Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"True ignorance is not the absence of knowledge, but the refusal to acquire it."

– Karl Popper

"Do not wait; the time will never be 'just right.' Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along."

– George Herbert

"The cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month."

–Fyodor Dostoevsky

1. The modern face of war: ‘Everything, everywhere, all at once’

2. In Beijing, Xi and Putin left no question of their close alignment in a divided world

3. Will Biden Now Step Up on Ukraine?

4. Four ways US Army’s Pacific chief plans to boost regional land forces

5. U.S. officials see strategic failure in Israel’s Rafah invasion

6. What Israel’s strategic corridor in Gaza reveals about its postwar plans

7. Military sexual assault totals down, but trust among women remains low

8. Ukraine war ramifications in Asia

9. War on the 21st Century Battlefield: Revisiting General Starry’s Conceptual Framework

10. West Point team’s computerized rifle scope adjusts itself in combat

11. The Most Important Factor Hardening China’s Stance on Taiwan

12. US postured to lose without a Standing Combined Joint Task Force in INDOPACOM

13. The Time for Europe to Step Up Is Now

14. Advantage Defense: Artificial Intelligence at the Tactical Cyber Edge

15. How Do Alliances End?

16. Xi takes off the mask: The Beijing tyrant has spent 12 years wrecking China’s image

17. The New Moral Resistance to Putin

18. General Officer Announcements (Army and Air Force)

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 16, 2024

20. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 16, 2024

21. Putin’s China Visit Highlights Military Ties That Worry the West

1. The modern face of war: ‘Everything, everywhere, all at once’

This may be the root of our problems. Failure to understand our adversary.

Excerpts:

Even in more traditional domains such as seapower, the U.S. and its allies are finding themselves repeatedly outmaneuvered by creative tactics that play out below the actual combat.

Michael Cunningham, an analyst at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation formerly based in China, stated his “culture shock” upon returning to the U.S.

“The U.S. is hyper-focused on a traditional view of security, in particular numbers – how many warheads, how many ships, what percentage of GDP goes to security,” he told the conference.

Chinese forces, by contrast, are focusing on new technologies, and avoid direct military confrontations by “trying out small-scale, gray-zone tactics, constantly.”

These tactics are “not front and center among [U.S.] strategists,” said Mr. Cunningham, but “they cause you to constantly react: It takes a lot of money and manpower, and you are constantly on the defensive.”

He cited hostile disinformation campaigns designed to misinform voters and widen divisions in societies; use of economic leverage; non-military incursions into disputed territories or regions; and the use of proxies to carry out actual attacks. Such tactics are “very hard to confront,” he stated.

The modern face of war: ‘Everything, everywhere, all at once’

Anti-Western forces use low-risk tactics, low-cost arms to challenge traditional forces

washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

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By - The Washington Times - Thursday, May 16, 2024

SEOUL, South Korea — Americans are at war but don’t realize it.

That was a key takeaway at least from a major security conference held here this week, with students of modern warfare noting that today’s current-generation, cross-domain conflict is — to borrow a phrase from Hollywood — “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

Adversarial states and non-state actors such as Islamic State and al Qaeda are deploying asymmetric assets that operate at low risk and low cost across new real and virtual battlefields, assets to which the U.S. and its allies have so far been unable to respond effectively, attendees at the annual Asan Plenum in Seoul heard.

While strategists in the U.S. and across the West promote the defense of the post-1945 “rules-based world order,” there are few or no rules or laws to govern emerging domains like cyberspace, outer space and “gray zone” tactics that stop short of actual shooting wars. A tradition-bound, high-cost U.S. military has not yet built effective tactical or sustainable technological counters to grey-zone tactics and low-tech, economical weapons, critics argue.

Conflict by computer

The advent of the internet, which straddles military, commercial and public spaces, is now the central battleground for an ongoing, invisible struggle. Big nations and big corporations are struggling to catch up.

“There are three kinds of companies,” said Lee Chung-min, an analyst with the Carnegie Foundation: “Companies that have been hacked by China or North Korea; companies that have been hacked by China or North Korea and don’t know it; and companies that are going to be hacked by China and North Korea.”

Though national security networks are fortified with firewalls, incompetence, malice and corruption offer infiltration routes to hostile players.

“Cyber security depends on everyone,” said Yang Uk of the Asan Institute, warning that PC and smartphone security is the responsibility of the individual. “The South Korean Ministry of National Defense has an intranet that is not connected to the internet. But it was hacked by North Korea.”

Analysts say the old ways of deterrence don’t always apply in modern conflicts. A giant defense budget doesn’t always guarantee security.

“How do you compete in a constant competition/conflict continuum short of all-out war while ensuring deterrence is assured?” asked Diana Myers, an ex-fellow with RAND Corporation. “The things that keep me up are non-kinetic: the ability for malicious nations and non-aligned actors to challenge how we receive and process information.”

There are “Orwellian” solutions to this problem, policing speech and political content, “but we are not that,” she said. “It puts us in a complicated situation.”

This stealthy conflict is unknown to most, but the seeds of mass destruction are built into the threat itself. Damage could be rapidly and massively escalated if a latent cyber intrusion — such as a sleeper agent — is fully activated.

“With cyber, you get inside a network and sit there and nobody knows you’re there,” said Peter Dean, director of foreign policy and defense at the United States Studies Center at the University of Sydney. “You won’t know until it escalates to a high level.”

Even if cyber aggressors are identified positively, they cannot be countered with force of arms due to issues of legality and proportionality. Mr. Lee wondered what the response of a democracy would be if its nuclear power grid were hit by a cyber strike. Even if attackers are positively identified, a traditional military strike against the attackers would likely not be feasible.

“What is a conventional military response – a proportional response – to a cyber attack?” asked Mr. Dean. “That is a question we don’t know the answer to.” Nation-states, he suggested, should arm themselves with offensive cyber capabilities, allowing them to retaliate in kind.

“If you launch an offensive cyber attack, you risk a retaliation you do not know about,” Mr. Dean said. For that reason, counteroffensive cyber capabilities could act as deterrents.

From hot zone to gray zone

Even in more traditional domains such as seapower, the U.S. and its allies are finding themselves repeatedly outmaneuvered by creative tactics that play out below the actual combat.

Michael Cunningham, an analyst at the Washington-based Heritage Foundation formerly based in China, stated his “culture shock” upon returning to the U.S.

“The U.S. is hyper-focused on a traditional view of security, in particular numbers – how many warheads, how many ships, what percentage of GDP goes to security,” he told the conference.

Chinese forces, by contrast, are focusing on new technologies, and avoid direct military confrontations by “trying out small-scale, gray-zone tactics, constantly.”

These tactics are “not front and center among [U.S.] strategists,” said Mr. Cunningham, but “they cause you to constantly react: It takes a lot of money and manpower, and you are constantly on the defensive.”

He cited hostile disinformation campaigns designed to misinform voters and widen divisions in societies; use of economic leverage; non-military incursions into disputed territories or regions; and the use of proxies to carry out actual attacks. Such tactics are “very hard to confront,” he stated.

Western or pro-Western forces proved they can compete in the new domains: The 2022 sabotaging of Russia’s Nordstream energy pipeline to Europe undercut the Kremlin’s economic leverage, although the saboteurs remain unidentified.

China is believed to have been behind another such incident: the 2023 cutting of undersea fiber-optic cables carrying internet services to Matsu, a Taiwanese-controlled island off China’s coast.

In both cases, the restraint and lack of fingerprints served the attacker well: “If you respond militarily, you are the one who started the war, and that goes down in history,” Mr. Cunningham said.

“We need developed rules and laws,” he added. “We have hard rules for traditional warfare, like what are war crimes, but we don’t have that for the grey zone.”

The consequences of failing to adjust to the new tactics can be just as effective as a traditional military action.

China is building massive bases across disputed chunks of the South China Sea; inching forces closer to Taiwan and India; and using Coast Guards and fishing fleets to press territorial claims against Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

“The thinking in China is basically, ‘Use whatever means necessary that are safe, smart and risk-averse,’” Mr. Cunningham said. “They know if they get into a conflict with almost anyone in Asia, it will be a U.S. ally and that makes it super-risky. But they see very little downside in these gray-zone tactics.”

So many red lines have been crossed by China that the Indo-Pacific is now a virtual “red carpet,” said Mr. Yang.

Low-cost low-tech

Emerging technologies present another challenge for those clinging to traditional military ideas.

“We are entering the first phase of ‘Iron Man wars’ or ‘Star Wars,’” said Mr. Lee, speaking of both new gear such as armored “exoskeletons” and personal jet-propulsion units, and the space domain, which is proving vital for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.

And many of the new military technologies are proving to be low-tech, affordable systems that enable the weak to level the playing field with the strong. Improvised explosive devices (IEDs) proved deadly to expensive Western militaries fighting terrorist forces in Iraq and elsewhere. Ukraine has used drones to cripple Moscow’s Black Sea Fleet, devastate its armored forces and bypass air defenses to strike targets deep inside Russia.

Currently, in both the Red Sea and across the Indo-Pacific region, U.S. forces face adversaries armed with equipment that is economical to build and tactics that minimize the risk of a major loss.

In Yemen, the use of low-cost drones and missiles by Houthi rebel fighters has forced Western navies to respond with high-cost missiles, while the Houthis’ dug-in positions have proven hard to hit with counterstrikes.

While Western naval “goalkeepers” continue to shoot down drones and missiles, the denial of the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to many international shippers is generating massive costs.

Likewise, repeatedly having to scramble advanced fighter jets to shoot down cheap Chinese “weather balloons” on suspected surveillance missions is not economically viable in the long run.

Mr. Dean said some arms in the pipeline, including sophisticated lasers and microwave weapons, may help to restore the balance.

“We have yet to come up with a response, we have to use technology to solve some of these issues,” he said.

• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.

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washingtontimes.com · by Andrew Salmon

2. In Beijing, Xi and Putin left no question of their close alignment in a divided world

Excerpts:

The two vowed to deepen their strategic partnership, and took aim at a United States they painted as a destabilizing aggressor.

In a sweeping 7,000-word joint statement outlining their shared view on issues from Taiwan to the war in Gaza, they proclaimed: “Russian-Chinese relations stand the test of rapid changes in the world, demonstrating strength and stability, and are experiencing the best period in their history.”

The meeting made for a deeply incongruous split-screen. As Xi and Putin sipped tea from wicker chairs in manicured gardens of the official Zhongnanhai compound and discussed how to “promote world peace and common development,” Ukrainian civilians called for evacuation from villages under assault from Russian forces.

In Beijing, Xi and Putin left no question of their close alignment in a divided world | CNN

CNN · by Simone McCarthy · May 17, 2024

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping attend an official welcoming ceremony in front of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on May 16.

Sergei Bobylov/Pool/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images

Hong Kong CNN —

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin’s meeting in Beijing on Thursday left no question of how closely the Chinese and Russian leaders are aligned in their vision for the world – and on bolstering the “powerful driving force” of their autocratic double act.

The two vowed to deepen their strategic partnership, and took aim at a United States they painted as a destabilizing aggressor.

In a sweeping 7,000-word joint statement outlining their shared view on issues from Taiwan to the war in Gaza, they proclaimed: “Russian-Chinese relations stand the test of rapid changes in the world, demonstrating strength and stability, and are experiencing the best period in their history.”

The meeting made for a deeply incongruous split-screen. As Xi and Putin sipped tea from wicker chairs in manicured gardens of the official Zhongnanhai compound and discussed how to “promote world peace and common development,” Ukrainian civilians called for evacuation from villages under assault from Russian forces.

Putin’s two-day state visit comes as Western leaders have leant on Xi to ensure that soaring exports from his country aren’t propping up the Russian war effort – a claim Beijing denies.

But even as Putin’s pomp-filled welcome in the Chinese capital seemed to fly in the face of Western concerns about the partnership, Putin appeared to depart Beijing with few, publicly acknowledged gains — though it remains unclear what happened in discussions behind closed doors.

Here are three key takeaways from the meeting.

Taking aim at a US-led world order

Xi and Putin used their meetings and hefty statement to take aim at what they described as a global security system defined by US-backed military alliances – and pledged to work together to counter it.

“[We] intend to increase interaction and tighten coordination in order to counter Washington’s destructive and hostile course towards the so-called ‘dual containment’ of our countries,” the leaders pledged in their joint statement.

The joint statement also called on the US not to arm its allies with missile systems, and condemned US cooperation with allies as “extremely destabilizing.”

The US considers China the “most serious long-term challenge to the international order,” and Russia “a clear and present threat.”

The strident declaration comes as both Russia and China have criticized US support for Israel and its war against militant group Hamas and sought to bolster ties across the Global South, where there is mounting backlash against Israel’s actions in Gaza.

On that conflict, they called for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, while also voicing their points of alignment on a range of other contentious geopolitical issues including Taiwan and North Korea.

Growing military cooperation

While slamming US military alliances, the two leaders pledged to “deepen” military “trust and cooperation,” saying they would expand joint exercises and combat training, regularly conduct joint sea and air patrols, and improve the “capabilities and level of joint response to challenges and threats.”

The two nations have grown their military drills around the world in recent years, continuing after Russia launched its war in Ukraine in February 2022 – drawing concern from Western observers that the two US rivals are working to enhance their military interoperability.

Putin also traveled to Beijing with top security officials who the Russian president said Thursday would join informal talks on Ukraine. Newly appointed Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov, and his predecessor Russian Security Council Secretary Sergey Shoigu, both attended.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping attend an official welcoming ceremony in front of the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on May 16, 2024.

Sergei Bobylov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images

It wasn’t clear if Chinese defense officials joined those talks, which took place, according to Russia state media, during four-hour informal negotiations behind the gates of the heavily secured Zhongnanhai compound — the residence for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Xi as reiterating a call for a “political solution” in Ukraine, as well as his support for a peace conference recognized by both sides.

Observers say Putin was likely interested in discussing material support for Russia’s war or defense industry, including dual-use items the US has said China is exporting to Russia, which power its defense industrial base. Beijing, which says it is neutral on the war, has repeatedly defended its trade with Russia as part of normal bilateral relations.

But such negotiations may show the limits of the partnership, at least when it comes to China increasing its support to include weapons. Xi, analysts say, is seeking to keep Putin as a close partner, while not stepping over Western red lines.

“Putin has gone to China in order to ask for more help from China, help he is unlikely to receive … he’s not going to get weapons and ammunition and other types of direct support from China for Russia’s war effort,” former US ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told CNN.

Broad rhetoric, few concrete pledges

Despite the lofty rhetoric, information on any major deals brokered during the meeting was scant as Putin departed Beijing for the second day of the visit in northeastern China’s Harbin.

One deal apparently left un-inked was on plans for a “Power of Siberia 2” pipeline, which would funnel Russian natural gas to China. Beijing is widely seen as hesitating on the long-hyped deal, which Putin wants to replace revenue lost as Europe reduces its reliance on Russian fuels after the Ukraine invasion.

BEIJING, CHINA - MAY 16: (RUSSIA OUT) Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (R) shake hands during a bilateral meeting on May 16, 2024 in Beijing, China. Russian President Vladimir Putin is in China for a two-day state visit. (Photo by Contributor/Getty Images)

Getty Images

Instead, the leaders in broad strokes pledged to “jointly promote the implementation of large-scale energy projects,” while upping energy cooperation across oil, liquified natural gas, natural gas, coal and electricity.

They also called for strengthening industrial cooperation across a range of fields including civil aviation construction, electronics, chemical industry, shipbuilding and industrial equipment.

These pledges, however vague, do signpost more economic coordination in the years to come.

“For Putin, it’s a glory moment that Russia is still on its feet (economically) … mostly because of the lifeline provided by China,” said Alexandra Prokopenko, a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

For that reason, she added, “he’s okay with on-going dependency between Russia and China – and with inequality in this relationship.”

CNN’s Ivan Watson, Rebecca Wright, Wayne Chang, Anna Chernova, and Alex Stambaugh contributed reporting.

CNN · by Simone McCarthy · May 17, 2024

3. Will Biden Now Step Up on Ukraine?

That is a pithy subtitle.

How to lose a war on the installment plan.

Will Biden Now Step Up on Ukraine?

His limits on Kyiv are a strategy for defeat on the installment plan.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/russia-ukraine-aid-kharkiv-joe-biden-vladimir-putin-xi-jinping-81d92332

By The Editorial Board

May 16, 2024 5:44 pm ET

Burnt-out cars are seen in the street following a Russian strike on Zolochiv in Kharkiv region, northeastern Ukraine, with guided bombs on May 1. PHOTO: VYACHESLAV MADIYEVSKYY/ZUMA PRESS

Vladimir Putin’s military is back on the offensive in Ukraine, producing another round of ugly battlefield scenes. Yet President Biden’s strategy, even after a cash infusion from Congress, looks like a plan for Ukraine to lose as slowly as possible. Is the Commander in Chief prepared to act like this is the world “inflection point” he invokes in speeches?

The Russians are making gains in Ukraine outside Kharkiv, albeit slowly and with no regard for the lives of their own soldiers. The Russian foray over Ukraine’s northern border may be a prelude to a larger offensive. The goal seems to be to spread Ukraine’s forces—already short on manpower—thin across a front that stretches some 600 miles.

Mr. Putin’s military is leveling the north with artillery and glide bombs. The Russian air force can launch these glide bombs from across the Russian border, without entering Ukrainian airspace. The Institute for the Study of War estimates that glide bombs with 40 to 60 kilometer ranges threaten more than 42,000 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory—an area larger than the Netherlands.

Ukraine has few to no options to strike back, and that’s a product of Mr. Biden’s policy. The President has precluded Ukraine from using American weapons to hit sovereign Russian territory. The practical effect of this is to offer the Russian military a safe haven. The Russians can build up troops, supplies and weapons near Ukraine. Mr. Putin can then deploy scarce defensive systems elsewhere, confident anything inside Russia is safe, courtesy of Mr. Biden’s preconditions.

The Biden Administration is touting its weapons packages since Congress passed new aid funding last month, including artillery and air defense ammo. Ukraine needs the rounds for the front lines and air-defense munitions to protect its military and civilian infrastructure from Russian missiles.

But more air defenses aren’t a strategy for Ukraine to prevail, or even improve its leverage at an eventual negotiating table with Mr. Putin. It’s a plan for Ukrainian defeat on the installment plan, which would be a failure for Mr. Biden—and the United States.

Mr. Biden will have to lift his embargo on Ukraine striking inside Russia. That will also mean providing the precision long-range missiles, in sufficient quantities, that can turn back the Russian advances and put Russian forces in Crimea at risk.

Mr. Putin has made veiled threats of escalation every time the U.S. has provided new weapons—only to back down. The Biden Team might worry more about the consequences of allowing Mr. Putin to wield nuclear blackmail to scare the U.S. out of defending its interests.

The larger strategic picture is worth noting, as Mr. Putin visits China and renews his “no limits” partnership with Xi Jinping. President Biden said in April that “China is providing components and know-how to boost Russia’s defense production.” Yet so far Mr. Biden hasn’t punished Beijing for ignoring U.S. warnings not to assist Russia’s war effort.

Mr. Putin is doubling down on his war aims and turning for help everywhere from Iran to North Korea. Mr. Xi’s involvement underscores that the war is about a consolidating anti-American axis, not merely Ukraine.

Congress granted Mr. Biden his military aid request. If his limits on Ukraine now lead to a Russian victory, he won’t be able to roll out his usual routine of blaming MAGA Republicans. Americans will know where the buck stops.

WSJ Opinion: Lessons on Low-Cost Deterrence and Drones From Ukraine

Play video: WSJ Opinion: Lessons on Low-Cost Deterrence and Drones From Ukraine

Speaking at the 2024 AFA Warfare Symposium, Gen. James Hecker described what the U.S. has learned from unmanned aerial vehicles—or UAVs—in Ukraine, and how they will change warfare. Images: AFP/Getty Images/U.S. Air Force via AP Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the May 17, 2024, print edition as 'Will Biden Now Step Up on Ukraine?'.

4. Four ways US Army’s Pacific chief plans to boost regional land forces

I would have liked to have heard how his vision fits into the defense of Korea.

Excerpts:

There are four steps to accomplishing this, Flynn noted.

“First,” he said, “reorganize the most battle-winning mix of capabilities.”

...

Flynn’s second building block is to regenerate combined joint warfighting capabilities. In other words, “training together, rehearsing together,” he said.

...

There’s “an increasing thirst from the region on that, in large measure because they go to our schools and then they have also been to our training centers. Only now, JPMRC is closer and it looks like the environment in the region,” Flynn said.

That type of effort also applies to Flynn’s third building block, which is to reapply land power to create unity of effort, and the fourth block, which is to build enduring advantages through regional posture, “allowing our Army forces to control decisive points.”

Four ways US Army’s Pacific chief plans to boost regional land forces

Defense News · by Jen Judson · May 16, 2024

HONOLULU — America and its Pacific partners are building a network of land forces to deter those who would threaten regional stability, but there are four building blocks to make this joint effort a success, according to the head of U.S. Army forces in the area.

Gen. Charles Flynn’s comments at a gathering of regional military leaders in Hawaii comes as China clashes with nearby nations over territorial disputes, and as North Korea continues to build its nuclear arsenal.

The U.S. Army and its allies and partners in the theater are finding more ways to come together and build relationships, Flynn said, some of which have endured since the end of World War II.

Regional countries must come together and “do so with a sense of urgency often only reserved for the most demanding situations,” Flynn said during his speech at the Association of the U.S. Army’s LANPAC conference.

“The situation now demands it, but we need not go it alone,” he added. “In this region, campaigning for land power provides something that no other foreign military power can. It is something that only land forces deliver. It’s called positional advantage.”

The strategic land power network, which is still taking shape, “must get in position to defend our sovereignty, to protect our people and to uphold their rights under international law,” he said.

There are four steps to accomplishing this, Flynn noted.

“First,” he said, “reorganize the most battle-winning mix of capabilities.”

The U.S. Army’s regionally focused multidomain task forces, Australia’s 10th Brigade, and the cross-domain formations Japan is creating serve as examples of how to reorganize forces to strengthen formations with high-end capabilities, Flynn told Defense News in an interview. In addition, countries in the theater should share their concepts among each other to ensure interoperability, he added.

The U.S. Army has also deployed a security force assistance brigade, a theater fires element and an information warfare directorate into areas near China.

Flynn’s second building block is to regenerate combined joint warfighting capabilities. In other words, “training together, rehearsing together,” he said.

Central to that is bringing the U.S. Army’s Joint Pacific Multinational Readiness Center from Hawaii to other countries in the theater as an exportable version, dubbed JPMRC-X. Australia and Indonesia hosted such versions last year; the same is expected to happen in the Philippines this month, where the JPMRC-X will help inform how the country plans to create its own high-level training events.

There’s “an increasing thirst from the region on that, in large measure because they go to our schools and then they have also been to our training centers. Only now, JPMRC is closer and it looks like the environment in the region,” Flynn said.

That type of effort also applies to Flynn’s third building block, which is to reapply land power to create unity of effort, and the fourth block, which is to build enduring advantages through regional posture, “allowing our Army forces to control decisive points.”

The U.S. Army also achieves this through extensive exercises, dubbed Operation Pathways, that continuously run throughout the year.

Flynn noted in his speech that the opportunity to increase multilateral cooperation is the highest he has ever seen. Each drill under Operation Pathways is growing as more move from bilateral to multilateral events, in some cases involving more than a dozen countries.

“Each of your armies has a duty to your nations, but also each of us has something to offer the group represented here today,” Flynn said in his speech. “The demonstration of unity and collective commitment is growing stronger by the day, and I’m very proud of the progress we’re making together because our tactical actions are having operational and strategic effects.”

About Jen Judson

Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

5. U.S. officials see strategic failure in Israel’s Rafah invasion

U.S. officials see strategic failure in Israel’s Rafah invasion

White House and U.S. intelligence officials doubt that Hamas can be fully defeated and worry the widening invasion will frustrate attempts at a peace deal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/05/16/biden-rafah-intelligence-netanyahu-strategy/?utm

By Karen DeYoung and Shane Harris

Updated May 16, 2024 at 9:15 p.m. EDT|Published May 16, 2024 at 7:54 p.m. EDT

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at a ceremony in Jerusalem on May 12, 2024. (Debbie Hill/AP)

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Top Biden administration officials traveling to Israel this weekend are running out of chances to persuade the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt their vision of how to end the war in Gaza and bring lasting peace.

More than seven months and tens of thousands of Palestinian civilian deaths after the brutal attack in Israel last October, the two sides are as far apart as ever on both battlefield tactics and overall strategy to achieve their shared goal of defeating Hamas.

Their profound differences range from whether it is possible for Israel Defense Forces to militarily destroy every vestige of Hamas — razing most of Gaza along with it — to whether the establishment of a Palestinian state is capitulation to terrorists or the only way to end the decades-long cycle of violence.

“I think in some ways we are struggling over what the theory of victory is,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell told a NATO youth conference in Miami on Monday. “Sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, total victory. I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible.”

Israel’s expanding assault on Rafah, the southernmost Gaza city where 1.5 million Palestinians had fled from relentless air and ground attacks farther north, is but the latest example of its disregard for U.S. warnings on military operations and the growing humanitarian crisis in the enclave.

Having committed itself to “ironclad” support of Israel’s defense, the Biden administration believes Israel’s current strategy is not worth the cost in terms of human lives and destruction, cannot achieve its objective, and will ultimately undermine broader U.S. and Israeli goals in the Middle East.

President Biden, already under severe domestic and global criticism for providing Israel with defense aid and diplomatic support, has threatened to withhold offensive weapons if it proceeds with a “major military operation” in Rafah without sufficiently protecting civilians there. But even the threat of a pause in shipments has cued outrage from Republican lawmakers who back supporting Israel at any cost.

Despite the evacuation of more than 600,000 Palestinians from the Rafah area over the past week, largely to areas where the United Nations says there is no shelter, food, water, sanitation or medical care, the administration has so far declined to characterize Israel’s attacks as the major Rafah operation it has made a red line.

This account of the strategic and political dilemmas faced by both the United States and Israel comes from more than a half dozen current and former U.S. and Israeli diplomatic, intelligence and military officials, several of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive relationship and the fraught future. Few expressed any optimism that a meeting of the minds was near, or that the administration had any new initiatives to bring an end to the conflict.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), calls on the Senate to take up the Israel Security Assistance Support Act during a news conference in front of the Capitol on Thursday. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

In Rafah and beyond, Israel faces choices that will once again be presented to Netanyahu this weekend when a delegation headed by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan arrives on a trip that also includes stops in Riyadh and other Arab capitals. Sullivan will be accompanied by a triad of Biden’s top aides on the issue, including National Security Council Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, presidential adviser Amos Hochstein and Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who spent most of the week in Ukraine.

“We have been doing a lot of work on this … with partners in the Arab world and beyond over several months,” Blinken said at a Wednesday news conference in Kyiv. “But it’s imperative that Israel also do this work and focus on what the future can and must be.”

Israel, Blinken said, “cannot, and says it does not want responsibility for Gaza. We cannot have Hamas controlling Gaza; we can’t have chaos and anarchy in Gaza. So there needs to be a clear concrete plan, and we look to Israel to come forward with its ideas.”

In an interview Wednesday with CNBC, Netanyahu acknowledged disagreements with the administration, but said “we have to do what we have to do,” which includes retaking all of Gaza. “You can’t leave Hamas there and talk about the day after because we’re not going to have a day after.”

The two-state solution that the United States and most of the rest of the world have advocated for decades “would be the greatest reward for the terrorists that you can imagine … giving them a prize. And secondly, it would be a state that would be immediately taken over by Hamas and Iran,” Netanyahu said.

Instead, he said a path forward in Gaza might be Palestinian administration, similar to what now exists on the West Bank, with Israel retaining “certain sovereign powers,” including all military and security functions and control over what and who crosses Gaza’s borders.

To the Biden administration that is a recipe for ongoing strife: a diminished but festering Hamas insurgency bolstered by angry Palestinians who see their territory destroyed and their rights again denied.

U.S. intelligence officials share White House doubts that Hamas can be fully defeated. “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces,” the U.S. intelligence community reported in its annual threat assessment in February.

To end the war in the short term and gain the release of the hostages, administration officials have pressed since the early months of the war an alternative to Israel’s scorched earth tactics of relentless attacks on dense urban areas, urging more intelligence-based, precise targeting.

The United States has long supplied Israel with various intelligence streams, including drone feeds from military sources and communications information collected by intelligence agencies, according to U.S. officials familiar with the long-standing arrangement.

Although it does not provide targeting information to help the IDF attack rank-and-file Hamas figures, officials said, it has been supplying information to help locate very senior figures, such as Hamas military leader Yehiya Sinwar, as well as hostages, since the war started.

Current and former U.S. officials said it can be difficult to know precisely how the U.S.-provided intelligence is used. In the CNBC interview, Netanyahu downplayed its amount and utility. While any input is appreciated, he said, “the main intelligence on Palestinians” and the Middle East broadly “is what we have on our own.”

An Israeli soldier secures a tunnel underneath al-Shifa Hospital on Nov. 22, 2023. (Ronen Zvulun/Reuters)

The task of persuading the Israelis to change course, U.S. officials acknowledged, has become much harder with the ongoing failure of U.S.-backed negotiations offering a temporary cease-fire in exchange for the release of Israeli hostages.

While there is widespread support inside Israel for eliminating Hamas, Netanyahu’s failure to win release of the hostages is increasingly unpopular. A number of current and former U.S. and Israeli officials expressed doubt that a full-scale invasion of Rafah would bring an end to the conflict or achieve the government’s goal of eliminating Hamas.

Retired Gen. David Petraeus, who utilized the “clear, hold and build” strategy to counter al-Qaeda forces in Iraq, said that Israel’s “punitive” clearing operations in Gaza, without any follow-up to hold territory or rebuild infrastructure and livelihoods for Palestinian civilians, would only result in Hamas reconstituting within an angry and alienated population.

“What you have is a cycle,” Petraeus said in an interview. “If you don’t hold and rebuild, you’re just going to have to clear again and again … all they’ve done essentially is to go into Gaza, destroy a target and then pull out.” While perhaps able to destroy Hamas as a military organization, Israel does not have the troops, doctrine, experience or political will to conduct the kind of comprehensive strategy that would prevent an insurgency from being reborn, he said.

“If Israel’s strategy is making it more likely, and not less likely that future terrorist attacks will occur, then it is not an effective strategy,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) told Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at an Appropriations Committee hearing last week.

Austin concurred, saying that a “key lesson” and “strategic imperative” learned by U.S. forces in recent decades “is you have to protect the people, the civilians in the battlespace, otherwise you create more terrorists going forward.”

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Many in Israel’s security and intelligences forces say they understand the problem, but that Biden’s efforts to pressure Netanyahu has achieved little. “Rafah is not the turning point. Nominating an alternative government to Gaza is the key,” said Rami Igra, who ran the Prisoners and Missing Persons Division for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service.

A broad, armored invasion into Rafah would ensure a quagmire and lead to more civilian deaths, said Alon Pinkas a veteran Israeli diplomat and former senior government adviser. “Wake up,” Pinkas said. “‘Toppling Hamas’ is only possible through diplomatic means.”

Even as it continues to urge a change in Israeli strategy, the administration has committed substantial effort to the heavy diplomacy of trying to preserve the crucial relationship between Egypt and Israel. It has worked to persuade Arab states in the Persian Gulf, primarily Saudi Arabia, to normalize their historically tense relations with Israel as a long-term security bulwark against Iran and its proxies, including Hamas, and to help secure and rebuild Gaza as part of a new Palestinian state.

It is trying to convince them to not only pay for reconstructing Gaza but also to provide troops to form a postwar security force there until a trained Palestinian force can be readied. But “nobody has raised their hand” to participate, a former senior U.S. military official close to the issue said, in the absence of any clear idea of what conditions on the ground would be, or Israel’s role.

As a sweetener for normalization, the administration has offered a strengthened bilateral defense pact with the Saudis, along with approval of an enhanced civil nuclear program, that would have the added advantage of steering them away from China and Russia as defense partners.

None of the terms have yet been settled in a form they can be offered to Israel, even were it to show an inclination to yield to Arab political and security demands for Gaza and the West Bank. “I don’t know how much longer they’re going to wait around,” one U.S. official said of the Saudis.

Abigail Hauslohner and Ellen Nakashima contributed to this report.

Israel-Gaza war

The Israel-Gaza war has gone on for six months, and tensions have spilled into the surrounding region.

The war: On Oct. 7, Hamas militants launched an unprecedented cross-border attack on Israel that included the taking of civilian hostages at a music festival. (See photos and videos of how the deadly assault unfolded). Israel declared war on Hamas in response, launching a ground invasion that fueled the biggest displacement in the region since Israel’s creation in 1948.

Gaza crisis: In the Gaza Strip, Israel has waged one of this century’s most destructive wars, killing tens of thousands and plunging at least half of the population into “famine-like conditions.” For months, Israel has resisted pressure from Western allies to allow more humanitarian aid into the enclave.

U.S. involvement: Despite tensions between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and some U.S. politicians, including President Biden, the United States supports Israel with weapons, funds aid packages, and has vetoed or abstained from the United Nations’ cease-fire resolutions.

History: The roots of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and mistrust are deep and complex, predating the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Read more on the history of the Gaza Strip.

By Karen DeYoung

Karen DeYoung is associate editor and senior national security correspondent for The Post. In more than three decades at the paper, she has served as bureau chief in Latin America and in London and as correspondent covering the White House, U.S. foreign policy and the intelligence community. Twitter

By Shane Harris

Shane Harris writes about intelligence and national security. He was a member of reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as two George Polk Awards. He is also the winner of the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense. Shane is the author of two books, "The Watchers" and "@War." Twitter

6. What Israel’s strategic corridor in Gaza reveals about its postwar plans

Photos and maps at the link.

What Israel’s strategic corridor in Gaza reveals about its postwar plans

Analysts say the buildup of the Netzarim Corridor is part of a large-scale project by the Israeli military to reshape Gaza and entrench its presence there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/17/gaza-israel-netzarim-corridor-war-hamas/?utm

By Loveday Morris, Evan Hill, Samuel Granados and Hazem Balousha

May 17, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EDT

Israeli troops are fortifying a strategic corridor that carves Gaza in two, building bases, taking over civilian structures and razing homes, according to satellite imagery and other visual evidence — an effort that military analysts and Israeli experts say is part of a large-scale project to reshape the Strip and entrench the Israeli military presence there.

The Netzarim Corridor is a four-mile-long road just south of Gaza City that runs from east to west, stretching from the Israeli border to the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas has made Israel’s withdrawal from the area a central demand in cease-fire negotiations.

But even as talks have continued over the past two months, Israeli forces have been digging in. Three forward operating bases have been established in the corridor since March, satellite imagery examined by The Washington Post shows, providing clues about Israel’s plans. At the sea, the road meets a new, seven-acre unloading point for a floating pier, an American project to bring more aid into Gaza.

Israel insists it does not intend to permanently reoccupy Gaza, which its troops controlled for 38 years until withdrawing in 2005. But the construction of roads, outposts and buffer zones in recent months points to an expanding role for Israel’s military as alternative visions for postwar Gaza falter.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has released few concrete plans for the “day after” — a source of frustration for his generals and for Washington — but has repeatedly vowed to maintain “indefinite” security control over the enclave. In addition to conducting future raids from outside, Israeli troops may need to “be inside” Gaza to ensure the demilitarization of Hamas, Netanyahu said in a podcast interview earlier this week.

In addition to leverage in negotiations, control of the corridor gives the Israeli military valuable flexibility, allowing troops to be deployed quickly throughout the enclave. It also affords the Israel Defense Forces the ability to maintain control over the flow of aid and the movement of displaced Palestinians, which it says is necessary to prevent Hamas fighters from regrouping.

At least 750 buildings have been destroyed in what appears to be a systematic effort to create a “buffer zone” that stretches at least 500 yards on either side of the road, according to an analysis by Hebrew University’s Adi Ben-Nun, a geographic data specialist. Another 250 buildings have been razed in the area of the U.S. pier, he said.

The IDF declined to comment on the clearing of buildings around the corridor, saying it could not answer operational questions during an ongoing war.

Military experts say it is part of a large-scale, long-term reshaping of Gaza’s geography, harking back to past Israeli plans to carve Gaza into easier-to-control cantons.

Damaged or destroyed buildings

detected by satellite

Erez

crossing

Destroyed

agricultural land

Partially damaged

agricultural land

Beit

Hanoun

Gaza

City

Netzarim

Corridor

New Israeli road

and outposts

GAZA

2 MILES

2 KM

LEB.

ISRAEL

Khan

Younis

Golan

Heights

ISRAEL

Rafah

JOR.

WEST

BANK

EGYPT

Rafah

crossing

Detail

Kerem Shalom

crossing

EGYPT

Sources: Building analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data through May 8 by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate

Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, Microsoft Maps. Agriculture analysis

by Adi Ben-Nun of Hebrew University.

“What we need is full freedom of operation for the IDF everywhere in Gaza,” said Amir Avivi, a reserve brigadier general and former deputy commander of the Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza Division.

‘Welcome to Netzarim Base’

The Netzarim Corridor is named after an Israeli settlement that used to sit on the coastal route — the second “finger” of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “five fingers” strategy that envisioned carving Gaza into segments, all under Israeli security control. The plan was only partially implemented before Sharon — once a champion of settlements — ordered an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.

“It’s no surprise that Israel went back and established this as a new corridor,” said Lt. Col. Jonathan Conricus, a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former IDF spokesman. “The terrain is the most conducive there and it suits the military purposes.”

The Netzarim axis was among the first targets for Israeli troops after they invaded Gaza in response to the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, pushing forward to cleave the Strip in two.

By Nov. 6, troops had cut an informal, winding track to the sea that allowed armored vehicles to reach al-Rashid Road, a major north-south thoroughfare that runs along Gaza’s coast. In February and March, Israeli troops formalized the corridor by building a straight road a few hundred meters to the south. The last section of the road, nearest to the coast, was completed between March 5 and March 9, satellite imagery shows.

The IDF says the road enables military vehicles to travel from one side of the Strip to the other in just seven minutes, giving soldiers speedy and unimpeded access to north and central Gaza. It was used as a base of operations for recent IDF attacks in Zeitoun, in northern Gaza, said one Israeli military official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in line with IDF protocol.

IDF’s infrastructure along the Netzarim Corridor

Jetty

1,500 FEET

IDF al-Rashid outpost

Work starts being visible

in satellite images around

mid March

Port offloading

area

al-Rashid Road

Destroyed

buildings

Destroyed

buildings

Destroyed

buildings

Section built

between Feb. 14

and March 9

Road visible in satellite

image since November

2023

Israa

University

Destroyed

buildings

Earth berm created

close to the corridor

during the second

half of March

Wastewater

treatment

plant

A road from the main corridor

to the Turkish hospital

compound was also created

in late March.

Turkish-Palestinian

Friendship

Hospital

Vehicles

Bulldozed

farmland

al Noor tourist

resort

Destroyed

greenhouses

Destroyed

buildings

Protective berm

Bulldozed

farmland

Netzarim

Corridor

Protective

berms

Areas likely used

as staging ground

by the IDF in 2023

Destroyed

buildings

Bulldozed

areas

Faculty of Law

al-Azhar

University

Destroyed

buildings

Destroyed building

of the al-Riyadh

auditorium

al-Mughraqa

Bulldozed

areas

Preexisting,

paved section

Destroyed buildings

Destroyed

warehouses

Destroyed

buildings

IDF Salah al-Din outpost

Work starts being visible

in satellite images between

March 5 and March 15

Destroyed warehouses

Salah al-Din Road

Vehicles

Possible

temporary

buildings

Destroyed

warehouses

Section built

between Feb. 7 and

Feb. 14

Netzarim

Corridor

Destroyed

buildings

Road visible in satellite

image since November

2023

al-Karama Street

Section built

between

Feb. 14 and

March 9

Juhor ad Dik outpost

Work starts being visible in satellite

images between March 15 and March 30

Earth berms

Qeseria

School

Juhor

ad Dik

Source: Satellite image as captured on April 16, Planet Labs

The corridor bisects Gaza’s only two major north-south roads — Salah al-Din Road, in the middle of the territory, and al-Rashid Road along the coast. The IDF began building forward operating bases at both points in early March.

The bases offer signs that the IDF could be preparing at some point for a controlled return of civilians to the north. Next to both bases, on roads leading north, are structures that appear to be “long parallel intake hallways” leading to a central compound, said Sean O’Connor, a lead analyst for satellite imagery at the security firm Janes.

The United States has said that Gazans who fled to Rafah and other points south should be allowed to return to their homes in the north; United Nations experts have said blocking them could amount to the “forcible transfer” of the population, a crime against humanity.

Jumaa Abu Hasira, 37, said soldiers fired shots in the air as he approached the corridor last month during a lull in the fighting, when rumors swirled that families could go north again. He was then detained, he said — blindfolded, hit with a rifle butt, beaten and interrogated for eight hours.

The IDF acknowledged that soldiers used “cautionary fire” as Gazans, including “armed terrorists,” approached the corridor, but did not respond to questions about Abu Hasira’s alleged detention.

The al-Rashid outpost also features observation points and a possible sentry post, said William Goodhind, an open-source researcher with Contested Ground, a research project that tracks military movements in satellite imagery.

The forward operating base on al-Rashid Road sits next to a jetty constructed in mid-March to receive aid for distribution by the World Central Kitchen charity. The U.S. floating pier is expected to be in the same area, with IDF troops providing security for shipments by sea.

“Welcome to Netzarim Base,” reads the blue graffiti on the concrete barriers outside, according to a photo geolocated by The Post and posted on X by an Israeli journalist who said it was spray painted by his brother. At night, bright white flood lights are visible for miles around.

“It is the only place in Gaza that is lit,” said one 29-year-old woman who lives just south of the base, speaking by phone on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety. “They usually go to an area and leave afterward,” she said of Israeli troops, adding that in Netzarim they look set to stay.

The fact that the pier lands at the end of the Israeli-military controlled corridor “suggests the IDF wants to be to control the flow of aid,” said Michael Horowitz, head of intelligence at Le Beck International. The corridor also links up with “Gate 96,” a new access point on Israel’s border with central Gaza that has recently been opened for aid trucks, according to the military official.

“You’re waiting for three to four hours, you can be sent back, you can be arrested,” Mohammed Abu Mughaisib, deputy medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said of aid trucks trying to traverse the corridor.

The United Nations has said that Israel’s repeated refusal to allow humanitarian convoys access to the north has magnified the hunger crisis there — described by the head of the World Food Program as a “full-blown famine.”

IDF’s al-Rashid outpost

al-Rashid Road

According to experts,

a series of long “halls” could be intake areas, leading to possible holding areas.

Netzarim Corridor

150 FEET

al-Rashid

outpost

Destroyed

buildings

Destroyed

buildings

Observation

point

Masts

for operational

communication

Vehicle

park

Temporary

buildings

Entry/Exit checkpoint

Observation

point

Protective berm

Secondary

entry/exit

Area of detail

Netzarim Corridor

Masts for operational

communications

IDF al-Rashid outpost

Entry/Exit

Observation

point

Temporary

buildings

Secondary

entry/exit

Protective berm

Destroyed

building

Observation

point

Source: Planet Labs and IDF handout images

Radar and observation capabilities have been installed at the new outposts, said Doron Kadosh, a military reporter with Israel’s army-run radio station who visited the Salah al-Din outpost last month. His photos show blue and white portable toilets, generators and towering red and white communications towers.

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“There was nothing,” he said of his first visit along the corridor in October, when it was still just a tank track. Now bases have sleeping areas, showers, a portable canteen building and hard cover shelters, Kadosh said.

Israeli troops also appear to have commandeered nearby civilian structures and turned them into military outposts. One is a former school in the village of Juhor ad Dik, about a mile from the border with Israel. Protective sand berms appeared at the location between March 15 and March 30, according to satellite imagery. The rest of the village has been destroyed.

Abdel Nasser, 45, fled his farm house in Juhor ad Dik with his wife and five children in October. “It used to be a haven for my family and me ... where we spent countless beautiful moments together,” he said.

“About two weeks ago, my neighbors informed me that the entire area had been destroyed, and all the surrounding agricultural land had been bulldozed.” He hasn’t been able to bring himself to tell his wife yet.

Israeli troops also appear to be using the Turkish-Palestinian Friendship Hospital, which once specialized in treatment for cancer patients, as a base of operations. The hospital shut down in the first week of November due to nearby airstrikes and lack of fuel, and thousands of cancer patients have been left without care. Sand berms appeared around the hospital in late November.

An Israeli soldier filmed himself tearing down large parts of the hospital with an earth mover in February. Images published online on May 8 by the Palestinian journalist Younis Tirawi and geolocated by The Post show Israeli soldiers using the hospital as a sniper position.

By March, Israeli forces had cleared hundreds of acres around the hospital — demolishing greenhouses and blowing up Israa University and the Palace of Justice, which housed Gaza’s high courts.

“Israel has not provided cogent reasons for such extensive destruction of civilian infrastructure,” Volker Türk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, said in February.

In all, the area cleared around the corridor and the pier encompasses at least four square miles, or a little more than 2,500 acres, according to the analysis by Ben-Nun from Hebrew University, though extensive damage to buildings and agricultural land extends farther.

“Everything is demolished along the way,” he said. “Completely demolished.”

Satellite images taken six months apart show the creation of the Netzarim Corridor south of Gaza City. (Video: Planet Labs)

Leveraging the corridor

Israel has indicated it may be willing to pull out of the corridor in the short term. The cease-fire deal that Hamas agreed to last week sets out a staggered drawdown from the area, according to a copy of the document obtained by The Post and verified by a person close to the negotiations.

On the 22nd day, the IDF must withdraw entirely from the Netzarim Corridor area and “completely dismantle military sites and installations,” it says.

But the IDF is likely to have been given assurances that it could return to Netzarim, even if it were forced to leave for a few months during a cease-fire, Horowitz said. The construction of multiple outposts, roads and extensive clearing “would suggest this might become permanent,” he said.

A protracted period of military occupation appears increasingly likely, military analysts say, in the absence of other plans for governance in postwar Gaza. Israel has pushed back against a U.S. proposal for a return of the Palestinian Authority, and there appears to be little regional buy-in for Arab security forces.

A long-term Israeli troop presence would be deeply unpopular in Gaza, with the corridor already a lightning rod for attacks. Hamas and other militant groups, including Palestinian Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, have launched more than half a dozen rocket and mortar attacks on Israeli troops in the corridor in the last week.

But as Hamas returns to northern areas already cleared by the IDF, military occupation — once an unthinkable suggestion within Israel — is now being openly discussed.

“There is no other option,” said Michael Milshtein, former adviser on Palestinian affairs to the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

Hajar Harb in London, Heba Farouk Mahfouz in Cairo, Karen DeYoung in Washington, Jarrett Ley in New York, Laris Karklis in Washington and Júlia Ledur in Philadelphia contributed to this report.

7. Military sexual assault totals down, but trust among women remains low

Is there a correlation: Low trust, low reporting?

Military sexual assault totals down, but trust among women remains low

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · May 16, 2024

A Pentagon report released Thursday found that less than half of women in the military trust their chain of command to properly handle reports of sexual assault, posing a continued problem for service leaders even as the number of assault cases fell significantly last year.

But Defense Department officials insist they see positive signs regarding recent reforms designed to bolster trust in leadership and curb assaults, and remain optimistic that additional steps will produce further improvements.

“A lot of those changes are underway, but we know it’s going to take some time before we start to see those numbers,” Beth Foster, executive director of the Defense Department’s Office of Force Resiliency, told reporters Thursday. “We know we have a lot more work to do to rebuild trust, especially amongst our service women.”

In reversal of recent years, military sex assault reports drop

A confidential survey also found a 19% drop in the number service members who said they'd experienced some type of unwanted sexual contact.

By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

According to the military’s annual report on the issue, about 29,000 active-duty troops (15,201 women and 13,860 men) reported experiencing a sexual assault or unwanted sexual contact in 2023. That’s almost 7,000 fewer cases (19%) than in 2021, the most recent year such a survey was conducted.

Foster credited the improvement to a host of factors, including reforms put in place by department leadership in 2021 and continued public focus on the issue.

But the 2023 figures still indicate 6.8% of active duty military women and 1.3% of active duty military men faced abuse last year. And survey data showed that only 38% of active duty women said they trust the department to protect their privacy if they report an assault.

In the same survey, 43% of women said they trust the military to keep them safe following an assault, and the same percentage said they believe the institution will “treat you with dignity and respect.”

Among men, rates of trust were significantly higher — 61% on privacy issues, and 66% on safety issues.

Defense officials noted that those trust scores among women rose slightly from 2021, and that 71% of women surveyed said they trust their immediate supervisor to handle sexual harassment and assault issues. That figure stood at 79% among men.

“Again, there’s much more to do, but we believe that is showing us some positive turns in leadership focus on this very important mission space,” said Nate Galbreath, acting director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.

Military officials said they expect reforms underway regarding new specialized prosecutors for sexual assault cases to help bolster victims’ faith in the system.

“We are focused on professionalizing our sexual assault response workforce,” Foster said. “A lot of these folks are performing that role in a collateral duty role, and while they may be very dedicated, victim assistance is a full-time job.”

The full report is available on the Defense Department’s website.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

8. Ukraine war ramifications in Asia

Quite a critique:

However, the West’s serious lack of prudence is evident as demonstrated by the evolving circumstances, both within and without Ukraine, such as Russia’s operational superiority in land warfare, the strong negative boomerang effect of the West’s economic sanctions against Russia, the West’s fatigue in continuing arms transfer and economic aid to Ukraine, the Russia-China strategic alignment and the West’s growing isolation from major Global South countries, all of which might accelerate the relative decline of the West in world politics.

Hence, the recent developments in North Korean affairs are merely epiphenomenal to the US’ relative decline as a result of its confrontation with Russia centered on the war in Ukraine.

With the UN sanctions regime hollowing out, Pyongyang is moving out of international isolation, and might find greater diplomatic and international economic opportunities with Russia and from many Global South countries. It could rise as a political-military middle power, particularly if it completes limited, but significant nuclear weapons development.

As a result, Japan as a frontline liberal-democratic state would face three nuclear-armed neighbors: Russia, China and North Korea.

The limited war in Ukraine has brought repercussions in Northeast Asia and might generate severe adverse regional ramifications for great power relations.

Japan and major European powers must enhance their solidarity and cooperation in international security while diplomatically striving to put an end to the war in Ukraine.

Fri, May 17, 2024 page8

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2024/05/17/2003817971

Ukraine war ramifications in Asia

By Masahiro Matsumura
On March 28, the UN Security Council disbanded the Panel of Experts, an auxiliary panel to the Sanctions Committee on North Korea that monitored the enforcement of UN sanctions imposed on North Korea, due to Russia’s veto against the annual renewal of its mandate.
The council’s Resolution 1718 created the committee in 2006 soon after North Korea’s first nuclear test and, since 2009 the committee has relied on the panel for impartial and authoritative fact-finding information to ensure the implementation of the sanctions.
Although the committee would continue, and is the core of the sanctions regime, the effectiveness of the sanctions regime would be hollowed out because the panel’s impartiality and authority cannot easily be replaced by other sources of information, and the compliance of individual UN member states.
The veto marked a shift in Russia’s North Korea policy. Amid the protracted war in Ukraine, Moscow-Pyongyang relations have seen a swift formation of strategic alignment against the US-led West. In return for substantial arms transfer to Moscow, such as cannon shells and ballistic missiles, Pyongyang is receiving benefits from Russia in the form of food and oil assistance, and military technology transfers.
Needless to say, this contravenes legally binding UN sanctions against Pyongyang, which Moscow agreed to, or at least it did not veto. In principle, the council could seek to impose economic and military sanctions on Russia, but in practice, Moscow could just sanction any proposal brought to the Council.
It appears that Moscow is purposely disrupting the UN-centered international legal order.
Moscow is now seen as a revisionist power intent on overthrowing the order, especially from the perspective of liberal democracies where the domestic rule of law is firmly established.
Yet no international order is politically neutral, as orders are built on the “status quo” characterized by the values and interests of the great powers who shape and form that order.
This is inevitable given the anarchical nature of international relations, where interests and power sometimes play a more decisive role than values, especially when a particular basic value or interest is not shared or only loosely shared among great powers.
The UN was constructed upon a military alliance formed during World War II. As a result, the UN Charter gives a veto in the Security Council to the Permanent Five (P5) victorious allied powers, reflecting their realpolitik interests and power relations at the time of its establishment.
This means that the council can only function well when the P5, particularly the US, Russia and China, see no serious challenge to their values, interests and power. Thus, it is imperative that a good balance be struck between the three great powers in international relations by continually making compromises among the P5. Pushing hard on one particular factor against the other two would only impair the council’s function.
Unfortunately, the West committed a fatal mistake in prioritizing liberal-democratic enlargement through NATO’s eastward expansion, especially to Ukraine. The priority might be politically correct, but it substantially challenged Russia’s interests and power and weakened the basis of the UN-centered international legal order for peace and security.
Thus, the ongoing protracted war in Ukraine as a de facto “surrogate war” between the US-led West and Russia is a natural consequence, at least in causation, but not in jus ad bellum, on the former’s breach of the realpolitik modus operandi, followed tit-for-tat by the latter’s reaction in the form of determined armed invasion of Ukraine.
Power struggles are commonplace in international relations, and there is nothing wrong with the US-led West’s politico-strategic offensives against Russia.
However, the West’s serious lack of prudence is evident as demonstrated by the evolving circumstances, both within and without Ukraine, such as Russia’s operational superiority in land warfare, the strong negative boomerang effect of the West’s economic sanctions against Russia, the West’s fatigue in continuing arms transfer and economic aid to Ukraine, the Russia-China strategic alignment and the West’s growing isolation from major Global South countries, all of which might accelerate the relative decline of the West in world politics.
Hence, the recent developments in North Korean affairs are merely epiphenomenal to the US’ relative decline as a result of its confrontation with Russia centered on the war in Ukraine.
With the UN sanctions regime hollowing out, Pyongyang is moving out of international isolation, and might find greater diplomatic and international economic opportunities with Russia and from many Global South countries. It could rise as a political-military middle power, particularly if it completes limited, but significant nuclear weapons development.
As a result, Japan as a frontline liberal-democratic state would face three nuclear-armed neighbors: Russia, China and North Korea.
The limited war in Ukraine has brought repercussions in Northeast Asia and might generate severe adverse regional ramifications for great power relations.
Japan and major European powers must enhance their solidarity and cooperation in international security while diplomatically striving to put an end to the war in Ukraine.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics and national security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, Japan, and a 2024 ROC-MOFA Taiwan Fellow-in-Residence at NCCU-IIR Taiwan Center for Security Studies.

9. War on the 21st Century Battlefield: Revisiting General Starry’s Conceptual Framework

We also need an intellectual renaissance for irregular warfare operational concepts (and understanding). Who is the General Starry for IW thinking?

Except:

Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.

War on the 21st Century Battlefield: Revisiting General Starry’s Conceptual Framework

https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/conceptual-framework/?mc_cid=edae415832&mc_eid=70bf478f36

FRANK JONES MAY 16, 2024 8 MIN READ

Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.

Today, U.S. Army General Donn A. Starry, the commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) from July 1977 to July 1981, is best remembered as the architect of the Cold War doctrine known as AirLand Battle, that first appeared in the 1982 edition of Army Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations. AirLand Battle doctrine was an artifact of a dispirited army turning its attention away from recent failed counterinsurgency operations in Vietnam to focus instead on the Warsaw Pact and the defense of Western Europe. Starry’s work initiated an intellectual renaissance in twentieth-century military thought, which can still serve as a model for the army (and other services) as they develop operational concepts, weigh the trade-offs associated with modernization, and more generally seek to understand how wars will be fought on the twenty-first-century battlefield.

Starry developed AirLand Battle to replace the controversial doctrine of Active Defense that his predecessor and inaugural TRADOC commander, General William DePuy, had developed for the 1976 version of FM 100-5. Many U.S. Army officers and defense analysts rejected DePuy’s approach, deeming Active Defense as reactive, emphasizing defense and stopping the “Soviet operational breakthrough maneuver” rather than taking the offensive. But affecting change in an institution as large as the army is challenging. As retired brigadier general Huba Wass de Czege has pointed out, “the Army’s struggle to get the doctrine ‘right enough’ after Vietnam” took “13 years”, and when AirLand Battle was “right enough,” it was a “way of thinking about war and a mental conditioning rather than a rigid set of rules and list to be done in lock-step fashion.”

Starry had as commanding general of the U.S. Army Armor Center and School under DePuy played a prominent role in fashioning Active Defense through his analysis of the 1973 Arab-Israeli (Yom Kippur) War and other activities. However, in his follow-on assignment as commander, V Corps in West Germany from 1976 to 1977, he began a rigorous effort to determine if employment of Active Defense was realistic. Using terrain analysis, experiments, examination of Soviet military doctrine, and information about force ratios, Starry concluded U.S. Army units in the V Corps sector of NATO’s central region would be considerably outnumbered. This assessment along with a reexamination of his earlier study of the Yom Kippur War, whereby he modified the tactical lessons of that conflict to the NATO scenario, prepared Starry for his next assignment as TRADOC commander. He was primed to revise the Active Defense doctrine.

As important as AirLand Battle doctrine was, however, it was only one element of a more complex conceptualization of warfare based on the idea of the “central battle,” which Starry defined as “the place on the battlefield where all aspects of firepower and maneuver come together to produce decisive action.” As he noted, “When the Central Battle idea was first conceived, I made the point that operational concepts had to be the driving force for describing interactions that were to occur on the most intense part of the battlefield (emphasis added).” Operational concepts do not validate the procurement of a specific weapon system or equipment. They are ideas necessary to achieve a desired military objective, but must be adaptable to changing perceptions and circumstances. Further, he stressed that they must be tested and their relationship to other concepts—tactical, organizational, training, and materiel concepts—ascertained. He was clear: “Concepts are not (emphasis in the original) doctrine until tested, approved, and accepted.” Thus, Starry fashioned a framework for how concepts not only resulted in doctrine, but the relationship doctrine had to training development, materiel requirements and organizations.

The first component he stipulated for framing an operational concept was the threat. To help define threats, Starry—unimpressed with how the former Army Combat Development Command had used long-range forecasts to determine requirements for the future combat environment—called for the army to work with the intelligence community to develop estimates of enemy capabilities. After discussions with the intelligence professionals, Starry came to believe that eight years was the appropriate time horizon for threat estimates informing combat developments; thus, 1986 became the endpoint for a number of studies that TRADOC conducted. However, Starry was also aware that the threat often changes, with the enemy devising countermeasures that complicate doctrine’s formation and narrowing its useful life.

The second component to framing an operational concept was defining the mission that the theater commander confronts at the operational level of war. Starry and others believed that the army had neglected to do this when formulating Active Defense. Starry stated simply that the mission was to fight and win at that level. In the European context, U.S. vital interests were at stake; therefore, the mission at the operational level was to “disrupt, delay, and destroy as possible” the attacking and follow-on Warsaw Pact forces, and “to win, not just avert defeat.” Starry envisioned NATO forces using a combination of deep attack and close-in battle to seize and hold the initiative through maneuver and fires. The use of such conventional means raised the nuclear threshold. Nonetheless, the army had to be capable of operating on the nuclear battlefield, because the Soviets were prepared to use these weapons.

When developing AirLand Battle, Starry was actually more interested in emerging deep fires and surveillance capabilities, systems that would help target and destroy enemy assets in the extended battlefield, and make deep attack possible.

The third component of developing an operational concept was the opportunities that new technology offered. Technological developments drive war, Starry noted, but “technology wins nothing unless it serves some doctrinal purpose.” It is worth noting that even before Active Defense, the army had already begun the modernization effort that would lead to the fielding of the “Big 5” systems (AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the M-1 Abrams main battle tank, the UH-60 Black Hawk utility and transport helicopter, the Bradley fighting vehicles, and the Patriot air defense missile system). When developing AirLand Battle, Starry was actually more interested in emerging deep fires and surveillance capabilities, systems that would help target and destroy enemy assets in the extended battlefield, and make deep attack possible. The Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) that was in development met the second requirement. Working with the Air Force’s Tactical Air Command, Starry recognized that Joint STARS, the U.S. Air Force’s airborne battle management, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform, was the answer to the first. The emphasis was on the integration of U.S. air and ground forces, and ultimately, U.S. forces with those of our allies.

The final component was historical insight, or as Starry once wrote, “The acquisition of a sense of historical mindedness.” Starry—an avid student of U.S., British, Soviet, and German tactics and operations in World War II, as well as of theoreticians like Jomini and Clausewitz—believed that studying military history helped officers develop professional technical competence. History was not a blueprint, he maintained, but a means of improving judgment and fashioning a logical approach to problem solving and to understanding the “reasons for and the results of previous solutions.” But the value of historical insights went beyond reading traditional history texts; it included analysis and studies of doctrine, policy, planning exercises, campaigns and individual battles to learn especially under what circumstances outnumbered forces won battles and campaigns. These assessments were critical to understanding NATO’s defense against a massive Warsaw Pact attack into West Germany. Systemizing these insights was critical; thus, historical knowledge undergirded the 1982 edition of FM 100-5.

In Starry’s framework, TRADOC was responsible for integrating these four components into a draft concept statement of a page or two, which when approved, resulted in a concept paper that was a comprehensive analysis of the requirement and the preferred outcome, the concept of how this end was to accomplished, where and when it needed to be undertaken, the organization that is was responsible for doing it, and what was needed for achieving the desired result that addressed tactics, equipment, organizations, and training. A lengthy and thorough evaluation process, which Starry stated was the “business of TRADOC,” followed the approved concept paper and only then, after discussions within the Army and with other services and allies, was an operational concept incorporated into doctrine, training developments, materiel requirements, and organizations.

Starry’s approach, however, is not an input-output model. It is a framework that forces senior military leaders to undertake a methodical planning process that produces a theory of victory for both conventional and nuclear battlefields, grounded in U.S. policy objectives and its national defense strategy, before the army makes any substantial investment. Observers seem to think that the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are going to lead directly to a new doctrine of war in the same way that conventional wisdom believes the Yom Kippur War produced AirLand Battle doctrine. However, just as the Yom Kippur war was merely an inflection point in the post-Vietnam reassessment of operational doctrine, these two conflicts, though rich in data, will likely only be part of the story of future doctrine development. In making these early assessments of means versus way and ends, the principal focus is on the tactical level of war and finding technological solutions, with little emphasis on the operational level of war where military resources are employed to achieve the strategic objectives (e.g., deterrence and warfighting) necessary to protect U.S. interests. For those looking for ways to accomplish strategic objectives, Starry’s framework and the evolution of AirLand Battle doctrine provide a useful guide.

Frank Jones is a Distinguished Fellow of the U.S. Army War College where he taught in the Department of National Security and Strategy. Previously, he had retired from the Office of the Secretary of Defense as a senior executive. He is the author or editor of three books and numerous articles on U.S. national security.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army, or the Department of Defense.

Photo Description: Soldiers from the 1-194th Field Artillery complete joint slingload training with UH-47 Chinook Helicopters out of the 2-211th General Support Aviation Battalion at Camp Ripley Training Center on May 19th, 2023. The two units worked together to complete two iterations of slingloading and firing two M777 Howitzers. Inset: GEN Donn A. Starry as Commander in Chief, U.S. Readiness Command

Photo Credit: Spc. Jorden Newbanks Inset: U.S. Readiness Command, Public Domain, via Wikimedia

Tags: AirLand Battle Cold War Defense Management Military Strategy and Campaigning Strategic Leadership Theory of War and Strategy

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2 thoughts on "WAR ON THE 21ST CENTURY BATTLEFIELD: REVISITING GENERAL STARRY’S CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK"

Jason Schuyler says:

May 16, 2024 at 10:37 am

General Donn Starry was an absolute visionary. Multidomain Operations, conceptually and at its core, is simply Starry’s principle of extended battlefields. “What emerges is a perception of the battlefield in which the goal of collapsing the enemy’s ability to fight drives us to unified employment of a wide range of systems and organizations on a battlefield which, for corps and divisions, is much deeper than that foreseen by current doctrine. ” Getting the Army of 2040 force structure, training pipeline, and organizational shape, at echelon, correct will be necessary to harness a growing reliance on information warfare, management of the electromagnetic spectrum, cyberspace, and AI-enabled systems.

Bill Eliason, Col, USAF (Ret), PhD, Director, NDU Press; Editor in Chief, Joint Force Quarterly says:

May 16, 2024 at 11:06 am

General Starry spoke multiple times to the new Joint Advanced Warfighting School in Norfolk near the end of his life. He was a man of great learning having a massive collection of books on a wide range of subjects, many in foreign languages which he had mastered. As many know, GEN Abrams tapped him to begin helping reshape the Army in the immediate post-Vietnam period. He did so in ways that were truly inspiring and very self depricating as he always credited his staff with the development and spreading the gospel of what became AirLand Battle. He also credited his positive relationship with the USAF’s Tactical Air Command on the 31 Initiatives which were concrete expressions of how the two Services would work together to achieve the doctrine’s success. Many have credited our success in Desert Storm to Gen Starry’s efforts. He remained humble of his role as he spoke to the JAWS students, preferring to discuss his views on leadership of change in the military vice the history of how AirLand Battle came about so I would agree that he was more focused on how to implement change in the military vice the specifics of what changes were needed. As others have said, the specifics of warfighting do change over time but the true battles are fought in the minds of those who are responsible for preparing for and engaging in war.

10. West Point team’s computerized rifle scope adjusts itself in combat

West Point team’s computerized rifle scope adjusts itself in combat

armytimes.com · by Zamone Perez · May 14, 2024

While in the mountains of Afghanistan, some soldiers faced issues adjusting their sights to differing elevations when under fire during an ambush.

After hearing this issue, a group of cadets at United States Military Academy West Point in New York sought to fix that problem by signing up for a project called Hindsight, sponsored by Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. The cadets, David Caddigan, Aiden Looney, Ashton Gaines, Heyward Hutson, dubbed the project “a smart sight for the average soldier.”

The quartet developed a proof of concept for an automatic optic adjustment attachment for a soldier’s weapon at the academy’s 25th Annual Projects Day Research Symposium on May 2. The project is one of hundreds of research projects presented by students at the academy.

“Basically, if you’re shooting at an incline, you’re going to be impacting quite a bit lower than you want,” Looney told Army Times. “The goal of this is basically to kind of adjust my sight picture — or what you’re seeing through your scope — so that you are actually getting on target when you’re shooting up a hill.”

The issue with in-the-moment adjustments has to do with the trajectory of rounds — and the pace at which a soldier can compensate and calculate in real time.

“The trajectory of an M4 round is not a straight line,” Caddigan explained. “It’s more of a parabolic — going up and then back down. When you’re shooting up a hill, that’s gonna throw them off based on different gravity and distance as well.”

A soldier’s rifle is traditionally zeroed for one distance or elevation, but the cadets’ proof of concept allows for a rifle to constantly reset, Caddigan said.

Hindsight uses a ballistics computer — attached to the side of the rifle — where a gyroscope measures the tilt and pitch of the weapon. That data going into the computer gets calculated through algorithms designed by Looney to enable motor movements that micro-adjust the sight to where the bullet is predicted to be shot.

Cadet Ashton Gaines speaks with attendees at the research symposium. (Ty Trotter/West Point)

The group spent five months working on the specific model they presented to the public, after deciding to use currently fielded scopes.

As with any experiments and inventions, there were some setbacks and issues to solve. The students only found the correct sized motor for the proof of concept three weeks before the project was presented.

As for the future of Hindsight, it will take another group of cadets to carry the project out of the proof of concept phase.

“We presented the device to the math department and … to some of the mechanical engineering [faculty],” Caddigan said. “One of the math advisors … thought it was a really interesting concept, because it’s something he experienced when he was deployed and seeing how inaccurate it is shooting around barriers and shooting up and down mountains.”

“But we’re still at kind of a proof of concept stage to where it’s still a little bit larger than you want on a rifle,” he added.

The cadets, who will be graduating later this month, haven’t heard what the future holds for the project. If another group of cadets pick up where they left off, though, the cadets had a few ideas of what issues might need tinkering.

“It’d be important to work into debugging the code and interacting more fluidly and gently with the motors, just because there’s some feedback that’s kind of making some slightly inaccurate adjustments,” Caddigan told Army Times.

Their sponsors at Picatinny Arsenal also offered the idea of a different power supply for the project, which would reduce the size of the ballistic computer, if the project is continued.

Correction: A previous version of this article misstated where Picatinny Arsenal was located. It is based in New Jersey.

About Zamone Perez

Zamone “Z” Perez is a reporter at Military Times. He previously worked at Foreign Policy and Ufahamu Africa. He is a graduate of Northwestern University, where he researched international ethics and atrocity prevention in his thesis. He can be found on Twitter @zamoneperez.

11. The Most Important Factor Hardening China’s Stance on Taiwan

Excerpts:

China’s infringements do not stop at Taiwan nor the South China Sea. The Cyber Threat Report 2022-2023 issued by the Australian Signals Directorate points out that “Volt Typhoon”, a Chinese state-backed hacking group, is targeting Australia’s critical infrastructure. It’s yet more proof that China has its own agenda to cause such unrest, and that cannot be attributed to other countries.

So, what is crucially missing from the “three factors” put forward by Solmaz that is hardening China’s stance on Taiwan is China’s longstanding and independently taken decision to toughen its stance on just about everything. It is obvious to the international society that China has entered a phase of self-assertion, where it feels that it can unilaterally alter the status quo across a whole range of flashpoint issues in its own favour.

It is vitally important to remember, in any analysis of the cross-Strait relationship, that China’s recent aggressive self-assertion is the single most important factor. To ignore the fact that China is hardening its diplomatic posture overall, solely through its own agency, bypasses the most important truth of the current strategic picture – that Xi’s vision for the future of the People’s Republic of China is the primary, and in many cases, the only causative factor in much of the strategic tension between China and its neighbours, including and especially Taiwan.

The Most Important Factor Hardening China’s Stance on Taiwan

By David Cheng-Wei Wu

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/05/17/the_most_important_factor_hardening_chinas_stance_on_taiwan_1032118.html?mc_cid=edae415832&mc_eid=70bf478f36

And that is China itself.

Tarik Solmaz’s recent article in The Interpreter, Three factors hardening China’s stance on Taiwan, provided an incisive snapshot of three of the factors aggravating Beijing’s aggressive grey zone actions against Taiwan in recent times.

But I’d take issue with one concerning aspect of Solmaz’s overall analysis. His thesis appeared to suggest that Taiwan, through its pursuit of ordinary diplomatic business, was in some way causing the hardening of China’s position. That may not have been his intention, but by picking three geopolitical factors in isolation, without delineating the larger frame of reference, and in the context of naming aggravating factors as causative, it creates the strong suggestion that Taiwan is somehow responsible for the constant harassment and grey zone operations being conducted against it. In other words, it leaves the impression of Taiwan is a troublemaker.

I certainly agree that Taiwan’s steadfast maintenance of its liberal democracy under China’s military and economic coercion, its participation in international organisations, and its ordinary diplomatic pursuit are all aggravating factors in China’s recent shift into intransigence and absolutism. Where I disagree, however, is in the suggestion that these factors are causative.

Neither democratic Taiwan nor authoritarian China is subordinate to the other. This has long been an internationally recognised fact. Taiwan has governed itself independently in a manner very different from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), interacted with the international society, and pursued like-minded partnerships. Taiwan’s presidential election held in January showcased its full-fledged democratic system and its people’s determination to safeguard their way of life. This stands to highlight fundamental differences in core values across the Taiwan Strait.

China coined the mantra “reunification”, as their ultimate political goal aiming to annex Taiwan. China’s expansionist intention is the single most decisive factor in the hardening of its stance on Taiwan. This being the case, democracies have collectively on several occasions reiterated the importance of cross-Strait peace, including via joint military drills such as Balikatan (meaning “shoulder-to-shoulder”) involving Australia, the United States and the Philippines, and US President Joe Biden signing the Supplemental Appropriation Act of 2024 to aid Taiwan through foreign military financing. This has showcased international support for Taiwan in its indefatigable efforts to preserve the peace over the Taiwan Strait, and it is internationally recognised that China is the authoritarian regime with motivations and plots to alter the status quo and jeopardise the security of the Indo-Pacific region.

It is a truism to state that Xi Jinping’s China is a very different regime to the administrations which preceded his. It hardly needs pointing out that China’s stance on many issues has hardened significantly since his accession to power, with the revanchist “Great Chinese Rejuvenation” ideological shift that he and his government have pursued. China’s position has hardened on every single one of its border disputes. The best example is that China has kept escalating regional tension in the South China Sea to pursue its relentless expansionism. And just recently, the CCP saw fit to unilaterally introduce the M503 flight path, imperiously sweeping away a 10 kilometre safety buffer and endangering all other air traffic carriers in the vicinity. Taiwan’s pursuit of business as usual cannot possibly be a causative factor in all of these significant increases in China’s national assertiveness.

China’s infringements do not stop at Taiwan nor the South China Sea. The Cyber Threat Report 2022-2023 issued by the Australian Signals Directorate points out that “Volt Typhoon”, a Chinese state-backed hacking group, is targeting Australia’s critical infrastructure. It’s yet more proof that China has its own agenda to cause such unrest, and that cannot be attributed to other countries.

So, what is crucially missing from the “three factors” put forward by Solmaz that is hardening China’s stance on Taiwan is China’s longstanding and independently taken decision to toughen its stance on just about everything. It is obvious to the international society that China has entered a phase of self-assertion, where it feels that it can unilaterally alter the status quo across a whole range of flashpoint issues in its own favour.

It is vitally important to remember, in any analysis of the cross-Strait relationship, that China’s recent aggressive self-assertion is the single most important factor. To ignore the fact that China is hardening its diplomatic posture overall, solely through its own agency, bypasses the most important truth of the current strategic picture – that Xi’s vision for the future of the People’s Republic of China is the primary, and in many cases, the only causative factor in much of the strategic tension between China and its neighbours, including and especially Taiwan.

David Cheng-Wei Wu is one of Taiwan’s top career diplomats in Australia. He commenced his diplomatic journey as a Desk Officer in the Department of European Affairs at MOFA in 2004, then advanced to serve as Third Secretary at the Embassy of the ROC (Taiwan) in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (2006-2009) and later as Consul at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago, United States (2009-12).

12. US postured to lose without a Standing Combined Joint Task Force in INDOPACOM

This is quite an indictment of our command structure(s).

Excerpt:

In other words, INDOPACOM has no means of orchestrating a synchronized Joint All Domain campaign to absorb the blow, then launch a devastating counter-offensive operation against the PLA — which has to be so effective it keeps China from considering the nuclear option. We stand postured to lose our first large-scale conventional battle against the PLA.

US postured to lose without a Standing Combined Joint Task Force in INDOPACOM - Breaking Defense

In this op-ed, John D. Rosenberger discusses the need for a Standing Combined Joint Task Force to face the China threat.

breakingdefense.com · by John D. Rosenberger · May 16, 2024

Adm. Samuel Paparo arrives for the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command change of command ceremony presided over by Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III on Joint Base Pearl Harbor Hickam, May 3, 2024. During the ceremony, Adm. Samuel Paparo assumed command from Adm. John Aquilino, who retired with 40 years of service in the Navy. (DoD Photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jack Sanders)

Earlier this month, retired Army officer John D. Rosenberger wrote in Breaking Defense about the need for US Indo-Pacific Command to tackle the Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) challenge in the Pacific. In this companion piece, Rosenberger raises concerns about the other half of the equation: a Standing Combined Joint Task Force positioned specifically for the China threat.

If Beijing wants to execute a first strike and seize Taiwan, the ideal time might be right now, when INDOPACOM has no Standing Combined Joint Task Force (SCJTF) trained, poised, and ready to immediately employ the combat power of its Component Commands to defeat the PLA’s effort. Should this occur, INDOPACOM chief Adm. Samuel Paparo would have to form an ad hoc operational CJTF that would take weeks to assemble and prepare for combat.

In other words, INDOPACOM has no means of orchestrating a synchronized Joint All Domain campaign to absorb the blow, then launch a devastating counter-offensive operation against the PLA — which has to be so effective it keeps China from considering the nuclear option. We stand postured to lose our first large-scale conventional battle against the PLA.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Paparo just took over at the command this month, and with a new commander should come a new way of doing business. Specifically, Paparo should look to create a permanent SCJTF, specifically postured for a China scenario.

Even Congress recognizes this imperative requirement. In the FY23 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Congress directed the SECDEF to create a fully equipped and persistent operational Joint Task Force within INDOPACOM. A year later, in the FY24 NDAA, Congress directed the SECDEF to send Congress his implementation plan to bring this Combined Joint Task Force to life.

Two years later, in testimony before Congress last month, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated, “What I’ve asked my team to do is look at this and do an assessment to make sure that we get it right, and we understand the operational and cost issues associated with this.” In non-Pentagon speak, we’re going to study it some more and kick the can down the street.

Granted, DoD has announced it is standing up a new operational Joint Task Force-Micronesia, under the command of a two-star admiral, with responsibility for the homeland defense of Guam, the US Commonwealth of Northern Marianas Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Pulau — our partner nations along the first island chain. While this may satisfy political interests to secure basing rights where we need them, this is not the type of warfighting organization that Congress directed the SECDEF to form.

Although Congress chose the wrong Joint doctrinal term in its directive two years ago, its intent was clear. Congress directed the SECDEF to establish a SCJTF, led by a four-star commander, poised and ready to command, orchestrate, and synchronize the employment of the Combined Joint forces allocated to the INDOPACOM theater.

For clarity, doctrinal definitions are important. In Joint doctrine, “Operational JTFs are the most common type of JTF and are established in response to a SECDEF-approved military operation or crisis … a Standing JTF is a JTF originally established as an operational JTF, but that has an enduring mission that is projected to continue indefinitely.” Clearly, there is no military operation or crisis ongoing in the INDOPACOM AOR, as yet, therefore a SCJTF aligns with Congressional intent.

Let’s cut to the chase. If the PLA chose to launch a first strike to seize Taiwan, Paparo would be compelled set up a CJTF on the fly, in the chaos of war, with no time for Crisis Action Planning. In other words, he will have to form a “pick up” team so to speak, cobbled together from personnel and equipment within his Component Commands, augmented by specialists across all Services, Allies, and other government agencies.

The problem is that the US military’s ability to do this quickly is poor. Historically, this process has taken Combatant Commands months to complete. INDOPACOM and other Combatant Commands were never designed to be warfighting headquarters; conducting large-scale, combat operations to protect America’s interests in the region was not what was envisioned when the COCOM structure stood up in 1986.

It’s difficult to understate how serious this is. The business of mastering the complex operational-level warfighting tasks necessary to defeat the combined forces of the PLA cannot be achieved without a stable command and staff team that has trained together tirelessly to develop and sustain proficiency in these tasks. Strangers, however competent, thrown together to form an ad hoc operational CJTF won’t cut it. Conducting synchronized, Joint All-Domain Operations at CJTF-level is a tough, complex, uncompromising business involving the orchestration of thousands of moving pieces. It is no place for amateurs.

For example, the ability to collect, analyze and disseminate actionable intelligence, the ability to employ the full array of Joint sensors throughout the Joint Operations Area to find high-payoff targets, the ability to mass lethal and non-lethal effects against these targets at the right time and place, while protecting forces and critical facilities from enemy counterstrikes, hinges on a mastery of joint combined arms synchronization — the most complex of all operational and tactical warfighting tasks. The skill and ability to do this takes endless training and practice. Only continual Combined/Joint, multi-echelon training, and plenty of it, can transform the combat potential of a SCJTF into a dominant force that can withstand first strike, rally quickly to seize the tactical and operational initiative, then transition to counter-offensive operations — the only means of achieving victory against the PLA.

Frustratingly, we see the opposite approach in INDOPACOM training exercises today. INDOPACOM typically tasks one of its component command headquarters to serve as a temporary operational JTF or CJTF for training exercises, e.g., Headquarters, US Army Pacific or Headquarters, III Marine Expeditionary Force. None of these and other Component Command headquarters are fully staffed, trained, and equipped to serve as an operational CJTF under combat conditions. All are cobbled together for exercise purposes, all requiring substantial augmentation from other Component Commands, Allies, and national agencies to perform the role of a CJTF for a typical two-week training exercise. Moreover, they are given 18-24 months to prepare for each exercise.

This approach — forming temporary CJTFs using Component Command headquarters as a base — guarantees that few members of the temporary CJTF staff become experts in Joint warfare nor have the knowledge of all capabilities the other services bring to the fight. At the end of each exercise, the knowledge, skills, and abilities that CJTF commanders and their staffs gain during an exercise evaporates when they return to their previous assignments, where they re-focus on parochial service interests in theater. Whatever Joint warfighting skills they develop during training decay quickly over time. High staff personnel turnover disperses the rest. Year after year, the process repeats itself.

We need to come to our senses. If the PLA launches a first strike, there will be no time to stand up an operational CJTF in the confusion and chaos of battle, much less train the organization. Forming a SCJTF now, highly trained and poised to fight, is the only solution to the PLA’s most likely course of action. A SCJTF would put teeth in deterrence forcing the Chinese to factor this formidable warfighting organization in its cost-benefit calculations.

Now is the time to reorganize and restructure INDOPACOM accordingly. And while it may feel less urgent, let’s do the same for EUCOM and CENTCOM as well. A restructure of Combatant Commands is long overdue. They were formed under strategic conditions that existed 38 years ago during the Cold War, specifically to fit the needs of their era. But that era is long gone.

Ignore the detractors within DoD who perpetually whine and argue the idea is inefficient and unaffordable. If we lose our first battle against the PLA, that will be a lame excuse.

Colonel (Ret) John D. Rosenberger served 29 years in the US Army as an armored cavalry officer and 20 years as a defense contractor at the forefront of Army and Joint modernization. For two years, serving directly for the SACEUR, he orchestrated the training of all NATO Combined Joint Task Forces in Europe in planning and executing large scale conventional operations. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of JANUS Research Group, Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense.

breakingdefense.com · by John D. Rosenberger · May 16, 2024

13. The Time for Europe to Step Up Is Now

Excerpts:

The effectiveness of the Wales Pledge in increasing European allies’ defense spending, even when accounting for international threats and domestic political economies, points to the importance of the Vilnius Pledge — making the 2 percent and 20 percent guidelines into “a floor not a ceiling” — in preparing NATO for current and emerging challenges. Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War remain uncertain — one could imagine a Ukrainian victory leading allies to believe that conventional threats in Europe have receded, while a Russian victory could lead them to seek accommodation underwritten by mutual nuclear deterrence. Neither of these specific outcomes is necessarily likely, and war in Europe may vacillate between them for some time to come.

Under such uncertainty, collective actions like the Wales and Vilnius pledges are particularly important. The Vilnius commitment means that allies have committed to collective action beyond common but uncoordinated reactions to evolutions in the threat situation in the coming years. This coordinated collective action is critically important in the face of persistent but dynamic external threats, as well as in the face of challenges posed by domestic politics within the alliance and its members.

A European commitment to the ability to lead in defending the territorial integrity of allies in Europe with U.S. forces decisively engaged elsewhere has been implicit within NATO for some time. Specifically, the NATO Defence Planning Process refers to the “50 percent” rule that “no ally should provide a contribution that represents more than half of a capability.” This has long been NATO’s capabilities “floor.” But unlike the Wales Pledge, it remains largely a non-public, implicit guideline. Best-case planning, as regards allies or adversaries, is no longer an option for NATO. Agreeing the 50 percent rule publicly at the level of heads of state and government, like the Wales and Vilnius pledges, would increase the likelihood of allies systematically complying with it, making NATO better prepared for war in Europe.

The Time for Europe to Step Up Is Now - War on the Rocks

JORDAN BECKER, DOUGLAS LUTE, AND ANDREW WEBSTER

warontherocks.com · by Jordan Becker · May 17, 2024

When former U.S. President Donald Trump indicated earlier this year that he “would encourage” Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to countries that are “delinquent,” presumably in terms of defense spending, allies expressed alarm. This trans-Atlantic burden-sharing kerfuffle is only unusual for the crassness of the language. U.S. concerns about European free-riding date back at least to the Eisenhower administration.

The time has come for European allies to carry a larger share of the burden of European defense. The era when allies could obfuscate unequal burden-sharing by claiming, for example, that increasing defense spending is “useless” to address capability shortfalls or contributions to NATO missions is over. There is simply no empirical support for these claims — defense spending correlates strongly with any meaningful measure of defense outputs. We argue, however, that harsh public criticisms like the language above are ineffective at convincing allies to spend more, while hard-won agreements like the Wales and Vilnius pledges do in fact lead to increased spending. Moreover, the severity of current security challenges makes the domestic and E.U.-level politics of such agreements more attainable.

Now is the time for NATO Europe to truly “step up” operationally and strategically. A “European Pillar” of NATO for the current security environment can emerge from a simple defense planning principle: NATO Europe must be capable of defending the territorial integrity of European allies even in a situation in which the United States is decisively engaged in conflict outside of Europe.

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Burden-Sharing Is Not Only a Trump Thing

In February 2015, Washington formally communicated to NATO allies that a significant portion of its national capabilities would be devoted to contingencies outside of Europe. Rather than address this reality by fielding the necessary capabilities themselves, non-U.S. allies simply chose to accept the risk that the portion of U.S. forces identified would not be available in a crisis. Nearly a decade later, allies should understand that demands outside of Europe have only increased, as has risk within Europe. Such risk is no longer acceptable, and European allies must be prepared to lead in the defense of Europe, regardless of who is president of the United States.

Scholars and practitioners have on occasion responded to Trumpian critiques of trans-Atlantic burden-sharing with arguments that NATO’s defense spending guidelines, to which Trump often refers, are, according to Garrett Martin and Balazs Martonffy, an inferior metric that Seamus Daniels and Kathleen Hicks argued allies should “move beyond” because it wrongly focuses on inputs. This is a mistake.

While defense outputs are surely more interesting and important than inputs like spending, they are very difficult to observe and agree upon: Are capabilities themselves outputs or merely what defense economists call “intermediate outputs?” What final outputs are countries interested in: Deterrence? Human security? These are interesting questions for economists, who continue to improve research on them. But policy should not be on pause until they are resolved.

As NATO seeks to move from burden-sharing to responsibility-sharing, defense spending remains foundational. It is clear now that there is a strong, positive relationship between defense inputs as measured by NATO and the European Union (i.e., share of gross domestic product spent on defense and share of defense budgets spent on equipment modernization, munitions, and operational activity) and a variety of important outputs. Here, we highlight three of those.

First, and perhaps most important at present, investing in readiness in the form of operating and maintenance expenditures, which also include munitions procurement and use, strongly predicts military aid to Ukraine. Not only was this the case at the outset of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but the relationship also persisted throughout 2023, as figure 1 demonstrates. A one percentage point increase in operating and maintenance spending, as a share of an ally’s gross domestic product, in one year corresponds to a 0.76 percentage point increase in that ally’s contributions to Ukrainian defense in the following year, as a share of the ally’s gross domestic product . This is a statistically significant (at the .01 level) and substantively large relationship that is not attributable to chance.

Figure 1: Operating and Maintenance Spending as a Share of Gross Domestic Product and Total Bilateral Commitments to Ukraine as a Share of Gross Domestic Product, 2022–-2023 (Source: Lanoszka and Becker, 2023)

Second, this finding echoes earlier findings that deployability and sustainability “output metrics” tracked by the European Defence Agency were also predicted by defense spending. Although NATO allies generally do not choose to release their “output metrics,” researchers are increasingly developing tools to measure defense capabilities, and those metrics also correlate well with defense spending.

Third, what figure 2 demonstrates is that material military power, defined by Mark Souva as “major naval, air and land weapons as well as nuclear weapons and ballistic missile capability,” is very well predicted by defense spending of all types, but particularly by topline defense spending as a share of gross domestic product (NATO’s 2 percent metric).

Figure 2: Defense Spending and Material Military Power (Source: Authors, based on Souva 2023 and Becker, Benson, Dunne, and Malesky, 2023)

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s conclusion that burden-sharing “involves cash, capabilities, and contributions” is inescapable: The more allies spend on defense, the more material capabilities they possess, and the more they have contributed to alliance priorities like support for Ukraine. Allies wishing to argue that their efficient defense enterprises yield outputs that belie their inputs should simply make their nonclassified output metricsavailable to the public.

Finally, conceptual critiques regarding fuzzy definitions and what Der Spiegel called “accounting tricks” are themselves fuzzy. NATO explains that “since 1963, [its defense spending data] has formed a consistent basis of comparison of the defence effort of Alliance members based on a common definition of defence expenditure.” We do not have to take NATO at its word, however, because the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) measures defense spending independently of NATO, and the two organizations’ figures match up quite closely.

Figure 3 shows how tightly and consistently correlated NATO’s and SIPRI’s defense spending figures have been across the decades. For each year and each country, SIPRI’s figures are on the X axis and NATO’s on the Y axis. For each decade, the regression coefficient is essentially 1, meaning the figures are nearly the same, with most observations tightly clustered along upward sloping lines with slopes of about 1.

Figure 3: NATO and SIPRI Defense Spending Data, by Decade (Source: Authors, based on SIPRI and NATO data)

There are some outliers in figure 3, and they are often from a handful of countries — namely Greece, Turkey, and Portugal. Figure 4 compares the NATO and SIPRI defense spending figures by country over time and includes those three countries alongside a sampling of other countries, including Germany, recently singled out for “accounting tricks.” Even when visualized this way, and despite some gaps for Portugal and Greece, the NATO and SIPRI spending datasets are consistent with one another and become more so over time. Between the validation of NATO figures by the International Secretariat and other allies as part of the NATO Defence Planning Process, and external validation by SIPRI, analysts can be confident that these figures do indeed enable what NATO correctly refers to as a “consistent basis of comparison” both over time and across countries.

Figure 4: NATO and SIPRI Defense Spending Data, by Country: Albania, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuania, Netherlands, Portugal, Turkey, United States (Source: Authors, based on SIPRI and NATO data

Berating Allies Does Not Improve Burden-Sharing

Claims such as Daniel Kochis’ that Trump’s “laser-like focus on inadequate defense spending” improved burden-sharing are just as wrong as claims that European defense spending is already sufficient or that inputs are unrelated to outputs. When, as one of us observed while serving in Brussels, U.S. representatives suggested to European allies in the winter of 2016 that they might consider moving toward U.S. positions on burden-sharing prior to the Trump inauguration, allies were nonplussed. This lack of response to U.S. executive criticism appears to be borne out by the historical data.

Figure 5 visualizes that Trump’s language on NATO was unusually negative among U.S. presidents, but figure 6 demonstrates that — at best — Trump presided over a continuation of a trend of increased spending established after the 2014 Wales Summit. Conversely, mean equipment spending (NATO’s key 20 percent metric) declined from 2019 to 2020 during Trump’s presidency.

The difference in tone, between, say, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ 2011 speech in Brussels — in which he shared critical “views in the spirit of solidarity and friendship, with the understanding that true friends occasionally must speak bluntly with one another for the sake of those greater interests and values that bind us together”— and Trump’s threats to abandon “delinquent” allies accused of “chronic underpayments” is distinct. Harsh language is not associated with positive effects on trans-Atlantic burden-sharing and may even provoke, as Kathleen Powers and Dan Altman found, “reactance,” in which countries galvanize resistance in response to the perception that outside pressure has infringed on their ability to make choices. In practical terms, this means that aggressive or insulting external demands make it harder for national leaders to manage the domestic politics of increasing defense spending — Trump’s singling out of Germany amid personal attacks on Chancellor Angela Merkel made her task before the Bundestag and the German people harder, not easier.

Figure 5: Positive, Negative and Ambivalent Language about NATO, by U.S. President (Source: Becker, Kreps, Poast, and Terman, 2023)

Figure 6: Disaggregated Military Expenditures by Year, Non-U.S. NATO, 1985–2023 (Source: Becker, Benson, Dunne, and Malesky, 2024)

So, despite assertions to the contrary, tough talking allies is at best ineffective and may even make it harder for allies to increase defense spending during times of (relative) peace. Until very recently, domestic political economies and institutional factors at the NATO and E.U. levels appeared to have much more significant relationships with European defense spending than external threats — whether those threats came verbally from U.S. presidents or physically from state or nonstate actors.

Threats Matter, but in Complicated Ways

It is easy to argue, as one of us has, that neither Trump nor President Barack Obama drove European defense spending up, but Russian President Vladimir Putin did. There is ample evidence that European allies are alarmed by Russia’s wars of aggression, and one might intuit that such alarm would cause increases in defense spending. But it is far from obvious how threatening behavior translates into threat perceptions, and how those threat perceptions translate into material action by threatened allies. Differences in actual behavior among allies with similar geostrategic positions provide evidence for the ambiguity of these relationships.

Canonical work in international relations focuses on threats as drivers of state behavior, including in alliances. But this relationship is very complicated to identify empirically, with threats’ effects difficult to disentangle from other factors, and often conditional on interactions with those factors. There is no evidence that defense spending correlates linearly or monotonically with threats, regardless of how those threats are measured.

A more realistic way to think about threats affecting alliance behavior is by conceptualizing threat perception at the level of individual allies rather than aggregate threat behavior and capabilities and thinking about structural breaks in those threat perceptions. It would be difficult to argue that Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine and the Islamic State’s proclamation of its caliphate in the months leading up to the Wales Pledge did not help enable allies to agree to it. Such conditions were not decisive but were catalyzing, enabling the alliance to formulate a collective response, even when allies have threat “awakenings” at different times and on different scales.

Figure 7 is suggestive on this front. U.S. defense spending shifted dramatically upward from 2001, then many allies shifted upward after 2014, Slovakia after 2018, and nearly all allies save the United States after 2022. Such breaks in spending may be associated with breaks in threat perception (i.e., the United States after 9/11, and European allies after Russian aggression in 2014 and 2022).

Figure 7: Structural Breaks? (Source: Authors, based on NATO data)

Future research may evaluate such possible structural breaks in defense spending along with similar breaks in threat perception. Current research, however, indicates that allied publics do respond to information about threats by altering their preferences about fiscal tradeoffs. The Italian public, for example, is generally believed to have distinctly unfavorable views toward defense spending, and particularly “guns versus butter” tradeoffs. Italian officials indicated in 2016 that Italy — despite having agreed at Wales to increase defense spending and specifically to increase equipment spending — would exclude some new military shipbuilding projects from its accounting of military equipment expenditures in the NATO Defence Planning Process because the Italian public would find such expenditures objectionable in a time of fiscal retrenchment.

An original survey experiment, however, fielded in Italy just prior to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, found that Italian respondents were more inclined to favor military spending when given information about the Russian threat, and that despite general public skepticism about defense spending in Italy, such information mitigates this skepticism, even when respondents are considering high debt burdens. So, it is possible that structural breaks in the threat environment, to the extent that such breaks are occurring, will yield concomitant structural breaks in attitudes toward and behavior regarding defense spending.

Making Institutions Work

NATO allies should not, however, count on threats advertising themselves far enough in advance to prepare for them with appropriate investments. Instead, they should purchase insurance against threats before they are apparent, assuming that Russia’s initial bungling of the Ukraine invasion is an exception rather than a rule. While such preparation is not automatic, it is attainable through careful diplomacy and management of institutions. NATO the organization enables allies to coordinate defense investments, which mitigates tendencies toward free riding, rather than encouraging them.

In short, the Wales Pledge to “reverse the trend of declining defence budgets” and “aim to move towards” 2 percent (of gross domestic product on defense) and 20 percent (of defense spending on equipment modernization) guidelines “within a decade” was effective in eliciting greater spending from allies than would have been the case in its absence. Figure 8 visualizes important evidence demonstrating that Denmark and Norway increased defense spending much more significantly and rapidly after 2014 than did Finland and Sweden, which faced nearly identical (if not more challenging) international situations and threat vulnerability but were not (at the time) NATO allies.

This phenomenon strongly suggests that the Wales Pledge itself had a significant effect on its signatories. Of course, the pledge itself was at least in part enabled by Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea. Further evidence of the effect of the Wales Pledge is the difficulty allies had in agreeing to the pledge in 2014, with reluctant nations having what one NATO official referred to as “temper tantrums” before finally relenting. If allies did not expect to be bound by the pledge, they would have instead shrugged their shoulders, agreed, and ignored it. The pledge was initiated, moreover, by then–Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen himself well before Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea, and the differing responses of NATO and non-NATO allies make it clear that increased threat from Russia alone was not enough to change behavior.

Figure 8: Slope Charts, Nordic Countries, Pre-and Post-Wales (Source: Becker 2024)

The effectiveness of the Wales Pledge in increasing European allies’ defense spending, even when accounting for international threats and domestic political economies, points to the importance of the Vilnius Pledge — making the 2 percent and 20 percent guidelines into “a floor not a ceiling” — in preparing NATO for current and emerging challenges. Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War remain uncertain — one could imagine a Ukrainian victory leading allies to believe that conventional threats in Europe have receded, while a Russian victory could lead them to seek accommodation underwritten by mutual nuclear deterrence. Neither of these specific outcomes is necessarily likely, and war in Europe may vacillate between them for some time to come.

Under such uncertainty, collective actions like the Wales and Vilnius pledges are particularly important. The Vilnius commitment means that allies have committed to collective action beyond common but uncoordinated reactions to evolutions in the threat situation in the coming years. This coordinated collective action is critically important in the face of persistent but dynamic external threats, as well as in the face of challenges posed by domestic politics within the alliance and its members.

A European commitment to the ability to lead in defending the territorial integrity of allies in Europe with U.S. forces decisively engaged elsewhere has been implicit within NATO for some time. Specifically, the NATO Defence Planning Process refers to the “50 percent” rule that “no ally should provide a contribution that represents more than half of a capability.” This has long been NATO’s capabilities “floor.” But unlike the Wales Pledge, it remains largely a non-public, implicit guideline. Best-case planning, as regards allies or adversaries, is no longer an option for NATO. Agreeing the 50 percent rule publicly at the level of heads of state and government, like the Wales and Vilnius pledges, would increase the likelihood of allies systematically complying with it, making NATO better prepared for war in Europe.

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Jordan Becker, Ph.D., is an Army officer, a professor at West Point, and director of the Social Science Research Lab at West Point.

Douglas Lute is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and served as the U.S. Ambassador to NATO from 2013 to 2017.

Andrew Webster is an Army officer and instructor of economics at West Point.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not represent those of the U.S. Military Academy, the U.S. Army, the Department of Defense, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Glenn Fawcett

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Jordan Becker · May 17, 2024

14. Advantage Defense: Artificial Intelligence at the Tactical Cyber Edge

Excerpt:

There are valuable roles for AI to play in cyber operations. As Jenny Jun recently described it—with admirable brevity—the effects of AI in the cyber domain will be “sharper swords, tougher shields.” On the offensive side, though, those roles remain small for now, as Microsoft and OpenAI observed, and ultimately might not make offensive cyber operations relevant at the tactical level. Much of AI’s value today lies in defensive cyber operations. As a cyber analyst, I have access to hundreds of billions of new records per day—a prime target for machine learning. When paired with improved warning intelligence, also through machine learning, this technology presents an opportunity to drastically reduce the amount of time threat actors go undiscovered—or even neutralize a campaign before it starts. An analyst support tool, built on top of a large language model, could further accelerate my pace of analysis. In the lead up to those operations, AI could help lessen the crushing burden of building and running training. Unlike many lofty ideas that over-promise and under-deliver, these goals are realistic and achievable with the resources line units have today. We say we want innovation. Here is the opportunity; we must seize it. This is how we can move toward meaningful use of AI at the tactical cyber edge.

Advantage Defense: Artificial Intelligence at the Tactical Cyber Edge - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Szewczyk · May 17, 2024

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In 2019, Rudy Guyonneau and Arnaud Le Dez captured a common fear in a Cyber Defense Review article titled “Artificial Intelligence in Digital Warfare.” “The question of AI now tends to manifest under the guise of a mythicized omniscience and therefore, of a mythicized omnipotence,” they wrote. “This can lead to paralysis of people fearful of having to fight against some super-enemy endowed with such an intelligence that it would leave us bereft of solutions.” With the release of ChatGPT in 2022, it looked like that fear had come true. And yet the reality is that AI’s use as an offensive tool has evolved incrementally and not yet created this super-enemy. Much of AI’s real value today lies in the defense.

As Microsoft and OpenAI recently explained, today we see threat actors using AI in interesting but not invincible ways. They found five hacker groups from four countries using AI. At first, the groups used large language models for research, translation, building tools, and writing phishing emails. Later, Microsoft saw the tools suggesting actions after a system had been hacked. Although some argue that modern models could take on more, that seems premature. In stark contrast to fear that AI would unleash a wave of robot hackers on the world, these actors used it for mundane tasks. Defensive cyber forces, on the other hand, could use AI technology that exists today to meaningfully improve cyber defenses in four key ways: accelerating the pace of analysis, improving warning intelligence, developing training programs more efficiently, and delivering more realistic training scenarios.

First, endpoints and network sensors create billions of events per day across the Department of Defense Information Network. Today, “data overload” is not just a theoretical danger. It is a given. As Guyonneau and Le Dez pointed out, though, volume is only half the battle. Cyber analysts must also grapple with “techniques and strategies [that] evolve at a frantic pace, the former through the exigence imposed by early experiences in the field and the rate of technological development, the latter as our understanding of the stakes grows.” It is not just the volume of data in the fifth domain that confounds understanding, but its complexity as well. This ocean of uncertainty is a prime target for two of the most common forms of AI, machine learning and large language models.

Machine learning won’t turn data into knowledge by itself, but it can speed up analysis. These models might not know why an endpoint acts the way it does, but they can spot weird activity. At scale, they shift the burden of sifting through millions of logs onto a computer. As a result, people spend less time searching for the digital needle in the cyber haystack and more time on complex investigations. The challenge of training, tuning, assessing, using, and parsing the output of these algorithms, though, means that few use them well, if at all. Large language models can help. ChatGPT or the open-source Llama 3, for instance, can handle these tricky steps. Instead of coding a support vector machine, I can ask ChatGPT to “Build a support vector machine with this sample data.” Instead of sifting through pages of documentation to tune hyperparameters, I can ask Llama 3 to tune them. Tasks that once took data scientists hours can now take an eager analyst just minutes.

Large language models could also accelerate the pace of analysis as the backbone for analyst support tools. Cyber analysts start many investigations based on opaque alarms. For example, an alert that “Trojan:Win32” malware could have infected an endpoint might entail hours of work just to gather basic information. A large language model could instead create a brief report that explained the alert, assessed suspect files, collected facts about the host that raised the alarm, and offered next steps for the investigation. The prominent threat hunting and incident response firm Red Canary already does this with what it calls “GenAI agents.” Externalizing mundane tasks like these would drastically accelerate the pace of analysis.

As a stepping stone between manual and semiautonomous investigations, one of my projects used large language models to build analyst playbooks. These playbooks guide junior analysts to approach complex investigations in a similar way as their more experienced counterparts do. They promote analytic rigor. The process of researching, understanding, and then creating detections and investigation strategies for such a vast array of malicious activities, though, takes months. Over the years I have seen many pursue this lofty goal yet inevitably fail. Using large language models and a bit of Python, though, I built a library of over six hundred playbooks—one for each technique in MITRE’s ATT&CK matrix, a taxonomy of malicious actions in the cyber domain—in a few hours.

Second, machine learning could also help derive meaning from internet-wide scanning data for improved warning intelligence. The intelligence cycle has struggled to keep pace with the cyber domain. Many reports on servers used to launch attacks or control malware implants, for example, arrive far too late to do any good. They provide interesting but seldom actionable information. By finding the traits of those servers from internet-wide scans and training machine learning models to spot them, cyber analysts can use these tools on live data feeds to quickly find new malicious servers. Rather than acting on similar insights in days or weeks as reports make their way out of an intelligence cycle, this approach would operationalize intelligence at machine speed.

Third, AI could better prepare analysts for defensive cyber missions. Training, for instance, takes a lot of time and is hard to do well. I dealt with this just last year in the new 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force. Assigned to an Army service component command rather than part of the Cyber Mission Force, the unit’s large cyber formation stood up without access to the training to do its job or any plan to obtain it. We found ourselves again re-creating the wheel by building our own training program. We planned to spend over a year on this project. After some experimentation, though, we found a way to use large language models to create the entire curriculum—to include lessons plans, training material, and even some hands-on exercises and assessments—in just a few hours.

Finally, AI could also improve hands-on training. Realistic scenarios are exceedingly difficult to build, run, and maintain. So much so, in fact, that they do not exist. Michael Schwille, Scott Fisher and Eli Albright recently described the challenges they faced when they tried to implement data-driven operations—using real-world data—into an Army exercise. As Guyonneau and Le Dez pointed out in their 2019 article, though, “If the corresponding data exists and can be acquired, a cyberteammate has the capacity to simulate any type of environment, whether friendly, neutral, or adversarial.” An AI agent can handle almost everything. Where an entire team would have manually setup cyber ranges, an agent could generate code describing that cyber range and then deploy it in a common industry practice called infrastructure as code. An agent could also run realistic scenarios with synthetic actors that respond to trainees’ actions in real time. No longer must analysts suffer through small, contrived events based on canned scripts put on by under-resourced training cells.

There are valuable roles for AI to play in cyber operations. As Jenny Jun recently described it—with admirable brevity—the effects of AI in the cyber domain will be “sharper swords, tougher shields.” On the offensive side, though, those roles remain small for now, as Microsoft and OpenAI observed, and ultimately might not make offensive cyber operations relevant at the tactical level. Much of AI’s value today lies in defensive cyber operations. As a cyber analyst, I have access to hundreds of billions of new records per day—a prime target for machine learning. When paired with improved warning intelligence, also through machine learning, this technology presents an opportunity to drastically reduce the amount of time threat actors go undiscovered—or even neutralize a campaign before it starts. An analyst support tool, built on top of a large language model, could further accelerate my pace of analysis. In the lead up to those operations, AI could help lessen the crushing burden of building and running training. Unlike many lofty ideas that over-promise and under-deliver, these goals are realistic and achievable with the resources line units have today. We say we want innovation. Here is the opportunity; we must seize it. This is how we can move toward meaningful use of AI at the tactical cyber edge.

Captain Zachary Szewczyk commissioned into the Cyber Corps in 2018 after graduating from Youngstown State University with an undergraduate degree in computer science and information systems. He has supported or led defensive cyberspace operations from the tactical to the strategic level, including several high-level incident responses. He currently serves in the 3rd Multi-Domain Task Force.

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

Image credit: NORAD/NORTHCOM Public Affairs

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Zachary Szewczyk · May 17, 2024

15. How Do Alliances End?

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And lastly, never underestimate an adversary’s efforts to prevent, degrade, or break alliances. Let’s call in the Sun Tzu/Clausewitz tag team once again. It’s commonplace within professional military education to insist that our opponent gets a vote in the success of our strategy and will doubtless cast its vote No. But the opposite is true as well. We will vote No on the success of the opponent’s strategy. When alliances of disparate opponents face off, chances for mischief-making are legion. So says Sun Tzu and his injunction to shatter hostile alliances.

Never neglect interaction between competitors bent on thwarting each other.

For his part, Clausewitz might opine that each contestant can manipulate the cost/benefit calculations that animate its opponent to wage war. It can try to dishearten the opponent, convincing the leadership that its hope is forlorn. Or it can try to persuade hostile leaders that if a triumph is either entirely beyond their means or beyond the means they are prepared to spend on the enterprise, they should stand down by cost/benefit logic. Alliances will go back and forth until . . .

Fuggedaboutit.

How Do Alliances End?

The United States’ standing in the world hinges on alliances and fellowships of all types—chiefly in the rimlands and marginal seas ringing the Eurasian supercontinent. America has no strategic position in the rimlands without them.

by James Holmes

The National Interest · by James Holmes · May 15, 2024

So I winged out to Chicago last month for a symposium at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library, across Michigan Avenue from the justly famed Art Institute of Chicago. My panel reviewed “Global Partnerships & Treaties.” This is a critical topic. After all, the United States’ standing in the world hinges on alliances and fellowships of all types—chiefly in the rimlands and marginal seas ringing the Eurasian supercontinent. America has no strategic position in the rimlands without them.

It can accomplish little in the place that matters most.

Nor is this lost on antagonists. They grok how much the United States depends on multinational leagues. That’s why they are doing their darnedest to degrade or break existing U.S. alliances, coalitions, and partnerships and forestall new ones. At present every body of water adjacent to the Eurasian periphery is potentially or actually embattled, from the Baltic Sea to the Red Sea to the Sea of Japan and everywhere in between. As geopolitics maven Nicholas Spykman pointed out eight decades ago, the United States has no access to the rimlands without command of waters lapping against the rimlands.

Without access it cannot carry on commerce. Nor can it wield diplomacy and military might to prevent a hostile hegemon or alliance from gaining control of the rimlands and constituting a threat to the Western Hemisphere. Maritime access is precious beyond price.

Here endeth the geopolitics sermon. During the Q&A in Chicago our panel chairman raised an intriguing question, riffing on Lord Palmerston’s oft-cited maxim that nineteenth-century Great Britain had no permanent allies, only permanent interests. (Palmerston hastened to add that Albion had no perpetual enemies either.) It may be that’s a general rule. Britain founded or joined alliances when collaborating suited its interests, chiefly in shaping events on the continent of Europe. Alliances expired their shelf-lives when they no longer suited British interests. In Palmerston’s view alliances, coalitions, and partnerships are temporary arrangements. Yet those who build, maintain, or study alliances tend to put the accent on what unites them and sustains them—not how they end.

So how do alliances end?

My go-to work for puzzling through such things is an old International Security essay by Harvard professor Steven Walt, titled “Alliance Formation and the Balance of World Power” (subsequently expanded to book form as The Origins of Alliances). To oversimplify, Walt discerns three types of adhesives that bring together alliances. He is a consummate international-relations realist, so power and national interests stand above all other factors. He seems to vest little faith in lesser adhesives while conceding they do exist and could boost or degrade an alliance’s longevity.

According to the realist school, common interests—mainly in fending off common threats—apply the stickiest glue binding together an international fellowship. Next stickiest are political, cultural, and social affinities among the allies. A common language, political system, or heritage primes the partners to look at the strategic environment in similar ways and to discern similar strategies for managing it. Walt puts less stock in such binding agents.

For him the weakest adhesives are transactional. That is, a predominant ally could rent allies, bankrolling some common venture. Or the hegemon could strongarm them, compelling them to obey its bidding. The crucial point is that transactional alliances endure only as long as the transaction remains in force. Lesser allies skedaddle when a hegemonic ally no longer pays the rent, or when it can no longer hold them at gunpoint. In other words, when they no longer have any interest in material gain or need to worry about self-preservation.

So there you have three broad ways of projecting how an alliance could end, extrapolating from what brings it together in the first place and keeps it together (until it doesn’t). The allies’ interests could diverge, or a common threat that brought them together could retreat enough that countering it no longer demands concerted action. The partners would drift apart. Sociocultural affinities might loosen, if indeed they were that compelling to begin with. Or one well-resourced or domineering ally might no longer have the means or desire to pay off or coerce its junior partners.

Strategy grandmasters Sun Tzu and Carl von Clausewitz may not see eye to eye on everything, but they are confirmed alliance skeptics. Sun Tzu enjoins Chinese sovereigns of antiquity to comport themselves like the “Hegemonic King,” the ruler of a state so musclebound that antagonists dare not make common cause against it. In fact, the Chinese sage designates alliance-breaking as a strategy of choice. Doing so simplifies the military problem by keeping foes fragmented, and weak, and vulnerable to being overcome one by one should the sovereign see the need.

In the best case—if alliance-breakers utterly outmatch their foes on an individual basis—they could spare themselves from fighting to fulfill their ambitions. Lesser combatants might stand down rather than risk an unwinnable or unaffordable war. Winning without a fight is good.

Clausewitz breaks down the types of alliances, observing that there are hegemonic alliances and alliances of equals. The dynamics within the two genres are quite different, in large part because of the Golden Rule of alliances: namely that he who has the gold makes the rules. Outsized contributions to the common effort confer outsized influence within alliance deliberations, whereas diplomacy among peers is at a premium when members commit more or less the same resources to the endeavor.

There are also coercive and consensual alliances, as Walt points out.

Whatever the internal makeup of a fellowship, Clausewitz regards alliances, coalitions, and partnerships as fragile, halfhearted affairs. Politics is key. He maintains that one ally never attaches as much value to another’s cause as to its own. It’s not all in, and thus is unprepared to invest maximum resources in the cause for as long as it takes. That being the case, the ally makes a middling investment in the cause. And tepid allies look for the exit when the going gets tough.

Think chemistry. Chemists teach that there are two types of chemical bonds, ionic and covalent. Atoms sharing an ionic bond transfer electrons to one another, making this a bond that verges on unbreakable. Atoms sharing a covalent bond share electrons—making this a relatively soluble bond. Clausewitz would contend that covalent bonds represent the rule in international partnerships of all sorts.

They are separable.

With all of this in mind, why don’t we spitball on some candidate scenarios for how alliances end. First, and most obviously, an alliance might dissolve because it accomplished the goal behind which the allies rallied. Clausewitz made a career of fighting against France. He saw coalition after coalition dash itself against French armies, only for the very last coalition to prevail at Waterloo and lay the groundwork for what turned out to be a durable postwar order in Europe.

The allied powers made provision to cooperate to forestall the rise of another Napoleon. But this was no NATO, a standing alliance that stays together after the demise of the hostile power that united it.

Second, and closely related, an alliance can start to fracture as the endgame of a conflict approaches and the allies look to their postwar interests—interests that may be odds with their wartime allies’. Austrian foreign minister Klemens von Metternich, another protagonist in the Napoleonic Wars and their aftermath, noted that an alliance without a “strictly determinate aim” tends to “disintegrate” as national interests and purposes diverge. Solidarity comes easy when allies bestride “death ground,” to borrow from Sun Tzu. The prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind wonderfully. That’s less and less true once the alliance steps off death ground and danger is no longer mortal. Then self-interest reasserts itself—because it can.

And solidarity becomes fissile. Think about the Grand Alliance that fought World War II. Once it became apparent that the Allies were the likely victor over the Axis, Allied leaders—Josef Stalin and Winston Churchill foremost among them—started jockeying for geopolitical position in postwar Europe. Marriages of martial convenience tend to prove perishable.

The partners look to themselves.

Third, if alliances can fall victim to their own success, defeat almost always sounds the death knell for the vanquished. Defeat means the arrangement has glaringly failed at its mutual purpose. The Central Powers didn’t outlive World War I, nor the Axis World War II. Nor is that surprising. Losing big tends to discredit an alliance—especially if it loses so big that its enemies can impose their own terms. Namely terms meant to prevent the rise of another such hostile concord.

Fourth, allies sometimes agree to disband their commitment to one another without encountering either victory or defeat. The Anglo-Japan alliance of 1902 served British and Japanese interests well for a time, but they consented to dissolve the alliance within the framework of the Versailles Treaty that cemented an end to World War I.

Fifth, one or more alliance members could undergo regime change. Revolutionary change tends to bring about drastic change to national character, to a point where the country ceases to be an attractive, capable, or competent partner in the common weal. Four empires fell during World War I or its aftermath, three among the fallen Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey—and one among the victors, namely Russia. Neither wartime alliance was likely to stand amid wrenching change. The 1979 Iranian Revolution spelled an end to the U.S.-Iranian alliance. Or, in effect the Soviet Union committed assisted suicide in 1991—portending ill for the Warsaw Pact, a coercive alliance from which allies, and even Soviet republics, were desperate to flee.

Sixth, a key member state could undergo a foreign-policy metamorphosis that undermines the alliance. The United States, a newcomer to world politics, turned its back on Europe following World War I, sealing the fate of the Versailles settlement. The Carter administration abandoned Taiwan in the late 1970s, shifting U.S. diplomatic recognition from the Republic of China to the People’s Republic of China. We still struggle with the fallout of that turnabout today. Most recently U.S. president Donald Trump made dismissive noises about distancing America from longstanding commitments to NATO, Japan, and South Korea.

Sometimes unsettled domestic politics can debilitate or even gut alliance commitments.

Seventh, sometimes an alliance fades away rather than burns out. Or maybe it never fully gels. One thinks of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization and the Central Treaty Organization, meant to be NATO equivalents and implements of containment in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. A confluence of events—enmity between would-be alliance partners, disparate views of the common interest, and on and on—could render an alliance stillborn. Even if it existed in name for a time, the accord might become moot because partners did not see challenges and solutions the same way.

Eighth, one or more allies might no longer be able to contribute meaningfully to the cause. For example, demographic decline might result in material decay over time, not just depriving an ally of manpower but enfeebling its economy, its capacity for technological innovation, and other foundations of military might. That ally would become a dependent on largesse from the strong. Inability to share the burden could generate stresses within fellow allies, whose governments and societies might well resent freeriding on their own finite resources—resources that could go to other pressing priorities at home. Ultimately a breach could befall the alliance when the robust abandoned the hangers-on. This is a real possibility as demographic decline takes hold in U.S. allies in Europe, not to mention Japan and South Korea.

It’s hard to uphold commitments without the wherewithal to uphold them. And it’s hard to expect others to provide for your security when you provide little in return.

And lastly, never underestimate an adversary’s efforts to prevent, degrade, or break alliances. Let’s call in the Sun Tzu/Clausewitz tag team once again. It’s commonplace within professional military education to insist that our opponent gets a vote in the success of our strategy and will doubtless cast its vote No. But the opposite is true as well. We will vote No on the success of the opponent’s strategy. When alliances of disparate opponents face off, chances for mischief-making are legion. So says Sun Tzu and his injunction to shatter hostile alliances.

Never neglect interaction between competitors bent on thwarting each other.

For his part, Clausewitz might opine that each contestant can manipulate the cost/benefit calculations that animate its opponent to wage war. It can try to dishearten the opponent, convincing the leadership that its hope is forlorn. Or it can try to persuade hostile leaders that if a triumph is either entirely beyond their means or beyond the means they are prepared to spend on the enterprise, they should stand down by cost/benefit logic. Alliances will go back and forth until . . .

Fuggedaboutit.

About the Author: Dr. James Holmes, U.S. Naval War College

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Nonresident Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.

The National Interest · by James Holmes · May 15, 2024

16. Xi takes off the mask: The Beijing tyrant has spent 12 years wrecking China’s image

Conclusion:

In his dozen years in nearly complete control of China, Xi has exploded all illusions that the most populous nation on Earth, and its second biggest economy, can be regarded as any kind of partner for the future. He has allied himself with the world’s pariahs, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and some of its lesser nuisances and has detached itself from rule-of-law liberal democracies, which it now confronts. It has emerged as a threat comparable to or greater than was posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It is as implacable an enemy of our nation and values, and it is increasingly well armed. It also has much more ability to seduce the West, for it is the supplier of goods that ordinary people want. The Soviet Union had nothing but strength on its side. China under Xi has strength and subtlety — and inducements to nations everywhere to prefer its patronage over America’s. Xi is responsible for this. He would like to get all the credit. He should certainly get the blame.

Xi takes off the mask: The Beijing tyrant has spent 12 years wrecking China’s image - Washington Examiner

By John Schindler

May 17, 2024 5:35 am

Washington Examiner · May 17, 2024

Xi Jinping‘s recent European tour was an unprecedented spectacle in international affairs: an Asian leader was arriving as representative of a great power to lesser nations of an anxious continent. China’s strongman landed in Paris on May 5, amid diplomatic pleasantries. Behind the gift exchange, including fine French cognac, any hopes French President Emmanuel Macron harbored that the visit might reverse the deterioration in relations between Beijing and Paris, and the broader European Union, were instantly dashed. Xi cut the figure of an aggressive tough guy. In Paris, he took on the subject of Europe’s most devastating war since 1945, saying, “We oppose using the Ukraine crisis to cast blame, smear a third country, and incite a new Cold War.” He made clear that Beijing’s robust support for Moscow in the third year of Russia’s renewed aggression against Ukraine isn’t something he is willing to compromise or negotiate.

Xi concluded his tour in Hungary, another NATO member, where his reception was far warmer. Upon Xi’s arrival in Budapest on May 8, Xi was given opulent red-carpet treatment by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. Under Orbán, Hungary is seen as an illiberal troublemaker by Western elites, but perhaps because of that, it is warmly embraced by China, which deems it an ideal vehicle for Chinese investments. Xi hailed China’s “deep friendship” with Hungary, the latter’s NATO membership notwithstanding, and the two nations were as one on the subject of strategic cooperation. Orbán expressed his position concisely: “Looking back at the world economy and commerce of 20 years ago, it doesn’t resemble at all what we’re living in today. … Then, we lived in a single-polar world and now we live in a multipolar world order, and one of the main columns of this new world order is China.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic at the Serbia Palace in Belgrade, Serbia, Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

The Chinese Communist Party boss, however, reserved his warmest embrace for Serbia. This was a diplomatic love-in, with Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić offering his Chinese counterpart royal treatment. The capital Belgrade was festooned with Chinese flags, Serbian air force MiG fighters escorted Xi’s plane, and Vučić boasted that his guest, “as the leader of a great power … will be met with respect all over the world, but the reverence and love he encounters in our Serbia will not be found anywhere else.” Warm relations between Beijing and Belgrade are not new, but they have grown cozier in recent years. Chinese investment is a main driver of Serbia’s economy. Vučić explained that “the sky is the limit” when it comes to Chinese-Serbian partnership. For his part, Xi stated China’s position forthrightly: “Eight years ago, Serbia became China’s first comprehensive strategic partner in the Central and Eastern European region, and today, Serbia is the first European country to build a community of destiny with China.”

The anti-NATO and especially anti-American tone of Xi’s Balkan sojourn was deliberate and impossible to miss. Serbia still nurses grievances against the NATO alliance for the 1999 Kosovo War, which included 78 days of NATO bombardment of the Balkan country. Xi’s visit designedly coincided with the 25th anniversary of that war’s most notorious mistake, the U.S. Air Force’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, which killed three Chinese nationals and injured 20 others. Beijing has never accepted the Pentagon’s assertion that this was a terrible mistake, a targeting error. (I was involved in the Kosovo War as a senior intelligence official, and I saw no evidence that the incident was due to anything other than the fog of war.) Chinese emotions over the 1999 embassy bombing remain tangible. “The Chinese people value peace but will never allow historical tragedies to happen again,” Xi told his Serbian hosts. “The friendship forged in blood between the peoples of China and Serbia has become the common memory of the two peoples and will inspire both sides to move forward together.” In short, he implied that China and Serbia were illegally attacked by NATO and the United States, and Xi wanted to make sure both his friends and his enemy across the Atlantic got the message that it would never happen again.

Chinese nationals residing in Belgrade vandalize the already damaged door at the United States embassy in Belgrade, Thursday May 13, 1999. NATO mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade Saturday killing three people and sparking protests. (AP PHOTO/str)

Serbia is an all-purpose Chinese client state in Europe surrounded by NATO members. What is really significant is the boast of Chinese economic and political power, even by a NATO member such as Hungary (and France, less ebulliently). The unipolar world dominated by the U.S. that emerged with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, grounded in American military and economic might, hasn’t merely faded away. It is the subject of deliberate efforts by Xi to displace it. It is the target of his entire worldview and his view of himself as the Chinese leader of destiny whose historical role is to build his nation to global preeminence at the expense of the U.S. and all it stands for.

The collapse of unchallenged U.S. global leadership, after years of slow decline, was made plain by the humiliating debacle of America’s shambolic retreat from Kabul in August 2021. That strategic coda to two decades of diffident and failing American war-making in Afghanistan signaled to the world the incompetence of U.S. diplomacy and military power. Behind a brave face, Uncle Sam was revealed as weary and inept. The Biden administration’s flagrant lies about our Kabul defeat, which the president and his minions continue to peddle even now, have done nothing to counter foreign perceptions. The U.S. under President Joe Biden is seen as a declining superpower in denial. It’s not a coincidence that, just four months after our retreat from Afghanistan, Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, judging that America would not fight for Kyiv.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, meets with senior officers of the armed forces stationed in Nanning, south China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, Dec. 15, 2023. (Li Gang/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Since the debacle of Kabul, China has been notably more willing to risk confrontations with the U.S. and its military. Clashes between Chinese fighters and unarmed American and allied surveillance planes have grown more frequent and dangerous. The Chinese confront allied warships, particularly in waters close to China. Beijing under Xi is not just willing but keen to take positions and actions that put it at odds with Washington. It is constantly probing and testing, increasingly confident that Biden will blink. Washington begged for months to restore the Pentagon’s hotline to Chinese military leaders in Beijing, which the People’s Liberation Army stopped answering in 2021. Xi agreed to restart it only after Biden made a personal appeal, a modern equivalent of the ancient kowtow, to China’s leader in 2023.

Much though the Biden administration has mishandled relations with China, it must be acknowledged that Chinese belligerence dates back through previous administrations, right back, in fact, to Xi’s emergence as Chinese leader in 2012. He was a new kind of leader, much more aggressive, much more assertive of China’s imperial destiny, much more ready to undermine the impression that China wanted to join the comity of nations. For three decades, America’s political and economic elites, and those of the West generally, believed that Beijing was on a path of democratization and normalization, wanting to be a partner with the West on most issues. Pundits referred to “Chimerica” as a financial partnership grounded in mutual dependency, displacing great power competition. Mutual interest was seen as undergirding good behavior by Beijing.

Posters showing the leaders of China including President Xi Jinping and the Potala Palace are seen on the wall of a Tibetan home during a government organized visit for journalists on June 3, 2021 to a farming village in Baji village near Linzhi, Tibet Autonomous Region, China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

That was part of the reason China was granted most-favored-nation trading status in 1993, an enormous win for Beijing and critically important to China’s economic rise, early in the first term of President Bill Clinton. China’s MFN status was made permanent in 2001, early in the presidency of George W. Bush. For three decades, few in Washington of either party expressed doubts about the wisdom of assisting China in its rise to global power. Those who raised questions about whether the communist regime was really a long-term partner were in the minority no matter who was in the White House.

Whatever was plausible or otherwise before the arrival of Xi, however, it is now clear that China, under a leader more dominant than any since Mao Zedong, is a great power with aggressive ambitions and little concern for international comity, except insofar as it is temporarily useful in pursuit of long-term Chinese dominance. Xi has initiated and is pursuing a military buildup to match China’s economic achievements, including a blue-water navy to challenge America’s Pacific supremacy. Xi has his own ideas about how the world ought to work, and it’s not how Davos or Foggy Bottom likes it. Although the great man theory of history is out of favor in the West, sometimes a single leader can change the world. Comrade Xi has, unquestionably for the worse, done that.

A US soldier (C) point his gun towards an Afghan passenger at the Kabul airport in Kabul on August 16, 2021, after a stunningly swift end to Afghanistan’s 20-year war, as thousands of people mobbed the city’s airport trying to flee the group’s feared hardline brand of Islamist rule. (Photo by Wakil KOHSAR / AFP)

Since becoming Chinese Communist Party boss in 2012, Xi has led his country onto a path of confrontation, not cooperation, with the West, especially the U.S. The son of a CCP functionary who rose methodically through the party’s ranks, through thick and thin, Xi has not shied away from confrontation, even though Beijing has demurred from open warfare against the West so far, preferring more deniable methods such as espionage, mass-hacking, and political influence operations.

The contrast with Putin is significant. The Kremlin boss took power a quarter of a century ago, and Putin, who is just a few months older than Xi, just celebrated his fifth presidential inauguration. He is Russia’s czar-for-life. Nevertheless, the early years of Putin’s rule witnessed some cooperation with the West. Early on, Putin even toyed with Russia joining NATO. Putin’s hostility toward the West maturated gradually, driven by events, and only became obvious by 2008, with Moscow’s brazen invasion of Georgia. The West never had any such honeymoon with Xi, who possesses the congenital anti-Western views of many CCP higher-ups.

Above all, Xi is a party man through and through, and his tenure as the boss has featured CCP consolidation of rule. Party authority has tightened under Xi, and internal dissent isn’t tolerated much more than it was under Mao, the tyrannical founder of the People’s Republic of China. Xi frequently compares himself to Mao and, like his predecessor, encourages a party cult of personality. Commemoration of the CCP’s 100th anniversary in 2021 featured comparisons between Mao and Xi, flattering to both, while the latter has depicted himself as the party’s most important “helmsman” since Mao. Xi is not “Mao 2.0,” for he has made China a great power. There’s a saying in China that Mao achieved jianguo (establishing the new Chinese republic), Deng Xiaoping, who ruled from 1978 to 1989, achieved fuguo (enriching China), and Xi has executed qiangguo (strengthening China). It is Xi who has transformed the dragon into a global menace.

Xi’s words and deeds make it plain that his aim is global hegemony, with China replacing America in setting the international order. Behind CCP platitudes about China’s “dream of national rejuvenation” by the middle of this century lurks the reality of tianxia (all under heaven), a Sinocentric throwback to China’s ancient past, with the “Middle Kingdom” at the center of global power surrounded by vassals and client states. Xi embraces this archaic ideology as a replacement for the “rules-based international order.” He has stated tianxia as his goal many times. In 2017, he cited it as a “common destiny for mankind.”

Like Putin’s pseudo-historical fantasies about “Holy Rus,” Xi’s ramblings about tianxia are for domestic consumption. But he is saying what he believes. America’s “Manifest Destiny” is two centuries old. China’s asserted destiny reaches back millennia. Xi rejects partnership with the West, which he sees as decadent and in an advanced state of collapse. He wants China to reestablish its place “under heaven,” overseeing a new world order where authoritarian regimes are the norm and Beijing gets the respect — and unchallenged rule over much of Asia, which China sees as its geographic and ancestral right.

It’s difficult to overstate the magnitude of the Chinese spy offensive that Xi has put in place against the West. It is engaged in a full-spectrum clandestine assault that FBI Director Christopher Wray in 2020 declared was “the greatest long-term threat” to America’s future, dwarfing all other security concerns. “The FBI is now opening a new China-related counterintelligence case every 10 hours,” Wray explained, adding that “of the nearly 5,000 active counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China.”

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Few in Washington’s secret corridors of power doubt that an increasingly aggressive China will act in the second half of this decade in ways that run the serious risk of all-out war. Xi has perhaps a decade of rule left in him before age takes its toll. The clock is ticking, and Xi’s desire to reunite Taiwan with the mainland is not in doubt.

In his dozen years in nearly complete control of China, Xi has exploded all illusions that the most populous nation on Earth, and its second biggest economy, can be regarded as any kind of partner for the future. He has allied himself with the world’s pariahs, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea, and some of its lesser nuisances and has detached itself from rule-of-law liberal democracies, which it now confronts. It has emerged as a threat comparable to or greater than was posed by the Soviet Union in the Cold War. It is as implacable an enemy of our nation and values, and it is increasingly well armed. It also has much more ability to seduce the West, for it is the supplier of goods that ordinary people want. The Soviet Union had nothing but strength on its side. China under Xi has strength and subtlety — and inducements to nations everywhere to prefer its patronage over America’s. Xi is responsible for this. He would like to get all the credit. He should certainly get the blame.

John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.

Washington Examiner · May 17, 2024

17. The New Moral Resistance to Putin

Excerpts:

Ordinary Russians today—that is, not civil society, but the masses who are afraid to think and to take responsibility for their country—do not care. They continue sitting in traffic and in restaurants, talking about anything except politics, mumbling to themselves the excuses for the inexcusable that they heard on television or read in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels. This is the same general public that, in its bewilderment and fear, accepted the necessity for the “special operation” in Ukraine in 2022 and who believed that Navalny’s 2020 poisoning was staged, or perhaps a provocation by Western special services. This is what the Kremlin has been counting on: the total and all-consuming indifference of the man in the street.

There are, however, people in this apathetic crowd who are burning up on the inside with shame at what has happened to their beloved country, at the impenetrable indifference and docility of the others. These are the people who carried candles for Navalny, candles that have become the last weapons of civilized human beings. Sakharov and Navalny were very different people who lived in very different times. And they were punished by the regime in very different ways. But each became in his own era a moral authority for the thinking part of Russian society. And they have helped ensure that public opinion, however eviscerated, continues to exist, despite all attempts by the regime to gobble it up.

The New Moral Resistance to Putin

Relearning a Soviet-Era Art Amid Repression and War

By Andrei Kolesnikov

May 17, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · May 17, 2024

On May 7, as Russian President Vladimir Putin was inaugurated for his fifth term in office, no one in Russia was prepared to protest. Given the country’s protracted and costly war in Ukraine, its creeping autocracy, and now this spring a major terrorist attack and widespread floods, outsiders may have wondered why people are not taking to the streets in large numbers and calling for an end to Putin’s rule. Are Russians simply unable to think and act for themselves?

The situation is more complicated than it appears. Yes, Russian society is in a state of conformist apathy, justifying the war to itself by borrowing words given to the public by the authorities; the political opposition is in exile, in jail, or dead. Yet over the past few months, a series of incidents have quietly shown that Russia does have a civil society—that is, communities of people who are prepared for peaceful resistance to the regime. Indeed, the dynamic between free-thinking Russians and the state is much as it was in the Soviet era of stagnation during the later decades of the Cold War.

In the 1960s, Soviet dissidents made themselves known. It was hardly noticed by the general public, but the history of resistance really began in those years. These writers, scientists, and activists were not trying to overthrow the Soviet regime; they were merely seeking to force the authorities to honor the rights and principles enshrined in the Soviet constitution. For a while, the authorities did not know how to respond, because this peaceful behavior did not qualify as “anti-Soviet activity,” and yet it could not go unpunished. But then they discovered they could criminalize these actions by changing the law. So began a new wave of repression that, after a few years, quashed nearly any independent expression of civil society. By 1972 the Soviet writer and dissident Lydia Chukovskaya could write in her diary, “There is no public life or activity in Russia: the state has gobbled it all up.”

To anyone who has experienced Putin’s Russia, the process that Chukovskaya described is familiar. Today, the status of Russian civil society has never looked more precarious. Since the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, the state has relentlessly increased the number of laws criminalizing various forms of public expression—and with them, the number of prosecutions for antiwar activities. Anyone showing critical or nonconforming views might also face unofficial pressure and threats from the workplace or in public. Moreover, Putin is not content simply to revert to Soviet tactics to silence the public: he seeks to outdo them.

But as was the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this new wave of repression does not mean that dissent and civil society do not exist. Like their Soviet forerunners, independent thinkers in Putin’s Russia have learned to express themselves through other means, including and without any organization, and these were mostly solitary pickets, attending plays and concerts that obliquely criticize the current political situation, taking part in private discussions—talking in kitchens, as it was known in Soviet times—and watching anti-Putin broadcasts on YouTube. Just like their Soviet counterparts, today’s dissidents know that their victories are moral rather than political, but they are not going away. As Russia becomes ever more isolated and the psychological toll of maintaining normalcy amid a grinding war rises, Soviet-style repression may be the only thing keeping those segments of the population who are dissatisfied with the war from exploding into public outrage.

BRINGING UP THE BODIES

The fierce battle over the release of opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s body to his mother, following his death in a Siberian prison in February, lasted nine days. Fearing protests, the authorities did not want to release the body. It became a moral battle—not only for the thousands of people who dared to openly pay tribute to Navalny but also for the millions who were horrified that the authorities were holding captive the remains of Putin’s biggest political rival, the man Putin hated most. It is strange and scary to think that getting back Navalny’s body was a victory for Russian civil society.

In Soviet times, too, the authorities feared unrest during the funerals of popular figures such as the poet and novelist Boris Pasternak in 1960 and the writer Ilya Ehrenburg in 1967. Sometimes, bodies were also detained in the interest of avoiding turbulence, even if the person in question was not so well known: after the 1980 death of Nadezhda Mandelstam, the widow of the famous poet Osip Mandelstam, who had been persecuted for his lacerating criticism of Stalin and died in the gulag, the authorities briefly held on to the body, fearing that the liberal intelligentsia would turn the funeral into a rally.

Nonetheless, when the body was finally released and it was possible to have a burial, after sunset, the public was deeply moved. “Suddenly everyone—those who were right by the grave and those who were far away—lit candles, so many candles,” Nadezhda Mandelstam’s friend, the scholar Lyudmila Sergeyeva, wrote. Here is another parallel with Navalny: in his case, thousands of Russians lit candles at makeshift memorials for a man who embodied an alternative future for them. In the stifling darkness of the Putin dictatorship, the candles of civil society burn brighter.

A memorial to Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and journalist Anna Politskovskaya, Moscow, March 2024

Reuters

Looking at today’s Russia, some might be tempted to argue that such forms of solidarity are senseless. But as the Soviet era shows, this misunderstands the intent. Acts of resistance, even if they have no practical result, show society that there are people who openly oppose state violence and injustice. Consider the seven dissidents who went to Moscow’s Red Square on August 25, 1968, to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

As Anatoly Yakobson, a human rights activist, historian, and literary critic, wrote at the time, “You cannot assess such actions using common political metrics where every action should yield a direct and measurable result, a material benefit. . . . It was a moral struggle.” By the late 1960s, the demonstrations on Pushkin Square that began during the trial of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, writers who had been charged for publishing anti-Soviet books in the West, had become an annual event.

Today’s protesters have been just as dignified and restrained. They might not be clamoring at the barricades, yet there they are in the courts, receiving Kafkaesque sentences for nonexistent crimes; in the swelling ranks of victims of political persecution and extrajudicial reprisals; on the ballooning lists of state-designated “foreign agents” and “undesirable organizations.” They have in droves signed their names in support of Boris Nadezhdin, the opposition candidate who tried to run for president this year on an antiwar platform but was disqualified a month before the election. And they are honoring Navalny at sites associated with other victims of state repression: the Solovetsky Stone on Lubyanka Square in Moscow; the Wall of Grief on Academician Sakharov Avenue; and the Bolshoi Moskvoretsky Bridge, colloquially known as Nemtsov Bridge, where another man who might have become president, the liberal politician and Putin critic Boris Nemtsov, was killed nine years ago.

Moral resistance is done for oneself as much as for the public. It is important for one’s conscience, allowing one to set personal standards of moral behavior in immoral times. As Larisa Bogoraz, one of the seven dissidents of the 1968 Red Square protest, said in her final statement in court, “I faced a choice: to protest or to stay silent.” She elaborated on her decision: “To stay silent for me meant to lie.”

CONSTITUTIONAL PATRIOTS

In the Soviet Union, the rise of dissident culture was initially driven by the insight that the authorities were failing to respect the Soviet constitution and the basic rights enshrined in it. The demand that officials rectify their ways, first formulated in 1965 by the political activist Alexander Esenin-Volpin in response to the arrests of Sinyavski and Daniel, marked the beginning of the movement.

In December of that year, Esenin-Volpin organized a meeting in Red Square calling for a “fair and open trial” of the two writers. More actions followed. The next year, dissidents staged a protest calling for adherence to the constitution, again in Pushkin Square. Then, in January 1967, after Soviet authorities arrested the poet Yuri Galanskov and his friends for publishing and distributing a samizdat journal, several more dissidents set up at the square. A year after that, the so-called Trial of the Four—the case against Galanskov and three other dissidents, Alexander Ginzburg, Alexey Dobrovolsky, and Vera Lahkova—sparked a further wave of petitions and protests. By calling on the regime to follow the letter of the Soviet constitution, these people laid the foundation for human rights activists in Russia today. Indeed, the appeal to adhere to the law can be made even more strongly now, since every day the state is trampling the rights and freedoms of the people that are guaranteed in the Russian constitution.

The Soviet state’s immediate response to the protests of the late 1960s, however, was to pass new laws making it easier to crack down on dissent. Although the Soviet Penal Code already included a famous provision against “anti-Soviet” activity, it did not have provisions that specifically applied to some dissident actions, so in 1966, two more articles were concocted: Article 190-1, prohibiting the spread of knowingly false statements that defame the Soviet state and social system, and Article 190-3, banning group actions that violate public order. In the early 1970s, prosecutors made particularly wide use of Article 190 to charge dissidents, and the quality of the judicial process gradually deteriorated. Whenever dissidents were being tried, otherwise competent judges disregarded arguments, laws, and even common sense.

Russian Journalist Antonina Favorskaya in court on charges of extremism, Moscow, March 2024

Yulia Morozova / Reuters

The Putin regime has adopted the same approach. In the face of efforts by civil society to uphold basic constitutional rights, it has expanded the penal code to quash all forms of dissent, criminalizing any actions that can be related to “extremism” and “discrediting the armed forces.” Investigators, prosecutors, and judges have begun to behave like their counterparts from half a century ago. In 2022, there was a notable increase in the number of articles of the penal code dealing with political crimes. In 2023 and in the first months of this year, legislators switched their focus to enforcing restrictions that violate the “human and civil rights and freedoms” section of the constitution, including labeling individuals as “foreign agents.” The punishments now being meted out for these invented crimes are formidable: for instance, the authorities are confiscating property from alleged offenders at levels that surpass those of the 1960s.

Meanwhile, prosecutions on antiwar charges have steadily increased since the war began. By the end of 2022, according to the Russian human rights organization OVD-Info, 378 people had been charged; that number had reached 794 people by the end of 2023. This year, between January and April alone, 960 people were detained. By contrast, even in the early 1970s, when the Soviet repressive machine was at its peak, the number of convictions for political crimes was about 160 per year. If anything, the situation today is much harsher and more repressive, arbitrary, and chaotic than it was then.

Neither does this trend seem likely to end soon. Given the increasingly absurd pretexts the state is using for criminal prosecution and the resounding success of informers of all stripes, the judicial crackdown will continue to worsen. And this is apart from the alarming rise in extrajudicial repression: OVD-Info, for example, has documented such tactics as pressure in the workplace, threats, expulsion from universities and schools, destruction of property, censorship, and forced public apologies—a tactic introduced by the Kadyrov regime in Chechnya for any alleged misdemeanor against the government. There is also the continual risk of being branded a “foreign agent,” an “undesirable organization,” or an “extremist,” not to mention the authorities’ pervasive disregard for the freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of association, an approach that renders almost any public activity suspect.

REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

In the first years after Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964, repression against regime critics was comparatively mild. A number of people who were not prepared to directly confront the regime committed acts of moral resistance, such as writing open appeals to the government to advocate for a cause. A whole letter-writing movement emerged.

In February 1966, 25 writers, scholars, and cultural leaders, including many who were favored by the regime, sent a letter to Brezhnev urging him not to rehabilitate Stalin. Later that year, a group sent a letter in support of Sinyavsky and Daniel, but in that case, the signers faced serious problems at work. In 1968, leading scientists and scholars from Akademgorodok, the celebrated Soviet university town near Novosibirsk, in southwestern Siberia, signed a letter calling for the authorities to stop prosecuting the defendants in the Trial of the Four. Other podpisanty (petitioners), many of them writers and poets, also spoke out in defense of Ginzburg, Galanskov, Dobrovolsky, and Lahkova, which had consequences, although not the most serious ones: some had temporary problems with publications and references in the press. And in 1970, a letter was written in defense of the poet Alexander Tvardovsky and opposing the dismissal of the editorial board of Novy Mir (New World), the liberal journal he headed.

Another example of resistance was the legendary 1968 concert in Novosibirsk, just a few months after the Akademgorok letter, by the famous poet and bard Alexander Galich. Performing before a large, young audience, Galich sang songs that were politically highly provocative, like his “Ode to Boris Pasternak.” Toward the end of one of them, a light exploded with a loud bang. “I thought someone shot at you,” the poet Yuri Kukin, another performer, told Galich. Galich responded, “I thought the first secretary of the obkom [regional committee of the Communist Party] shot himself.” After this incident, Galich was banned from performing, but his songs remained a crucial touchstone in educated Russian circles of the time. Listening to them—and after Galich’s emigration to Western Europe, to his broadcasts on Radio Liberty—became itself an act of resistance.

Galich referred to this phenomenon as “silent resistance,” a term that might be used today to describe the feelings and behavior of millions of antiwar and anti-Putin Russians. Although it is hard to find literal analogs to Galich’s songs, many Russians have become avid watchers of YouTube videos of opposition figures and analysts, concerts by opposition rappers, and singers who are more familiar to older generations of liberal intellectuals—all of whom play the role of a kind of collective Galich.

Soviet dissident writers Yuli Daniel (left) and Andrei Sinyavsky at the opening of their trial, Moscow, February 1966

Bettmann Archive / Getty Images

During the 1960s, information spread with impressive speed: something akin to social networks formed among the intelligentsia, a process that had already begun under Nikita Khrushchev but reached its full extent in the early Brezhnev years. Most important, these activities showed that a civil society existed. They might have been underground, but they were visible, audible, and palpable. They proved that members of the Soviet public had opinions of their own.

By the latter part of the decade, these activities made the regime fear civil society. In 1967, the death of the writer Ilya Ehrenburg provoked a large public outpouring, and the state restricted access to the cemetery where he was buried. In her diary that day, Chukovskaya wrote: “They didn’t let people into the cemetery; there was a police cordon [saying], ‘Cleaning day, no entry.’” In a later entry, she noted the state’s growing paranoia about the circulation of dissident materials and literature: “Apparently there’s a real fear of Samizdat! This means public opinion has emerged.”

At the same time, the Communist Party leadership felt it was important for intellectuals to have a means to let off steam to prevent more widespread discontent. Indeed, a publication existed for precisely this purpose: Literaturnaya Gazeta (Literary Newspaper), which one of Brezhnev’s advisers is said to have described as “a sort of socialist Hyde Park,” a reference to Speaker’s Corner in London. As one of its former editors put it, the journal was “a lie of the highest quality: not for the masses, only for the intellectual reader.” It lied by drawing readers into current debates and creating the “illusion of democracy,” all the while distracting readers from what the editor called “the real problems of Soviet society.”

In Putin’s Russia, no such official outlet exists, another sign that the current regime is crueler than its Brezhnev-era counterpart. The Kremlin sees no need to allow the public to let off steam. As a result, today’s liberal intelligentsia watches Telegram channels and YouTube, the two independent platforms that have survived Moscow’s crackdown on social media—mainly because pro-Putin and pro-war voices rely on them—or they read media blocked by Putin’s regime via virtual private networks, or VPNs, to get around the censorship.

FREE THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

During the era of stagnation, as the Brezhnev years came to be called, the two most emblematic Soviet dissident intellectuals were the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov and the writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Both released manifestos and publications and achieved extraordinary international renown. But they had two very different views of the present and future.

Solzhenitsyn’s position was summarized in an anthology of articles he published in 1974 under the title From Under the Rubble. In it, he presented a moderately conservative and nationalistic view of the problems of Russia and the world and criticized Western civilization. In this way, he made clear his differences with Sakharov. In “As Breathing and Consciousness Return,” Solzhenitsyn criticized Sakharov, analyzing the latter’s liberal views from a conservative perspective. “A large swath of educated society still stagnates on these positions,” Solzhenitsyn wrote, referring to Sakharov’s famous “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom”—a view of the world that was close to universalist, human rights, and liberal consciousness.

By contrast, Sakharov sought to enlighten the Soviet leadership, believing in its rationality and cooperativeness. In the early 1960s, when he called for a prohibition on nuclear testing because of its long-term negative impact on the environment, he elicited a harsh and emotionally charged reaction from Nikita Khrushchev, who was against the idea of such a treaty but came around to it, in what became the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. Sakharov’s directness initially made Khrushchev’s successor, Brezhnev, respect him and carefully read everything that Sakharov wrote.

Solzhenitsyn argued that Sakharov overlooked “vital national forces in Russia.”

After 1968, however, instead of trying to convince the regime in Moscow, Sakharov started addressing those he believed were ready to hear him—the Soviet people and the outside world. He was right. His “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom”—his famous essay warning of the threat of nuclear weapons and arguing for the need to bring together the capitalist and communist systems—went on to reach some 20 million readers worldwide. When the essay was published in The New York Times, it was the last straw for the Soviet government, which banned Sakharov from all military work and later prevented him from leaving the country.

According to Sakharov, the obliteration of intellectual freedom by dictators in their efforts to maintain power resulted in the mental and moral degradation of society, and was therefore self-destructive. He believed that scientific progress in itself could not bring happiness unless the state and its citizens upheld moral values. Criticizing the coy anti-Stalinism of his time, which concealed what he saw as a velvet re-Stalinization, Sakharov called for the authorities to declassify all security service archives (including those of the NKVD and KGB) and to undertake a “nationwide investigation” into the crimes of the Stalin-era regime. None of this took place, of course, and such steps are even more unimaginable in today’s environment, in which Putin’s Kremlin flaunts its Stalinist lineage.

In the end, the possibility of reform was less hopeful than Sakharov imagined. In disputing Sakharov’s position, Solzhenitsyn criticized the ideas of convergence and progress and what he called the “passive imitation of the West.” Most important, Solzhenitsyn argued that Sakharov overlooked “vital national forces in Russia.” As Solzhenitsyn posited, with some foresight, “Perhaps we should recognize that the evolution of our country from one form of authoritarianism to another would be the most natural, the smoothest, the least painful path of development for it to follow?”

KEEPING THE CANDLES LIT

As both the Soviet dissident era and the evolution of Putin’s Kremlin make clear, Russia’s entire modern history can be understood as swinging between cycles of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. It is no accident that the only places it made sense for Russians to light candles in Navalny’s honor were sites commemorating victims of earlier political repression.

This is why the Putin regime deemed it so crucial to destroy and annihilate Memorial, the organization dedicated to documenting Soviet and specifically Stalin-era crimes and commemorating their victims. This is also why Putin has found it necessary to rewrite history and destroy the memory of the state’s misdeeds. Putinists are not the heirs of the Great Victory of 1945—the Soviet people’s, not Stalin’s, triumph over Hitler in World War II—that they claim to be. They are the heirs of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1938, and of his ruthless crackdown on “rootless cosmopolitans” from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.

Paying tribute to Navalny at the closed gates of Borisovskoye Cemetery, Moscow, March 2024

Reuters

Ordinary Russians today—that is, not civil society, but the masses who are afraid to think and to take responsibility for their country—do not care. They continue sitting in traffic and in restaurants, talking about anything except politics, mumbling to themselves the excuses for the inexcusable that they heard on television or read in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channels. This is the same general public that, in its bewilderment and fear, accepted the necessity for the “special operation” in Ukraine in 2022 and who believed that Navalny’s 2020 poisoning was staged, or perhaps a provocation by Western special services. This is what the Kremlin has been counting on: the total and all-consuming indifference of the man in the street.

There are, however, people in this apathetic crowd who are burning up on the inside with shame at what has happened to their beloved country, at the impenetrable indifference and docility of the others. These are the people who carried candles for Navalny, candles that have become the last weapons of civilized human beings. Sakharov and Navalny were very different people who lived in very different times. And they were punished by the regime in very different ways. But each became in his own era a moral authority for the thinking part of Russian society. And they have helped ensure that public opinion, however eviscerated, continues to exist, despite all attempts by the regime to gobble it up.

ANDREI KOLESNIKOV is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center.

Foreign Affairs · by Andrei Kolesnikov · May 17, 2024

18. General Officer Announcements (Army and Air Force)

It is not often that we see a promotion from one to three star to take command of a major command.

Excerpt:

Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael E. Conley for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as commander, Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurlburt Field, Florida. Conley is currently serving as director, Operations, Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurlburt Field, Florida.

RELEASE

IMMEDIATE RELEASE

General Officer Announcements

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3778651/general-officer-announcements/

May 17, 2024 |

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3778651/general-officer-announcements/

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III announced today that the president has made the following nominations:

Air Force Lt. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as superintendent, U.S. Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Bauernfeind is currently serving as commander, Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurlburt Field, Florida.

Army Lt. Gen. Sean C. Bernabe for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as deputy commanding general, U.S. Army Europe-Africa, Germany. Bernabe is currently serving as the commanding general, III Corps and Fort Cavazos, Fort Cavazos, Texas.

Air Force Maj. Gen. John J. DeGoes for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as surgeon general of the Air Force, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Pentagon, Washington, D.C. DeGoes is currently serving as deputy surgeon general, Office of the Surgeon General of the Air Force, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

Army Maj. Gen. Brian S. Eifler for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as deputy chief of staff, G-1, U.S. Army, Pentagon, Washington, D.C. Eifler is currently serving as commanding general, 11th Airborne Division/deputy commander, U.S. Alaskan Command, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska.

Air Force Maj. Gen. Thomas K. Hensley for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as commander, Sixteenth Air Force, Air Combat Command, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas. Hensley is currently serving as deputy commander, Sixteenth Air Force, Air Combat Command, Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, Texas.

Air Force Maj. Gen. David H. Tabor for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as deputy chief of staff, Plans and Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Pentagon, Washington, D.C. Tabor is currently serving as director of Programs, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans and Programs, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael E. Conley for appointment to the grade of lieutenant general, with assignment as commander, Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurlburt Field, Florida. Conley is currently serving as director, Operations, Air Force Special Operations Command, Hurlburt Field, Florida.

19. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 16, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-may-16-2024

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces are stabilizing the situation along the northern border in Kharkiv Oblast and that the tempo of Russian offensive operations in the area continues to decrease.
Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister Ihor Klymenko reported that Russian forces have executed civilians and taken civilians captive in Vovchansk.
Russian President Vladimir Putin likely views Russia's relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) as decisive to his effort to further mobilize the Russian economy and defense industry to support a protracted war in Ukraine.
Putin also used his meeting with Xi to promote known Kremlin narratives feigning interest in peace negotiations and a diplomatic resolution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Russian forces are reportedly able to conduct fixed-wing drone reconnaissance deep in the Ukrainian rear due to Ukraine's lack of air defense interceptors.
Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful drone strikes against a Russian defense industrial plant in Tula City on the night of May 15 to 16.
Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure since March 2024 have likely caused long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure and repeated energy blackouts.
A Russian insider source, who has previously accurately reported on Russian military command changes, claimed that senior Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials are vying for the position of Chief of the General Staff.
Kremlin and Georgian officials promoted established Kremlin information operations alleging that the West is orchestrating protests against Georgia's "foreign agent" law in order to overthrow the Georgian government.
Turkey and Russia are reportedly exploiting European Union (EU) sanctions regulations to export Russian oil to the EU, allowing Russia to continue to receive significant oil revenues to fund its war effort in Ukraine.
Russia reportedly launched a satellite as part of its program to develop a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in the weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, likely as part of Russian preparations for a future confrontation with NATO.
Russian forces recently advanced near Lyptsi, Vovchansk, Kupyansk and Donetsk City.
Several Russian opposition media outlets reported on May 16 that Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrei Kartapolov rejected a bill that would grant deferment from mobilization to certain Russian civilians, likely to support ongoing and future crypto-mobilization efforts.

RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, MAY 16, 2024

May 16, 2024 - ISW Press

Download the PDF

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, May 16, 2024

Christina Harward, Angelica Evans, Nicole Wolkov, Riley Bailey, and George Barros

May 16, 2024, 7:55pm 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 1pm ET on May 16. ISW will cover subsequent reports in the May 17 Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment.

Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces are stabilizing the situation along the northern border in Kharkiv Oblast and that the tempo of Russian offensive operations in the area continues to decrease. Ukrainian Khortytsia Group of Forces Spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nazar Voloshyn stated on May 16 that Ukrainian forces are partially stabilizing the situation in the Kharkiv direction, and the Ukrainian General Staff noted that Ukrainian forces have so far denied Russia’s tactical objectives to penetrate Ukrainian defenses within Vovchansk (northeast of Kharkiv City) and establish a foothold in the area.[1] The Ukrainian General Staff noted that Ukrainian forces have forced Russian forces to significantly decrease the tempo of their offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky noted that Ukrainian forces continue to inflict significant losses on Russian forces in the area.[2] Kharkiv Oblast Military Administration Head Oleh Synehubov stated that Ukrainian forces have stopped Russian forces’ active advance in Kharkiv Oblast and that Ukrainian forces have regained more favorable positions in some unspecified areas.[3] Synehubov added that Russian forces are transferring reserves to the area in an attempt to continue advancing.[4]

Zelensky stressed in an interview with ABC News on May 16 that the situation in the Kharkiv direction is very serious and that Ukrainian forces cannot afford to lose Kharkiv City.[5] Zelensky argued that Russia will not be able to seize Kharkiv City if Ukrainian forces receive two Patriot air defense systems to deploy to the area.[6] Russian fixed-wing aircraft have increasingly targeted Kharkiv City and its environs with glide bombs and various missile strikes in recent weeks to degrade Ukrainian defenses and prompt residents to flee the city.[7] Sufficient air defense coverage in the Kharkiv City area would allow Ukrainian forces to constrain Russian aviation operations, but only if Western countries permitted Ukraine to use the systems to intercept Russian aircraft in Russian airspace, since Russian aircraft can strike Kharkiv City without ever leaving Russian airspace.[8] Russia is leveraging Russian airspace as a sanctuary to strike Kharkiv Oblast due to prohibitions on the use of Western-provided systems to strike targets within Russia.[9]

Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister Ihor Klymenko reported that Russian forces have executed civilians and taken civilians captive in Vovchansk. Klymenko stated on May 16 that Russian forces in northern Vovchansk are preventing residents from evacuating and are holding civilians captive in basements in the settlement.[10] Klymenko stated that Russian forces have begun to execute civilians and reported that in one instance Russian forces killed a fleeing civilian who refused to follow Russian commanders’ orders.[11] The detention and summary execution of civilians is a war crime and emblematic of Russian forces‘ behavior in all occupied Ukrainian territories. The United Nations (UN) reported in December 2023 that it had documented at least 142 cases of Russian forces executing Ukrainian civilians.[12] Russian military massacres like the massacres in Bucha and Izyum are a microcosm of Russian atrocities throughout Russian-occupied areas, and the Russian military has shown no indication that it has attempted to constrain Russian forces from brutally victimizing Ukrainian civilians and committing other war crimes.[13] For almost the past year and half Russian forces have mainly been gradually advancing near small settlements that have been largely depopulated by the war, and it is notable that relatively rapid Russian tactical advances into a populated settlement were immediately accompanied by the detention and execution of civilians. Russian forces committed blatant war crimes in Bucha and Mariupol in the first months of the full-scale invasion; and over two years of fighting in Ukraine and the Kremlin's corresponding dehumanization of Ukrainians have likely inured Russian forces to such crimes. Russian attempts to seize major population centers like Kharkiv City do not just threaten Ukraine with operationally significant setbacks but also with war crimes and violations that accompany Russian occupation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin likely views Russia's relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) as decisive to his effort to further mobilize the Russian economy and defense industry to support a protracted war in Ukraine. Putin arrived in Beijing and met with PRC President Xi Jinping on May 16, and the two leaders signed a series of documents intended to recognize and deepen their bilateral cooperation.[14] Putin and Xi signed a joint statement, several agricultural and ecological agreements, an infrastructure and engineering construction agreement, and several media agreements.[15] Putin and Xi highlighted bilateral trade and economic cooperation throughout their public speeches, and Putin's delegation included several Russian officials and businessmen likely involved in Putin's efforts to further mobilize the Russian defense industry, including Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov, Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu, Federal Service for Military-Technical Cooperation Head Dmitry Shugaev, Russian aluminum company RUSAL founder Oleg Deripaska, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin, and Russian Direct Investment Fund CEO Kirill Dmitriev.[16] Belousov professed his intention to focus on integrating the Russian military's economy into the general Russian military economy during a speech on May 14, and Putin announced that Shoigu will work with the Presidential Administration's Military-Industrial Complex Commission on May 15.[17] The Russian delegation likely aimed to expand cooperation with their Chinese counterparts that will facilitate increased economic ties between Russia and the PRC. The Economist reported on April 29 that Russia's defense industry has increasingly relied on the PRC to provide dual-use goods, such as semiconductors and navigational equipment, to support arms production.[18] US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated on May 1 that PRC exports of dual-use goods to Russia have helped Russia significantly increase its defense production and that 70 percent of Russia's machine tools and 90 percent of its microelectronics are from the PRC.[19] The PRC has previously signaled concerns that its economic relationship with Russia may place PRC entities under threat of secondary sanctions, and Putin likely intends to head off these concerns as the Russian defense industry grows increasingly reliant on the PRC.[20]

Putin also used his meeting with Xi to promote known Kremlin narratives feigning interest in peace negotiations and a diplomatic resolution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Putin and Xi signed a joint statement on May 16 that alluded to Russia's support for the PRC's proposed peace plan and a possible future PRC-led negotiation to end the war in Ukraine.[21] The statement claims that both Russia and the PRC are against any efforts that prolong or further escalate the war and that both countries support a "sustainable settlement" for the "Ukraine crisis." Xi stated during a joint press conference with Putin that the PRC and Russia both perceive a political settlement as the right way to resolve the situation in Ukraine.[22] ISW has previously assessed that the Kremlin will continue to use any calls for peace negotiations to feign interest in negotiations in hopes of undermining Western support for Ukraine and prompting the West to force Ukraine into negotiations with Russia that make concessions on Ukrainian sovereignty and territorial integrity.[23]

Russian forces are reportedly able to conduct fixed-wing drone reconnaissance deep in the Ukrainian rear due to Ukraine's lack of air defense interceptors. The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) reported on May 14 that Ukraine has had to husband its diminishing supply of surface-to-air missiles (SAM), which has allowed Russian reconnaissance drones to fly more freely into Ukrainian rear areas, including over Kharkiv City, and optimize Russian forces’ reconnaissance fire complex (RFC).[24] RUSI stated that Ukraine's decreased air defense interceptor supplies have forced Ukraine to increasingly make difficult decisions between deploying air defense coverage to critical infrastructure in rear areas or to frontline areas, as ISW has repeatedly assessed.[25] RUSI noted that well-provisioned Ukrainian forces were previously able to curtail Russian reconnaissance capabilities for most of the full-scale invasion.[26] Russian forces have been conducting a large-scale air campaign against Kharkiv City as part of their offensive operations in northern Kharkiv City and have been using glide-bomb strikes to enable Russian ground maneuver in Kharkiv Oblast.[27] Russian forces notably used glide-bomb strikes to tactical effect during their seizure of Avdiivka.[28] Ukrainian forces require Western-supplied air defense interceptors in order to destroy Russian reconnaissance drones in both rear and frontline areas at scale and defeat the optimized Russian RFC that is enabling Russian tactical advances along the front.

Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful drone strikes against a Russian defense industrial plant in Tula City on the night of May 15 to 16. Ukrainian intelligence sources told several Ukrainian outlets that Ukraine's Main Military Intelligence Directorate (GUR) conducted successful drone strikes against the "Bazalt" defense industrial plant, which produces weapons and ammunition for the Russian military.[29] Footage published on May 16 purportedly shows the strike in Tula City.[30] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) claimed on May 16 that Russian forces downed two Ukrainian drones over Tula Oblast, and Bazalt denied claims that any drones struck its production facilities in Tula City.[31]

Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure since March 2024 have likely caused long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure and repeated energy blackouts. Ukraine's largest private energy operator DTEK reported energy blackouts in Kyiv City and Oblast on May 14 and stated that blackouts occur without warning.[32] Ukrainian energy company Yasno stated that Russian strikes cause Ukrainian energy operators to conduct emergency blackouts in order to balance the power system.[33] Ukrainian state electricity transmission operator Ukrenergo's supervisory board member Yuriy Boyko stated that Ukraine may experience power outages that began on May 14 until August or September 2024.[34] The Ukrainian Energy Ministry reported on May 16 that it began receiving emergency electricity from Poland, Romania, and Slovakia.[35] DTEK warned in late March that more accurate and concentrated Russian strikes are inflicting greater damage to Ukrainian energy facilities than previous Russian attacks did.[36] Russian forces will likely continue to conduct mass strikes to cause long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure as degraded Ukrainian air defense capabilities persist until US-provided air defense missiles and other Western air defense assets arrive at scale.[37] Long-term damage to Ukraine's energy grid that generates persisting energy disruptions threatens to constrain Ukrainian efforts to expand its defense industrial base (DIB).[38]

A Russian insider source, who has previously accurately reported on Russian military command changes, claimed that senior Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials are vying for the position of Chief of the General Staff. The insider source claimed on May 14 that unspecified Russian deputy defense ministers and heads of unspecified main directorates in the Russian MoD are likely competing to become Russian Chief of the General Staff, a position that Army General Valery Gerasimov has held since 2012.[39] The insider source claimed that some unspecified actors are prioritizing placing disgraced Wagner-affiliated Army General Sergei Surovikin in the position of Chief of the General Staff, but that there are other considerations for Surovikin to take other roles, and that it is too early to determine whether Gerasimov‘s position as Chief of the General Staff is coming to an end. The insider source claimed that there are three main "centers of power" within the Russian MoD. The "preservation group" reportedly consists of Russian deputy defense ministers Ruslan Tsalikov, Colonel General Viktor Goremykin, and Nikolai Pankov. The "lockout group" reportedly consists of Russian deputy defense ministers Colonel General Alexander Fomin, Army General Pavel Popov, Colonel General Yuriy Sadovenko, Alexey Krivoruchko, and Tatyana Shevtsova — all of whom the insider source claimed will likely resign. The insider source did not expound upon the designations of "preservation group" and "lockout group." The insider source claimed that the "bastions" in the Russian MoD include Gerasimov and deputy defense ministers Colonel General Yunus-Bek Yevkurov and Lieutenant General Andrei Bulyga. The insider source claimed that Bulyga will likely resign. ISW cannot independently verify any of the insider source's claims. Several Russian milbloggers and insider sources claimed on May 13 that Tsalikov and Krivoruchko submitted their resignations to former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu a week before Putin removed Shoigu as defense minister.[40]

Kremlin and Georgian officials promoted established Kremlin information operations alleging that the West is orchestrating protests against Georgia's "foreign agent" law in order to overthrow the Georgian government. Several officials from the ruling Georgian Dream party alleged that Iceland, Lithuania, and Estonia are taking "hostile" steps and trying to overthrow the Georgian government after the Icelandic, Lithuanian, and Estonian foreign ministers visited protests in Tbilisi against the "foreign agents" law on May 15.[41] Russian Federation Council Vice Speaker Konstantin Kosachev similarly claimed that the West is orchestrating protests in Georgia in order to overthrow the Georgian government and that the Georgian "foreign agents" law is necessary to protect Georgia from "externally sponsored coups."[42] Kosachev reiterated longstanding Kremlin narratives about the US government's alleged involvement in Ukrainian protests in 2013–2014. ISW assessed on May 15 that Kremlin and Georgian officials would increasingly allege that the West is attempting to interfere in Georgian affairs, and ISW has recently observed how Georgian Dream and Georgian security officials have intensified their use of established Kremlin information operation and are increasing their rhetorical alignment with Russia against the West.[43] Georgian Dream actors likely intend to purposefully derail long-term Georgian efforts for European integration, which play into continued Russian hybrid operations to divide, destabilize, and weaken Georgia.[44]

Turkey and Russia are reportedly exploiting European Union (EU) sanctions regulations to export Russian oil to the EU, allowing Russia to continue to receive significant oil revenues to fund its war effort in Ukraine. Politico reported on May 15 that the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, the Center for the Study of Democracy, and Politico's independent reporting indicate that Turkey is likely disguising the origin of Russian oil in order to exploit EU sanctions regulations that allow "blended" oil containing certain proportions of Russian oil that have undergone "substantial transformation" to enter the EU.[45] Politico stated that Russian oil imports to the Turkish ports of Ceyhan, Marmara Ereglisi, and Mersin significantly increased between February 2023 and February 2024 while these three ports' oil exports to the EU also significantly increased — "strongly" indicating that Turkey is "repackaging" large amounts of Russian oil. Politico stated that not all of the Turkish ports are "substantially transforming" Russian oil into entirely new products — as required by EU sanctions regulations — and that Turkey is "rebranding" the oil with a Turkish "certificate of origin." Politico reported that this scheme likely has generated up to three billion euros (about $3.2 billion) of revenue for Russia between February 2023 and February 2024 from these three ports alone.

Russia reportedly launched a satellite as part of its program to develop a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in the weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, likely as part of Russian preparations for a future confrontation with NATO. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on May 16 that US officials stated that Russian launched a satellite in space as part of its nuclear anti-satellite weapon development program on February 5, 2022 — 19 days before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.[46] US officials reportedly stated that the satellite Russia launched does not contain a nuclear weapon but contains components of the new weapon system that Russia is developing to destroy hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit, particularly in areas where there are many US government and commercial satellites, including SpaceX’s Starlink satellites.

Key Takeaways:

Ukrainian officials reported that Ukrainian forces are stabilizing the situation along the northern border in Kharkiv Oblast and that the tempo of Russian offensive operations in the area continues to decrease.
Ukrainian Internal Affairs Minister Ihor Klymenko reported that Russian forces have executed civilians and taken civilians captive in Vovchansk.
Russian President Vladimir Putin likely views Russia's relationship with the People's Republic of China (PRC) as decisive to his effort to further mobilize the Russian economy and defense industry to support a protracted war in Ukraine.
Putin also used his meeting with Xi to promote known Kremlin narratives feigning interest in peace negotiations and a diplomatic resolution to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Russian forces are reportedly able to conduct fixed-wing drone reconnaissance deep in the Ukrainian rear due to Ukraine's lack of air defense interceptors.
Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted successful drone strikes against a Russian defense industrial plant in Tula City on the night of May 15 to 16.
Russian missile strikes against Ukrainian energy infrastructure since March 2024 have likely caused long-term damage to Ukrainian energy infrastructure and repeated energy blackouts.
A Russian insider source, who has previously accurately reported on Russian military command changes, claimed that senior Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officials are vying for the position of Chief of the General Staff.
Kremlin and Georgian officials promoted established Kremlin information operations alleging that the West is orchestrating protests against Georgia's "foreign agent" law in order to overthrow the Georgian government.
Turkey and Russia are reportedly exploiting European Union (EU) sanctions regulations to export Russian oil to the EU, allowing Russia to continue to receive significant oil revenues to fund its war effort in Ukraine.
Russia reportedly launched a satellite as part of its program to develop a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in the weeks before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, likely as part of Russian preparations for a future confrontation with NATO.
Russian forces recently advanced near Lyptsi, Vovchansk, Kupyansk and Donetsk City.
Several Russian opposition media outlets reported on May 16 that Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrei Kartapolov rejected a bill that would grant deferment from mobilization to certain Russian civilians, likely to support ongoing and future crypto-mobilization efforts.

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

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

Russian Main Effort — Eastern Ukraine

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

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

Russian forces recently seized Lukyantsi (northeast of Lyptsi) and advanced closer to Lyptsi amid continued offensive operations in the area on May 16. Geolocated footage published on May 15 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced south of Lukyansti, and ISW assesses that recent reports that Russian forces seized the settlement are accurate.[47] Geolocated footage published on May 16 indicates that Russian forces advanced closer towards Lyptsi from the northeast.[48] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced up to 1.2 kilometers in depth near the southern outskirts of Hlyboke (north of Lyptsi), although ISW has not yet observed evidence of further Russian gains in the area.[49] Russian forces continued offensive operations north of Lyptsi near Pylna, Lukyantsi, and Hlyboke and near Lyptsi itself.[50]

Russian forces recently advanced within northern Vovchansk and continued offensive operations in the area on May 16. Geolocated footage published on May 16 indicates that Russian forced advanced up to Taras Shevchenka Street and along Korolenka Street in northern Vovchansk and seized the Vovchansk Central District Hospital.[51] Geolocated footage published on May 16 indicates that Russian forces recently made marginal gains in northeastern Starytsa (west of Vovchansk on the western side of the Siverskyi Donets River).[52] Russian sources claimed that Russian forces advanced up to three kilometers within Vovchansk and are approaching the Vovchansk cemetery in northeastern Vovchansk and the Aggregate Plant in central Vovchansk.[53] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces continued offensive operations near Starytsya, Pletenivka (north of Vovchansk), and Vovchansk.[54]

The limited combat power that Russian forces have so far committed to offensive operations in northern Kharkiv Oblast may already be degraded. Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated on May 16 that elements of the 18th Motorized Rifle Division and the 7th Motorized Rifle Regiment (both 11th Army Corps [AC], LMD) have suffered heavy losses attacking along the Hlyboke-Lukyantsi front and that the recent tempo of Russian offensive operations in the area has significantly decreased.[55] Mashovets stated that elements of the 1st Tank Regiment (2nd Motorized Rifle Division) and 47th Tank Division (both 1st Guards Tank Army, Moscow Military District [MMD]) are currently conducting offensive operations near Vovchansk.[56] Mashovets stated that the Russian Northern Grouping of Force is "leasing" limited elements from the 1st Guards Tank Army, which is currently responsible for renewed offensive operations northwest of Svatove.[57] Ukrainian military observer Yuriy Butusov stated on March 25 that elements of the 138th and 25th motorized rifle brigades (6th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Leningrad Military District [LMD]) are also operating within northern Vovchansk, however.[58] Ukrainian sources reported that limited elements of the 30th Motorized Rifle Regiment (72nd Motorized Rifle Division, 44th AC, LMD) and the 128th Motorized Rifle Brigade (44th AC, LMD) participated in initial assaults in northern Kharkiv Oblast, and Mashovets stated that Russian forces could use these elements to relieve 11th AC elements in the Lyptsi area.[59] Mashovets noted that other Russian force groupings do not have "free" combat ready forces and assets at the regiment-brigade level to transfer to the Northern Grouping of Forces that would help sustain and intensify offensive operations along the border.[60] A Ukrainian battalion commander in the Kharkiv direction stated on May 16 that Chechen Akhmat forces are also operating in the area, although these are likely limited elements that transferred to Belgorod Oblast for border security purposes in summer 2023.[61] Russian forces appear to have launched their offensive operation in northern Kharkiv before they had completed bringing the Northern Grouping of Forces up to its reported planned end strength and may lack sufficient combat-ready forces to achieve their operational objectives in Kharkiv Oblast.[62]

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 recently advanced southeast of Kupyansk amid continued fighting along the Kupyansk-Svatove-Kreminna line on May 16. Geolocated footage published on May 16 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced north of Berestove (southeast of Kupyansk), and Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces are advancing towards the northern outskirts of the settlement.[63] The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Russian forces conducted a mechanized assault of an unspecified size in the direction of Berestove and that Ukrainian forces pushed Russian forces out of positions near Kyslivka (southeast of Kupyansk).[64] The spokesperson for a Ukrainian unit operating in the Kupyansk direction stated that Russian forces have recently intensified assaults in the Kupyansk direction and are suffering heavy personnel losses.[65] Russian forces continued assaults northeast of Kupyansk near Synkivka; southeast of Kupyansk near Pishchane, Ivanivka, and Stelmakhivka; and southwest of Svatove near Novoyehorivka and Novosadove.[66] Elements of the Russian 47th Tank Division (1st Guard Tank Army [GTA], Moscow Military District [MMD]) are reportedly operating near Synkivka.[67]

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

Russian forces continued ground attacks in the Siversk direction (northeast of Bakhmut) near Spirne (southeast of Siversk) and near Rozdolivka and Zvanivka (both south of Siversk) on May 16.[68]

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Chasiv Yar on May 16, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Russian forces continued assaults north of Chasiv Yar near Hryhorivka, near the Novyi and Kanal microraions in eastern Chasiv Yar, and southeast of Chasiv Yar near Klishchiivka and Andriivka.[69] Elements of the Russian 58th Spetsnaz Battalion (Main Directorate of the Russian General Staff [GRU]) and the 200th Motorized Rifle Brigade (14th Army Corps [AC], Leningrad Military District) are reportedly operating near Chasiv Yar.[70]

Russian forces continued offensive operations near Avdiivka on May 16, but there were no confirmed changes to the frontline in this area. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced near Solovyove and towards Yasnobrodivka (both northwest of Avdiivka), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of these claims.[71] A Russian source claimed that Russian forces are struggling to clear the area between Pervomaiske and Nevelske (both southwest of Avdiivka) and that the Balka Domakha stream that runs between Netaylove (southwest of Avdiivka) and Nevelske is a contested "gray zone."[72] Russian forces conducted assaults northwest of Avdiivka near Kalynove, Arkhanhelske, Novooleksandrivka, Sokil, Novopokrovske, and Solovyove; west of Avdiivka near Umanske and Orlivka; and southwest of Avdiivka near Netaylove and Pervomaiske.[73] 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).[74]

Russian forces recently made a confirmed advance west of Donetsk City amid continued Russian offensive operations west and southwest of Donetsk City on May 16. Geolocated footage published on May 16 indicates that Russian forces recently advanced southwest of Marinka (southwest of Donetsk City).[75] A Russian milblogger claimed that Russian forces marginally advanced towards Kostyantynivka (southwest of Donetsk City), but ISW has not observed visual confirmation of this claim.[76] Russian forces continued offensive operations west of Donetsk City near Krasnohorivka and Heorhiivka; southwest of Donetsk City near Pobieda, Novomykhailivka, Paraskoviivka, and Kostyantynivka; and east of Vuhledar near Mykilske and Vodyane.[77] Elements of the Russian 39th Motorized Rifle Brigade (68th AC) are reportedly operating near Kostyantynivka, and elements of the 238th Artillery Brigade (8th CAA, Southern Military District) are reportedly operating near Krasnohorivka.[78]

Russian forces continued offensive operations in the Donetsk-Zaporizhia Oblast border area. Russian milbloggers claimed that Russian forces advanced in southern Urozhaine (south of Velyka Novosilka), and ISW assesses that Russian forces advanced in these areas given confirmed Russian advances in the surrounding area.[79] Russian forces continued ground attacks south of Velyka Novosilka near Staromayorske and Urozhaine.[80] Ukraine's Southern Operational Command and Navy Spokesperson Captain Third Rank Dmytro Pletenchuk stated on May 16 that Russian forces have intensified efforts to storm Ukrainian positions in southern Ukraine and conducted 19 unsuccessful assaults near Staromayorske in the past day.[81]

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

Russian sources widely refuted the Russian Ministry of Defense's (MoD) May 15 claim that Russian forces seized Robotyne on May 16. The Telegram channel of the Russian 70th Motorized Rifle Regiment (42nd Motorized Rifle Brigade, 58th Combined Arms Army [CAA], Southern Military District [SMD]) claimed that Russian forces pushed Ukrainian forces from one of their main positions in Robotyne, but that heavy fighting continues in the settlement.[82] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces maintain positions in the northern outskirts of Robotyne and that it is too early to discuss the seizure of the settlement.[83] Russian forces also continued attacking northwest of Verbove (east of Robotyne).[84] Elements of the Russian BARS-1 (Combat Army Reserve) unit are reportedly operating near Robotyne.[85]

Russian forces continued assaults in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast near Krynky on May 16.[86] Ukrainian military observer Kostyantyn Mashovets stated that elements of the Russian 61st Naval Infantry Brigade (a district-level unit operating under the Leningrad Military District [LMD], formerly Northern Fleet) are operating on unspecified Dnipro River islands.[87]

Ukrainian forces conducted ATACMS and drone strikes against occupied Crimea on the night of May 15 to 16. The Russian MoD claimed that Russian forces destroyed five ATACMS missiles and two Ukrainian drones over Crimea on the night of May 15 to 16 and destroyed 11 Ukrainian naval drones in the Black Sea later during the day on May 16.[88] Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces launched a first wave of aerial and naval drones targeting occupied Sevastopol to distract Russian air defenses and then launched several ATACMS missiles, which Russian forces downed over Belbek Airfield.[89] Ukrainian forces conducted an ATACMS strike against the Belbek Airfield on the night of May 14 to 15.[90] Pletenchuk stated that Ukrainian forces had not yet verified the result of the strikes against the airfield, although the Atesh Crimean partisan movement stated that its agents confirmed that Ukrainian forces successfully struck the airfield and that there were several hours of secondary detonations at the airfield's main missile and artillery warehouse.[91] Ukraine-based open-source organization Frontelligence Insight, citing low-resolution satellite imagery, stated that at least three missiles struck the Belbek Airfield in the past two days- two near the airfield's apron and one near the fuel depot - but could not determine the extent of the damage to the airfield.[92] High resolution satellite imagery collected by Maxar on May 16 indicates that the strike destroyed at least two MiG-31s and one Su-27 and damaged one MiG-29.[93]

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

Russian forces conducted several individual missile strikes against Ukraine on May 16. Ukraine's Southern Operational Command reported that Russian forces struck civilian infrastructure in Mykolaiv City with an unspecified ballistic missile.[94] The Kharkiv Oblast Prosecutor's Office reported that Russian forces launched an unspecified number and type of missiles at Chuhuiv from Belgorod Oblast and noted that Russian forces launched two S-300 air defense missiles from Belgorod Oblast at Kharkiv Oblast in the past day.[95] The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) published footage claiming to show Russian forces conducting an Iskander ballistic missile strike against a Ukrainian formation operating in Kharkiv Oblast.[96]

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

Several Russian opposition media outlets reported on May 16 that Russian State Duma Defense Committee Chairman Andrei Kartapolov rejected a bill that would grant deferment from mobilization to certain Russian civilians, likely to support ongoing and future crypto-mobilization efforts. Russian opposition media outlets reported that Kartopolov rejected a bill that would grant deferments from mobilization to fathers with three children.[97] Russian State Duma Deputy Nina Ostanina disagreed with the bill's rejection and noted that the Russian presidential decree defines a "large family" as having three or more children.[98] The Russian State Duma previously decided not to adopt amendments that would guarantee deferment from mobilization for fathers with three or more children, disabled children, or single fathers in October 2022, shortly after the start of Russia's partial mobilization in September 2022.[99] The State Duma has adopted an amendment granting deferments for fathers with four or more children under 16, however, likely to posture Russia's support for "traditional values" and to avoid domestic discontent.[100] Russia likely wants to maintain as large of a pool of men eligible for mobilization as possible to support ongoing crypto-mobilization efforts.

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

Russian defense company "PPSh Laboratory" General Director Denis Oslomenko stated on May 16 that PPSh Laboratory is developing a thermal imaging system for the Russian Black Sea Fleet (BSF) to use for repelling naval drone attacks.[101] Oslomenko stated that Russian forces, presumably those operating BSF surface vessels, lack thermal imaging equipment making it difficult for them to repel naval drone attacks at night. Oslomenko stated that the thermal imaging systems are able to detect targets from over a kilometer away.

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

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

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

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

Russian Information Operations and Narratives

A Kremlin official reiterated a long-standing Russian information operation meant to deter the West from providing long-range strike capabilities to Ukraine and from allowing Ukrainian forces to conduct strikes against legitimate military targets in Russia with Western-provided weapon systems. Russian State Duma Chairperson Vyacheslav Volodin claimed that Russia would retaliate with more powerful weapons if Ukrainian forces used Western weapons to strike Russian territory.[102] Volodin's threat rings hollow given that Russian law (illegally) defines Crimea, and the Ukrainian oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhia, and Kherson as Russia, and Ukrainian forces regularly strike these Russian-occupied territories with Western-provided weapons. Ukrainian operations to strike systems in Russia’s de jure territory that are directly supporting Russia's offensive ground operations in Ukraine would be an inherently defensive effort, and Western policies prohibiting Ukrainian forces from using Western-provided systems to strike military targets in rear areas is compromising Ukraine's ability to defend itself against Russian offensive operations.[103] 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.[104]

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev attempted to baselessly link the assailant who attempted to assassinate Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico to Ukraine. Medvedev did not explicitly allege that the assailant had ties to Ukraine but baselessly claimed that the assailant had expressed support for Ukraine.[105] Medvedev also called the assailant's assassination attempt "Russophobic." Medvedev is a notably nationalistic and extreme voice in the Russian government and routinely makes deliberately outlandish and unfounded statements as part of information operations aimed at the West.[106]

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

Belarus and Iran continue to develop their bilateral relations. Head of the Belarusian MoD's Department of International Military Cooperation Major General Valery Revenko and Iranian military attaché Captain First Rank Reza Khosravi Moghadam met on May 16 at an accreditation meeting in Belarus and discussed international and regional security and the development of Belarusian–Iranian military cooperation.[107] Belarus and Iran have pursued increased military, economic, and technical cooperation in the past, and Russia likely benefits from these relations through the Union State framework.[108]

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.

20. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, May 16, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-may-16-2024

Key Takeaways:

Yemen: Houthi Supreme Leader Abdulmalik al Houthi claimed that the Houthis have attacked international shipping in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days. No evidence to support this claim is currently available.
Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF 98th Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Jabalia refugee camp.
Southern Gaza Strip: The IDF 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations east of Rafah City.
West Bank: The IDF conducted an “extensive” operation to disrupt Palestinian militia financing networks in several cities in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least 16 attacks into northern Israel.
Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias— claimed two attacks targeting Israel.

IRAN UPDATE, MAY 16, 2024

May 16, 2024 - ISW Press

Iran Update, May 16, 2024

Kathryn Tyson, Andie Parry, Kelly Campa, Johanna Moore, Alexandra Braverman, Ashka Jhaveri, and Nicholas Carl

Information Cutoff: 2:00pm ET

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

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

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

Houthi Supreme Leader Abdulmalik al Houthi claimed on May 16 that the Houthis have attacked international shipping in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days.[1] No evidence to support this claim is currently available. Abdulmalik stated that the Houthis conducted two attacks targeting Israel-affiliated targets in the Mediterranean Sea over the past week without providing further details.[2] The Houthis’ Shahed-136 drone has a range of around 2,500 kilometers and could thus reach the Mediterranean Sea.[3] Abdulmalik’s claim comes after the Houthis announced on May 3 that they began a “fourth phase” of escalation by targeting international shipping bound for Israel in the Mediterranean Sea.[4]

Abdulmalik’s claim is likely part of the broader effort that the Axis of Resistance is conducting to impose an unofficial blockade on Israel. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Bahrain have similarly claimed in recent weeks to have conducted attacks targeting Israeli infrastructure and sites tied to Israeli international trade.[5] It is similarly unclear whether these attacks actually occurred. Iran and its so-called “Axis of Resistance” appear to be operating on the theory that severe economic disruption would compel Israel to accept defeat in the Gaza Strip and that such economic pressure could ultimately collapse the Israeli state. Iranian leaders have said repeatedly in recent months that their theory of how to destroy Israel revolves around stoking fear in Israel in order to catalyze reverse migration away from Israel. Iran has sought to extend its military reach into the Mediterranean Sea as part of this effort, as CTP-ISW has previously reported.[6]

CTP-ISW has previously assessed that the Houthis will likely fail to disrupt trade around the Mediterranean Sea in the same way that they have around the Red Sea.[7] The Houthis have a much more limited suite of capabilities that could reach the Mediterranean Sea. The Houthis also presumably lack a robust targeting capability there, whereas the Iranian Behshad surveillance ship provides targeting intelligence the Houthis around the Bab al Mandeb strait.[8]

Abdulmalik separately called on Iranian-backed Iraqi militias to join the Houthis’ “fourth phase” of escalation in the Mediterranean Sea.[9] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—has claimed several attacks on Israeli civilian and military infrastructure along the Israeli coast since December 2023.[10] The Islamic Resistance in Iraq also claimed that it could reach the Mediterranean Sea with a drone similar to the Houthi Samad drone on May 13.[11]

Key Takeaways:

Yemen: Houthi Supreme Leader Abdulmalik al Houthi claimed that the Houthis have attacked international shipping in the Mediterranean Sea in recent days. No evidence to support this claim is currently available.
Northern Gaza Strip: The IDF 98th Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Jabalia refugee camp.
Southern Gaza Strip: The IDF 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations east of Rafah City.
West Bank: The IDF conducted an “extensive” operation to disrupt Palestinian militia financing networks in several cities in the West Bank.
Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights: Lebanese Hezbollah conducted at least 16 attacks into northern Israel.
Iraq: The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias— claimed two attacks targeting Israel.

Gaza Strip

Axis of Resistance objectives:

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

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) 98th Division continued to conduct clearing operations in Jabalia refugee camp on May 16. Israeli forces killed and detained dozens of fighters, located weapons, and destroyed military infrastructure in Jabalia.[12] Israeli airstrikes have killed over 150 fighters in Jabalia since the IDF expanded clearing operations there on May 11.[13] Palestinian militias have claimed 20 attacks targeting Israeli forces operating near Jabalia refugee camp since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 15.[14]

The IDF said on May 16 that five IDF soldiers died from Israeli tank fire in Jabalia refugee camp on May 15.[15] An Israeli tank fired two shells at a building after mistaking a group of Israeli soldiers inside the building for Palestinian fighters. The soldiers belonged to the IDF 202nd Paratrooper Battalion. The attack resulted in seven other IDF injuries.[16]

The IDF announced that its 99th Division "completed” its clearing operation in Zaytoun on May 16.[17] The IDF launched a re-clearing operation into Zaytoun neighborhood, southern Gaza City, on May 8, marking the third time that the IDF has conducted a clearing operation there.[18] The IDF 2nd Brigade (99th Division) killed Palestinian fighters and destroyed an "operational shaft" in Zaytoun.[19] The IDF said that the 2nd Brigade and 679th Brigade continue to operate in the central Gaza Strip.

The IDF 162nd Division continued to conduct clearing operations east of Rafah City on May 16. The IDF 89th Commando Brigade directed airstrikes targeting Hamas fighters in eastern Rafah City.[20] The IDF 401st Brigade and Givati Brigade (both under the 162nd Division) killed Palestinian fighters and located weapons and tunnel shafts.[21] Palestinian militias, including Hamas, targeted Israeli forces east of Rafah with anti-personnel mines, rocket-propelled grenades, sniper fire, mortars, and rockets.[22]

Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said on May 16 that the IDF will deploy additional forces to Rafah as Israeli forces continue to conduct limited operations in the area.[23] Gallant said that Israeli forces have destroyed several tunnels in eastern Rafah and will continue to destroy tunnels there.[24] Gallant added that IDF operations will “intensify” in Rafah. Gallant said that Hamas is not able to “regenerate itself” and that Hamas lacks reserves, supplies, and munitions and has no ability to manufacture weapons or provide medical treatment to its fighters.[25]

This map displays engagements between Israeli and Palestinian ground forces across the Gaza Strip. To compile this map data, you must clean the data and ensure that the coordinates are standardized.

US CENTCOM announced on May 16 that it had anchored a temporary pier to the Gaza Strip to deliver humanitarian aid by sea.[26] The United States had delayed anchoring the pier due to inclement weather until now.[27] CENTCOM said that trucks carrying humanitarian assistance will begin moving ashore in the coming days.[28] The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Brown, expects that aid will start moving into the Gaza Strip by the weekend and that, initially, around 25 trucks will move into the strip.[29] US officials have said previously that 90 trucks will move into the strip in the initial phase of the plan.[30]

Egypt rejected on May 16 an Israeli proposal to coordinate the reopening of the Rafah border crossing, according to two unspecified Egyptian security sources.[31] An Israeli delegation visited Cairo on May 15 to present a plan to reopen the crossing. The proposal included a mechanism on how to manage the crossing after an Israeli withdrawal, including having the Palestinian Authority (PA) unofficially manage the crossing.[32] An unspecified US official told Israeli media on May 13 that the PA rejected the Israeli proposal for the PA to manage the crossing.[33] Egypt said that the crossing should be managed only by Palestinian authorities, leaving few options other than the PA.[34] The Hamas-run General Authority for Crossings and Borders has previously managed the crossing.[35] Israeli forces seized control of the Rafah crossing when it launched a limited operation into Rafah on May 7.[36]

Israel said on May 16 that 250 trucks carrying humanitarian aid entered the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing in the southern Gaza Strip and the Western Erez crossing in the northern strip.[37] Aid groups and the UN have reportedly struggled to deliver the trucks due to the active fighting near the crossings.[38]

Palestinian fighters conducted at least three rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip into southern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cut off on May 15. Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine separately fired rockets targeting Kerem Shalom and Nahal Oz, respectively.[39] Unspecified Palestinian fighters mortared Meflasim.[40]

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

West Bank

Axis of Resistance objectives:

Establish the West Bank as a viable front against Israel

Israeli forces have engaged Palestinian fighters in at least eight locations in the West Bank since CTP-ISW's data cut off on May 15.[41]

The IDF conducted an “extensive” operation on May 16 to disrupt Palestinian militia financing networks in several cities in the West Bank.[42] The IDF raided sites in Bethlehem, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tubas, and Tulkarm.[43] The IDF also detained several Palestinians and confiscated documents and unspecified technological equipment.[44] The IDF stated that the operation was conducted as part of an expansion of the IDF's and Shin Bet’s activities to “prevent terrorist funds in the Central Command.”[45] PIJ, the al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, and other Palestinian fighters targeted Israeli forces with small arms and improvised explosive devices, in Nablus, Qalqilya, Tubas, and Tulkarm during the IDF operation.[46] Hamas and the al Aqsa Martyrs‘ Brigades separately conducted a combined attack targeting an IDF unit at the Taiba crossing along Israel-West Bank border.[47] Israeli forces killed three Palestinian fighters during clashes in Tulkarm.[48]

A Palestinian individual stabbed an IDF non-commissioned officer at the Yitzhar Junction south of Nablus on May 16.[49] The IDF and Shin Bet conducted a manhunt and detained the suspect in Awarta, south of Nablus.[50]

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

Southern Lebanon and Golan Heights

Axis of Resistance objectives:

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

Lebanese Hezbollah has conducted at least 16 attacks into northern Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cutoff on May 15.[51] Hezbollah launched two S-5 air-to-surface rockets from a drone for the first time, targeting an IDF site near the Israel-Lebanon border.[52] The IDF conversely stated that Hezbollah used a one-way attack drone.[53] Video of the attack suggests that Hezbollah launched rockets from a drone before the drone hit its target and detonated. Hezbollah separately conducted its furthest drone attack into Israel yet on May 15.[54] At least one drone struck an Israeli missile-detecting blimp 35 kilometers south of the Israel-Lebanon border.[55] An IDF spokesperson said that the attack on the blimp did not degrade the “IDF's ability to build an aerial image of the area.”[56] Hezbollah also targeted two Israeli military industrial sites in northern Israel with one-way attack drones.[57]

The IDF Air Force struck a weapons manufacturing plant that Hezbollah used to build guided munitions and drones in the Baalbek region.[58] Lebanese media described the Israeli strike as the largest in Baalbek since the start of the war.[59] Hezbollah fired a 60-rocket barrage targeting three IDF sites in northern Israel on May 16 in response to the Israeli airstrike.[60]

IDF Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi met with division commanders responsible for northern Israel on May 15.[61] Halevi said that Israeli forces in Northern Command have ”very high readiness” and that the IDF will make decisions for northern Israel ”according to the developments.”[62]

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

Iran and Axis of Resistance

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq—a coalition of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—has claimed two attacks targeting Israel since CTP-ISW's last data cut-off on May 15.[63]

Former Iraqi Parliament Speaker Mohammed al Halbousi and the Shia Coordination Framework—a loose coalition of Iranian-aligned Shia political parties—appear to have agreed on a nominee for parliament speaker.[64] Halbousi allied with the Sunni Sadara bloc to form a majority coalition of Sunni parliamentarians and nominated Mahmoud al Mashhadani for parliament speaker on May 12.[65] The Shia Coordination Framework filed two lawsuits in January and May 2024 against Halbousi’s previous nominee for parliamentary speaker Shaalan al Karim as part of their efforts to install their preferred candidate, Mashhadani, as speaker.[66] Halbousi previously claimed that the parliament speaker must be from his Taqqadum party to represent the Sunni majority in Parliament.[67] He also threatened to withdraw the Taqqadum party from Parliament if the speaker nominee is not one of its members.[68] Iraq’s parliament will vote on a new speaker on May 18.[69]

US Central Command (CENTCOM) conducted a preemptive strike targeting four one-way attack drones in Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen on May 14.[70] CENTCOM determined that these systems presented an imminent threat to US, coalition, and merchant vessels in the region.

21. Putin’s China Visit Highlights Military Ties That Worry the West

Putin’s China Visit Highlights Military Ties That Worry the West

David Pierson

By David Pierson

May 17, 2024, 4:04 a.m. ET

The New York Times · by David Pierson · May 17, 2024

The Russian leader visited an institute in Harbin known for defense research. President Xi Jinping saw him off with a rare and seemingly deliberate embrace for the cameras.

In a rare show of affection from China’s leader, Xi Jinping hugged President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia after they vowed deeper cooperation at their summit meeting in Beijing.Credit...Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik

May 17, 2024, 4:04 a.m. ET

President Vladimir V. Putin attended a trade fair on Friday in a northeastern Chinese city and toured a state-backed university famous for its cutting edge defense research, highlighting how economic and military ties between the countries have grown despite, or perhaps because of, Western pressure.

Mr. Putin’s visit to Harbin, a Chinese city with a Russian past, is part of a trip aimed at demonstrating that he has powerful friends even as his war against Ukraine — a campaign that he is escalating — has isolated him from the West. The visit followed a day of talks between him and President Xi Jinping of China that seemed orchestrated to convey not only the strategic alignment of the two powerful, autocratic leaders against the West, but a personal connection.

State media showed Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi, neck ties off after formal talks on Thursday, strolling under willow trees and sipping tea at a traditional pavilion on the sprawling grounds of Zhongnanhai, the walled leadership compound in Beijing, with only their interpreters. As Mr. Xi saw Mr. Putin off in the evening, he even initiated a hug — a rare expression of affection for the Chinese leader.

A photograph provided by Russian state media showed Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi attending a tea ceremony in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai Park on Thursday.Credit...Mikhail Metzel/Sputnik

“Xi’s very deliberate embrace of Putin for the cameras wasn’t just to emphasize the closeness of the political relationship between the two countries and their leaders,” said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. “There was also a touch of disdain directed at Washington, which has been pressuring Beijing to withdraw support from Moscow. That clearly isn’t going to happen in any substantive fashion.”

The show of camaraderie was the final touch in talks that culminated in a joint statement that took aim at the United States, which Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi have accused of seeking to suppress their countries. The statement pledged that Russia and China would work more closely in critical sectors like energy, space and the military.

The growing security ties between the two nuclear-armed powers is a focal point of Mr. Putin’s Harbin visit.

While China and Russia are not formal allies committed to defend each other with military support, their armed forces have worked together more closely in recent years. Their air forces and navies have held joint military exercises, including near Alaska and Taiwan, the de facto independent island claimed by Beijing. On Thursday, the two leaders issued words of support for their separate claims to Taiwan and Ukraine.

And while China has vowed not to provide Russia with lethal weapons, it has been the top supplier of components like semiconductors and machine tools that have both civilian and military uses.

While that is helpful, Mr. Putin still seeks access to more sophisticated tools. The Harbin Institute of Technology is best known for its research of rockets, missiles and space technology — expertise that Russia would greatly benefit from as the war in Ukraine has revived its need for a more robust military-industrial complex. The institute also trained North Korean scientists who worked on Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, according to The Wall Street Journal and South Korean media.

A photograph provided by Russian state media shows President Putin and Vice President Han Zheng of China touring an exhibition in Harbin on Friday.Credit...Sergei Bobylyov/Sputnik

Mr. Putin’s tour of the school is steeped in symbolism. The 103-year-old institution recently opened a joint campus with St. Petersburg State University, Mr. Putin’s alma mater. And in something of a snub to Washington, the school belongs on the United States’s so-called entity list, barring it from accessing American technology and taking part in educational exchanges because of its links to the People’s Liberation Army.

“We should be less concerned about what particular technologies China might be sharing with Russia from Harbin or elsewhere, than the larger pattern and signal that this visit represents,” said Markus Garlauskas, a security expert at the Atlantic Council.

“China did not need to host Putin at Harbin in order to transfer technologies from there to Russia,” he added. “That this visit took place so openly is a visible and symbolic sign of Beijing being willing to provide directly military-applicable technology to support Russia’s war against Ukraine.”

Song Zhongping, a commentator in Beijing who is a former military officer, defended Mr. Putin’s visit to the institute, pointing to the school’s cooperation with Russia in education.

“Communication at the university level between China and Russia is consistent with the academic exchange and national interests of both countries,” Mr. Song said.

Mr. Garlauskas said the tour of the Harbin Institute of Technology had echoes of when Mr. Putin hosted Kim Jong-un, the North Korean dictator, at a Russian spaceport last year before Pyongyang began supplying Moscow with ballistic missiles and other munitions to use in Ukraine.

“What China shares with Russia, Russia could easily then turn around and share with North Korea,” Mr. Garlauskas said.

A photograph provided by Russian state media shows Mr. Putin and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, examining a rocket assembly hangar during Mr. Kim’s 2023 visit to Russia.Credit...Artyom Geodakyan/Sputnik

Not long ago, it was China that drew greater benefits from access to Russian military technology. Starting in the 1990s, and peaking in the early 2000s, Beijing was a major buyer of Russian arms. Sales then began to slow after Moscow grew concerned about China reverse engineering Russian weapons, said Elizabeth Wishnick, a senior research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses in Virginia.

It wasn’t until about a decade ago that cooperation between the two sides returned, leading to China’s acquisition of more Russian jet engine technology and surface-to-air missile systems. Still, in a sign that there are limits to its cooperation with China, Russia is holding out sharing its silent submarine technology, a feature that makes the vessels especially hard to detect, Ms. Wishnick said.

Mr. Putin is also using his visit to Harbin, where he attended a trade fair, to promote the flow of goods between the countries.

China has given Russia an economic lifeline by buying huge amounts of Russian oil to circumvent the effects of its financial isolation from the Western world. Not only that, with many foreign consumer brands also leaving Russia, Chinese companies have stepped in to fill a vacuum for the likes of automobiles, smartphones and televisions. That contributed to a record $240 billion in two-way trade between the China and Russia in 2023, up from $190 billion in 2022, according to Chinese customs data.

Maintaining that growth in trade is a major focus in both countries, analysts said, now that Western pressure on Chinese banks to scale back transactions with Russian firms is believed to have led to the first year-on-year decline in trade in more than two years in March.

One solution would be to increase the amount of transactions settled in local currencies rather than dollars to avoid the risk of sanctions. Mr. Putin said on Thursday that more than 90 percent of commercial transactions conducted between Russia and China were now being cleared in rubles or renminbi.

“Protecting the financial assets of big banks in China is the top crucial interest of China,” said Shi Yinhong, an international relations professor at Renmin University in Beijing. He said China was trying to reduce its exposure to the dollar beyond just in Russia, but that the room to do so was “limited.”

Olivia Wang contributed reporting.

David Pierson covers Chinese foreign policy and China’s economic and cultural engagement with the world. He has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about David Pierson

See more on: Russia-Ukraine War, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un

The New York Times · by David Pierson · May 17, 2024

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

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