol Metulla in northern Israel, as seen from the Hamames Hill in Khiam, near the Lebanese-Israeli border, in southern Lebanon. (credit: THAIER AL-SUDANI/REUTERS)

Hezbollah and Hamas get a pass. Why? They are not countries, just terrorists. To the BBC and other Western media, they are militants. Blame the victim. Exonerate the criminal.

University of Michigan political scientist Ron Inglehart, who died in 2021, had a brilliant idea over 40 years ago. He initiated the World Values Survey, to study values worldwide and to see how they are changing, in 90 countries. The hypothesis was that as more and more people in the world escape poverty, they will think differently. Their values will change. They will give more weight to freedom, to individual liberties, to education, to modern Western democracy. As countries grow richer, people’s principles everywhere will align. Liberal democracy triumphs. A new world order. It didn’t happen.

As the business weekly The Economist notes in a recent cover article, “Western values are now steadily diverging from the rest of the world.” In much of the Islamic world – which comprises two billion people – conformity, tradition, security, religious supremacy, and power are key values. In the West, self-direction, self-enhancement, self-expression, democracy, human rights, and achievement dominate.

Russia’s Putin declares war on Western values. China and Iran join. A destructive divisive wall has been built between West and East. Populism spreads, as the underclass rebels against the educated elites. War and pandemics have generated insecurity that has led some countries to seek strong autocratic leaders.

Putin has clung to power for 24 years. A change in the Russian constitution will likely keep him as Russia’s autocrat until 2036, when he turns 84, despite his disastrous missteps.

Once, China regularly replaced its top leader every decade. Now, Xi Jin Ping grasps the reins and appears intending to rule forever. Elsewhere, too, leaders manipulate democracy to gain power, then dismantle it to retain power and steal. Hamas is near the top of the class. Had our Israeli leaders been paying attention, the lesson from the global values earthquake should have been “Mind the gap!”

Instead, following elections on November 4, 2022, with their anti-democratic “reforms,” the Netanyahu government turned the values gap into a self-serving destructive crevasse dividing the nation.

The global divide between Western liberal and traditional conservative values exists as a microcosm within Israel. The latest example is the ultra-Orthodox refusal to accept military service, to defend the country that supports them. Sephardi Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef declared that young men would leave the country rather than serve. When they do, I wonder whether Canada, the US, France, Germany, and the UK will pay them liberally to sit and study Torah.

For Israel, this values divide is a double whammy. As our creative young people launch start-ups and raise investment funds abroad, they now face stigma and approbation abroad, while dealing with a nation divided within, at home. The fault line within Israel is not solely political. It is value-based. Political views change. Values don’t. As one expert said, values that change are not values, they are opinions. The unity that the Gaza war brought to Israel is fading rapidly.

I find some comfort in history. Great progress has often emerged from horrific destruction and chaos. You can patch up an old building. Or you can tear it down and build a fantastic new one. The European Union, for example, arose from the ashes and destruction of World War II. So did a powerful global financial and economic ecosystem that lifted many out of poverty. As an old-timer, I recall this process of renewal occurring in Israel after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It was painful, slow, wrenching, and often frustrating. But renewal occurred. And so it will again.

4. Zoom out: What the future holds

In the past few days, my Neaman Institute colleague Dr. Gilead Fortuna and I have interviewed several Israeli business leaders. What we learned is disturbing.

Israel’s economy is in deep hot water. As I write this, the business daily The Marker reports a 50 percent rise in businesses seeking court protection from creditors; “Many businesses are deep in debt and taking their last breaths.”

We’ve been in trouble before. In 2007-8, there was a disastrous global financial crisis. Israel was impacted. Then, in March 2009, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his term of office and led economic reforms that helped boost per capita GDP by 60% between then and 2020; unemployment fell to a record low of 3.4% in the months before COVID-19 began.

But today? Netanyahu has thrown the economy under the bus, to pander to the far Right and remain in office despite massive public opposition.

As nations scramble to reorganize in this New World Disorder, one key insight emerges. Major supply chain disruptions during COVID, the Russia-Ukraine War, the Gaza war, and Houthi blockade of the Red Sea have occurred. They are causing nations everywhere to rely far less on imports and far more on local production. Israel must become more self-reliant. The latest supply-chain disruption is Turkey’s decision to boycott sale of cement, steel, and other building materials to Israel.

A decade ago, in 2014, at its weekly meeting, Netanyahu’s cabinet approved reforms in the import of food to Israel “to facilitate a dramatic opening of the economy to the massive importation of food products.” The short-term goal? Lower the cost of living. The long-term cost? Israel’s vital self-sufficient agriculture. A very bad deal.

We do not need massive imports. We do need massive local production. As global famine looms, Israel must remain largely self-sufficient in producing food.

Consider Haifa Group (formerly, Haifa Chemicals). It is investing $200 million in a new ammonia plant in the Negev – part of a $350 million investment program to boost fertilizer production to meet world demand. Government support? Minuscule, slow, and bureaucratic.

Sooner or later – hopefully sooner – we, the people of Israel, will elect a new, competent government able to zoom out, analyze the situation at home and abroad, face reality, establish priorities, and zoom in to rebuild our economy in a way that responds to global disorder, while protecting our borders, returning our refugees to their homes, restoring our liberal democracy, and rebuilding trust in the IDF and our government, while restoring strategic cooperation with the US and other allies. All we need are a few good women and men.

Postscript: In the early morning hours of Sunday, April 14, Iran sent more than 300 ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones to attack Israel. The IDF reported that nearly 99% were shot down, mainly by Israel, some by coalition forces. The attack was ordered by Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, an aged Shia religious cleric and politician, Supreme Leader of Iran for nearly 35 years. His 85th birthday was on April 19. Some 200 million Shia Muslims revere him, 10 percent of the world’s two billion Muslims. He controls the murderous Revolutionary Guards and guides their perfidy. Clash of values? Religious leader who sows death? I wonder if the ill-informed liberals in the world believe that Israel should respond by sending him a birthday bouquet of roses. ■

The writer heads the Zvi Griliches Research Data Center at S. Neaman Institute, Technion. He blogs at www.timnovate.wordpress.com.

Jerusalem Post

9. A lesson from World War II: Appeasement never works

Excerpts:

The mistakes the West has already made cannot be undone, but at least must not be repeated. The lesson of appeasement that led to World War II was forgotten in recent decades with the resurgence of an aggressive Russia and the indulgence of a rising China, which successfully followed Deng Xiaoping’s admonition for Chinese leaders to “hide your capabilities, bide your time.” Xi discarded the coyness. 

What was never hidden — indeed, was constantly exaggerated and flaunted — was the deep sense of grievance at the hands of Western powers. China’s “century of humiliation” served the same purpose and mimicked the language of Hitler’s condemnation of the Treaty of Versailles. “Germany was humiliated. … So long as this Treaty stands there can be no resurrection of the German people.” Implicitly or explicitly, both statements required a forceful redressing of perceived historic injustices.  

The guilt-ridden, fearful and profit-lust motivations of the West manifested in four decades of generous engagement policies that constituted the direct opposite of Beijing’s preemptive charges of “containment” and “holding China down.” The West succumbing to the clever psychological warfare enabled the emergence of the powerful and aggressive Communist China that now menaces the Indo-Pacific and world peace. Fortunately, there is now broad bipartisan consensus on the nature of the threat.  

What is needed is a clear and unambiguous policy statement that any Chinese resort to force against Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan or any other American ally or security partner will be met with a decisive U.S. military response. Today’s Hitlers will pay attention. 

A lesson from World War II: Appeasement never works 

BY JOSEPH BOSCO, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 05/14/24 10:00 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4661316-lessons-from-wwii-appeasement-never-works/

Will today’s Cold War confrontation end auspiciously, the way the first one did, or will it slide through strategic miscalculations on both sides into a third world war? 

Adolph Hitler’s misjudgments before World War II could be matched by Vladimir Putin’s and Xi Jinping’s today. At each step in Hitler’s preparations for war against Nazi Germany’s neighbors, the international community wavered, convinced itself that his assurances of peaceful intent were sincere, and simply wished the problem away. Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” proved evanescent. 

Until the last few years, the West made the same mistake regarding the hostile intentions of Russia and China. Even now, after Putin’s third invasion of a neighboring country with the aim of reconstituting the former Soviet Union — Georgia in 2008, Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014, Ukraine again in 2022 — some Western leaders still seem to believe they can deal with him as a normal leader in a normal time. 

Commercial factors and profit-seeking constantly skew national security considerations on Russia, just as they did with Nazi Germany in the 1930s and early 1940s. On China, America’s most dangerous adversary, business interests in the United States press political leaders to weaken or eliminate punitive measures to counter China’s economic aggression. They seem intent on validating the observation attributed to Lenin that “capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them.”  

There are other disturbing parallels between today’s East-West confrontation and the period leading up to World War II. As was also true of the Cold War, the confrontation is not merely about territorial disputes but over something more fundamental and ideological — a political holy war of sorts whose outcome is existential for both sides. The battleground does not simply concern the fate of individual countries’ rulers but the viability of governing systems generally and the international order itself. 

Xi and Putin declared the inevitable conflict in their announcement of a “no-limits strategic partnership” just before Russia’s most recent invasion of Ukraine: “Certain States’ attempt to impose their own ‘democratic standard’ on other countries … pose serious threats to global and regional peace and stability and undermine the stability of the world order. … It is only up to the people of the country to decide whether their State is a democratic one.”    

Those who decide the Russian state is not democratic, like Alexei Navalny, end up in prison and/or dead.  

The painful lesson the world learned — or should have learned — from its experience with men like Hitler, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Communist China’s Mao Zedong is that rulers who grievously mistreat their people, as China and Russia do, and who become powerful enough to threaten their neighbors and world peace invariably do so.  

The international legal norm that guarantees national sovereignty and noninterference in the internal affairs of other states frequently comes into tension with international humanitarian norms such as the prohibitions against genocide and crimes against humanity.  

More recently, the international community has developed the concept of a “Responsibility to Protect,” which, theoretically at least, establishes the norm that when a regime is incapable or unwilling to address a humanitarian catastrophe within its population, or is itself the perpetrator of it, the international community has a moral obligation and a legal duty to intervene.  

With countries as militarily powerful as China and Russia — or even smaller and poorer states like North Korea that have been allowed to develop nuclear weapons — the intervention as a practical matter cannot be in the military realm, but must rely instead on economic, diplomatic and moral shaming through information warfare. Those nonkinetic approaches contributed to the relatively peaceful end of the apartheid system in South Africa and the downfall of the Soviet Union, the latter of which Putin has called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” 

The mistakes the West has already made cannot be undone, but at least must not be repeated. The lesson of appeasement that led to World War II was forgotten in recent decades with the resurgence of an aggressive Russia and the indulgence of a rising China, which successfully followed Deng Xiaoping’s admonition for Chinese leaders to “hide your capabilities, bide your time.” Xi discarded the coyness. 

What was never hidden — indeed, was constantly exaggerated and flaunted — was the deep sense of grievance at the hands of Western powers. China’s “century of humiliation” served the same purpose and mimicked the language of Hitler’s condemnation of the Treaty of Versailles. “Germany was humiliated. … So long as this Treaty stands there can be no resurrection of the German people.” Implicitly or explicitly, both statements required a forceful redressing of perceived historic injustices.  

The guilt-ridden, fearful and profit-lust motivations of the West manifested in four decades of generous engagement policies that constituted the direct opposite of Beijing’s preemptive charges of “containment” and “holding China down.” The West succumbing to the clever psychological warfare enabled the emergence of the powerful and aggressive Communist China that now menaces the Indo-Pacific and world peace. Fortunately, there is now broad bipartisan consensus on the nature of the threat.  

What is needed is a clear and unambiguous policy statement that any Chinese resort to force against Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan or any other American ally or security partner will be met with a decisive U.S. military response. Today’s Hitlers will pay attention. 

Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the secretary of Defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute. Follow him on X @BoscoJosephA.  

10. Exclusive: US intelligence spotted Chinese, Iranian deepfakes in 2020 aimed at influencing US voters

And how many people will disbelieve these reports and believe other conspiracy theories?.

Excerpts:

But the US remains fertile ground for conspiracy theories, whether domestic or foreign in origin.

Nearly 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaners said that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was not legitimate, according to a CNN poll released in August.

And positive views of many government institutions are “at historic lows,” with just 16% of the public saying they trust the federal government always or most of the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in September.

“Americans, for whatever reason, are a lot more willing to believe crazy conspiracy theories and a lot less willing to accept, as truth, things coming from the federal government,” Warner said on CNN Wednesday.

The 2024 US election will present new opportunities for foreign influence operations. US military aid to Ukraine is essentially on the line, with Democrats largely backing Biden’s support for Ukraine and some leading Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, increasingly backing away from foreign aid.

FBI officials are concerned that the war in Ukraine – and US support for Kyiv — might be an “animating event for the Russians” in terms of conducting interference or influence operations aimed at the US election, a senior FBI official told reporters last week.

Exclusive: US intelligence spotted Chinese, Iranian deepfakes in 2020 aimed at influencing US voters | CNN Politics

CNN · by Zachary Cohen, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez · May 15, 2024

National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.

NSA/Handout/Reuters

CNN —

Operatives working for the Chinese and Iranian governments prepared fake, AI-generated content as part of a campaign to influence US voters in the closing weeks of the 2020 election campaign, current and former US officials briefed on the intelligence told CNN.

The Chinese and Iranian operatives never disseminated the deepfake audio or video publicly, but the previously unreported intelligence demonstrates concerns US officials had four years ago about the willingness of foreign powers to amplify false information about the voting process.

The National Security Agency collected the intelligence that gave US officials insights into China and Iran’s capabilities in producing deepfakes, one of the sources said.

Now, with deepfake audio and video much easier to produce and the presidential election just six months away, US officials have grown more concerned over how a foreign influence campaign might exploit artificial intelligence to mislead voters.

At an exercise in the White House Situation Room last December in preparation for the 2024 election, senior US officials wrestled with how to respond to a scenario where Chinese operatives create a fake AI-generated video depicting a Senate candidate destroying ballots, as CNN has previously reported.

At a briefing last week, FBI officials warned that AI increases the ability of foreign states to spread election disinformation.

It’s unclear what was depicted in the deepfakes that the Chinese and Iranian operatives prepared in 2020, according to the sources, or why they were not ultimately deployed during that election.

At the time, some US officials who reviewed the intelligence were unimpressed, believing it showed China and Iran lacked the capability to deploy deepfakes in a way that would seriously impact the 2020 presidential election, a former senior US official told CNN.

“The technology has to be good; I don’t think it was that good,” the former official said. “Secondly, you have to have a risk appetite. China, no. Iran, probably yes.”

Sources pointed to no evidence of coordination between the two countries.

Keeping an eye on adversaries

The NSA has continued to collect intelligence on foreign adversaries developing deepfakes and the potential threat they pose to US elections now that the technology has advanced dramatically over the last four years, the former senior official added, pointing out that in 2020, there wasn’t, for example, a large language model like ChatGPT that was easy to use.

The NSA declined to comment.

US officials have maintained a high level of visibility into the AI and deepfake advancements made by countries including China, Iran and Russia since the 2020 election. But putting that intelligence to use inside the US remains a challenge, the former official said.

Ukrainian servicemen fire a M777 howitzer toward Russian troops near a front line in the Donetsk region, Ukraine on May 1, 2024. FBI officials are concerned that President Joe Biden's backing of Ukraine may lead Russia to take more risks in interfering in the 2024 presidential election.

Valentyn Ogirenko/Reuters

Related article FBI watching if US support for Ukraine will spur Russian risk taking in 2024 election

“The question becomes how quickly can we spot an anomaly and then share that rapidly within the United States,” the former official told CNN. “Are we winning the race against a series of adversaries that might operate within the US? That’s the challenge.”

The threat of deepfakes and foreign influence is poised to come up in a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, when lawmakers will get a rare opportunity to publicly interrogate the director of national intelligence and other senior officials on foreign threats to elections.

“Other adversarial nations know that it is relatively easy and, frankly, cheap to try to interfere in our election,” Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, told CNN’s John Berman Wednesday morning. “I think we should expect China, Russia, Iran, potentially other nation-states to try to both either cyberattack our infrastructure or, more likely, spread misinformation to try to pit Americans against Americans.”

While they didn’t deploy their deepfakes in 2020, Iranian government operatives did undertake a brazen attempt that year to influence voters by imitating the far-right Proud Boys group and disseminating a video purporting to show the hack of a US voter registration database, according to US prosecutors.

“The fact that the Iranians pulled the Proud Boys crap but didn’t try deep fakes was either a lack of faith in the capabilities or a sign of no clear internal guidance,” one person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.

Lost in translation

For foreign influence operations to be effective, they also need to resonate with the American public, something China has struggled with, the former senior US official said.

“I think it’s clearly a cultural piece,” the former official said. “They really have a very difficult understanding of the issues that that are divisive or necessarily how to play to those issues, where the Russians do not.”

Generative AI, or AI used to create video, audio, imagery or text, has made foreign influence actors more efficient in creating content, but “there is no evidence that it has made them or their campaigns any more effective,” said Lee Foster, an expert in tracking foreign influence operations online.

“Generative AI has so far not helped actors resolve the main bottleneck they face: distribution,” said Foster, who is a co-founder of AI security firm Aspect Labs. “Actors have rarely struggled with creating content. Getting it in front of the right eyeballs at a meaningful scale has been and continues to be the sticking point, one that AI so far has not helped them overcome.”

Foster and other experts have cautioned against exaggerating the impact of foreign influence operations, including those that use AI, because it benefits the propagandists themselves.

Disinformation in the US

But the US remains fertile ground for conspiracy theories, whether domestic or foreign in origin.

Nearly 70% of Republicans and Republican-leaners said that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was not legitimate, according to a CNN poll released in August.

And positive views of many government institutions are “at historic lows,” with just 16% of the public saying they trust the federal government always or most of the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey released in September.

“Americans, for whatever reason, are a lot more willing to believe crazy conspiracy theories and a lot less willing to accept, as truth, things coming from the federal government,” Warner said on CNN Wednesday.

The 2024 US election will present new opportunities for foreign influence operations. US military aid to Ukraine is essentially on the line, with Democrats largely backing Biden’s support for Ukraine and some leading Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, increasingly backing away from foreign aid.

FBI officials are concerned that the war in Ukraine – and US support for Kyiv — might be an “animating event for the Russians” in terms of conducting interference or influence operations aimed at the US election, a senior FBI official told reporters last week.

This story has been updated with additional information.

CNN · by Zachary Cohen, Sean Lyngaas, Evan Perez · May 15, 2024

11. How Will Taiwan’s New President Handle China?

And what is of supreme importance is to attack the enemy's strategy.

Excerpts:

Visitors to Taiwan often remark on how calm daily life seems, in contrast to foreign headlines that suggest war with China could come at any minute. In private conversations, Taiwanese citizens will confess unease, like residents of a town at the foot of a shaky dam holding back a rising reservoir. Still, few can imagine an overwhelming invasion in the coming months or years, and they do not vote based on the China issue alone. In fact, the electoral battle between the DPP, the KMT, and the insurgent TPP was fought as much over issues such as education and housing as it was over identity and security. Opinion polls show that most residents of Taiwan today, including descendants of mainlanders, do identify as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese.” But they value their democratic system more than an affiliation with any individual party. In his victory speech, Lai said the DPP was chastened by the lukewarm results. He pledged to reflect on the voters’ message to his party.

By voting for a divided government, Taiwan’s voters have forced leaders in not only Taipei but also Beijing to adapt to a more nuanced political reality. Chinese President Xi Jinping is clearly impatient for progress on Taiwan, asserting in speeches that the issue cannot be handed down indefinitely from one generation to the next. Beijing has adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the island through such measures as cyberattacks, military patrols, hard-elbowed diplomacy, and disinformation campaigns. But the split in Taipei lessens the likelihood of a seismic constitutional or symbolic shift on sovereignty that the Communist Party might feel forces its hand to invade. If Lai and his administration successfully bolster deterrence, he may yet persuade Xi that any attempt to invade Taiwan runs too big a risk of wrecking the CCP’s other plans for China’s so-called “great rejuvenation.”

The United States, meanwhile, can use the space created by Taiwan’s political muddle to reaffirm Washington’s commitment to the status quo. U.S. policymakers and pundits can begin by winding back their own inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric over the issue. If Washington aims to bolster asymmetric deterrence through arms sales and training, for instance, policymakers should take care to expand such programs without fanfare or political posturing. The overriding objective should be to postpone the date of any potential conflict as far as possible into the future, in hopes that the political landscape will shift to allow for a peaceful, permanent settlement. Such patience is, after all, the route that Lai has chosen. As he stated in a television interview in December, quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “supreme excellence” is “breaking an opponent’s will without a fight.”

How Will Taiwan’s New President Handle China?

Lai Ching-te’s Precarious Balancing Act

By Nick Frisch

May 16, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Nick Frisch · May 16, 2024

On May 20, in a ceremony in Taipei, Lai Ching-te is scheduled to be inaugurated as the next leader of Taiwan. Currently vice president, Lai is taking over from President Tsai Ing-wen at a delicate moment in Taiwan’s relations with Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party regards the self-ruling island of 23 million people as a renegade province to be unified with the mainland by force, if necessary. And although Taiwan has managed to maintain significant trade and interpersonal ties to mainland China while postponing discussions over its sovereignty, this ambiguous status quo has recently frayed amid political headwinds from both Beijing and Taipei. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has explicitly made taking Taiwan part of his plans to “rejuvenate” China. But Taiwan’s people are less interested than ever in unifying with the mainland.

When Lai, a known China skeptic, triumphed in January’s election, international headlines suggested that Taiwan’s voters had worsened this breach by keeping the presidency in the hands of the Democratic Progressive Party, to which Tsai and Lai both belong. The DPP has historically advocated that Taiwan alter its constitution to formally declare independence, although the party’s political candidates today say they have no plans to do so. Lai himself was once a vocal independence activist. As a result, Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing despise the DPP and Lai as irreconcilable separatists.

But despite such media attention, the 2024 election was not an overwhelming victory for Taiwanese voters favoring independence. The DPP’s supporters may have celebrated Lai’s victory in the streets of Taipei, but the party’s own strategists did not. In the 2016 and 2020 elections, voters elected Tsai with more than half of the ballots cast and awarded the party unprecedented legislative majorities. This time around, Taiwan’s voters rendered a mixed verdict. Lai won with only a plurality; the island’s more China-friendly opposition party, the Kuomintang (KMT), now controls a larger bloc in parliament. Had the KMT successfully struck a joint-ticket deal with a popular third-party insurgent, Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), it might have won the presidency. Lai’s victory, then, does not symbolize some new provocation in the dispute with Beijing. Nor does it signal voters’ endorsement of pro-independence politicians over pro-Chinese candidates. Instead, January’s election was a muddle—the sort that healthy democracies sometimes deliver.

Outside powers should respond accordingly. Despite Beijing’s dislike of the DPP, and the CCP’s evident discomfort with a free vote held on its doorstep, the results of January’s contest need not invite disaster. Rather, China is now looking at a Taiwan in which Beijing’s most implacable political foe, the DPP, is electorally diminished. Washington, meanwhile, must understand Lai’s precarious position and the internal tensions within the party so it can play the ambiguous hand dealt by Taiwanese voters. If U.S. leaders wish to bolster deterrence across the Taiwan Strait, they can now do so in a political climate less likely to generate initiatives (such as sensitive referendum votes) that a more emboldened DPP might have been tempted to take. Lai has declared that he will continue the “no surprises” status quo embodied by his predecessor. Beijing, Taipei, and Washington may therefore be able to breathe easier, at least in the near term, instead of girding for conflict—and if they play their cards right, they may yet buy more time for peace.

NEW SHOOTS

Born in rural Taiwan in 1959, Lai was raised by a single working-class mother after his father died in a mining accident. His parents grew up under the Japanese empire, which ruled Taiwan as a showcase colony featuring hallmarks of modernity such as electrification, roads, and baseball leagues, until Tokyo’s surrender at the end of World War II. The island then came under the control of the Chinese nationalist KMT, whose forces were fighting a losing civil war on the mainland against Mao Zedong’s communist insurgency. After KMT troops, escorted by U.S. Navy ships, arrived in Taiwan in 1945, they proceeded to brutalize locals suspected of harboring Japanese or left-wing sympathies.

In 1949, the remnants of the KMT—including its leader, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek—fled to Taiwan after losing to communist forces. As Mao consolidated power and founded the People’s Republic of China, the nationalist exiles maintained their separate and competing government in Taipei: the Republic of China. Both governments claimed sovereignty over the island and the mainland. Mao and Chiang agreed on little but concurred that Taiwan was part of China. The contest between PRC and ROC turned the Taiwan Strait into a Cold War frontier, with the “Red” Chinese mainland facing an island stronghold of “Free China.” The moniker was a bitter joke bitter joke to local Taiwanese who resented the Washington-backed junta in Taipei, feeling they were neither free nor Chinese.

In Lai’s youth, Taiwanese politics were dominated by martial law under the one-party rule of the KMT, which ran the government, military, and society through a corps of political commissars. These elites saw themselves as the continent’s legitimate government, unwillingly exiled to a peripheral province, and ruled native islanders accordingly. In school, the “national language” of Mandarin was mandatory; the Lai family’s Hokkien dialect, forbidden. Textbooks taught Chinese history and literature from a continental perspective. Students were drilled to be “exemplary Chinese” in preparation for the KMT’s eventual recovery of the mainland from what the party called “communist bandits.” The security services persecuted activists who campaigned for locals’ civic and economic rights, and Chiang’s cronies favored fellow exiled mainlanders over native-born islanders for posts in politics and business.

If Beijing, Taipei, and Washington play their cards right, they may yet buy more time for peace.

But in 1987, Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law and slowly moved to democratize Taiwan. The junior Chiang, once the KMT’s spy chief, bowed to pressure from Washington and rising civic activism at home by releasing political prisoners and widening freedoms. Eventually, elements of the KMT elite also softened their stance on former communist foes across the strait. Beijing, after all, had embraced elements of capitalism, welcoming investors from Taiwan who hailed from old mainlander money. And in so doing, the Communist Party had made China rich and strong.

As Taiwan’s rival political parties began competing in free elections, underground agitators for democracy and formal independence emerged into the open, founding the DPP. Democratization spurred the KMT, now obliged to win votes, to recast itself as a normal political party. Given the KMT’s repressive past and lingering ties to China, however, many native middle-aged Taiwanese voters remain deeply distrustful of the organization. Some DPP stalwarts even fear that older KMT voters sentimental toward China will form a fifth column and assist Beijing in the event of an invasion.

Lai came of age against this evolving political landscape. As a boy, he read kung-fu fantasy novels and dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player but eventually, heeding his mother’s advice, pursued medicine. Lai won renown in Taiwan as a spinal specialist and earned a public health degree from Harvard. After leading a physicians’ professional association, he was elected to a parliamentary seat in 1996. An assured politician with carefully coifed hair, Lai represented a district for over a decade in Tainan, a city full of Hokkien-speaking native Taiwanese that reliably elects DPP candidates.

Through his tenure in Taiwan’s occasionally unruly parliament, Lai earned a reputation for candor and, occasionally, confrontation. In 2005, he was captured on video shouting at an opponent in frustration over a defense budget bill. Then, as now, the presidency was held by a DPP candidate, Chen Shui-bian, but the parliament was dominated by the KMT, which was holding up military appropriations meant to deter Beijing. Incensed, Lai turned to a KMT legislator and bellowed, “You block everything!” The video, which went viral, captured Lai’s frustration with what he perceived as the KMT’s soft position on China. Three years later, with a massive corruption scandal hanging over the DPP, the KMT recaptured the presidency and retained parliament. Taipei’s stance toward China soon grew more cordial as the KMT government cut spending on defense and promoted more trade and tourism across the strait.

THE PATH TO POWER

When Lai traded his parliamentary seat for the mayoralty of Tainan in 2010, he was already tipped as a possible future presidential candidate. His rhetoric on Taiwan’s sovereignty and independence thrilled the DPP’s base. Some party insiders murmured that Lai might be stronger presidential timber than Tsai, then the party’s chairwoman, who had never lived or worked in the south of the island. But Tsai, a former trade lawyer and Taipei technocrat, had spent her opposition years diligently salvaging the DPP’s tarnished brand after Chen’s wreck of an administration. Regarded as capable by her peers and the electorate, she became the party’s nominee.

Tsai’s prospects as a 2016 candidate were buoyed by protests against the incumbent KMT government by the youthful Sunflower Movement. The demonstrations began in 2014 when students, outraged by a KMT-backed trade bill that would have opened sensitive economic sectors such as the media to mainland Chinese investment, occupied parliament. They ultimately succeeded in blocking the law, helping propel the DPP to capture both parliament and the presidency in 2016.

As a candidate, Tsai repeatedly promised to maintain the status quo when it came to China, Nonetheless, when she took office, Beijing was contemptuous—and Washington, wary. Observers anxious about mounting tensions with China worried that internal DPP party pressure might win out over Tsai’s cautious instincts, pushing her to use her presidential powers or legislative majority to attempt constitutional changes or other moves toward formal independence for Taiwan. Yet Tsai kept her word and held off on making drastic moves, disappointing her party’s base but providing stable leadership. She won reelection by a large margin.

U.S. policymakers must wind back their own inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric over Taiwan.

Despite Tsai’s electoral success, the DPP’s base vote clearly favored a candidate in the mold of Lai. His seasoning in the southern byways of Taiwanese politics made him both a valuable ally and a dangerous rival. With Lai’s star rising, Tsai appointed him premier in 2017—only for him step down in 2019, along with other party leaders, after DPP midterm losses. In his resignation speech, Lai portentously cited a line from a trilogy by his favorite kung-fu novelist (Jin Yong, also a favorite of Chinese President Xi Jinping), assuring his supporters that “We will meet another day upon the rivers and the lakes.” His words, a winking nod to the roiling factional struggles in martial-arts fiction, foreshadowed real-life political intrigue: with Tsai weakened, Lai challenged her in the party’s 2020 presidential primary, unprecedented for a sitting incumbent. She prevailed, but Lai took about 27 percent of the vote, and was given the vice-presidential slot on Tsai’s winning ticket.

Now, Lai has made it to the top of Taiwanese politics. Yet thanks to the KMT’s parliamentary success, his inauguration appears less a confident passing of the baton than an awkward political transition. The preferred candidate of the pro-independence voter base has arrived in office at the exact moment that DPP has lost the ability to fulfill the political aspirations of its most ardent constituents.

Moreover, after eight years in office, the party is no longer a fresh face. In the January election, youth voters gravitated toward Ko, the charismatic third-party candidate. A social media sensation, surgeon, and former mayor of Taipei with a more conciliatory stance toward China, Ko won a quarter of the presidential vote, and his insurgent TPP won enough seats in parliament to hold the balance of legislative power. Lai’s KMT opponent in the election, Hou Yu-ih, may also be the kind of candidate who can challenge the DPP in the future. The mayor of a Taipei suburb, Hou is a former police chief and native-born islander who speaks folksy Hokkien and acknowledges that Taiwan needs a credible military deterrent.

LIVING BENEATH THE DAM

Visitors to Taiwan often remark on how calm daily life seems, in contrast to foreign headlines that suggest war with China could come at any minute. In private conversations, Taiwanese citizens will confess unease, like residents of a town at the foot of a shaky dam holding back a rising reservoir. Still, few can imagine an overwhelming invasion in the coming months or years, and they do not vote based on the China issue alone. In fact, the electoral battle between the DPP, the KMT, and the insurgent TPP was fought as much over issues such as education and housing as it was over identity and security. Opinion polls show that most residents of Taiwan today, including descendants of mainlanders, do identify as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese.” But they value their democratic system more than an affiliation with any individual party. In his victory speech, Lai said the DPP was chastened by the lukewarm results. He pledged to reflect on the voters’ message to his party.

By voting for a divided government, Taiwan’s voters have forced leaders in not only Taipei but also Beijing to adapt to a more nuanced political reality. Chinese President Xi Jinping is clearly impatient for progress on Taiwan, asserting in speeches that the issue cannot be handed down indefinitely from one generation to the next. Beijing has adopted an increasingly aggressive posture toward the island through such measures as cyberattacks, military patrols, hard-elbowed diplomacy, and disinformation campaigns. But the split in Taipei lessens the likelihood of a seismic constitutional or symbolic shift on sovereignty that the Communist Party might feel forces its hand to invade. If Lai and his administration successfully bolster deterrence, he may yet persuade Xi that any attempt to invade Taiwan runs too big a risk of wrecking the CCP’s other plans for China’s so-called “great rejuvenation.”

The United States, meanwhile, can use the space created by Taiwan’s political muddle to reaffirm Washington’s commitment to the status quo. U.S. policymakers and pundits can begin by winding back their own inflammatory and unhelpful rhetoric over the issue. If Washington aims to bolster asymmetric deterrence through arms sales and training, for instance, policymakers should take care to expand such programs without fanfare or political posturing. The overriding objective should be to postpone the date of any potential conflict as far as possible into the future, in hopes that the political landscape will shift to allow for a peaceful, permanent settlement. Such patience is, after all, the route that Lai has chosen. As he stated in a television interview in December, quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, “supreme excellence” is “breaking an opponent’s will without a fight.”

• NICK FRISCH is a Resident Fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project.

Foreign Affairs · by Nick Frisch · May 16, 2024

12. Crink: the new autocractic 'axis of evil'

CRINK. Can we adopt that acronym?

I think the only threat larger than China is the collusion among China, Russia, Iran, and north Korea: CRInK.

We must understand this collusion to be able to deal with it across the instruments of national power and work with like-minded friends, partners, and allies to counter the "CRInK."

Excerpts:

The UK and its allies must belatedly acknowledge the growing collusion among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Rishi Sunak said during a speech yesterday. Echoing that warning, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith told The Times that this axis is "determined to end Western values", which would mean "an end of human rights and the rule of law".

...

What is the Crink end goal?

The target of the Crink coalition is not the overthrow of a "rules-based international order", said Cohen, but rather of the "American-led world order" of the past 75 years. To achieve their goals, the major Crink players are "increasingly willing to use open violence" and to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.

Crucially, three out of four Crink nations are nuclear-armed, and Iran is "not far off", said Taylor.

Ultimately, said Cohen, "they are united by a growing belief that their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight".

Crink: the new autocractic 'axis of evil'

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea make up the 'axis of totalitarian states' colluding to undermine the West

The Week · by Harriet Marsden, The Week UK · May 14, 2024

Last October Vladimir Putin visited his counterpart Xi Jinping in China, which has provided a 'trade lifeline' for Russia since the Ukraine invasion

(Image credit: Sergei Guneyev / Pool / AFP via Getty Images)

By

published 14 May 2024

Britain faces "the most dangerous" years since the end of the Cold War, with an "axis of authoritarian states" colluding against the West, Rishi Sunak has warned.

The UK and its allies must belatedly acknowledge the growing collusion among China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, Rishi Sunak said during a speech yesterday. Echoing that warning, former Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith told The Times that this axis is "determined to end Western values", which would mean "an end of human rights and the rule of law".

MPs cautioned last month that the UK and other Western governments needed to devise a strategy to deal with this increasingly "coordinated and assertive axis", said the i news site – or World War Three would be "inevitable".

What are the Crink nations?

The acronym Crink (China-Russia-Iran-North Korea) was coined last year by Peter Van Praagh, president of the Halifax International Security forum in Washington, following the Hamas attacks in October.

The term, a play on the Brics nations, describes "a new alignment of nations where global democracies' strategic challenges now originate", said the annual conference statement.

China's threat towards Taiwan and its aggression in the South China Sea, Russia's war on Ukraine, and Israel's war in the Middle East (part of its decades-long conflict with Iran and its regional proxies) are separate conflicts with differing agendas.

But in Washington, it is "increasingly common" to view them as part of "one big narrative", said Adam Taylor in The Washington Post. The Crink nations differ starkly in ideology; the coalition is better understood as a "marriage of convenience" – and desperation.

How are China, Russia and Iran working together?

The four provide weaponry and oil for each other to "evade sanctions imposed by the West", said the i news site. Experts warn they are working "more closely together" in the background of conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East and Africa.

Iran has been playing an "important role" in Russia's war, said Eliot A. Cohen in The Atlantic. Iranian drones "fly every night at Ukrainian cities", to reveal air defences and "pave the way" for Russian missiles.

In return, Russia reinforced Iran's defences against Israeli strikes with Russian weapons, said Taylor. This is part of a "strategic alliance" forged by Russia's invasion: a "mutually beneficial relationship" between two pariah states.

China, the most significant Crink nation, has also provided "a trade lifeline for Russia" since its invasion sparked western sanctions.

This week President Xi Jinping will welcome Vladimir Putin in China for the Russian president's second high-profile visit in less than a year, "the latest sign of their growing alignment", said CNN.

China also maintains close ties with Iran, providing it with support that has similarly diminished the impact of sanctions. The deepening relationship is driven by "mutual interests", said The Diplomat: China's "insatiable energy needs and Iran's quest for economic and diplomatic support". But it is underpinned by "a shared narrative of resistance against perceived Western hegemony".

At the heart of this geopolitical maelstrom lies China's "increasingly assertive global posture". Its deepening relationship with Iran and Russia can be understood through the lens of its "burgeoning superpower rivalry" with the US.

What is North Korea's role?

North Korea, perhaps the most unpredictable of the Crink nations, is taking advantage of the fragmenting international order to ramp up pressure on the US and South Korea.

Alongside its military development over the past few years, North Korea has been "chumming up to Russia and remaining on the right side of China", said The Times's Asia editor Richard Lloyd Parry.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the relationship between Pyongyang and Moscow has flourished. North Korea has provided Russia with much-needed ammunition and war materials in exchange for the "advanced technology" that Pyongyang covets, said Taylor.

North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un visited Russia last autumn, his first foreign trip since 2019, and pledged closer military cooperation with Putin.

North Korean weapons were also used by Hamas in the 7 October attacks on Israel, according to the Israeli and South Korean military. North Korea denies this, but has sold anti-tank rocket launchers to Hamas in the past.

What is the Crink end goal?

The target of the Crink coalition is not the overthrow of a "rules-based international order", said Cohen, but rather of the "American-led world order" of the past 75 years. To achieve their goals, the major Crink players are "increasingly willing to use open violence" and to threaten the use of nuclear weapons.

Crucially, three out of four Crink nations are nuclear-armed, and Iran is "not far off", said Taylor.

Ultimately, said Cohen, "they are united by a growing belief that their moment is coming, when a divided and indecisive West, richer but flabbier, will not fight".

Harriet Marsden is a writer for The Week, mostly covering UK and global news and politics. Before joining the site, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, specialising in social affairs, gender equality and culture. She worked for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent, and regularly contributed articles to The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The New Statesman, Tortoise Media and Metro, as well as appearing on BBC Radio London, Times Radio and “Woman’s Hour”. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, London, and was awarded the "journalist-at-large" fellowship by the Local Trust charity in 2021.

13. US to Boost Output of Bombs Designed to Hit Underground Nuclear Facilities

US to Boost Output of Bombs Designed to Hit Underground Nuclear Facilities

• Ammo plant in Oklahoma will produce up to four times as many
• Bomb could penetrate buried nuclear sites in Iran, North Korea

By Anthony Capaccio

May 14, 2024 at 1:00 PM EDT

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-14/us-to-make-more-bunker-buster-bombs-that-can-hit-underground-nuclear-facilities?sref=hhjZtX76

An Army ammunition plant in southeast Oklahoma is being expanded to at least triple monthly production of the US’s biggest non-nuclear bomb, a weapon often invoked in debates about a potential attack on deeply buried nuclear facilities in Iran or North Korea.

The 30,000-pound Massive Ordnance Penetrator, known as a bunker-buster, can be dropped only from a B-2 stealth bomber. It’s far bigger than the unguided 2,000-pound (900-kilogram), explosives that the Biden administration has postponed sending to Israel out of concern for civilian casualties in its war to defeat Hamas in Gaza.

The facility under construction at the 70-square-mile (181-square-kilometer) McAlester Army Ammunition Plant will significantly increase production as needed, the Air Force said in a statement. Officials at the facility told Bloomberg News during a March tour by General Charles Brown, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that equates to completing as many as six or possibly eight bombs per month, up from two currently.

McAlester personnel fill bomb casings with explosives and load the warhead and fuse. Boeing Co. makes the bomb’s tailkit, which provides navigation.

The Army has described the new bomb assembly area at the Oklahoma plant as a “state of the art facility that has the ability to support the production of 2,000-to-30,000-pound assets as well as providing flexible” explosive “mixing options needed for future requirements.” It’s scheduled to be completed by late spring to early fall, according to the service, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony scheduled for July 30.

A separate program to test a new “Large Penetrator Smart Fuse” for the bomb has been on hold because of “contract challenges that affected the ability to construct targets” to evaluate the improvement, the Pentagon test office said in its latest assessment of weapons programs.

The Massive Ordnance Penetrator “is a very important weapon” for US Central Command as well as Europe and the Indo-Pacific region, Frank McKenzie, a retired Marine Corps general who led Central Command, said in an email. It “ensures that we can target extremely well-protected underground facilities, wherever they are located.” He said that it “contributes significantly to our ability to achieve deterrence against nations such as Iran.”

Its importance is demonstrated by General Brown, who keeps a fragment from a test firing of the bomb in his Pentagon office.

Read More: More 30,000-Pound ‘Bunker-Buster’ Bombs Sought for US Forces

Iran has the largest underground program in the Middle East “to conceal and protect critical military and civilian infrastructure throughout the country,” according to the Defense Intelligence Agency in a 2019 report on its military. Iran maintains that its extensive nuclear program is intended for peaceful uses.

North Korea, China

In a separate 2021 report, the Pentagon intelligence agency said North Korea’s underground facilities are “the largest and most-fortified in the world,” with thousands of them “intended to withstand” US bunker-buster bombs.

Separately, China’s military “maintains a robust and technologically advanced underground facility program to conceal and protect all aspects of its military forces,” the Pentagon said in its most recent China military report.

In addition to its low-profile task assembling bunker-busters, the Oklahoma plant plays a role in supplying Ukraine with 155mm shells and air defense weapons. Although no artillery ammo is produced at McAlester, it’s a key storage, inspection and shipment point crammed with cargo containers and magazines loaded with ammunition. The weapons are shipped over 200 miles (322 kilometers) of railroad track to air or sea transit points within days of a presidential authorization to draw down US stockpiles.

Established in 1943 as a Navy facility before transfer to the Army, the plant is a high-security but bucolic facility with open spaces through which the occasional deer lopes.

14. US military says Gaza Strip pier project is completed, aid to soon flow as Israel-Hamas war rages on

US military says Gaza Strip pier project is completed, aid to soon flow as Israel-Hamas war rages on

BY  LOLITA C. BALDOR

Updated 6:21 AM EDT, May 16, 2024

AP · May 16, 2024

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. military finished installing a floating pier for the Gaza Strip on Thursday, with officials poised to begin ferrying badly needed humanitarian aid into the enclave besieged over seven months of intense fighting in the Israel-Hamas war.

The final, overnight construction sets up a complicated delivery process more than two months after U.S. President Joe Biden ordered it to help Palestinians facing starvation as food and other supplies fail to make it in as Israel recently seized the key Rafah border crossing in its push on that southern city on the Egyptian border.

Fraught with logistical, weather and security challenges, the maritime route is designed to bolster the amount of aid getting into the Gaza Strip, but it is not considered a substitute for far cheaper land-based deliveries that aid agencies say are much more sustainable. The boatloads of aid will be deposited at a port facility built by the Israelis just southwest of Gaza City and then distributed by aid groups.

Heavy fighting between Israeli troops and Palestinian militants on the outskirts of Rafah has displaced some 600,000 people, a quarter of Gaza’s population, U.N. officials say. Another 100,000 civilians have fled parts of northern Gaza now that the Israeli military has restarted combat operations there.

Pentagon officials said the fighting in Gaza wasn’t threatening the new shoreline aid distribution area, but they have made it clear that security conditions will be monitored closely and could prompt a shutdown of the maritime route, even just temporarily. Already, the site has been targeted by mortar fire during its construction and Hamas has threatened to target any foreign forces who “occupy” the Gaza Strip.

The “protection of U.S. forces participating is a top priority. And as such, in the last several weeks, the United States and Israel have developed an integrated security plan to protect all the personnel,” said Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, a deputy commander at the U.S. military’s Central Command. “We are confident in the ability of this security arrangement to protect those involved.”

U.S. troops anchored the pier at 7:40 a.m. local time Thursday, the military’s Central Command said, stressing that none of its forces entered the Gaza Strip and would not during the pier’s operations.

“Trucks carrying humanitarian assistance are expected to begin moving ashore in the coming days,” the command said. “The United Nations will receive the aid and coordinate its distribution into Gaza.”

The World Food Program will be the U.N. program handling the aid, officials said.

Israeli forces will be in charge of security on the shore, but there are also two U.S. Navy warships near the area in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the USS Arleigh Burke and the USS Paul Ignatius. Both ships are destroyers equipped with a wide range of weapons and capabilities to protect American troops off shore and allies on the beach.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani confirmed that the pier had been attached and that Israeli engineering units had flattened ground around the area and surfaced roads for trucks.

“We have been working for months on full cooperation with (the U.S. military) on this project, facilitating it, supporting it in any way possible,” Shoshani said. “It’s a top priority in our operation.”

Aid agencies say they are running out of food in southern Gaza and fuel is dwindling, which will force hospitals to shut down critical operations and halt truck deliveries of aid. The U.N. and others have warned for weeks that an Israel assault on Rafah would cripple humanitarian operations and cause a disastrous surge in civilian casualties.

More than 1.4 million Palestinians — half of Gaza’s population — have been sheltering in Rafah, most after fleeing Israel’s offensives elsewhere.

The first cargo ship loaded with 475 pallets of food left Cyprus last week to rendezvous with a U.S. military ship, the Roy P. Benavidez, which is off the coast of Gaza. The pallets of aid on the MV Sagamore were moved onto the Benavidez. The Pentagon said moving the aid between ships was an effort to be ready so it could flow quickly once the pier and the causeway were installed.

The installation of the pier several miles (kilometers) off the coast and of the causeway, which is now anchored to the beach, was delayed for nearly two weeks because of bad weather. The sea conditions made it too dangerous for U.S. and Israeli troops to secure the causeway to the shore, U.S. officials said.

Military leaders have said the deliveries of aid will begin slowly to ensure the system works. They will start with about 90 truckloads of aid a day through the sea route, and that number will quickly grow to about 150 a day. But aid agencies say that isn’t enough to avert impending famine in Gaza and must be just one part of a broader Israeli effort to open land corridors.

Because land crossings could bring in all the needed aid if Israeli officials allowed, the U.S.-built pier-and-sea route “is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Scott Paul, an associate director of the Oxfam humanitarian organization.

Biden used his State of the Union address on March 7 to order the military to set up a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza, establishing a sea route to deliver food and other aid. Food shipments have been backed up at land crossings amid Israeli restrictions and intensifying fighting.

Under the new sea route, humanitarian aid is dropped off in Cyprus where it will undergo inspection and security checks at Larnaca port. It is then loaded onto ships — mainly commercial vessels — and taken about 200 miles (320 kilometers) to the large floating pier built by the U.S. military off the Gaza coast.

There, the pallets are transferred onto trucks, driven onto smaller Army boats and then shuttled several miles (kilometers) to the floating causeway, which has been anchored onto the beach by the Israeli military. The trucks, which are being driven by personnel from another country, will go down the causeway into a secure area on land where they will drop off the aid and immediately turn around and return to the boats.

Aid groups will collect the supplies for distribution on shore, with the U.N. working with the U.S. Agency for International Development to set up the logistics hub on the beach.

Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, told reporters that the project will cost at least $320 million, including the transportation of the equipment and pier sections from the United States to the coast of Gaza, as well as the construction and aid delivery operations.

___

Associated Press writers Jon Gambrell in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Julia Frankel in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.

AP · May 16, 2024

15. Mystery in the Alps: A Chinese Family, a Swiss Inn and the World’s Most Expensive Weapon

A modern "coast watcher" system? (From WWII where the US and allies used the islands throughout the Pacific as observation posts to surveil and report on Japnese troops movements).

 Today are the Chineseusing expats to establish observation posts around the world to gather information?

Mystery in the Alps: A Chinese Family, a Swiss Inn and the World’s Most Expensive Weapon

Switzerland agreed to buy F-35 jet fighters to park on a remote runway. Then the U.S. zeroed in on the Wangs, who owned the rustic hotel next door.

By Drew HinshawFollow

, Joe ParkinsonFollow

 and Liza LinFollow

 | Photographs by Francesca Volpi for The Wall Street Journal

May 16, 2024 12:01 am ET

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/chinese-family-hotel-spy-jet-switzerland-712fe15c?mod=hp_lead_pos7

UNTERBACH, Switzerland—The Hotel Rössli, a century-old lodge in this Alpine valley village, enjoys a spectacular view from its front. The lace-curtained windows stare out into a crop of mountains capped with snow that melts into the nearby waterfall where Sherlock Holmes, in one of the novels, plummets to an untimely death.

But it is the view from the back that caught the attention of American intelligence agencies. About 100 yards from the rear of the rustic, wood-paneled inn, just past a child’s swing set, cuts the runway where the Swiss military had agreed to base several F-35s, the world’s most advanced jet fighter. The airstrip, only partly fenced, is so accessible to passersby that farmers sometimes lead cows across it, bells clanging from their necks.

Until recently, the hotel’s most pressing complaint came from elderly neighbors disappointed that its Chinese owners, the Wang family, had closed its restaurant after buying it in 2018. Though Wang Jin’s wife, Lin Jing, spoke only Mandarin, and communicated using hand gestures, he smoothed things over by introducing himself in decent German to residents who were flattered—“very Swiss,” one said.

On a crisp summer morning last year, Swiss federal police raided the Rössli, taking the Wangs and their 27-year-old son Dawei in for questioning. Somebody left a note on the door reading: “The hotel is closed.” 

For months, U.S. and British national security officials had been claiming that its quaint 1903 facade offered Beijing’s intelligence services an ideal watchpost on the front edge of an escalating spy war between America and China. Xi Jinping’s intelligence agencies, U.S. officials warned, were going to enormous lengths to acquire information about the supersonic jet, built to penetrate enemy airspace undetected.

The Wangs, now in China, have emphatically denied that their lodge served anybody other than visitors to the hamlet of Unterbach (pop. 478), offering hiking trails and rides on a nearby funicular. Switzerland, a historically neutral country eager to appease both superpowers, took more than a year to weigh the American allegations against the hotel.

An F-35 A Lightning II jet fighter displayed during a media presentation at Emmen Air Base, in central Switzerland on March 24, 2022. PHOTO: FABRICE COFFRINI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

In the end, the U.S. laid down a condition: If Switzerland wanted the F-35, the area had to be secure. That meant the Wangs had to go.

The truth of whether the Wangs were small-time innkeepers or a secret weapon in Beijing’s decadelong effort to capture one of America’s most closely protected military secrets may never be known. The case boils down to whether the family was interested in the view from the hotel’s front, or its back.

What’s for sure is a global contest between Beijing and Washington over military secrets is spilling into new and far-flung places.

China’s foreign ministry said in faxed responses that China is a victim of espionage and has always firmly opposed espionage, adding that “relevant parties” should stop smearing China without any basis. 

A spokesman at Beijing’s Washington embassy, while unfamiliar with the allegations concerning the remote hotel in Switzerland, suggested it is part of a pattern. “The United States has frequently hyped up ‘Chinese espionage activities’ in order to discredit and suppress China,” he wrote in an email. 

‘Like a kind of movie’

For months since the raid in Unterbach, residents have puzzled over the mystery of whether America’s counterintelligence machinery was correct in zeroing in on the quiet hoteliers next door. Why, of all the antique hotels in Switzerland, would a Chinese buyer choose a tumbledown lodge butted against a military airstrip? The first F-35s weren’t meant to arrive until around 2028, and had only ever landed on the airfield once or twice. Is China’s campaign to decode the superjet so extensive that it would send an ordinary-seeming family to purchase a hotel nearly 10 years before its arrival?

“We were very surprised. It sounded like a kind of movie,” said Juck Egli, chief administrator of the nearby town of Meiringen, which houses a museum and a statue of the world’s most celebrated detective, with his trademark pipe and deerstalker hat. “We’re famous for Sherlock Holmes, but this is like the new mystery of Meiringen.”

To piece together the riddle of the Wangs’ picturesque hotel, reporters from The Wall Street Journal traveled by train across Switzerland, pulling land registry and police documents, residency records, and speaking with Swiss, Chinese, U.S. and European officials. Reporters met villagers, neighbors and former employees of the Rössli. Many, though not all, of them see the disappearance of the Wangs as more a tale of American overreach than Chinese spies.

“If secret services were at work, this property purchase would probably be a very clumsy method of obtaining espionage results,” said Kaspar Kohler, the Rössli’s prior owner.

From China, the son, Dawei, told Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger that the hotel’s only problem is a permitting issue and they planned to come back. A graduate of Beijing New Talent Academy, where tuition tops out at $35,800, he later studied at the Swiss Hotel Management School in Montreux, Switzerland. 

A former classmate remembers him frequently driving a rented car on weekends with other Chinese students to Italy. His parents, after paying almost $1 million for the hotel, complained about the cost of Swiss labor, the price of fixing its coffee machine and the cold they escaped by spending long stretches home in China.

When the Journal dialed Swiss phone numbers for Dawei and his mother, an older lady speaking in Mandarin picked up, then quickly ended the call. Subsequent calls weren’t answered.

The Swiss Federal Intelligence Services declined to comment in detail, instead sending a section from “Switzerland’s Security,” an annual report. It claims China makes more use of spies embedded as civilians in Switzerland than even Russia: “Their personnel mainly work under cover as scientists, journalists or business people.” The U.S. Embassy said it learned that the hotel had been closed “at the same time as the public.”

The family provided Swiss police a forwarding address in Dragon Villas, a gated community of American-style brick suburban houses on Beijing’s northern fringe, home to newfound millionaires from China’s boom years, as well as North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un’s half-brother Kim Jong Nam—until he was assassinated in Kuala Lumpur in 2017.

The Wangs have since disappeared without a trace. The tables at the Rössli are still set for breakfast service: jars of muesli, dried fruit and downturned coffee cups atop saucers. An elderly neighbor keeps the heating on to stop the pipes from freezing.

Almost the only visitors recently were a traditional dancing troupe, parading through the town ringing bells during a local festival. Their route, which passed the forlorn inn, had a tongue- in-cheek title: “the spy loop.” 

Military personnel leaving the Unterbach air base.

The flying supercomputer

The villagers at Unterbach had never heard anything so loud. 

For years, sonic booms had echoed across the bucolic village of wood-paneled chalets, whenever European jet fighters took off from the nearby airstrip. The mostly elderly residents had grown accustomed to watching the jets from behind their windows, which the Swiss military soundproofed. Plane spotters often congregated on a nearby balcony, filming videos of the Gripen, the F-5E/F Freedom Fighter and the Eurofighter Typhoon. 

But the afterburning, turbofan engine of the F-35 thundered with such force that residents of Unterbach complained it shook their internal organs. Neither the reinforced glass nor their protests were of any use.

Graffiti on a village wall—“NEIN!”—stands near a poster: “We don’t need the F-35.”

At a total cost of $1.7 trillion, the most expensive weapons program in history was designed to make a statement, a flying supercomputer that would give America “total dominance” in any air war. Two decades in the making, it could slip into enemy airspace, evade even the most advanced defenses, pinpoint airstrikes then blast out at supersonic speeds. Pilots nicknamed it “Panther,” because the plane could identify and kill any target before being seen.

Almost as soon as it hit the skies, the Pentagon sounded the alarm to the White House: China was intent on learning its secrets. The National Security Agency documents Edward Snowden leaked in 2015 showed Chinese hackers had stolen terabytes of data on the jet. 

Xi had begun enacting reforms that would hugely expand China’s spying structures. In 2017, China passed its sweeping National Intelligence Law, obligating Chinese nationals to aid their government’s spy agencies: “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts,” it read.  

Switzerland’s decision to buy F-35s drew protests in 2022. PHOTO: FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The following year, Kaspar Kohler finally found a buyer for the Rössli.

The aging innkeeper had tried for years to find someone who would carry on the traditions of the eight-room hotel until the Wang family stepped forward. In a village without any other proper restaurant, his life’s work was the gathering space for elderly residents sharing early suppers, skiers stopping by for Swiss coffee and schnitzel and pilots or technicians at its diner, whose promotional literature read: “Here the boss still cooks himself!”

The Wangs registered their new property in their son Dawei’s name, and took up a mountain-view suite. Cleaners and receptionists could keep their jobs, the father reassured them in mannerly German.

Kohler wanted to show them around the kitchen on one of their first mornings, to teach them his Swiss recipes. Instead they came down and sat in the breakfast area, waiting to be served.

“They were not even able to crack open an egg,” one worker said. After a few weeks, Kohler left the Rössli, deflated, without a proper goodbye, and handed the keys to the Wangs—who, to villagers’ dismay, promptly closed its restaurant.

Mr. Wang smoothed it over by introducing himself to the village, undertaking modest upgrades such as painting the window shutters and furnishing a modest breakfast counter, offering bread and cereal. Visitors were arriving in a trickle, not a flood, often leaving complimentary reviews: “Kind family.” “Very friendly host!”

Villagers noticed the family would travel back to Beijing for long periods, including over Christmas holidays, the most lucrative time of year. Asked where he picked up German, Wang Jin told his new neighbors that he had grown up the son of a diplomat serving in Germany and Switzerland.

A view of the interior of the Hotel Rössli.

Of the four diplomats named Wang who served in Switzerland during Wang Jin’s childhood, two were military attachés, according to local archives. Of the two who served in West Germany, one left abruptly after five months, citing medical leave. The second arrived in 1969 as a reporter for the Chinese state news agency before working his way up to ambassador.

Many Chinese diplomats in Bern in the 1950s and 1960s were spies, who made the city a hub for espionage operations of the new Communist Chinese government in Europe, said Ariane Knüsel, a Swiss scholar and author of the book “China’s European Headquarters: Switzerland and China during the Cold War.” 

For China, neutral Switzerland was the most important diplomatic destination in Europe during the years after China’s 1949 revolution, Party and state press say. When the People’s Republic of China’s first ambassador to Switzerland, Feng Xuan, returned home, he became deputy director of what is now the Ministry of State Security, according to Party-run media accounts. 

By the time the Wangs were running the Rössli half a century later, Swiss security officials were reporting that the ministry had dramatically boosted its operations in the country. Several Chinese citizens deemed to be spies by Swiss authorities have been caught in recent years, most asked to quietly leave, Swiss intelligence experts say. They include one referred to in files as “Mr. T”—a student at Zurich’s elite science university, ETH—who was paid in cash by the Chinese embassy in Bern.

As the years ticked by, the Rössli’s longtime employees left, frustrated with the inn’s decline and annoyed at being asked to cook meals for the owners, using Chinese ingredients whose instructions were in Chinese. By 2020, new workers were arriving from China, and some didn’t have residence permits. Outgoing employees learned that, apart from the son, the Wangs lacked residency, and came and went on tourist visas. 

Swiss diners, punctilious about their local preferences, were complaining: The bread at breakfast came from the supermarket, not the bakery. When one neighbor stopped in for a coffee, he was shocked that the son, after graduating from an elite hospitality school, didn’t prepare café au lait in the Swiss fashion.

“He put cold milk into a normal coffee instead of heating the milk first,” the neighbor said. “It is a pity.”

A sign underscores the hotel’s remote location.

A far more serious complaint was being examined inside America’s embassy to Switzerland.

A country that hadn’t been dragged into a foreign war since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo didn’t seem to appreciate the gravity of the espionage threat U.S. intelligence and defense officials saw in the tumbledown hotel.

In 2018, the U.S. and Switzerland had begun discussing the labyrinthine terms of a deal that would put the F-35 on the airfields of a neutral country. Swiss voters had rejected buying relatively affordable Swedish jet fighters in a 2014 referendum; the money would be better spent on education, campaign organizers said. Aircraft retirements in the years that followed, plus three planes that crashed into Swiss mountains or in France, left the country with few ready jet fighters with full-time pilots. Their navigation equipment was so rudimentary, in some cases lacking even GPS, that in July 2019, an entire Swiss air patrol team accidentally flew over a yodeling competition, interrupting the festivities and causing a scandal in the local press.

That same summer, the U.S. descended on Unterbach to show off a better plane.

Screeching through mountains, a gunmetal gray F-35 rolled to a stop next to the Rössli, then took off again, with a roar that shook every window in the village. Spectators by the dozens trampled overgrown grass, thronged a nearby roof, or climbed a step ladder to catch a glimpse.

They weren’t the only ones intrigued. As the Swiss interest in the F-35 grew, U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats based in Switzerland began repeatedly warning that Chinese intelligence personnel, based under diplomatic cover in the lakeside city of Geneva, were attempting to gain information on U.S. jets, a senior U.S. official serving at the time said. Reports reached the ambassador that the Swiss weren’t taking those concerns seriously: The Swiss Federal Intelligence Service has only about five people dedicated to China, said Ralph Weber, a China expert and Mandarin speaker at the University of Basel. “The Swiss-China politics is just about not angering China in any way,” he said. 

In 2020, Swiss voters approved a new referendum to budget the money needed to purchase F-35s—by just 9,000 votes. As the Swiss began ticking through requirements to buy the warplanes, a third referendum to stop it nearly went ahead, then was scrapped. Finally, in 2022, Switzerland agreed to spend 6 billion Swiss francs, or $6.65 billion, for three dozen F-35s, scheduled to arrive in 2028, the largest military procurement in the country’s history. 

There was still an important requirement U.S. officials felt the Swiss weren’t taking seriously: security around the airfield.

Cars and cattle compete for space on the roads of Unterbach.

U.S. officials responsible for aircraft sales traveled to Unterbach and made requests, including that screens be built around the runway. On the airport’s roof, hobbyist plane spotters would often show up, told by friends in the Swiss Air Force when combat planes were scheduled to fly. That was also a risk. 

In America, air bases generally prohibit photographing jet engines, for fear that an adversary could reverse-engineer them. Even seemingly ordinary aspects of the F-35 were classified “top secret,” including the helmet, which processed data collected by the aircraft. But Switzerland, a member of neither the European Union nor NATO, didn’t have the same classification system as the U.S.

More pressingly, the Rössli needed new ownership; a Swiss family had been, at one point, trying to buy it, “but they didn’t get the loan from the bank,” said Simon Zumbrunn, a local egg farmer who sits on the village’s Unterbach Aerodrome Commission. He believes the Chinese family was innocent.

U.S. meetings with sympathetic counterparts in Swiss intelligence came and went without commitments. The British followed up with their own meetings, discussing the Rössli and growing frustrated that Swiss national security officials seemed reluctant to broach the subject with their political leadership. U.S. officials argued that under China’s 2017 national security law, the Wangs, should Beijing ask, would be required to help gather information on the jet.

Swiss officials said they took the concerns seriously—but had to raise them to a political leadership perplexed by America’s campaign, now focusing on the forlorn hotel. The U.S. had no hard proof that the Rössli was a spying operation, a senior Swiss official said—only that it could be. “You’re never going to know,” he said.

In 2023, the frustrated U.S. ambassador sharpened his warnings. If the F-35 was meant to be based in Unterbach, then Unterbach had to be secure.

 Months passed without action. Finally, late last summer, as backpack-clad hikers thronged the trails, a group of civilian policemen arrived midmorning at the Rössli. There were no cordons and no commotion. The cantonal police arrived shortly after and began searching the property. The elder Wangs were taken away in handcuffs, then fined $5,400 for mostly minor violations of Switzerland’s Hospitality Industry Act, among them: “mopping the floors and tables, and watering the garden in the Rössli without having the proper work permit.” 

Wang Jin later came back to apologize to neighbors: They were sorry for any inconvenience and would be heading back to China for a while. He left the keys with a neighbor, and a request—“keep the pipes warm”—a villager said. 

Not long after, an online ad circulated listing the hotel for sale for $1.8 million. In January, the Unterbach Aerodrome Commission received word that a buyer had emerged: the Swiss military.

Terms were undisclosed.

Villagers wonder what fate holds for their local hotel.

Eva Hirschi contributed to this article

Write to Joe Parkinson at joe.parkinson@wsj.com, Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com and Liza Lin at liza.lin@wsj.com

16. For China, Russia Is Both a Partner and a Predicament

For China, Russia Is Both a Partner and a Predicament

On his trip to Beijing, Russian President Vladimir Putin will be seeking more support to resist Western efforts to isolate Moscow

https://www.wsj.com/world/putin-beijing-visit-xi-support-3b0531c3?mod=Searchresults_pos2&page=1

By Austin Ramzy

Follow

Updated May 16, 2024 12:05 am ET

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping attended an official welcoming ceremony. PHOTO: PAVEL BYRKIN/ZUMA PRESS

HONG KONG—For Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin is a useful partner in opposing a U.S.-dominated world order.

But the relationship also represents a liability for China as American and European officials warn Beijing against aiding Russia’s efforts to rebuild its military.

Putin arrived in Beijing on Thursday, in his first trip abroad since he secured a rubber-stamp election victory in March. The two leaders declared a “no limits” friendship shortly before Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Since then, China has been less effusive even as it has provided a lifeline to Russia’s economy. Putin will be seeking more of the support that has helped Russia resist Western efforts to isolate it. The visit will also give him an opportunity to demonstrate to the Russian public that he still has powerful friends—a message often stressed by state media.

“Putin, of course, will like to see some sort of very persistent Chinese endorsement,” said Zhu Feng, a professor of international relations at Nanjing University.

Putin and Xi have a longstanding friendship. PHOTO: SPUTNIK/REUTERS

What Putin is more likely to get is a continuation of China’s policy to help Moscow prop up its economy, buying up its cheap energy exports and selling it the consumer goods Russia increasingly struggles to import from elsewhere.

China hasn’t publicly criticized the invasion of Ukraine, which it officially calls a “crisis” rather than a war. Xi has rejected suggestions that Beijing should do more to press Moscow to end the war. But the Chinese leader has also warned against use of nuclear weapons, a specter that Putin has occasionally raised over Ukraine.

“On the one hand we are very opposed to the use of military force against other countries,” said Zhu. “On the other hand, we don’t want relations with Russia to completely collapse. They’re our neighbor, China is a big buyer of Russian oil and gas. Beijing would just like to see the relationship go on without distraction. But as long as the war persists, it is a diplomatic dilemma for China.”

The relationship between the two countries is underpinned by a longstanding friendship between the two leaders, who have met each other dozens of times and frequently exchange gifts and birthday wishes. Xi’s first foreign trip after securing a third term last year was to Moscow.

Putin’s trip comes just a week after he was inaugurated for another six-year term. China has become an important outlet for him diplomatically, as he is increasingly shunned internationally and limited in his ability to travel after the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for him.

Russian and Chinese national flags were flown together at Tiananmen Square in Beijing. PHOTO: ANDY WONG/ASSOCIATED PRESS

The two countries have grown closer during the war, with trade growing last year by more than 26% to $240 billion. That growth has stalled in recent months, but experts say that significant volumes are moving through third countries in Central Asia such as Kyrgyzstan.

China is a big customer of Russian oil and natural gas, which it can buy at a markdown as Europe has curbed such purchases since the start of the war. Russia also looks to China for consumer goods, providing a steady market at a time of weak global demand. Chinese vehicles have surpassed many European brands in Russia, helping China become the world’s biggest car exporter last year.

“The general framework of this relationship is pretty solid,” said Jakub Jakobowski, a China researcher and deputy director of the Centre for Eastern Studies, a Polish government-funded think tank. “As long as the strategic conflict with the U.S. is in place, and probably not going away anytime soon, they will lean on Russia as the only viable partner.”

The U.S. has accused China of helping Putin rebuild his military, supplying chips used in advanced weapons, jet parts, drone engines and earth movers. China denies it has supplied any arms to Russia and says it closely regulates so-called dual-use equipment with potential civilian and military applications.

While the U.S. has sanctioned Chinese companies for providing military technologies such as chips and optics to Russia, it has thus far held off on sanctions that would cut off Chinese banks from the global financial system, a move that could have broad economic impact.

Putin’s visit comes on the heels of Xi’s trip to Europe, where he met with leaders in France, Serbia and Hungary. Each stage of the Chinese leader’s visit seemed designed to appeal to the segments of Europe that are less eager to embrace the U.S.’s tough stance toward China, analysts said.

“From Putin’s point of view, or the China-Russia relationship point of view, this European visit was just great, the way Xi Jinping devised it,” Jakobowski said. “If you look at the countries he visited and the overall context, it’s clear this was very anti-American.”

In addition to Beijing, Putin will also visit Harbin, a city in northeastern China that was developed by Russia starting in the late 19th century as the hub of a railway network in the region. The city retains some of its historic Russian architecture and is hosting a Russia-China Expo that focuses on trade and investment ties between the two countries.

Putin’s visit to China’s northeast has added to speculation that he could also travel to North Korea, a country that Russia has grown closer to since the start of the war in Ukraine. Putin met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Russia in September, and Moscow has turned to North Korea to supplement its own arms production as its supplies are exhausted by the war in Ukraine. In January, the Kremlin said Putin would pay a visit to Pyongyang in the near future.

Putin has said he supports China’s efforts to promote an end to the fighting in Ukraine. PHOTO: GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

The growing Russia-North Korea ties have caused some discomfort in China, which worries that it could be lumped into a grouping reminiscent of their alignment during the Korean War, said Zhu, the Chinese scholar.

“Beijing totally rejects falling into a new Cold War,” said Zhu.

Speaking to Chinese state media ahead of his visit to China, Putin said Russia and China had a common goal in standing up to the U.S. and its allies. “We also reject Western attempts to impose an order based on lies and hypocrisy, on some mythical rules of no one knows whose making,” he told the state-run Xinhua News Agency.

Putin also said he supported China’s efforts to promote an end to the fighting in Ukraine. Last year China issued a position paper on Ukraine and has dispatched an envoy, Li Hui, to European capitals to discuss potential diplomatic solutions. But China’s position was seen by European officials as closely matching Russia’s. Beijing’s argument that Russia has rights to “indivisible security,” with no other country’s security efforts threatening its own, follows Putin’s justification for invading Ukraine.

Ann M. Simmons in London contributed to this article.

Write to Austin Ramzy at austin.ramzy@wsj.com

Copyright ©2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the May 16, 2024, print edition as 'Putin Trip to China Spotlights Key Partnership'.

17. As Hamas returns to the north, Israel’s Gaza endgame is nowhere in sight

As Hamas returns to the north, Israel’s Gaza endgame is nowhere in sight

American and Israeli officials are offering increasingly blunt assessments about Hamas’s resilience and Netanyahu’s failure to plan for postwar Gaza.

By Loveday Morris, Shira Rubin and Hazem Balousha

May 15, 2024 at 5:47 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Loveday Morris · May 15, 2024

JERUSALEM — It was last December when the Israeli military declared victory in the Jabalya refugee camp, saying it had broken Hamas’s grip on its traditional stronghold in the northern Gaza Strip.

“Jabalya is not the Jabalya it used to be,” Brig. Gen. Itzik Cohen, commander of Division 162, said at the time, adding that “hundreds of terrorists” had been killed and 500 suspects arrested.

Five months later, Israeli forces are back in Jabalya. Ground troops are pushing into the densely packed camp, backed by artillery and airstrikes — one in a string of recent “re-clearing” operations launched by the Israel Defense Forces against Hamas, whose fighters have rapidly regrouped in areas vacated by the IDF.

Israel’s fast-moving offensive in Gaza has given way to a grinding battle of attrition, highlighting how far it remains from its chief military aim — the complete dismantling of Hamas. As an adaptable militant organization that has easy access to recruits, an expansive tunnel network and is deeply embedded in the fabric of Gaza, Hamas has shown it can weather a protracted and devastating war.

The resumption of heavy fighting in the north comes as the IDF presses ahead with its heavily criticized campaign in the southern city of Rafah — long framed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a final battle against Hamas’s last intact battalions. Now, American officials and some of the prime minister’s fellow cabinet members are offering increasingly blunt assessments about the resilience of the militant group and Netanyahu’s failure to plan for postwar Gaza.

In striking remarks Wednesday night, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called on Netanyahu to make a public commitment that Israel will not end up governing Gaza after the war, amid mounting fears in the IDF that its mission is creeping toward reoccupation of the territory.

“Hamas might regain its strength as long as it maintains civilian control,” Gallant said. Failure to create an “alternative governing authority,” he said, “is equivalent to choosing between the two worst alternatives: Hamas rule or Israeli control of Gaza.”

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan sounded a similar note on Monday: “Military pressure is necessary but not sufficient to fully defeat Hamas,” he told reporters. “If Israel’s efforts are not accompanied by a political plan for the future of Gaza, and the Palestinian people, the terrorists will keep coming back.”

Netanyahu said last week that Israel has killed 14,000 Hamas militants; the IDF put its estimate at 13,000 last month. The numbers are not possible to independently verify — and no evidence has been offered to support them — but even the high-end figure would amount to less than half of Hamas’s estimated fighting force before the war. Thousands of other militants belong to smaller groups that vie with Hamas for local influence.

Middle East conflict

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed since October, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children. Health services have been decimated, many families have been displaced multiple times, and a “full-blown famine” has taken hold in the north, according to the head of the World Food Program.

“It would be astounding for me if it wasn’t incredibly easy for Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza to recruit,” said H.A. Hellyer, a scholar specializing in Middle East security at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Royal United Services Institute.

While Hamas has been “significantly and substantially degraded,” he said, an organization that has been active in Gaza since the 1980s and governed it for more than 15 years is not going to “simply disappear.”

After seven months of bombardment and ground operations by one of the world’s “most powerful armies,” he said, “Israeli forces still haven’t been able to come close to victory.”

When Israeli troops withdrew from Jabalya last year, Hamas began a recruitment drive for jobs securing aid and setting up a new headquarters there, according to residents. “There is the presence of policemen, but without a police uniform, and they are all in civilian clothes,” said a 42-year-old Jabalya resident, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for his safety.

Israel says four Hamas battalions remain intact in Rafah, where its troops are slowly approaching residential areas despite threats by President Biden to cut off military aid.

There are several “layers” of Hamas fighters embedded in the city, said Maj. Gen. Tamir Hayman, a former head of Israeli military intelligence. He said the operation will focus on “the people who are underground, underneath military installations, and others who are above ground, and connected to the underground layer,” waiting to “carry out ambushes” on Israeli troops.

Two hundred and seventy-three Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza since the beginning of ground operations in October, following Hamas’s deadly attack on southern Israel. Though rocket barrages from the enclave subsided for months after Israel’s campaign in the north, they have been ramping up again in recent weeks.

On Tuesday, a rocket could be seen streaking toward the Israeli border town of Sderot, a vivid reminder of Hamas’s staying power. Israeli military helicopters swooped in for medical evacuations. The injured were rushed to waiting ambulances.

Israel Ziv, a retired major general who served as the head of the IDF Operations Division, said the country looks set on continuing “a multi-chapter war” that could unfold like the one it waged in southern Lebanon starting in the 1980s — which involved devastating bouts of fighting and a 15-year occupation, but ultimately failed to eliminate the threat of Hezbollah.

Ziv estimated there are at least 20,000 Hamas militants left in Gaza who “will easily recruit the next 40,000.”

Earlier gains by the IDF have “evaporated” because of a lack of political plans, he said. “If you are working only militarily without any diplomatic solution, you’re inside this swamp. Israel is stuck inside Gaza.”

Netanyahu has resisted U.S. proposals for the Palestinian Authority to play a leading role in postwar Gaza, or to consider a path to a Palestinian state, arguing that it would reward Hamas for their Oct. 7 atrocities.

Experts say his refusal to address the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is stymieing buy-in from Arab states in planning for postwar security.

“Who is going to want to come in, govern and essentially be the police for the Israeli occupation?” Hellyer said. “Israel is blocking off any and all avenues that look sensible.”

As long as Hamas retains its military grip on Gaza, it is clear that “no entity will be willing to take on the civil administration of Gaza for fear of its safety,” Netanyahu said in a statement Wednesday. “Therefore, discussions about ‘the day after,’ while Hamas remains, will remain just empty talk.”

But frustrations are growing within the Israeli military, and generals are speaking more freely about the deepening security vacuum.

“There is no doubt that creating an alternative to Hamas would put pressure on it,” Israeli military spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said at a news conference Tuesday when asked about Hamas’s return to the north. "But that is a question for the political leadership,” he added pointedly.

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett likened the state of the war to “mopping water up a slanted floor.”

“Somehow planning for post-Hamas Gaza has become a taboo in our government,” he wrote on X this week. “We can decide to keep Israeli temporary admin, or local Palestinian, or other options. But we need to decide SOMETHING. Who fills the void.”

Military experts warn that Israel could be lurching toward a new military occupation — a nightmare scenario for the IDF and another possible fault line in relations with Washington, where officials have insisted that “Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land.”

Speaking in October, Gallant listed “the removal of Israel’s responsibility for life in the Gaza Strip” as one of the main aims of the war. Seven months on, that appears a distant possibility.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t taken care of the replacement of Hamas,” said Kobi Michael, an expert at Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. “The only option I can see is a temporary military administration that will take care and run the territory and the population and the humanitarian aid,” he said, noting that the idea was now being discussed more seriously in Israel’s military establishment.

Netanyahu’s recent public statements also suggested a long-term Israeli military presence in Gaza. “If you look at what you need to do after this war is won, you’ll have to have sustained demilitarization by Israel,” he said in a podcast interview this week. “If you have to be inside, you be inside.”

Yossi Melman, a longtime intelligence columnist for the Haaretz newspaper, said the IDF mission has lost its compass.

“They are like zombies wandering around,” he said. “They don’t know what to do.”

Rubin reported from Tel Aviv and Balousha from Cairo. Heidi Levine contributed to this report from Sderot.

The Washington Post · by Loveday Morris · May 15, 2024

18. Putin and Xi deepen partnership and scold the United States

Is anyone surprised?

Putin and Xi deepen partnership and scold the United States

https://www.reuters.com/world/putin-xi-deepen-partnership-scold-united-states-2024-05-16/?utm

By Reuters

May 16, 20245:57 AM EDTUpdated an hour ago

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping meet in Beijing, China May 16, 2024. Sputnik/Sergei Guneev/Pool via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab

MOSCOW, May 16 (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed on Thursday to deepen their "strategic partnership" while scolding the United States for a series of moves that they said threatened their countries.

In a 7,000-word joint statement on "the deepening of the comprehensive partnership and strategic cooperation entering a new era," the two leaders noted positions in everything from economics and space to defence, Ukraine and Taiwan.

"The parties reiterate their serious concern over the attempts of the United States to disrupt the strategic security balance in the region," a Russian version of the document said.

Coming soon: Get the latest news and expert analysis about the state of the global economy with Reuters Econ World. Sign up here.

Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge

19. The Army has stepped up its training for tunnel warfare, a dangerous — and growing — form of combat

Excerpts:

China is believed to have thousands of miles of tunnels, while North Korea may have thousands of bunkers, tunnels and even air bases complete with subterranean taxiways.

Military experts say North Korea may have exported its tunnel-building expertise to Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that the U.S. and other nations designate as terrorists.

Hamas also has developed new tactics, Richemond-Barak said — an obvious one being its use of hostages as human shields to protect tunnels from attack.

This underlines a reason that non-state groups like Hamas are likely to continue to dig in, even as nations like the U.S. invest in sophisticated military technology.

"The advances that have been made in anti-tunnel technology — from detection to mapping and destruction and neutralization of tunnels — we might say that this would be a deterrent for all these actors like Hamas and Hezbollah and al-Qaeda to stop using tunnels," Richemond-Barak said. "But what we see is that high-tech warfare is driving this use of low-tech warfare."

The Army has stepped up its training for tunnel warfare, a dangerous — and growing — form of combat

wunc.org · by Jay Price · May 14, 2024

After seven months of war in Gaza, Israel has still probed little of what's believed to be hundreds of miles of tunnels — an underground network that Hamas uses for refuge, to hide hostages, to move around undetected — and to pop out unexpectedly and fight.

Tunnel warfare is becoming a common tactic on modern battlefields, and it's one of most dangerous forms of combat, especially for the attackers.

That is why groups like Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda have built underground facilities, seeking to blunt the advantages of the militaries hunting them, said Daphné Richemond-Barak, who authored the book "Underground Warfare."

“For the last two decades, what we see is that this tactic has indeed become more popular with non-state actors,” said Richemond-Barak, an assistant professor at Reichman University in Israel and a scholar with two research institutes at West Point. “It is spreading as a global security threat, from theater to theater.”

Geopolitical foes of the United States, such as China, North Korea, Iran and Russia, also are pushing more of their military and nuclear facilities underground, prompting the U.S. to increase its focus on tunnel warfare.

The Army has built several tunnel warfare training facilities, including one of its largest at Fort Liberty, N.C., the base formerly known as Fort Bragg. Simply called Range 68, it's two-thirds of a mile of disorienting twists and turns, hatches, and doorways hidden in a mock Eastern European village.

It's used both by conventional units like the 82nd Airborne Division and by Army Special Operations troops. On a recent day, a small Special Forces team slipped into a house and fired at role-playing terrorists with non-lethal rounds.

But their main target fled into a tunnel entrance hidden in a back room. The troops peered in, spotted him and quickly started firing. Then they tossed a flash-bang, a grenade designed to disorient.

The soldier playing the role of the target scrambled farther, trying to lure them into a smaller tunnel where they’d be easier to kill. Eventually, though, they found another entrance and caught him.

Watching and listening from a fake house across the street was Mike Murray, who served three decades in the Army before retiring, He now oversees the base’s dozens of training ranges and helped plan the newer section of tunnels, which were finished in 2020.

“Just from my perspective, this is graduate level,” Murray said of the elaborate tunnel system. “We tried to make it as complicated as possible.”

An older section is filled with chest-deep water. Some tunnels open into spacious rooms that could be used for a command center, a medical treatment area or for storing arms.

Others squeeze down until you’re crawling.

“You're on your hands-and knees-type area in complete darkness,” Murray said. “You go from a larger tunnel system now on to literally something that maybe your elbows are banging the side of the walls.”

The man playing the role of the target in the training exercise was a Special Forces staff sergeant named Adrian. (The Army allows Special Operations soldiers to be identified only by their first names.) He said it was designed to make him the bait and lure soldiers into the tunnels, where they're usually at a disadvantage.

“You have no idea how big the tunnel system is or how small it is, how compressed it is, how dense it is," he said. "Where are the obstacles? Is there a trip wire? Are there false doors, etc.?

"The person that knows the tunnel system better, it's basically a win-win for those personnel.”

Adam Luther

/

U.S. Army

The subterranean training facility at Fort Liberty, N.C. allows Special Forces and other troops to move through a system of passages ranging from 7 feet to only 30 inches tall.

Underground warfare goes back to prehistory.

But for Americans, perhaps the best-known in recent case was in Vietnam, where the Viet Cong dug vast complexes, including at least one with more than a hundred miles of tunnels.

John Keaveney was sent into those complexes. He was one of the U.S. troops known as "Tunnel rats."

It was an extraordinary experience, he said, but not in a good way.

“The more I did it, the better I got at it," he said. "You learn to use your senses because it's very dark. You learn to smell things and listen good."

He crawled into tunnels more than 50 times spread over two tours of duty. When he went in, he carried just a flashlight, a pistol and a knife. Sometimes he had a partner, sometimes he went alone.

Inside, waiting, he found booby traps, snakes, spiders and sometimes enemy fighters. His flashlight sometimes revealed unnerving sights, including an operating room with one dead Viet Cong soldier on the table and another in a hammock.

The medical team had fled just ahead of him.

Keaveney was given no real preparation for the job. He was picked because the tunnels were often tight, and he was 5-foot-3 and weighed 110 pounds.

Some in his unit, he said, were sent in a few times but had psychological breakdowns. The stress wore on him, too.

“I got to the point where I couldn’t sleep no more,” he said. “I came home, and I didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought I just spent too much time in the tunnels.

Professor Richemond-Barak said those psychological effects are a key reason troops need special training for fighting underground.

“You lose your sense of space, your sense of direction, your sense of time very quickly inside a tunnel," said Richemond-Barak, who has been inside tunnels built by Hamas and Hezbollah. “And so this is why I think it's very important to bring soldiers inside tunnels and not merely use simulators or virtual reality. You really need to feel it in your heart, feel a low level of oxygen, feel how your body is reacting to this kind of reality."

Adam Luther

/

U.S. Army

Hatches, ladders, and pitch black passageways await soldiers at Fort Liberty's subterranean training facility. Communication devices also may not function in the underground environment.

China is believed to have thousands of miles of tunnels, while North Korea may have thousands of bunkers, tunnels and even air bases complete with subterranean taxiways.

Military experts say North Korea may have exported its tunnel-building expertise to Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that the U.S. and other nations designate as terrorists.

Hamas also has developed new tactics, Richemond-Barak said — an obvious one being its use of hostages as human shields to protect tunnels from attack.

This underlines a reason that non-state groups like Hamas are likely to continue to dig in, even as nations like the U.S. invest in sophisticated military technology.

"The advances that have been made in anti-tunnel technology — from detection to mapping and destruction and neutralization of tunnels — we might say that this would be a deterrent for all these actors like Hamas and Hezbollah and al-Qaeda to stop using tunnels," Richemond-Barak said. "But what we see is that high-tech warfare is driving this use of low-tech warfare."

This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.

wunc.org · by Jay Price · May 14, 2024

​20. Exclusive: Driver’s Attempt at Breaching Quantico Gate Echoes Deadly Incidents at White House, U.S. Military Bases

This apparently happened nearly 2 weeks ago (May 3, 2024). Why am I only seeing this in local news? (very local news). I could have missed the reporting on this but I try to pay attention to new, especially anything that is potentially terrorist related.

Excerpt:

Officers then used vehicle denial barriers, or roadblocks that were used to keep out cars, which prevented the two men from traveling further onto the base. The occupants were detained and eventually turned over to ICE, and no one was injured, said Curtis.

Multiple sources report one of the individuals inside the truck is a Jordanian foreign national who recently crossed the southern border into the U.S., and that one of the occupants is on the U.S. terrorist watch list. Quantico did not confirm this information.

QUANTICO

Exclusive: Driver’s Attempt at Breaching Quantico Gate Echoes Deadly Incidents at White House, U.S. Military Bases

https://www.potomaclocal.com/2024/05/10/exclusive-drivers-attempt-at-breaching-quantico-gate-echoes-deadly-incidents-at-white-house-u-s-military-bases/

Kelly Sienkowski

May 10, 2024 at 4:46pm

The Iwo Jima statue outside the Fuller Gate at Quantico Marine Corps Base

Two people inside a box truck tried to force their way onto Quantico Marine Corps Base.

After being pressed by Potomac Local News, base officials today said that in the early morning hours of Friday, May 3, 2024, the two men drove a truck up to the base’s main gate on Fuller Road, just outside Dumfries, told guards that they were contractors for Amazon and were making a delivery to Quantico Town’s post office. The town is located inside the military base.

The men did not provide any approved access credentials, and police determined the vehicle had no affiliation with the base, so officers directed the truck to a holding area for standard vetting procedures. “One of the military police officers noticed the driver, ignoring the direct instructions of the officers, continued to move the vehicle past the holding area and attempted to access…Quantico,” said base spokesman Capt. Micheal Curtis.

Officers then used vehicle denial barriers, or roadblocks that were used to keep out cars, which prevented the two men from traveling further onto the base. The occupants were detained and eventually turned over to ICE, and no one was injured, said Curtis.

Multiple sources report one of the individuals inside the truck is a Jordanian foreign national who recently crossed the southern border into the U.S., and that one of the occupants is on the U.S. terrorist watch list. Quantico did not confirm this information.

Potomac Local News requested more information from ICE, and we’ll update this post as soon as we receive it.

Sources also tell us security on the base has been heightened since the incident, and that a mass email was sent to base personnel urging them to be on high alert.

The Quantico incident mirrors others at military installations across the U.S. and the White House, which have raised concerns about security protocols and the safety of personnel following three separate incidents involving unauthorized vehicle access.

Two days after the incident at Quantico, a vehicle crashed into an outer perimeter gate of the White House in Washington, D.C., resulting in the death of the driver. President Joe Biden, who was away for the weekend in Delaware, was not present during the incident, and the Secret Service confirmed that there was no threat to the White House.

The driver, a male whose identity has not yet been disclosed, was found deceased in the vehicle following the crash, which took place shortly before 10:30 p.m.

The Secret Service promptly enacted security measures, assuring the public that there was no immediate threat to the White House. Both the Secret Service and local law enforcement agencies are actively investigating the incident to determine its cause and any underlying factors.

Tragedy struck at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek–Fort Story in Virginia on Sunday, April 28, when a driver attempted to breach security protocols at the installation’s gate and crashed into a hydraulic barricade. Despite attempts by the base’s fire company to extinguish the resulting fire, the driver succumbed to the crash. According to a public affairs officer, the vehicle disregarded security checks and barreled through the gate at high speed.

On April 3, at Naval Base San Diego, an internal security vehicle triggered chaos at the Norman Scott Gate. The unmarked vehicle, belonging to the base’s security team, breached the gate without stopping, prompting the activation of emergency barricades. The ensuing collision injured three occupants, including two civilian officers and one active-duty military member.

On March 27, 2024, at Twentynine Palms, California, a Chinese national made a brazen attempt to gain access to the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. Despite being informed by military police that he lacked authorization, the individual proceeded past gate guards, prompting immediate intervention by law enforcement. The suspect was swiftly detained and transferred to Customs and Border Patrol custody. 

Kelly Sienkowski is a freelance reporter for Potomac Local News. If you’re not getting our FREE email newsletter, you are missing out. Subscribe Now!

21. U.S. lays out plans for withdrawing troops from Niger

U.S. lays out plans for withdrawing troops from Niger

The two American bases, enabling drone operations for more than a decade, have been used to contain groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/15/niger-us-military-withdrawal/

By Missy Ryan and Rachel Chason

Updated May 15, 2024 at 4:28 p.m. EDT|Published May 15, 2024 at 11:28 a.m. EDT

Demonstrators in Agadez, Niger, demand the withdrawal of U.S. troops during a protest in late April. (Issifou Djibo/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

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A U.S. delegation will present the government of Niger this week with detailed plans for shuttering two key American bases and withdrawing all troops, officials said, as the Biden administration moves after months of strained negotiations to comply with the African nation’s decision to terminate a valued counterterrorism mission.

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Senior Defense Department officials, including Chris Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, and Lt. Gen. Dagvin Anderson, who oversees force development on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, began talks with Nigerien officials Wednesday.

The discussions represent a significant development in the months-long standoff over the U.S. military presence there and the nature of the two countries’ broader relationship. It comes as Niger’s prime minister, installed following a 2023 military coup, accuses the United States of seeking to dictate his country’s foreign dealings and blames Washington for the breakdown of what had been an important security partnership.

Several senior U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive bilateral discussions, discussed the ongoing effort to prepare for the departure from two American bases, which have been the sites of regional drone operations for more than a decade, and the exit of about 1,000 U.S. personnel, including members of the military, civilians and contractors.

While U.S. officials had held out hope for months that a full withdrawal could be avoided in the wake of the Biden administration’s decision to suspend most military aid due to the coup, they are now moving ahead with that plan. Whether cooperation can resume in earnest in the future remains unknown.

“The time for us to address future partnership with the CNSP will be after they see and understand our clear plan to fully withdraw,” a senior defense official said, using an acronym for Niger’s new government. “The burden of proof is on us.”

The official declined to disclose how long it would take the U.S. military to complete its withdrawal once that process begins, saying that the government of Niger must be informed of the timeline first.

He noted that once a withdrawal order is given, it will take several weeks before the first shipments of equipment will be ready to be flown out, but said that the military can begin immediately to rotate out troops who have been stationed in Niger, some whose tours have been extended as negotiations have dragged on, and replace them with specialized personnel needed for base closure.

Niger’s government, in a social media post Wednesday, said the talks with Maier and Anderson, who were joined by U.S. Ambassador to Niger Kathleen FitzGibbon, represented an important step following Niamey’s decision this spring to end the U.S. troop presence, which in turn was a “turning point in relations between the two countries.”

The government said the plans presented by the U.S. side would be discussed by Nigerien officials with the goal of ensuring the American departure would occur under “the best possible conditions, guaranteeing order, security and compliance with set deadlines.”

A second U.S. official said remaining American troops are focused on assessing what equipment must be transported out of Niger when forces depart and what can be left behind. He said those decisions will depend partly on the value and sensitivity of individual items — weapons, ammunition and communications gear must go, for example, but things like vehicles or construction equipment might stay — and the volume of transport aircraft that will be available to ferry out people and gear.

The U.S. and Nigerien flags wave outside Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger, during the facility's construction in 2018. (Carley Petesch/AP)

In the meantime, U.S. forces have had little interaction with a contingent of Russian troops who are occupying the same air base where some U.S. personnel are stationed. Niger’s decision to invite in Kremlin troops as military ties with Washington have faltered has been another point of friction with the United States, which is locked in a major confrontation with Moscow over its war in Ukraine.

“Obviously, there was a little angst with that news in and amongst the troops themselves, but since then, it’s settled and I think everybody’s resorted to being professional about it,” the second official said of the arrival of Russian forces. “No issue from either side.”

American officials do plan to ask Nigerien officials to help them ensure that sensitive items or facilities don’t fall into Russian hands after the expected U.S. departure.

The officials also said they are working to troubleshoot issues with Niger’s government, which had prohibited some inbound flights carrying medical supplies — although a shipment of medicine arrived recently and the pharmacy at the air base is now fully stocked — and made it difficult for new personnel to arrive. Officials have noted that the CNSP government has granted all requests to fly out troops requiring medical treatment outside Niger.

“As we encounter these challenges, we’re finding the way like everyone else, to be creative and work around it,” the second official said. He said it had been a trying situation for troops grappling with months of uncertainty about the future of their mission and deployments, but commanders were trying to provide mental health and other support.

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The Biden administration is also working to line up an alternate platform for the U.S. effort to address a growing Islamist extremist movement in the Sahel. Without their bases in Niger, American officials will no longer be able to contain the threat posed by groups linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State “from the inside out,” as the first official put it.

​ 

“Now, we are transitioning to going outside-in to the Sahel,” the official said, “because we have lost some of our access to the Sahel for now.”

American officials are looking for “willing partners,” he said, focusing on Ivory Coast and Benin as potential possibilities. U.S. Africa Command’s commander, Marine Gen. Michael Langley, made visits to those countries in the past month.

Chason reported from Dakar, Senegal. John Hudson contributed to this report.

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By Missy Ryan

Missy Ryan writes about national security and defense for The Washington Post. She joined The Post in 2014 and has written about the Pentagon and the State Department. She has reported from Iraq, Ukraine, Egypt, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mexico, Peru, Argentina and Chile.

By Rachel Chason

Rachel Chason is The Washington Post's West Africa bureau chief. Before becoming a foreign correspondent in 2022, she was a reporter on the Local desk, focusing on politics and government in Prince George's County, Md.  Twitter

22. Opinion | The West Doesn’t Understand How Much Russia Has Changed

Excerpta:

Chinese culture will not replace Western culture as Russians’ main reference point any time soon. But a profound change has taken place. From the other side of the Iron Curtain, Europe was seen as a beacon of human rights, prosperity and technological development, a space that many Soviet citizens aspired to be part of.

Now a growing number of educated Russians, on top of feeling bitterness toward Europe for its punitive sanctions, see China as a technologically advanced and economically superior power to which Russia is ever more connected. With no easy way back to normal ties with the West, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

In his dystopian novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” Vladimir Sorokin describes a deeply anti-Western Russia of 2028 that survives on Chinese technology while cosplaying the medieval brutality of Ivan the Terrible’s era. With every passing day, this unsettling and foresighted novel — published in 2006 as a warning to Russia about the direction of travel under Mr. Putin — reads more and more like the news.

Opinion | The West Doesn’t Understand How Much Russia Has Changed

The New York Times · by Alexander Gabuev · May 15, 2024

Guest Essay

The West Doesn’t Understand How Much Russia Has Changed

May 15, 2024

Credit...Charles Desmarais

By

Mr. Gabuev, the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote from Berlin.

Vladimir Putin’s trip to Beijing this week, where he will meet with Xi Jinping and top Chinese officials, is another clear demonstration of the current closeness between Russia and China.

Yet many in the West still want to believe that their alliance is an aberration, driven by Mr. Putin’s emotional anti-Americanism and his toxic fixation on Ukraine. Once Mr. Putin and his dark obsessions are out of the picture, the thinking goes, Moscow will seek to rebuild ties with the West — not least because the bonds between Russia and China are shallow, while the country has centuries of economic and cultural dependence on Europe.

This wishful view, however appealing, overlooks the transformation of Russia’s economy and society. Never since the fall of the Soviet Union has Russia been so distant from Europe, and never in its entire history has it been so entwined with China. The truth is that after two years of war in Ukraine and painful Western sanctions, it’s not just Mr. Putin who needs China — Russia does, too.

China has emerged as Russia’s single most important partner, providing a lifeline not only for Mr. Putin’s war machine but also for the entire embattled economy. In 2023, Russia’s trade with China hit a record $240.1 billion, up by more than 60 percent from prewar levels, as China accounted for 30 percent of Russia’s exports and nearly 40 percent of its imports.

Before the war, Russia’s trade with the European Union was double that with China; now it’s less than half. The Chinese yuan, not the dollar or the euro, is now the main currency used for trade between the two countries, making it the most traded currency on the Moscow stock exchange and the go-to instrument for savings.

This economic dependence is filtering into everyday life. Chinese products are ubiquitous and over half of the million cars sold in Russia last year were made in China. Tellingly, the top six foreign car brands in Russia are now all Chinese, thanks to the exodus of once dominant Western companies. It’s a similar story in the smartphone market, where China’s Xiaomi and Tecno have eclipsed Apple and Samsung, and with home appliances and many other everyday items.

These shifts are tectonic. Even in czarist times, Russia shipped its commodities to Europe and relied on imports from the West of manufactured goods. Russia’s oligarchs, blacklisted by most Western countries, have had to adapt to the new reality. Last month, the businessman Vladimir Potanin, whose fortune is estimated at $23.7 billion, announced that his copper and nickel empire would reorient toward China, including by moving production facilities into the country. “If we’re more integrated into the Chinese economy,” he said, “we’ll be more protected.”

From the economy, education follows. Members of the Russian elite are scrambling to find Mandarin tutors for their kids, and some of my Russian contacts are thinking about sending their children to universities in Hong Kong or mainland China now that Western universities are much harder to reach. This development is more than anecdotal. Last year, as China opened up after the pandemic, 12,000 Russian students went to study there — nearly four times as many than to the United States.

This reorientation from West to East is also visible among the middle class, most notably in travel. There are now, for example, five flights a day connecting Moscow and Beijing in under eight hours, with a return ticket costing about $500. By contrast, getting to Berlin — one of many frequent European weekend destinations for middle-class Russians before the war — can now take an entire day and cost up to twice as much.

What’s more, European cities are being replaced as Russian tourist destinations by Dubai, Baku in Azerbaijan and Istanbul, while business trips are increasingly to China, Central Asia or the Gulf. Locked out of much of the West, which scrapped direct flights to Russia and significantly reduced the availability of visas for Russians, middle-class Russians are going elsewhere.

Intellectuals are turning toward China, too. Russian scientists are beginning to work with and for Chinese companies, especially in fields such as space exploration, artificial intelligence and biotech. Chinese cultural influence is also growing inside Russia. With Western writers like Stephen King and Neil Gaiman withdrawing the rights to publish their work in Russia, publishers are expanding their rosters of Chinese works. Supported by lavish grants for translators from the Chinese government, this effort is set to bring about a boom in Chinese books.

Chinese culture will not replace Western culture as Russians’ main reference point any time soon. But a profound change has taken place. From the other side of the Iron Curtain, Europe was seen as a beacon of human rights, prosperity and technological development, a space that many Soviet citizens aspired to be part of.

Now a growing number of educated Russians, on top of feeling bitterness toward Europe for its punitive sanctions, see China as a technologically advanced and economically superior power to which Russia is ever more connected. With no easy way back to normal ties with the West, that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

In his dystopian novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” Vladimir Sorokin describes a deeply anti-Western Russia of 2028 that survives on Chinese technology while cosplaying the medieval brutality of Ivan the Terrible’s era. With every passing day, this unsettling and foresighted novel — published in 2006 as a warning to Russia about the direction of travel under Mr. Putin — reads more and more like the news.

Alexander Gabuev (@AlexGabuev) is the director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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The New York Times · by Alexander Gabuev · May 15, 2024

23.  How, exactly, is TikTok a threat to national security?

Opinion 

 How, exactly, is TikTok a threat to national security?

The government’s move against the platform won’t be its last attempt to control the internet.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/15/tiktok-ban-no-national-security-issue/?isMobile=1&utm

By George F. Will

Columnist|

May 15, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Metastasizing government, seeping into every crevice of life, cannot get out of its own way. It justifies punitive action against Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok as crucial to “national security.” Simultaneously, however, the government claims that a Japanese steel corporation’s purchase of U.S. Steel would threaten “national security”: Federal officials feign alarm (this is too risible to be other than political theater) about a corporation from an allied nation purchasing the third-largest U.S. steelmaker, from which the Defense Department currently buys none of the merely 3 percent of domestic steel production it needs.

Under a new law, TikTok, which says it has 170 million U.S. users (2 billon worldwide), would be banned from U.S. app stores unless its Chinese ownership is terminated within 270 days, with a possible 90-day extension. Perhaps this ownership has serious national security implications. Recently retired congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), an exemplary legislator who chaired the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, was a prime mover of the anti-TikTok legislation. He rightly regards the CCP as TikTok’s ultimate master in China’s Leninist party-state, and he correctly considers the CCP evil and dangerous. But those judgments do not suffice to dispel doubts about the national security facts, and the wisdom and constitutionality of the law.

Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the temperate senator who chairs the Senate’s Select Committee on Intelligence, voted for the law and says of people who doubt the necessity and fear the precedent of the forced-divestiture-or-ban: “They’ve not seen what Congress has seen.” Well.

Nowadays, a “trust us” response from government intensifies rather than allays suspicions. So, Congress should share much of what it has seen that supposedly justifies forcing divestiture or the banning of TikTok. And it should explain what intelligence sources and methods would be compromised by sharing everything.

Regarding the postulated danger from TikTok siphoning up users’ data: What data? How is this dangerous? How is it different from what Facebook and others do? And cannot China get oceans of such data from private sellers of data?

Another question: In Cold War 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a federal law burdening citizens’ “right to receive” mailed communist propaganda from a foreign adversary. Do not Americans therefore have a fundamental First Amendment right to access social media platforms of their choice, even ones delivering, inter alia, a wicked regime’s content?

Although the obvious target is TikTok, the new law also applies to other social media platforms “controlled by a foreign adversary.” This provision might suffice to protect the law from violating the Constitution’s prohibition of bills of attainder: laws punishing a person or entity without a trial. But the provision seems merely cosmetic.

TikTok successfully incited its U.S. users, who an independent monitor says spend much more time on it than people do on Instagram or Snapchat, to inundate Congress with pleas on the app’s behalf. Legislators considered this evidence of how manipulable Americans (especially but not only young ones) are, and why they need protection from TikTok. So, the argument for the ban-or-divest law rests on the idea that people should trust their government, which does not trust them to furnish their own minds.

Some Americans, oblivious of their cognitive dissonance, are warning about the imminent arrival of domestic authoritarianism, while hoping for the incarceration of the incumbent president’s principal opponent. One way our nation could minimize the self-inflicted damage to its reputation would be to not retreat from its defense of an open internet.

Today’s TikTok panic — the legislation against it sped through the House in 47 days — is occurring in an America whose commitment to free speech has withered in recent decades. Many progressives, especially, believe free speech is often harmful, so the First Amendment is, to use the mincing adjective progressives adore, “problematic.” Progressivism is inherently paternalistic — government knows best; eat your spinach — and hence infantilizing. Many conservatives are making this a bipartisan temptation.

But respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions. It is prudent to assume this: TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.

Government will, as usual, say that its steadily enlarged control of our lives is for our own good. Regarding TikTok, the government says its control is to protect us from influences we cannot be trusted to properly assess. And, of course, to enhance “national security.”

Opinion by George F. Will

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021. Twitter

24. Chinese Perspectives on the “Indo-Pacific” as a Geostrategic Construct - Mapping China's Strategic Space

Conclusion:

Whether Xi believes that the Western powers are indeed bent on seeing China’s fall may not matter. The fact that he publicly repeats this (even if out of political and institutional necessity) is sufficient to discourage the strategic community from serving any self-correcting role within elite foreign policy circles. As such, when China’s behavior persists in appearing more coercive than cooperative, it may drive countries closer to the United States, encouraging them to reduce or eliminate any economic interdependence with China. Paradoxically, the perception of containment and the ensuing aggressive actions that are only perceived as “defensive” by Chinese elites could further convince regional countries to engage in security integration with the United States.

Chinese Perspectives on the “Indo-Pacific” as a Geostrategic Construct - Mapping China's Strategic Space

Elliot S. Ji

strategicspace.nbr.org · May 14, 2024

The geopolitical significance of the Pacific and Indian Oceans has been a prominent issue in the Chinese political and diplomatic discourse. In 2013, Xi Jinping called on leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Economic Leaders’ Meeting to “firmly move toward the goal of constructing a common destiny of the Asia-Pacific,” a vision he has since advocated for repeatedly during diplomatic engagements with APEC state leaders. With the concept of the “Indo-Pacific,” the geopolitical chessboard of Asia is expanded to highlight the connection between the two oceans, fusing the region into a single geopolitical framework that encompasses multilateral security partnerships, economic and trade integration, and a structure of strategic competition for regional players to balance each other’s influence.

Xi Jinping calling on leaders at the APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting to “firmly move toward the goal of constructing a common destiny of the Asia-Pacific” on October 7, 2013. Imago / Alamy Stock Photo.

China’s strategic community of policy experts, including those closely affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) foreign policy organs and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), have extensively analyzed the significance of the Indo-Pacific. Many leading Chinese experts at the time suspected that this concept of Indo-Pacific, which shifted from “Asia-Pacific” to highlight the geostrategic value of the Indian Ocean, would quickly gain traction in the foreign policy of its geopolitical rivals and their close allies, creating new security challenges for China. Over the past decade, the Chinese strategic community has perceived this concept as a geostrategic response to China’s rise—a foreign policy instrument through which the United States, its allies, and partners can shape the security environment around China in their favor. Given the security and economic importance of the region, examining how Chinese strategists understand the Indo-Pacific as a geopolitically competitive space lends essential insight into how China perceives its strategic priorities in the context of security competition with regional countries.

Drivers of the Shift: The Geopolitical Significance of the Indian Ocean

Following then prime minister Shinzo Abe’s speech to the Indian parliament in 2007, the concept of Indo-Pacific gradually gained significance in Japanese and Australian strategic discourse. After Abe’s speech, Chinese strategic thinkers occasionally referred to the new “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept. Still, they did not immediately consider Japan’s goal to bring about the Indo-Pacific concept. The geopolitical assessment of connecting the Indian Ocean to Asia’s political landscape came a few years later when the United States began referring to the same concept in the early 2010s. Four drivers stood out in several oft-cited papers by well-connected Chinese scholars: (1) the shifting strategic center of gravity to the East, (2) the growing military and economic importance of the Indian Ocean, (3) the United States’ strategic demand to maintain influence in the Pacific, and (4) regional countries’ pursuit of elevated status through U.S. support.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe (right) addressing the Indian parliament on August 22, 2007. Indian Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs.

In a 2013 article, Zhao Qinghai of the China Institute of International Studies, a research institute directly governed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, stated that the “strategic center of gravity” (shijie zhanlue zhongxin) is moving to the East because of the vital economic importance of the Indo-Pacific region, which serves as the “powerhouse of the global economy.” Zhao further noted that in terms of geopolitics, the Indo-Pacific has nine of the ten largest ports and seven of the ten largest militaries, making it an unusually dynamic and intricate security environment. The geography would allow a rising India to project its military power to the region by collaborating with Western countries that seek to use India to balance against China’s maritime expansion.

Liu Zongyi of another state-sponsored think tank, the Shanghai Institute of Imnternational Studies, similarly noted that India is in a naturally advantaged position to leverage the vital geopolitical importance of the Indian Ocean. Two-thirds of the world’s maritime oil transport flows through the Indian Ocean, which holds several maritime chokepoints, including the Straits of Hormuz, Malacca, and the Bab al-Mandab.

Wu Zhaoli at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences also argued that the Indian Ocean “has already been incorporated in the grand strategic thinking of the traditional East Asian states,” citing their dependence on imported oil. As a result, the growth of Chinese and Indian naval power and the expansion of the two countries’ maritime interests resulted in an “intensifying strategic competition that drives the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean as a connected body.”

Given the geostrategic importance of the Indian Ocean, Chinese strategists are concerned that the emergence of the concept would reinforce U.S. power in the region. They believe that this construct would enhance the U.S. strategic position in the region through minilateral security cooperation and regional economic integration with liberal economies, particularly India and Australia. By boosting India’s prominence in the western Pacific through security cooperation like the Quad (comprising Australia, India, Japan, and the United States), the United States could fulfill the need to create its “strategic space” and defend against China.

(Left to right) U.S. president Joe Biden, Australian prime minister Anthony Albanese, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida attending a meeting of the Quad in Hiroshima on May 20, 2023. Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz.

Furthermore, Chinese experts pointed out that the shift to the Indo-Pacific framework serves the interests of regional U.S. partners. By highlighting their geopolitical positions to the United States, these countries can “elevate their status” in the region and “tie the United States down” in the Indo-Pacific for a long-term security guarantee. Australia, for instance, actively promoted the Indo-Pacific framework to signal its geostrategic importance to U.S. interests in exchange for continued U.S. security assistance to counter Chinese influence. Therefore, from the Chinese point of view, the “Indo-Pacific project” is partly driven by individual state interests that can be advanced by locking in U.S. involvement in the region. Note that the “individual state interests” do not necessarily align with the United States’ strategic priorities and could change over time. This could be the perceptual underpinning of China’s confidence in employing a “wedging” strategy to separate U.S. allies and partners.

Perception of Encirclement and Containment

If the Indo-Pacific as a geostrategic project was born with the overtone of geopolitical competition, the Chinese perception of this project’s motives is a deciding factor in how China assesses the security of its strategic space. President Xi Jinping’s recent speeches make clear that the official Chinese position depicts Western powers as relentless interventionists actively suppressing China’s growth and entirely responsible for the deterioration of the country’s external environment. During the 2023 “two sessions,” he claimed that the “Western countries led by the United States have implemented all-around containment, encirclement, and suppression,” thereby creating “unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development.”

Not surprisingly, the same perception of containment and encirclement can be observed in the writings of influential Chinese authors. Indeed, well-connected scholars in the Chinese strategic community often must toe the party line under Xi’s rule. Yet the idea of seeing the United States as intending to contain China has been ingrained in Chinese strategic discourse since the end of the Cold War, indicating some level of genuine belief among the strategic studies community. For instance, Wu Zhaoli, writing in 2013, categorized the then nascent “Indo-Pacific vision” as an attempt to “contain China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region, especially in the Indian Ocean.” Xia Liping, a well-connected scholar with affiliations with the State Council Development and Research Center, the Taiwan Affairs Office, and the PLA’s Nanjing Military Academy, described the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy as an attempt to expand the hub-and-spoke security system to the Indian Ocean to contain China’s. He envisioned that the previous “Asia-Pacific” framework was “missing a half” on the west side when only Japan and Australia were anchors of the hub-and-spoke system. The expansion of the system to India and the Indian Ocean would create “a large arc-shaped network of allies and partners that surrounds the East Asian continent, with Japan and India balancing and pinning China from both west and east” and give “the United States a geostrategic advantage.”

More recently, the Biden administration released the Indo-Pacific Strategy in 2022, doubling down on the commitment to regional allies and partners while reversing some of the “America first” policies that were considered counterproductive to alliance cohesion during the Trump administration. This has only reinforced the conviction that the Indo-Pacific strategy was focused on containing China. As Fan Gaoyue, a retired PLA senior colonel who previously taught at the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, put bluntly, the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy “is fundamentally intended to make India the front line of containing China…[to] stop China’s rise and preserve the American global hegemony.” Fan’s conviction seems universal in the Chinese strategic community. The inclusion of the Indian Ocean in the arc of containment only reinforces the widely shared view that the Indo-Pacific strategy is further compressing China’s strategic space.

Incorporating the Indo-Pacific into Strategic Discourse

Despite seeing the Indo-Pacific from a containment angle, Chinese strategic thinkers nevertheless express confidence that China can safely exploit the weaknesses and immaturity of this geopolitical construct. This stems from the perception that the key U.S. partners may not always be on board with the United States in encircling China because they have individual economic and trade ties with China that are too costly to cut.

Chinese experts frequently point to the “domestic disagreements” with which countries like India, Australia, and Japan must contend as what may hamstring the development of the Indo-Pacific concept. Specifically, when the concept was gaining prevalence, Chinese strategists doubted whether Australia and India were entirely determined to join forces with the United States to balance against China. They cited India’s long preference for strategic autonomy and Australia’s economic interdependence with China, both of which have significant domestic political pull on these countries’ foreign policy. “India’s diplomatic strategy of placing bets on both the United States and China will make the U.S. Indo-Pacific geostrategic construct unattainable,” Liu Zongyi stated. Similarly, Wu Zhaoli argued that if the United States “excessively emphasizes the geopolitical aspects of the Indo-Pacific but ignores the intrinsic economic trends in the region, it will only create doubts and concerns in the Australian and Indian strategic communities.”

Indeed, Chinese writings published during Xi Jinping’s third term affirmed these earlier views. Since 2018, several influential Chinese scholars at state-sponsored think tanks have argued that any explicit leaning toward the United States will create difficult strategic tradeoffs for India and Australia, which must balance their economic relations with China and their security assistance from the United States. These countries’ participation in agreements on regional economic integration is often cited as evidence that key U.S. partners have diverse strategic interests that do not fully align with those of the United States, creating challenges for incorporating the Indo-Pacific concept into their respective strategic priorities.

Going forward, China’s foreign policy could reflect what Fan Jishe at the CCP Central Party School describes as “shaping [the U.S. allies’] policies and behaviors” through China’s “relatively complex political, economic, and diplomatic ties with these countries.” While some Chinese scholars assess that aligning with the United States could be an increasingly attractive strategic option for India as its economic and military rivalry with China intensifies, most express little concern with the Indo-Pacific concept becoming a successful U.S.-led “united front” against China.

Conclusion

In the past decade, Chinese strategic thinkers have closely examined the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a geostrategic construct through which the United States and its regional partners can advance their geopolitical interests in Asia. The strategic community’s attention to the role of India and the Indian Ocean may point to the regime’s renewed efforts to strengthen its geopolitical position and reduce China’s vulnerabilities, such as energy dependence and insufficient force projection over maritime chokepoints. Given the military and economic significance of the Indian Ocean, China will likely expand its economic influence over the Indo-Pacific region and prioritize the force-projection capabilities of its naval assets in the near future.

Furthermore, this essay’s assessment of the Chinese strategic community reveals a sobering thought on understanding strategic thinking in China. By mapping how Chinese strategic thinkers perceive and assess the emergence and construction of the Indo-Pacific, we know that the Chinese view of this concept, while uniformly focusing on geostrategic containment and encirclement, indicates a level of confidence that China can leverage the disparate strategic interests and the economic dependence on China among key U.S. partners to counter the attempts to deny its rise.

What is missing, however, is a reflection or assessment of how China’s behavior is perceived by these countries and whether China appears to be an attractive partner and neighbor. The absence of self-reflection likely results from President Xi Jinping’s relentless push of the CCP’s narrative of victimhood and the increasingly pervasive influence of nationalism. As the party continues to use external threats to justify the legitimacy of its leadership, it must install a hostile image of Western powers and police any thinking that could implicate China’s role in fueling an adverse security environment. This encourages an echo chamber in the strategic studies community and can erode any remaining self-correcting functions once supported by Chinese scholars, both civilian and military.

Whether Xi believes that the Western powers are indeed bent on seeing China’s fall may not matter. The fact that he publicly repeats this (even if out of political and institutional necessity) is sufficient to discourage the strategic community from serving any self-correcting role within elite foreign policy circles. As such, when China’s behavior persists in appearing more coercive than cooperative, it may drive countries closer to the United States, encouraging them to reduce or eliminate any economic interdependence with China. Paradoxically, the perception of containment and the ensuing aggressive actions that are only perceived as “defensive” by Chinese elites could further convince regional countries to engage in security integration with the United States.

Elliot S. Ji is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University.

IMAGE CREDITS

Banner illustration by Nate Christenson ©The National Bureau of Asian Research.

ENDNOTES​'

Xi Jinping, “Xi jin ping zai ya tai jing he zu zhi gong shang ling dao ren feng hui shang de yan jiang” [Xi Jinping’s Speech at the APEC Economic Leader’s Meeting], Xinhua, October 8, 2013, http://www.xinhuanet.com/world/2013-10/08/c_125490697.htm; and Xi Jinping, “Tuan jie he zuo yong dan ze ren gou jian ya tai ming yun gong tong ti—zai ya tai jing he zu zhi di er shi jiu ci ling dao ren fei zheng shi hui yi shang de jiang hua” [Cooperate in Solidarity to Take Responsibility, Building a Shared Destiny of the Asia-Pacific—a Speech at the 29th APEC Economic Leader’s Meeting], Gazette of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), November 18, 2022, https://www.gov.cn/gongbao/content/2022/content_5729414.htm. 

For limited Chinese reactions to Abe’s speech, see Shu Biquan, “Ri ben hai yang zhan lüe yu ri mei tong meng fa zhan qu shi yan jiu” [A Study on Japan’s Maritime Strategy and Development Trends in the Japan-U.S. Alliance], Pacific Journal 19, no. 1 (2011): 90–98; and Jin Xide, “Ri yin an quan xuan yan yu ‘jia zhi guan wai jiao’” [Japan-India Joint Security Statement and “Value Diplomacy”], Contemporary World, no. 12 (2008): 29–31.

Zhao Qinghai, “‘Yin tai’ gai nian ji qi dui Zhong guo de han yi” [The Concept of “Indo-Pacific” and What It Means for China], Contemporary International Relations, no. 7 (2013): 17. 

Ibid., 18.

Liu Zongyi, “Chong tu hai shi he zuo?—‘Yin tai’ di qu de di yuan zheng zhi he di yuan jing ji xuan ze” [Conflict or Cooperation?—Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Choices in the Indo-Pacific Region], Indian Ocean Economic and Political Review, no. 4 (2014): 4–20. 

Wu Zhaoli, “‘Yin tai’ de yuan qi yu duo guo zhan lüe bo yi” [Indo-Pacific: Origins and Multinational Strategy Game], Pacific Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 33.

Lin Minwang, “‘Yin tai’ de jian gou yu ya zhou di yuan zheng zhi de zhang li” [The Construct of ‘Indo-Pacific’ and the Pull of Asian Geopolitics], Foreign Affairs Review 35, no. 01 (2018): 20.

Zhao, “‘Yin tai’ gai nian ji qi dui Zhong guo de han yi,” 16; Wei Zongyou, “Mei guo yin tai zhan lüe yan bian qu shi ji ying xiang ping gu” [The Evolution and Impact of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy], Frontiers, no. 5 (2021): 92–100; and Ye Hailin and Li Mingen, “Mei guo ‘yin tai zhan lüe’ de tiao zheng yu zhong guo zhou bian wai jiao de yin ying” [The U.S.’ Adjustment of Its ‘Indo-Pacific Strategy’ and the Response of China's Neighbourhood Diplomacy], Journal of Latin American Studies 45, no. 1 (2023): 28–49, https://kns.cnki.net/kcms/detail//11.1160.c.20230228.1006.002.html.

Zhang Guihong, “‘Yi dai yi lu’ chang yi yu yin tai zhan lüe gou xiang de bi jiao fen xi” [Belt and Road Initiative vs. Indo-Pacific Strategy], Contemporary International Relations, no. 2 (2019): 33.

Zhao, “‘Yin tai’ gai nian ji qi dui Zhong guo de han yi,” 19. 

Zhang Li, “‘Yin tai’ gou xiang dui ya tai di qu duo bian ge ju de ying xiang” [The Indo-Pacific Approach: Implications for Asia-Pacific Regional Multilateral Scenario], South Asian Studies Quarterly, no. 4 (2013): 1–7. 

Bonny Lin et al., “China’s 20th Party Congress Report: Doubling Down in the Face of External Threats,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, October 19, 2022, https://www.csis.org/analysis/chinas-20th-party-congress-report-doubling-down-face-external-threats. 

Keith Bradsher, “China’s Leader, With Rare Bluntness, Blames U.S. Containment for Troubles,” New York Times, March 7, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/07/world/asia/china-us-xi-jinping.html. 

This perception was salient as Chinese scholars observed U.S. and NATO military operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan. For early evidence of the view of containment, see the PLA research on lessons learned from the Kosovo War. Xu Guang and Li Zhengguo, eds., Ke suo wo zhan zheng yan jiu [Research Into Kosovo War] (Beijing: PLA Press, 2000). 

Wu, “‘Yin tai’ de yuan qi yu duo guo zhan lüe bo yi,” 35.

Xia Liping, “Di yuan zheng zhi yu di yuan jing ji shuang zhong shi jiao xia de mei guo ‘yin tai zhan lüe’” [U.S. Indo-Pacific Strategy: Geopolitical and Geoeconomic Perspectives], Chinese Journal of American Studies 29, no. 2 (2015): 37.

Ibid., 37.

The White House, “Indo-Pacific Strategy of the United States,” February 2022, https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/U.S.-Indo-Pacific-Strategy.pdf. 

Several Chinese articles review the evolution of U.S. strategy in the Indo-Pacific. See, for example, Huang He, “Mei guo di yuan zheng zhi zhan lüe yan bian zhong de e zhi si wei: Cong‘xuan ze xing e zhi’ dao ‘yin tai zhan lüe’”[The Containment Thinking in the Evolution of American Geopolitical Strategy: From “Selective Containment’” to “Indo-Pacific Strategy”], Journal of Shenzhen University (Humanities & Social Sciences) 35, no. 1 (2018): 72–78. 

Fan Gaoyue, “Mei guo yin tai zhan lüe ji qi shi shi yu ying xiang” [American Indo-Pacific Strategy and Its Implementation and Influence], Northeast Asia Economic Research 5, no. 2 (2021): 102.

Wu, “‘Yin tai’ de yuan qi yu duo guo zhan lüe bo yi,” 39; Xia, “Di yuan zheng zhi yu di yuan jing ji shuang zhong shi jiao xia de mei guo ‘yin tai zhan lüe,’” 48; and Song Wei, “Cong yin tai di qu dao yin tai ti xi : yan jin zhong de zhan lüe ge ju” [From Indo-Pacific Region to Indo-Pacific System: The Strategic Framework in Evolution], Pacific Journal 26, no. 11 (2018): 33.

Liu, “Chong tu hai shi he zuo?” 15.

Wu, “‘Yin tai’ de yuan qi yu duo guo zhan lüe bo yi,” 39.

Mei guo yin tai zhan lüe ji qi shi shi yu ying xiang,” 106–8; Ye and Li, “Mei guo ‘yin tai zhan lüe’ de tiao zheng yu zhong guo zhou bian wai jiao de yin ying; and Zhang Weiwei, “Zhan lüe fen xi shi jiao xia de bai deng zheng fu ‘yin tai zhan lüe’” [The Biden Administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy from the Perspective of Strategic Analysis], Peace and Development, no. 2 (2022): 39.

Fan Jishe, “Cong ya tai dao ‘yin tai’: mei guo di qu an quan zhan lüe de bian qian yu hui gui” [From Asia-Pacific to Indo-Pacific: The Evolution and Return of U.S. Regional Security Strategy], Journal of International Security Studies 40, no. 5 (2022): 52.

See, for example, Zhao Pu and Li Wei, “Ba quan hu chi : mei guo ‘yin tai’ zhan lüe de sheng ji” [Sustaining Hegemony: The Upgrade of the U.S. “Indo-Pacific Strategy”], Northeast Asia Forum 31, no. 4 (2022): 40–41.

For a recent analysis of the echo chambers and the information challenge of authoritarian rule, see Tong Zhao, “How China’s Echo Chamber Threatens Taiwan: Xi Jinping Has Unleashed Hawkish Forces He Can't Control,” Foreign Affairs, May 9, 2023, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/taiwan/-china-echo-chamber-threatens-taiwan.

strategicspace.nbr.org · May 14, 2024

25. Techcraft on Display in Ukraine

Excerpt:

Overall, leaders should measure their efforts in techcraft against a key outcome: enabling the success of the warfighter on the ground. The character of warfare is evolving rapidly. The ongoing Army transformations, particularly punctuated by events in Ukraine, indicate a significant shift in operations that the Army must be ready to conduct. The increasingly critical presence of drones and sensors has been decisive. U.S. Army Europe and Africa units have integrated Ukraine war lessons, learned rapidly, and leaders across the Army can do their own part in growing their soldiers’ techcraft by inviting, enabling, leading, and sharing. It is crucial for us to recognize this dynamic landscape and maintain an adaptive techcraft mindset, as the pace of technological change shows no signs of slowing down.

Techcraft on Display in Ukraine - War on the Rocks

BRIAN A. HESTER, DENNIS DOYLE, AND RONAN A. SEFTON

warontherocks.com · by Brian A. Hester · May 16, 2024

Tactics are a science, but applying tactics in combat is an art. A military force wins by seeing how general principles apply to a specific situation and being creative with combat solutions.

For two years, Ukrainians have been defending their country with creative combinations of tactics and technology. Ukraine was thrown into a conflict full of juxtaposed old and new tech, but in part because Ukraine’s tech-savvy population volunteered to serve, they were able to survive Russia’s assault and even make gains, especially in 2022. We call these tactical and technical talents of applying modern technology on the battlefield “techcraft.” American soldiers should go into battle with the same advantage. Fieldcraft means using what is available to survive in the field. By techcraft, we mean the field-expedient use of technology in war.

A multi-echelon, grass-roots approach is needed across the U.S. Army to allow soldiers to display and develop their techcraft. For example, think back to the time where radar technicians, highly specialized dedicated personnel, were critical and decisive in combat reconnaissance. Now the Army has evolved the role of such technicians to adapt to the changing landscape, which includes advanced technology like uncrewed control systems and sensor technology. Gone are the days when mastery of a specific technological device remains the key to tactical success. They face an operational environment where they must integrate technological solutions as rapidly as industry makes them. Soldiers can continue to contribute to tactical success in the Army by expanding their skillsets, and Army leaders can be deliberate in growing their soldiers’ techcraft. Leaders should invite soldiers to the table when developing solutions, enable them with resources, lead them through innovation processes, and share ideas with others.

Become a Member

Lessons, Training, and Techcraft

Techcraft may sound futuristic, but soldiers have always used technology in unexpected ways on the battlefield. Techcraft, as a concept, is being named so we can collectively punctuate its importance and deliberately acknowledge its ever-increasing significance. While training Ukraine soldiers, U.S. Army Europe and Africa observed a significant level of techcraft, manifesting as battlefield innovation, in an environment where Ukrainian soldiers’ technology and vocational aptitude enabled them to employ, maintain, and repair available military equipment such as the M777 artillery, Stryker armored vehicles, M2 Bradley fighting vehicles, or M1 Abrams tanks. Those on the ground took their skills one step further however, adapting available civilian tech like hobby drones, robots, and radio-controlled vehiclesto gain tactical advantage. The Ukrainian army’s encouragement on their personnel being innovative should be seen as a force multiplier, something that enables transformation in contact and could be decisive in the fight.

The war in Ukraine has amplified the necessity to broaden baseline soldier proficiencies to retain land dominance. Two of us serve in the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, under U.S. Army Europe and Africa, where we had the opportunity to develop and foster techcraft through training informed by lessons gleaned from the war in Ukraine. Our analysis of the battlefield has indicated that technology innovations, using resources that are immediately available, both enable and protect the warfighter on the ground. This highlights the importance of techcraft at the tactical edge of the modern battlefield.

The integration of small unmanned aerial systems and 3D printed attachments is critical to the training we develop. These include quadcopter reconnaissance drones and manually operated first-person view drones. U.S. Army Europe and Africa units have experimented with several Ukrainian adaptations of custom-built drone attachments that provide soldiers the capability to deliver payloads from the unmanned device. For example, in a dedicated techcraft fabrication center, U.S. soldiers printed and assembled an unmanned system removable mechanism that can carry a variety of different sized inert munitions and can deliver to a target with great accuracy. Based on the critical role first-person view drones have assumed in the war in Ukraine, the U.S. Army stood up a section dedicated to training new drone operators through simulation and live flights. To further increase the function and capability of drones, soldiers have crafted custom-designed attachments that include landing legs or payload holding mechanisms, all inspired by real world-designs being used in Ukraine.

The presence of soldier-applied techcraft has also influenced deep area targeting, not just close-range operations. Traditional long-range fires and heavy artillery have been a decisive element in the war in Ukraine. The United States provided over 30 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems to assist in weakening Russian capabilities. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy credited these as critical in the successful operation to regain control of Kherson, a city that Russia had occupied for eight months. But the battlespace has morphed due to the proliferation of technology, such as modified and equipped drones. Historically, key targets for long-range precision fires were command centers or anti-aircraft systems. Yet, as the efficacy of soldier ingenuity and applied techcraft has become more apparent, forward drone pilot training centers and drone fabrication nodes have become a greater priority for elimination. As these targets are often several kilometers into the battlespace, identifying them accurately presents a unique problem set. U.S. Army Europe and Africa and V Corps developed capabilities to solve this problem through the use of 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s regimental observer control-teams, who use solar-panel equipped electric bikes and can conduct in-depth reconnaissance. Innovative ideas like regimental observer control-teams, and the equipment they employ, are just the beginning of what leaders at the lowest levels can accomplish when empowered by their seniors to apply techcraft and solve complex problems on the battlefield.

Techcraft is present in our formations, but it is up to us to identify and grow it. Leaders can take inspiration from the types of innovation happening in Ukraine, and support soldiers who use technology in effective and innovative ways to accomplish their mission. There are some significant roadblocks within the existing oversight and certification systems for the U.S. Army, which has constrained the growth potential of techcraft and innovation in our formations. For example, modified technology proposals must go through several authorities and exceptions to policy in order to conduct tests. While innovation happens at the lowest level, modification of regulation should occur at upper levels to facilitate this innovation culture and process. We learned that leaders can encourage growth in techcraft by increasing unit exposure to technology and being less risk-averse with equipment experimentation in the field. Here are our recommendations on how to do that.

Invite

Leaders need to get to know their soldiers and the skills they possess outside of their military occupational specialty or duties. Indicators that a soldier has an aptitude for techcraft include an interest in computers, video gaming, electronics, STEM education, and, obviously, hobby drones. Leaders should invite soldiers at all ranks, regardless of their military occupational specialty, to help solve challenging problems faced during training and mission execution. The most important characteristic is the drive to change the Army and provide a tactical capability to warfighters that will help fight and win the nation’s wars. Soldiers with techcraft skills are excited to get involved and drive change, as they are motivated by the tangible progress they can observe in the Army.

Enable

Leaders should follow up the invitation with providing the necessary resources and time to execute and test the brainstormed solutions. For example, leadership acquired exceptions to policy for soldiers to work on drones in the 7th Army Training Command’s Innovation Lab. The 2nd Cavalry Regiment regimental commander authorized and acquired electric bikes for the regimental observer control-teams to experiment and train on. Soldiers were given the time to tinker and test and empowered to make designs, and they created innovative adaptations of technology that were used to train and iterate on. This environment has paved the way for real and rapid innovation that produced usable creations in a lightning fast 24 to 96-hour design cycle. Leaders can deliberately set conditions, allocate time, and set funding to acquire the necessary equipment needed to grow and encourage techcraft within their formations.

Lead

Leaders’ presence with soldiers in the techcraft space will be required to navigate the risks and challenges that will inevitably arise. For example, leader experience in understanding risk, and risk mitigation, will allow for breakthroughs in tactical edge innovation, design, development, and implementation in training and operations. Yet, leading in this space requires leaders with at least a notional level of technical acumen and techcraft attributes. We should invest in our officer, warrant officer, and non-commissioned officer professional military education to develop and educate those that we will be immersed in a technologically infused battlespace that demands this skill in techcraft. Leaders should grasp and identify the inherent risk with design iteration and experimentation, and assume this risk so that soldiers may operate freely without unreasonable and stifling restrictions. With risk tolerance, we discover ways to build capability, so risk should be better understood and assumed. If we are too risk-averse, we cannot enable the warfighter.

Additionally, leaders should provide specific examples of what needs to be solved, such as “we need to ensure our Stryker, with a dismounted infantry squad, can make it to the probable line of contact under threat of a swarm of first-person-view drones.” Techcraft and fieldcraft trained and educated soldiers can use their skills to better enable counter-drone or robotic capabilities to create the conditions needed for the Stryker and dismounts to make contact with human-machine integrated formations and be best positioned to win the initial contact, trading first contact with the enemy by a soldier with a robot instead. We should, however, be careful to not hinder our basic warfighting capabilities while building techcraft proficiencies and attributes in our tactical formations.

Share

Leaders should share these lessons across the force through writing articles, sharing designs they have created with each other, and sharing knowledge on how to create and employ their designs. The importance of techcraft has grown increasingly apparent as maneuver commanders observe lessons learned from the battlefield in Ukraine, yet a critical function to success is a unified effort across the Army as a whole. Soldiers applying their techcraft in one unit may design and create a useful tool that gives them an enhanced capability. Holding it, however, within their own formation could potentially lead to a waste of resources in duplicative efforts. It is imperative that when soldiers are empowered to innovate, they are also given the opportunity to then share their developments across the force, providing the capability at scale with potential to be improved through an iterative design cycle. This concept mimics the unified efforts that we can observe in Ukraine, where tech-savvy volunteers have gathered ideas together to better their country’s fighting force.

Conclusion

Overall, leaders should measure their efforts in techcraft against a key outcome: enabling the success of the warfighter on the ground. The character of warfare is evolving rapidly. The ongoing Army transformations, particularly punctuated by events in Ukraine, indicate a significant shift in operations that the Army must be ready to conduct. The increasingly critical presence of drones and sensors has been decisive. U.S. Army Europe and Africa units have integrated Ukraine war lessons, learned rapidly, and leaders across the Army can do their own part in growing their soldiers’ techcraft by inviting, enabling, leading, and sharing. It is crucial for us to recognize this dynamic landscape and maintain an adaptive techcraft mindset, as the pace of technological change shows no signs of slowing down.

Become a Member

Command Sgt. Maj. Brian A. Hester enlisted as an infantryman and has served in every infantry position of leadership during his 34 years of service. He served three tours in Iraq, two tours in Afghanistan, and deployed with Kosovo Force 17. He is now the senior enlisted advisor for U.S. Army Futures Command.

Command Sgt. Maj. Dennis Doyle enlisted as an armor crewman in 1996 and has served tours in Bosnia and Iraq. He has played a critical role in shaping 2nd Cavalry as a lethal and agile force, capable of rapid deployment and informed by the most recent lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.

Ronan A. Sefton is a U.S. Army intelligence officer with extensive experience working with foreign partners. He has worked as a linguist and is an avid fan of 3D printers and drone technology. While serving in 2nd Cavalry Regiment, he had the opportunity to interact with Ukrainian servicemembers to capture lessons from the war.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent those of the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: ChatGPT

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Brian A. Hester · May 16, 2024

26. Multi-Dimensional Modeling for Irregular Warfare

We must not neglect the human domain. It is where wars are ultimately won.

I am unfamiliar with an Irregular Warfare Center at NDU.

Excerpt:

To better prepare for future challenges, the Pentagon needs to create models that embrace all three dimensions. The office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense – Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD-SOLIC) and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) are well positioned to support this evolution. SOCOM’s new Joint Military Analysis (JMA) process, along with forthcoming updates in FM 3-05 (Army Special Operations Forces) and contributions from the Irregular Warfare Center at NDU, can help provide insights and methodologies to further refine military modeling. This collaborative effort improves planning and resource allocation and ensures that US forces remain effective in the face of evolving global threats. Ultimately, embracing a three-dimensional approach will better prepare the US military for future conflicts, ensuring it does not underestimate its adversaries or the environments in which it operates.

Multi-Dimensional Modeling for Irregular Warfare - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Erik A. Davis · May 16, 2024

In a recent wargame designed to simulate a major invasion in the Indo-Pacific region, organizers deliberately removed the civilian population from the battlefield. This surprising decision was made to focus exclusively on large-scale combat operations (LSCO), allowing for a direct, seemingly unobstructed contest between the American-made M1 Abrams against Chinese Type 99 main battle tanks. Emphasizing straightforward, physical engagements, this type of scenario is where the Department of Defense has traditionally excelled in modeling.

However, the reality of warfare quickly complicated the simulated environment. Despite the American commander’s efforts to isolate the battlefield, external influences through a third-party country challenged the exercise’s narrow scope. This revealed a significant limitation: the multidimensional nature of actual combat defies the simplifications of traditional wargames. The Department of Defense often relies on these types of one-dimensional approaches in wargaming, focusing predominantly on the physical aspects of warfare. This perspective has led to significant strategic missteps in the last two decades, as demonstrated by the flawed outcomes in America’s post-9/11 wars.

To address this shortcoming, the Department of Defense must evolve its approach by integrating human and information dimensions into its modeling processes. This change will improve planning and resource allocation and ensure that US forces are better prepared for future conflicts.

A One-Dimensional Model

The Department of Defense primarily models hardware rather than human factors, but this approach often results in major missteps. For instance, in August 2021, analysts predicted the Afghan government would fight for at least six months after the US withdrawal. Similarly, in February 2022, western predictions underestimated Kyiv’s resilience, expecting it to fall within six days. Both projections were spectacularly wrong.

Part of the problem lies in how the US military models combat. The process often simplifies and distorts irregular warfare capabilities. Conducted by the Center for Army Analysis (CAA), this modeling tries to quantify the effects of human and informational dimensions into tangible, physical terms. For example, an extensive resistance force or an effective information operation might be represented as a simple increase in the effectiveness of friendly forces, such as making tank rounds 16% more effective.

While such simplifications can be appropriate for specific scenarios, such as a psychological operation helping to take tanks off the battlefield, they often fail to capture the nuanced impact of significant events. The defiant stance of Volodymyr Zelenskyy with his cabinet, the resolve of border guards at Snake Island, or the symbolic strength of “I need ammunition, not a ride” do not readily translate into numerical modifiers like a +1 artillery strength. These elements have been central to the war in Ukraine, yet they resist reduction to solely the physical dimension.

How The Other Dimensions Are Different

The limitations of the current one-dimensional approach have not gone unnoticed. Critics, including Marine Lieutenant Colonel Paul Bailey, are pressing the Department of Defense to broaden its perspective by integrating human and information domains more thoroughly into Pentagon modeling. Reflecting on the failures in Afghanistan, Bailey argues that “[t]o better enable future success, the military needs to apply analysis-based political warfare frameworks.” He points out that the United States’ inadequate grasp of the human dimension directly contributed to the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan. “Rather than waging a political warfare campaign, the U.S. military basically approached Afghanistan through traditional battlefield combat,” Bailey notes, highlighting a default to “unilateral combat operations that often failed to distinguish between the Taliban, Haqqani network, al Qaeda, local warlords, or militias.”

Admittedly, modeling human and information dimensions is challenging. However, completely ignoring or trying to compress these aspects into the physical dimension distracts from their unique characteristics. Recognizing the distinctiveness that led to their inclusion in military doctrine is crucial. In other words, each military domain – air, land, maritime, space, and cyberspace – has physical, human, and information dimensions that warrant thorough exploration.

Take, for instance, the Ayungin Shoal in the South China Sea. This site illustrates the complexity of these dimensions: the physical dimension is significantly shaped by the maritime domain, which features competing territorial claims. But there is also a human dimension, with fleets of illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, not to mention the sailors on the BRP Sierra Madre. The information dimension also comes into play, as the US supports the Philippines by publicizing the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) illegal activities in the region. To effectively analyze the ongoing dispute between the Philippines and the PRC, modelers, simulators, and wargamers must examine all three dimensions for comprehensive insights.

The Human Dimension: Antifragile

Early in the nuclear age, debates raged about the value of counterforce versus counter-value targeting. The theory was that physical destruction could compel a population to pressure their government to surrender. This was the underlying theory behind earlier strategic bombing campaigns, an attempt to reduce the human dimension into the physical. And it did not work.

In Bombing to Win, Robert Pape demonstrated that attacks on the civilian populace hardly ever induce the desired result. Similarly, Thomas Griffin found that these attacks “…could prove counterproductive to the political aims of the war.” Gavin Wilde, examining how cyber-attacks were failing to induce the predicted results, noted that “the bombardment of one’s adversaries—be they British, German, Japanese, Vietnamese, or Iraqi—typically prompted more anger than fear, sparking a rally-round-the-flag effect for the besieged populace.” Can a loitering munition take out a power control station? Yes. Can a cyber team attack it via the cyber domain and physically damage it? Possibly. Our current physical models can easily simulate both. But what is the impact on the human dimension?

Nasim Taleb’s concept of Antifragility describes systems that improve under stress – unlike traditional military hardware like M1 Abrams tanks, which are merely resilient. Humans, in contrast, can become antifragile, thriving under certain kinds of stress and chaos. Taleb explains that humans generally respond better to acute stressors than to chronic ones, especially when these acute stressors are followed by sufficient recovery time, allowing these challenges to serve as catalysts for growth and adaptation. This distinction underscores the necessity of incorporating human factors in military models. While a physical model might predict a straightforward victory for the US Army of Saddam’s forces in the Iraq War, a model that accounts for the human dimension would expose the subsequent power vacuum and the emboldening of Iran, illustrating the unpleasant consequences of warfare that go beyond mere battlefield success.

The Information Dimension: Virality

Similarly, the information dimension operates under unique rules akin to viral pathology. Ideas spread and mutate within populations, influenced by the latest digital and AI tools, which amplify their reach. The information dimension, however, is not solely the realm of psychological operations. A Carrier Task Group, often viewed as a symbol of “hard power,” can wield substantial influence in the information sphere. For instance, following a devastating typhoon, a Carrier Task Group off the coast of the Philippines can profoundly demonstrate US “soft power,” offering essential aid and thus positively influencing perceptions.

The rise of advanced technologies, such as large language models and machine learning, is reshaping conflict at an unprecedented scale. Innovations like deepfake videos designed to discredit opponents, AI-driven Chatbots that foment unrest inside online communities, and social media scrapping tools that analyze sentiment are poised to transform the information dimension. As costs decrease and capabilities expand, the impact of these tools grows exponentially.

Yet the essence of the information dimension lies not in the volume of data or messages but in their ability to find susceptible hosts. Ideas, like viruses, must find receptive minds to infect and multiply, once again underscoring the necessity of including human factors in military modeling and wargaming. This approach allows analysts to identify key influencers and nodes where information operations could have disproportionate effects.

Integrating Human and Information Dimensions for Effective Modeling

All models have limitations, but as G. E. P. Box famously said, “some are useful.” The challenge lies in improving military models to more accurately mirror the complexities of modern warfare. The Pentagon has already seen some successes in this area through its operations in the Philippines and Colombia, which successfully incorporated human and information factors.

Looking ahead, one of the most pressing questions facing the US military is how well Taiwan might resist a Chinese invasion. Current models may not accurately predict this scenario due to their focus on the purely physical dimension. The war in Ukraine further exposes the shortcomings of traditional models in urban combat, where physical, human, and information factors are intertwined.

To better prepare for future challenges, the Pentagon needs to create models that embrace all three dimensions. The office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense – Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD-SOLIC) and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) are well positioned to support this evolution. SOCOM’s new Joint Military Analysis (JMA) process, along with forthcoming updates in FM 3-05 (Army Special Operations Forces) and contributions from the Irregular Warfare Center at NDU, can help provide insights and methodologies to further refine military modeling. This collaborative effort improves planning and resource allocation and ensures that US forces remain effective in the face of evolving global threats. Ultimately, embracing a three-dimensional approach will better prepare the US military for future conflicts, ensuring it does not underestimate its adversaries or the environments in which it operates.

Lt. Col. Erik Davis is an active-duty Army officer with over 16 years of experience in special operations. He is also a Gen. Wayne A. Downing Scholar with master’s degrees from King’s College London and the London School of Economics. His assignments have taken him from village stability operations in rural villages in Afghanistan to preparing for high-end conflict in the First Island Chain. He was a 2023 Irregular Warfare Initiative Fellow.

Main Image: Students from Air War College participate in a war-game designed around Pacific conflict, December 21, 2023. (Billy Blankenship via DVIDS)

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.

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De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

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