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Quotes of the Day:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
– Dwight D. Eisenhower
"I shall rejoin myself to my native country, with new attachments, and with exaggerated esteem for its advantages; for though there is less wealth there, there is more freedom, more ease, and less misery."
George Washington letter to James Warren
"The sides are being divided now. It’s very obvious. So if you’re on the other side of the fence, you’re suddenly anti-American. Its breeding fear of being on the wrong side. Democracy’s a very fragile thing. You have to take care of democracy. As soon as you stop being responsible to it and allow it to turn into scare tactics, it’s no longer democracy, is it? It’s something else. It may be an inch away from totalitarianism."
– Sam Shepard
1. US Air Force general: US will not assist Israel in war with Hezbollah as it had with Iran
2. South By Southwest festival bars Army, defense industry from 'sponsoring' 2025 event
3. China is seeking ways to disrupt daily American life should a conflict erupt, Pentagon’s IT leader says
4. The ‘Unfettered’ Trade That's Wildly Popular—and Ignored in Washington
5. Leadership in Modern War by Mick Ryan (Parts 1 and 2)
6. Pentagon's Efforts on Traumatic Brain Injuries to Get Government Watchdog Review
7. Analysis: Poland Continues to Prepare Citizens for War With Russia
8. New Attacks Suggest Moscow Rapidly Losing Control Over Dagestani Population
9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 26, 2024
10. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 26, 2024
11. Report to Congress on Use of Force in Cyberspace
12. Have China’s Wolf Warriors Gone Extinct?
13. Joe Biden's Failed Strategy Against the Houthi Threat in the Red Sea
14. Protecting America’s cybersecurity demands showing our teeth
15. Hamas’s Ruthless Long-Term Strategy of Necessary Sacrifice
16. How the military is preparing for AI at the edge
17. Reimagining the Arsenal of Democracy
18. "People's Satellite" Helped Ukraine Hit Over 1,000 Targets Spy Agency Says
19. Senate committee looks to withhold funding for Cybercom capability architecture
20. Africa Needs More American Involvement—Not Less
21. Should Americans Die for a Single Filipino?
22. Resilience and Resistance Post-Raisi: A Data-Centric Approach to Iran
23. The All-Airborne 'Remembrance Bowl' in Normandy Should Be a Bigger Deal Than the Army-Navy Game
1. US Air Force general: US will not assist Israel in war with Hezbollah as it had with Iran
Did the CJCS give us an Acheson moment? (January 1950 and Korea not inside the US defense perimeter in Asia). Will Iran interpret the statement the same way north Korea did?
US Air Force general: US will not assist Israel in war with Hezbollah as it had with Iran
Gen. Brown asked Israel to think of how a war would affect the region, as well as the impact it would have on US forces.
By JERUSALEM POST STAFFJUNE 24, 2024 10:36Updated: JUNE 24, 2024 14:34
Jerusalem Post
Air Force General Charles Q. Brown warned that the US would not be able to help defend Israel against an all-out war with Hezbollah in the same way that it stepped in during the Iran drone attack in April, the Associated Press (AP) reported on Monday.
Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also said that Iran “would be more inclined to support Hezbollah."
While the Islamic Republic supports Hamas, General Brown said that Tehran would stand more firmly behind Hezbollah, “particularly if they felt that Hezbollah was being significantly threatened.”
According to AP, he also said that any Israeli military offensive into Lebanon could risk triggering a broader war, putting US forces in danger.
Risk of escalation
In the event of war, Brown said the US would not provide the same assistance as it did when Iran carried out a missile and drone attack on Israel earlier this year. He also said it was hard to fend off the shorter-range rockets that Hezbollah fires across the border into Israel.
Wreckage lies in the garden of a house hit in rocket attacks from Lebanon, amid ongoing cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israeli forces, in Kiryat Shmona, northern Israel, June 4, 2024. (credit: AMMAR AWAD/REUTERS)He asserted that the safety of US forces was the priority and reiterated that no attacks had been carried out on US bases in the region since February, AP added.
Brown said that the US continued to warn Israel against going to war with Lebanon.
"Think about the second order of effect of any type of operation into Lebanon, and how that might play out and how it impacts not just the region, but how it impacts our forces in regions as well,” Brown reportedly said.
Brown's comments come amid heightened expectations that the IDF may launch a military campaign in Lebanon to oust Hezbollah from the territory on Israel’s border to stop its persistent attacks.
Prime Minister Netanyahu told Channel 14 on Sunday night that Israel is open to a diplomatic resolution to the Hezbollah threat, but he stressed, “It must be on our terms.”
“We will do what is necessary," he said. "I can assure the citizens of Israel that if we are required to take on this challenge, we will do it. We can fight on several fronts, and we are also preparing for it.”
Tovah Lazaroff contributed to this report.
Jerusalem Post
2. South By Southwest festival bars Army, defense industry from 'sponsoring' 2025 event
Sigh...
Of course the right thing to do is to respect their decision and their right to decide who to allow to participate in their event as well as their right to use their venue as a protest against the military and weapons manufacturing. This is America afterall and we fight to maintain the freedom to take such actions.
Hopefully SXSW will include a statement thanking the US military for protecting their right to exclude them from the event and their right to use its exclusion to make a political statement. (note my attempt at sarcasm)
But if I were to advise the wrong thing to do I would encourage all US military personnel assigned to the Army Futures Command in Austin to flood the venue wearing Army related T-shirts, hats, and such to demonstrate a huge military presence.
Excerpt:
In a statement published on the SXSW website, the organizers state that “After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model. As a result, the US Army, and companies who engage in weapons manufacturing, will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025.”
South By Southwest festival bars Army, defense industry from 'sponsoring' 2025 event - Breaking Defense
However, an Army spokesperson tells Breaking Defense the service does not believe it is fully banned from all future events, and did not rule out the possibility of attending SXSW in some capacity next year.
By AARON MEHTA and ASHLEY ROQUE
on June 26, 2024 at 4:44 PM
breakingdefense.com · by Aaron Mehta, Ashley Roque · June 26, 2024
Dr. Stefan Williams, Chemical Engineer, United States Army, Ms. Cassandra Reilly, Deputy Product Manager, US Army, Dr. Thomas Zawodzniski, UT-ORNL Governor’s Chair for Electrical Energy Conversion and Storage, The University of Tennessee Oak Ridge Innovation Institute, and Mr. Eric South, Manager, Naval Surface Warfare Center participate in the “Future of Power: A Creative Discussion on Possibilities” panel at the Thompson Hotel during SXSW 2024 in Austin, TX on March 8th, 2024. (US Army Photo by Patrick Hunter)
WASHINGTON — The South By Southwest festival has decided to bar the military or defense industry to be a sponsor-level participant in the 2025 edition of the music and technology showcase, organizers announced today.
The move follows protests at the 2024 edition, which included the US Army as a “super sponsor” of the event, as well as visible participation from RTX subsidiary Collins.
In a statement published on the SXSW website, the organizers state that “After careful consideration, we are revising our sponsorship model. As a result, the US Army, and companies who engage in weapons manufacturing, will not be sponsors of SXSW 2025.”
It is unclear how the organizers will categorize “companies who engage in weapons manufacturing,” and whether that means, say, space companies who do work for the DoD would be barred from the show. It is also unclear if the military or defense firms can still exhibit at the event if they are below the “sponsor” level of participation. In response to a request for clarification, organizers repeated the statement and said that is “the only language we have on the subject.”
Army Futures Command spokesperson Lt. Col. Jamie Dobson told Breaking Defense the service does not believe it is fully banned from all future events and did not rule out the possibly of attending SXSW in some capacity next year.
“We appreciated the opportunity to join South by Southwest in 2024. With US Army Futures Command headquartered in Austin, we value any opportunity to join with our community to ignite discovery and make new connections,” Dobson subsequently wrote in a short statement. “The Army will continue to seek opportunities to meet technology innovators and leaders, explore new ideas and insights, and create dynamic industry partnerships because tomorrow is worth protecting.”
While best known as a music festival, over the last decade SXSW has become more and more of a technology showcase — with defense companies taking note. The first notable visit was in 2017, when Lockheed Martin brought a Sikorsky helicopter to the show, and defense presence has been regular ever since — particularly after the 2018 standup of Army Futures Command, which is based in Austin. Both the military and defense industry have viewed the show as a chance to talk with new tech vendors, as well as push the message that the military is open to innovation.
According to Defector, there were 28 events hosted throughout the 2024 SXSW that were marked as tied to the US military. Gen. James Rainey, the head of Futures Command, had a plum speaking spot at this year’s edition. In addition, the Pentagon had a central hub, which hosted a series of panels and events throughout the festival; SXSW’s site states that “For five days, the US Army and US Navy are bringing together creators, explorers, and doers from across the defense innovation ecosystem for an official SXSW House,” with one of the panels listed as “This Quantum **** is Real.”
While there was always some unease about the visibility of the defense industrial complex among some attendees, the issue exploded in a public way this year, with a number of musicians — Deadline reports over 80 acts — cancelling their performances to protest having defense contractor involvement in the show in light of the war in Gaza. That, in turn, triggered criticism from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott of those musicians.
In a March 12 response to Abbott, SXSW stated that “The defense industry has historically been a proving ground for many of the systems we rely on today. These institutions are often leaders in emerging technologies, and we believe it’s better to understand how their approach will impact our lives.
“The Army’s sponsorship is part of our commitment to bring forward ideas that shape our world. In regard to Collins Aerospace, they participated this year as a sponsor of two SXSW Pitch categories, giving entrepreneurs visibility and funding for potentially game-changing work,” the statement continued.
Still, it appears that, at least for the foreseeable future, the protests have had the desired effect.
UPDATED 6/26/24 at 6:25 pm to include a statement from the US Army.
breakingdefense.com · by Aaron Mehta, Ashley Roque · June 26, 2024
3. China is seeking ways to disrupt daily American life should a conflict erupt, Pentagon’s IT leader says
Unrestricted warfare. What more can I say?
China is seeking ways to disrupt daily American life should a conflict erupt, Pentagon’s IT leader says
defenseone.com · by Patrick Tucker
BEIJING, CHINA - AUGUST 21: A cyber game player competes in a game of "Warcraft III" during a cyber game competition at the China Korea Cyber Game 2005 (CKCG 2005) on August 21, 2005 in Beijing, China. Some 68 cyber game players, including both professional and non-professional gamers from China and South Korea, participated in the four-day game tournament over three different online games, which began August 19. Photo by Cancan Chu/Getty Images
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Science & Tech
The DISA director also wants more transparency from the IT companies it hires.
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June 26, 2024 08:58 PM ET
By Patrick Tucker
Science & Technology Editor, Defense One
June 26, 2024 08:58 PM ET
BALTIMORE–The Defense Department’s IT agency is shoring up the military’s infrastructure to better withstand attacks as China looks for ways to disrupt everyday life in the United States during a conflict, Lt. Gen. Robert Skinner said Wednesday.
“That is a key objective for the PRC: to make sure that they can disrupt our day-to-day life,” said Skinner, who leads the Defense Information Systems Agency. “They will want to look at: ‘How can we disrupt, not just militarily, but from an information standpoint, and from our day-to-day lives?’ To see: ‘Is the will there, as a nation, to continue on with whatever kind of conflict is going?’”
Skinner said that China’s “risk tolerance continues to change”—meaning that Beijing is willing to go further in its offensive cyber and space operations.
He echoed other government leaders and China experts, who have pointed to the Volt Typhoon campaign aimed at critical infrastructure around the world. Similarly, a new report from cybersecurity group Recorded Future and Sentinel Labs notes that China is launching more ransomware attacks at infrastructure and civilian entities, an escalation from past years’ espionage and data theft efforts. Another new report, from RAND, says China is likely to launch riskier attacks on space communications and other areas as well.
One reason Chinese leaders are willing to take more risks is that their space-sensing capabilities are growing, enabling them to keep a closer eye on U.S. military and other forces, the RAND report said.
“The PLA of 2020 and beyond is more likely to undertake coercive activities and accept the risk of escalation with the United States than it was a decade prior. Although this more risk-accepting mindset was most visible in domains other than space, future PLA space operations could follow the same trend, particularly as Chinese space capabilities evolve,” the report said.
Skinner said China is carefully watching DISA to see how the agency strengthens the military’s IT infrastructure. As evidence, he displayed a slide from a DISA presentation on new network architecture schemes that had been translated into Chinese “for internal use,” but kept the same graphic.
He said the agency is trying to improve Pentagon defenses by using data from across the department.
Much of the Pentagon’s plans to improve its network defenses rest on the move to cloud services, such as Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft Azure. The thinking is that enterprise cloud gives network administrators a much better window into what’s going on with every computer in the network.
But enterprise cloud, and the companies that provide it, aren’t perfect—as shown in an April report from the Cyber Safety Review Board that called Microsoft’s security culture “inadequate” and said the company “deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management,” producing “avoidable errors.”
Skinner did not address the report directly upon being asked. But he did say “going to enterprise cloud does provide greater security opportunity and greater safety.”
Still, “at the end of the day, it still has to be configured correctly, still has to be operated, maintained correctly…So some things that we're working through with [enterprise cloud providers] is first and foremost is on contracts, making sure that the contracts identify the specific standards and know and make sure that they meet and also that the contracts identify and allow us to have visibility into their cybersecurity posture,” he said. “The third piece is making sure we continue to highlight to the vendors and commercial companies that they do need to take it seriously, from the CEO on down to the person who's doing the actual changing of configurations or designing the capabilities.”
4. The ‘Unfettered’ Trade That's Wildly Popular—and Ignored in Washington
Charts and graphics at the link:https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/the-unfettered-trade-thats-wildly-popular-and-ignored-in-washington/?utm
Excerpts:
Thanks to new technologies and modest government meddling, digital trade has exploded in recent years, to Americans’ great benefit. Given the rapid acceleration of AI and robotics, as well as new and wildly popular forms of entertainment, we should expect more growth—and more benefits—in the years ahead, unless governments kill the “golden goose” with new taxes, regulations, and other types of interference. That risk, unfortunately, is today very real. Countries around the world have started proposing “digital services taxes,” demanding that certain data be “localized,” and pushing a “precautionary principle” approach to AI and other new digital technologies. The WTO’s important moratorium on e-commerce duties was just extended, but only for two years—and further extensions are in doubt. Perhaps worst of all, the United States government has aligned with various left-wing critics and stopped leading on digital trade at the WTO and in other international forums, despite its many economic benefits and U.S. companies’ global dominance.
That’s a heckuva lot more important than steel (or whatever). Maybe someone should talk about it?
The ‘Unfettered’ Trade That's Wildly Popular—and Ignored in Washington
Let’s talk about digital trade.
thedispatch.com · by Scott Lincicome
When Joe Biden and Donald Trump face off in tomorrow’s inaugural Mandelbaum Memorial Presidential Debate, the issue of international trade will almost certainly come up. Assuming it does, you can bet good money that the candidates and/or debate moderators will mention China and tariffs and the trade deficit and maybe Nippon Steel or electric vehicles or supply chain resiliency. An even safer bet, however, is that they’ll all ignore an area of trade that not only is important (for the economy and security) and booming (thanks to minimal government interference), but also one that the United States totally dominates. An area of trade that likely affects our daily lives more than all those container ships and steel imports and other things lamented daily by our current crop of politicians and pundits. (In fact, there’s a decent chance you’re using it right now.)
I’m talking about digital trade—and, from the looks of it in Washington, I’m just about the only one.
The Explosion in Digital Trade—Especially Gaming
As I briefly discussed two years ago when everyone was predicting the “Death of Globalization” (LOL in retrospect), global trade in goods has slowed but trade in services—especially digital services—has exploded. Between 2005 and 2023, in fact, the value of digitally delivered services has more than quadrupled (and that’s surely a major understatement because digital trade is so difficult to measure):
As Middlebury College’s Gary Winslett explained last year in an essay for Cato’s globalization project, this rapid growth is owed to three big things: First, governments have lightly regulated digital trade and, in fact, have maintained a global moratorium on e-commerce duties (tariffs) since 1995, thanks to a longstanding World Trade Organization agreement. Lessons abound.
Second, incredible technological improvements—faster internet, better laptops and smartphones, etc.—have made it increasingly easy to send vast amounts of digital content around the world in milliseconds. Consider, for example, the exponential growth in international internet bandwidth—the infrastructure needed to carry our Zoom calls, shared docs, streaming media, and other digitally delivered services.
Third and most recently have been pandemic-related changes, many of which have since morphed into a new normal (see, e.g., remote work). Put all three together, and you get substantial increases in worldwide trade of not only stuff we typically think of as “digital services” (e.g., software and e-commerce), but also many things that we don’t—at least not until very recently: lawyers in New York, Zoom tutors in Pakistan, fitness instructors in London, and countless others. Here’s Winslett explaining:
Digitalization has reduced what political economists call the “proximity burden.” With goods, the seller and the buyer do not normally need to be near each other. A pair of shoes can be made in Vietnam and purchased in Spain. Traditionally, that has not been the case with services. To provide a service, the seller and the buyer needed to be in the same room. Some services still work that way. If you want a haircut, you must physically go to a barber or stylist, and traveling too far to get that service easily overwhelms the value of the service, which means that the service has to be provided locally. Granted, many services continue to operate this way, but as the Zoom tutor and Peloton examples suggest, an increasing number of services do not, thanks to digitalization.
A variety of services—including content creation, engineering, legal assistance, and customer service—can now be traded internationally. This will continue to grow over time as technology progresses. Advances in augmented and virtual reality could make delivering services internationally even easier and more effective. Imagine being able to take an immersive, virtual cooking class from someone in Thailand or violin lessons from a musician in Poland, who could use augmented or virtual reality to help you better understand how to position your arms.
As AI and robotics proliferate, demographic challenges motivate, and immigration restrictions stubbornly persist, more physical tasks might similarly be digitized and traded across borders—what economist Richard Baldwin has deemed “globotics.”
Right now, however, one of the boomiest areas of digital trade is—as Juan Londoño explains in a separate Cato essay—is online gaming (“esports”), which is big, big business these days. Before you boomers laugh at that last thought, please note that global revenue directly generated by video games is now three times larger than revenue generated by music and movies combined.
As Londoño details, the internet and globalization have driven this spectacular growth. Today, gamers can not only play games with and against other gamers from all over the world, but also watch others do the same—itself a huge, global business. Professional esports players and online streamers can make millions in winnings and endorsements, while many others have turned online gaming—playing/streaming, coaching, commenting, selling “virtual goods,” etc.—into a lucrative side hustle. The 2023 “League of Legends” world championship had a peak viewership of 6.4 million people, sold out a 16,000-seat venue in minutes, and generated $143 million in direct and indirect sponsorship revenue. That’s not (yet) Super Bowl numbers, but it’s still incredibly impressive: The just-completed 2024 NHL Stanley Cup finals, for example, averaged just 4.2 million viewers (and that was with a thrilling Game 7), while the amazing 2023 World Series—won by the amazing Texas Rangers (woot!)—averaged 9.1 million.
The globalization of gaming has generated immense benefits for not only American consumers (aka gamers), but also the American software, hardware, marketing, and related companies that facilitate it. Per Londoño, “the US gaming industry brought in approximately $68.3 billion in revenue in 2023… directly employs 104,080 people and sustains a workforce of 350,015 people when accounting for indirect jobs and other economic impacts.” (For reference, the U.S. iron and steel industry dominates U.S. trade policy today yet directly employed only 83,600 Americans last year.)
Overall, the United States is—by far—the world’s leading digital services provider:
Given the relatively low government barriers to online commerce and the United States’ impressive position, this is a modern free-trade success story—and a very big and promising one, at that. Yet, though trade and globalization are now constant political topics, we never hear a peep about any of this stuff. It’s all container ships and steel and soybeans and blah blah blah.
Gee, I wonder why?
Trade Really Is Technology
There are surely many reasons for this glaring omission, beyond simply the age of our political candidates and the sclerosis that infects much of our policy. Among those reasons is that digital trade challenges the conventional wisdom about globalization in several important ways that today’s politicians might not appreciate. Americans, so we’re told, have embraced protectionism, yet—as Kevin Williamson noted last week—we all joyfully and regularly consume loads of digital “content” from all over the world and do so with little concern for its origins or means of delivery. Kevin is also surely correct that Americans would “riot” (figuratively, I think) if the U.S. government suddenly started interfering in our content consumption habits to protect, say, some random pundits or gamers or Victorian cosplayers in Milwaukee. We really like this stuff, as the eight-fold increase in “audiovisual services imports” (aka stuff like Squid Game and The Great British Bake Off) between 2010 and 2021 demonstrates. It’s undoubtedly increased even more since then.
Perhaps more importantly, digital trade uniquely demonstrates that, as economists have tried (and mostly failed) to explain, trade is just another form of technology, like cars or robots or computers. Professor Steven E. Landsburg famously explained this concept in the “Iowa Car Crop”:
There are two technologies for producing automobiles in America. One is to manufacture them in Detroit, and the other is to grow them in Iowa. Everybody knows about the first technology; let me tell you about the second. First you plant seeds, which are the raw material from which automobiles are constructed. You wait a few months until wheat appears. Then you harvest the wheat, load it onto ships, and sail the ships eastward into the Pacific Ocean. After a few months, the ships reappear with Toyotas on them.
To other wonks and economists, this example is brilliant, but normies probably aren’t buying it. Digital trade and AI, however, have made the lesson much clearer and more tangible. For example, fast-food ordering kiosks have recently proliferated due to the high cost of labor in many U.S. cities. In California, the voice inside the kiosk is a “bot” (artificial intelligence) in the machine itself. In New York, on the other hand, the voice is an actual person living in the Philippines.
Here’s another, perhaps apocryphal but certainly funny, example of this blurring of economic lines that recently went viral:
We can surely argue about which approach, AI or “digital outsourcing,” is better for business or which is more humanitarian, but their local economic effects—on American workers, employers, competitors, consumers, the economy, and so on—are essentially identical. And, to the extent these changes are market-driven, the effects are mostly good: Businesses get needed support and can potentially expand other operations; consumers get needed services, often at lower prices or with more variety; competitors are pushed to keep up; and resources (labor, raw materials, capital, etc.) once dedicated to outsourced operations can be deployed elsewhere in more productive and viable U.S. businesses. Overall, the “winners” far outnumber “losers,” living standards rise, and the national economy is better off on net—a result repeatedly found in the economics literature on trade, including on the much-derided “China Shock.”
It’s thus unsurprising that studies find it difficult to distinguish the effects of trade from those of technology, including when it comes to jobs. After documenting the post-China Shock evolution of American manufacturers in a 2018 paper, for example, economists Teresa Fort, Justin Pierce, and Peter Schott acknowledge that the “data provide support for both trade‐ and technology‐based explanations of the overall decline of [manufacturing] employment over this period, while also highlighting the difficulties of estimating an overall contribution for each mechanism.” Other papers have—contra the protectionist narrative—found that technology is actually more disruptive and “costly” for local workers than is trade. For example, a 2019 International Monetary Fund cross‐country analysis of trade and technology shocks found that while both can raise regional unemployment and lower labor force participation, only automation has long‐lasting harms. Regions hit by trade shocks, by contrast, actually ended up better off a couple years later.
Economists also understand, of course, that these shocks do have some downsides. Competition is difficult for incumbents whether it comes from a person across the street or in another state or from an alternative product or new technology. That pressure can, in turn, generate layoffs or bankruptcies, none of which are easy. But in these cases, too, economists know that the disruptions’ benefits far outweigh their costs, and that the risk of facing new competition—of being disrupted—is the “price” we all must pay to live in a dynamic, modern, and prosperous economy. Just as we wouldn’t want to live in a world of horse-drawn carriages, abacuses, and phlebotomy, we wouldn’t want to live in a world without trade—over short or long distances.
And our modern digital habits make this clear.
Summing It All Up
Thanks to new technologies and modest government meddling, digital trade has exploded in recent years, to Americans’ great benefit. Given the rapid acceleration of AI and robotics, as well as new and wildly popular forms of entertainment, we should expect more growth—and more benefits—in the years ahead, unless governments kill the “golden goose” with new taxes, regulations, and other types of interference. That risk, unfortunately, is today very real. Countries around the world have started proposing “digital services taxes,” demanding that certain data be “localized,” and pushing a “precautionary principle” approach to AI and other new digital technologies. The WTO’s important moratorium on e-commerce duties was just extended, but only for two years—and further extensions are in doubt. Perhaps worst of all, the United States government has aligned with various left-wing critics and stopped leading on digital trade at the WTO and in other international forums, despite its many economic benefits and U.S. companies’ global dominance.
That’s a heckuva lot more important than steel (or whatever). Maybe someone should talk about it?
Note: Capitolism will be off next week.
Chart(s) of the Week
No, the United States isn’t a lot like late Soviet Russia:
Seriously, it’s not:
No, really:
Welfare states:
The Links
My cover story on globalization for Cato’s new flagship magazine
Debunking claims that free marketers have no plans for the U.S. defense industrial base
Rural U.S. towns have “too many old people”
Small U.S. towns can’t find local manufacturing workers
U.S. manufacturing has flatlined
Massive fraud plagued the employee retention tax credit
Economic freedom is really important
The U.S. saves Europe, again
China’s super-rich flee the country
Libertarian pro-natalism
GMO mosquitoes eradicating malaria
“More Disabled Americans Are Employed, Thanks to Remote Work”
Paper: Starbucks boosts entrepreneurship
U.K. retailers evading Brexit border charges
Ozempic-fueled yogurt boom
Backpack satellite internet
Largest mozzarella stick in the world
Olympians bring their own AC to Paris
thedispatch.com · by Scott Lincicome
5. Leadership in Modern War by Mick Ryan (Parts 1 and 2)
Part One: Leadership in Modern War
Part Two: Leadership Lessons from Ukraine
These two articles should be useful for discussions in PME leadership courses as well as in graduate security studies programs.
Excerpts Part One:
A final lesson for political leaders from the war in Ukraine is about will. The key lesson is that no one will help a nation that doesn’t demonstrate the will to defend itself. It is a lesson about will, and one that politicians everywhere must learn. There are many dimensions to this demonstration of will. Ultimately it is about building national resilience in all of its forms.
Sovereign resilience, which also includes the requirement to mobilise people and industry people for large military and national challenges, must be led from the very top of a nation’s political leadership. It requires that they be able to explain the rationale for defending a nation and for the sacrifices needed. It is something that the Ukrainian president has done from the beginning of the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022. In essence, a key observation from Ukraine is that political leaders must be able to ask themselves whether they would pass ‘the Zelensky test’ and hopefully the answer is ‘yes’.
Excerpts Part Two:
The most fundamental human skill in any institution is effective leadership. While important in civil and commercial entities, the value of good leadership in military affairs can literally be the difference between life and death. Those who are appointed to lead nations, military and national security institutions or directly command military personnel on operations must be able to lead and to influence. To be an effective leader, they must develop the skills and interpersonal approaches to convince others to do very difficult things in demanding and dangerous circumstances.
The aim of this article has been explore some of the lessons from Ukraine for the development of effective leaders in wartime. While this study was undertaken by viewing leadership through the lens of political, strategic and combat leaders, there are undoubtedly other frameworks which might be employed in studying leadership lessons from the war. And it goes without saying that every lesson identified in the two articles in this short series on leadership lessons from Ukraine could be the subject of entire books. They probably will be in due course.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated, again, that good leadership matters. It has provided many lessons, although in almost every case, these are not new lessons. But whether it is has been the Ukrainian President or a squad leader in charge of combined arms assault, the skill of leaders has provided the essential foundation for success where it has occurred. And while some of the qualities of good leaders continue to evolve as they always have, the identification and nurturing of good leaders remains the core of effective modern institutions.
THE FUTURE OF WAR
Leadership in Modern War
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/leadership-in-modern-war
We must prepare for other future conflicts by learning the many lessons about leadership offered by the ongoing war in Ukraine. Part One of a two-part article.
MICK RYAN
JUN 26, 2024
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The face of modern combat leadership. Source: @DefenceU one Twitter and the Ukrainian 42nd Mech Brigade
Leadership matters, it makes a difference. Kaja Kallas, 2023
Leadership is something I have studied for many years, and I have written on this topic many times. It is a topic worthy of study both inside and outside military institutions given the profound difference in effectiveness between well-led organisations and those that suffer from poor leadership.
The war in Ukraine, and many of the strategic activities associated with the war, have provided observations and lessons from which western nations and their military and national security institutions might learn. Although I have written before on some of the leadership lessons from Ukraine, and also cover it in my forthcoming book about the Ukraine War, I wanted to return to the topic because the longer this war continues, the more robust is the breadth and depth of leadership lessons available.
I had intended that this be a single article, but as I got into writing it, it quickly became apparent that it would need to be a two-part article. Therefore, in this first part, I explore the rationale for studying leadership during the Ukraine War as well as the lessons for political leaders. In part two, I examine the lessons of leadership from the war at the strategic level and the lessons that can be used to develop future combat leaders.
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The image at the top of this article is just one example of modern leadership. It is a photo of a married couple, both of whom command combat units in the Ukrainian 42nd Mechanised Brigade. The war has provided many examples of leadership from combat leaders such as this couple, as well as from strategic and political leaders. We need to learn the lessons of their experiences.
No human endeavour involving more than one person is likely to succeed without some kind of leadership. Sometimes that leadership is found wanting, and at times, it is positively woeful. But good leadership not only helps teams, institutions and nations succeed in their collective activities, but also inspires individuals to achieve things well beyond what they thought they were capable of.
Leadership is an essential human skill with many definitions. In the new Australian Defence Force doctrine on leadership (which I helped develop), leadership is described as follows:
Leadership is an affair of the heart. And of the mind. Guided by character. It is the spirit that develops people, builds teams and gets results. It is an interplay of emotions, feelings, attitudes and values. It involves being able to understand what followers need, being able to predict how they will react, and inspiring them towards achieving a common goal. We define it as the art of positively influencing others to get the job done.
Field Marshal Montgomery in his 1961 book The Path to Leadership, called it a “battle for the hearts and minds of men.” There have been many other definitions offered by individuals from government, commerce, the arts and the military. Those who seek to continuously improve their leadership capacity, and that of their subordinates, must look to all aspects of human endeavour for exemplars of good leadership. Renowned strategist and organisational change expert, Peter Drucker, once described leadership as follows:
Leadership is not magnetic personality — that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people” — that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.
No human endeavour possesses such high stakes as leadership of a nation in wartime. People who are elected or appointed to lead and command must have the presence to inspire or convince others to do most complex and difficult things in terrible and demanding circumstances.
Good leadership is developed through experience, study, reflection, mentoring and the mental capacity to embrace variety of ideas. Providing the "why", or purpose, is also a central responsibility for leaders. Purpose is more vital than the tasks to be undertaken. Leaders inspire through giving their people meaning.
But the authority granted to leaders has many limitations. These limits might involve organisational boundaries, or even national caveats. Consequently, leading through influence is a critical skill. Clear purpose helps, but leaders must invest in developing the logical and emotional appeal of tasks and missions, collaborate with others and then communicate using various mediums. This is regardless of whether the setting is the battlefield or a national capital. It is a lesson that has been proven again and agin during the war in Ukraine.
Learning from the War in Ukraine
Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, there have been many publications exploring lessons from the war since February 2022. Most of the observations produced by academic, government and media institutions over the past 26 months can be classified into one of three primary categories.
First, there are many observations about equipment. This includes the multitude of different combat and support equipment, as well as munitions and other materiel used to underpin combat operations and the defence of military forces and civilian infrastructure. Most recently, this has included advocacy for the ATACMs missiles for Ukraine, the pending deployment of F16 fighter jets, the application of drones in the land, air and maritime domains, and the Russian development of turtle tanks in the first half of 2024. Over the past year or so, this has also incorporated debates over industrial capacity and sourcing of munitions and equipment for Ukraine, and Russia.
A second major category of observations concerns ideas. This includes military tactics and strategies used by either side, as well as national policy implemented by Ukraine, Russia, the United States and other nations. It has included observations about poor integration of combat arms, particularly by the Russians, as well as Ukrainian tactics to defeat the Russians north of Kyiv. Recently, observations have been made about Russian Z Storm Units and evolved tactics for the use of drones, Russian human wave tactics, the employment of artillery and drones to close the detection to destruction gap and the evolving integration of the Ukrainian air defence network.
But this category of learning from the war in Ukraine has also extended to the consideration about the pace and risk tolerance of strategic and political decision making in the West. Recently, this has also included the development of bilateral security agreements between Ukraine and many other Western nations.
Third, there are observations lessons about from Ukraine about organisations and formations employed during the war. Early in the war, many observations were made about the utility of the Russian battalion tactical groups. Since then, other observations have been made about Ukrainian assault brigades, the new Ukrainian drone service, and Russian private military companies. Michael Kofman and Rob Lee have also written about the strengths and weaknesses of higher-level force design of the Russian military, and Dara Massicot has been an excellent source of insights on Russian strategic military re-organisations announced by Defence Minister Shoigu since the the beginning of the war.
All three of these subject areas related to learning from the Ukraine War provide useful insights to inform adaption in Ukraine and its supporters in the West. Unfortunately, countries like China are also learning many of these lessons from the war and applying them in their own force development efforts.
A core responsibility of professional military and national security institutions is to collect and analyse the many observations made about the war and analyse which ones might be acted on rapidly and which ones require more evidence or more time to implement. And while there are a multitude of observations about equipment, ideas and organisations that can be exploited in the short term, there is also one other area that is worthy of close study and analysis: leadership.
Prime Minister Kaja Kallas of Estonia - an exemplar of effective modern leadership Source: @KajaKallas at Twitter / X
Leadership: Enduring and Evolving Features
As different institutions evaluate their observations from Ukraine, and how these may inform and evolve the development of leaders at different levels, it is important that we also understand how war itself is changing. Scholars and military intellectuals who study war and the military profession differentiate between wars’ changing character and its enduring nature. This intellectual construct of how war has some elements that continuously change and some that consistently remain the same originated, at least in written form, with Carl von Clausewitz’s masterpiece written in the 19th century On War. His work remains foundational in the contemporary study of war.
War’s Enduring Nature. The enduring nature of war refers to those aspects of human conflict that are consistent themes throughout the ages. This nature of war is defined by the interaction between opposing wills, violence, and its being driven by politics. In describing this theory of the nature of war, Clausewitz sought to depict what he believed were the universal – or enduring elements – that every theorist above all should be concerned about. It is important to understand this when studying leadership because the concepts of ambiguity, fear, friction and surprise must be central to preparing leaders for their roles in war.
War’s Changing Character. When exploring the changing character of war, we are accepting that political, technological, societal developments drive the evolution in how war is waged. Humans have moved from swords and shields to tanks and planes, and now into an era of autonomous machines and algorithms used in all domains of human competition and conflict. The ideas applied to war, blending new technologies and new organisations, have also continued to develop throughout the ages. This process has continued during the war in Ukraine. This concept of war’s changing character is an important aspect of leadership development programs because in any conflict, both sides learn, adapt and change. This change needs to be understood, nurtured and sometimes forced through, by leaders at many levels. Leadership development programs must educate leaders about their role in absorbing new ideas and technologies in their institutions so that they have the best possible chance of success.
Finally, leadership occurs at different levels in every country and institution, requiring different skill sets at those levels. In my book War Transformed, I proposed five different stages of leadership that military leaders progress through during their careers. For the purposes of this examination of leadership lessons from Ukraine, I propose to divide the review into three distinct forms of leadership: political, strategic and combat. Of course, there are many other ways that this exploration might be conducted, but this framework is probably the simplest.
While the issues that are covered in this article might relate to specific levels of command, there will also be what could be described as ‘interface issues’. These are the aspects of leadership theory and practice that relate to how different levels of leadership might interact. For example, civil-military relations are an interface issue for the political and strategic level of command. Operational art, logistics and training are interface issues between strategic and combat leaders.
It is worth noting at this point that there are many other examinations of command and leadership during wartime which might be read to complement this article. One recent book on this topic, which explores multiple wars including Ukraine, is Lawrence Freedman’s brilliant Command: The Politics of Military Operations from Korea to Ukraine. A small selection of other useful books on this topic includes David Horner’s Strategy and Command, Pois and Langer’s Command Failure in War, Van Crevald’s Command in War, and Roberts’ Command Decisions.
Back to Carl von Clausewitz, who tells us in Book 1 of On War that “the political object, as the original motive of the War, will be the standard for determining both the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made. It is appropriate then that our exploration of leadership lessons from Ukraine begins with the political level.
Political Leadership
In their chapter in the recent book War in Ukraine, Thomas Mahnken and Joshua Baker write that “in the months leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there was plenty of wishful thinking that such a war would be irrational.” This appears to have been a widely held view among many politicians in the West before the war. Politicians in Ukraine, the west as well as in Russia and China, have probably learned a lot since that time. Of course, the fact that this learning has occurred among the political elite is a hypothesis!
We also need to assume that Russia, China and their authoritarian (and wannabe authoritarian) partners around the globe have been watching and learning from the performance of politicians during this war. Back in September last year I explored what China might be learning from the war in this regard.
The first lesson is about the importance of alliances. It is hard to imagine where the war would be now if not for the NATO alliance and its military, intelligence, informational and diplomatic support to Ukraine. The NATO alliance has been reinvigorated and even expanded in the past 26 months in a way that was unanticipated a few short years ago. NATO has been fundamental in deterring Russia from any expansion of the war, and in the training and equipping of the Ukrainian armed forces. Modern political leaders must not only understand the importance of alliances in their security of their own nations, but how these alliances contribute to a more secure and prosperous global security. Political leaders must understand the necessity of investing in such alliances and be advocates for them with both domestic and international audiences.
A second lesson on political leadership from the war might be about the pace of decision-making. The speed of planning, decision making, action is increasing due to hypersonic weapons, faster media cycles, and AI support at many levels. Military organisations must ensure that their people and institutions at every level are able to intellectually and physically deal with the environment through better use of time for improved decision-making.
Further, military personnel must be able to exploit this use of time to improve their capacity to adapt through re-organization, re-equipping, re-thinking and re-skilling. This exploitation of time also applies to politician. And, it might be observed, that politicians have not adapted well to the pace of modern war. Decision-making about the provision of military assistance throughout the war has been slower than required by battlefield and strategic realities. This is related to a third observation on political leadership: escalation and red lines.
This third lesson about escalation management and red lines is a crucial one because it is, in all fairness to political leaders, a very delicate balancing act. A nation has to be opaque enough in its decision making to not provide warning to the enemy about future intentions, but transparent enough to prevent that enemy from making decisions that escalate the war out of the control of all participants. As part of this difficult political balancing act, nations and alliances must take care to not reveal all of their red lines and not demonstrate too much fear about how their own decisions might lead to vertical or horizontal escalation in the war.
There was probably a much better appreciation of this issue, and the related subject of deterrence, among politicians who lived through the Cold War period. The current generation of western politicians need to improve their performance, however. The debates on whether providing a few dozen tanks or artillery systems to Ukraine would escalate the situation not only demonstrated strategic immaturity and risk aversion by politicians, it also led to Ukraine not being able to exploit battlefield opportunities and probably more Ukrainians deaths than necessary. Understanding and practicing the internal debates on escalation management is an imperative for modern politician leaders.
A fourth lesson for political leaders is investing in deterrence. Deterrence has been a characteristic of relations between tribes and nations since such organisations and relationships developed thousands of years ago. Deterrence is a national undertaking to discourage or restrain another nation-state or non-state entity from taking unwanted actions. It has several important components. Deterrence possesses a psychological dimension and aims to affect a potential aggressor’s decision-making process. This effect is achieved through the ‘use’ of force in the form of a threat. A third psychological element is the fear of possible undesirable consequences. A final component is the undesirable consequences for a potential aggressor are failure or that costs will exceed possible gains.
One of the crucial responsibilities of national political leadership is to deter aggression against the nation they lead, and to resource their participation in multinational efforts to deter coercion, aggression and conflicts. Maybe Russia would not have been deterred by a more robust stance from Ukraine and NATO in 2022. It is an interesting counter-factual to ponder. But it is clear we are now living in an era where predatory authoritarian regimes see western political weakness as provocative. More robust conventional and nuclear deterrence regimes are required in democracies and this must be led from the top.
A fifth lesson for political leaders is about strategic communication with their citizens and enemy populations. Disruptive new technologies have not only enhanced the lethality of military forces at greater distances, but they also now provide the technological means to target and influence various populations in a way that has not been possible before. Political leaders need to be able to explain conflict to their citizens, and the strategies and resources needed to defend national sovereignty. This has been a role assumed by President Zelensky throughout this war, as well as by other leaders such as Kaja Kalas and Jens Stoltengerg. At the same time, the political leaders of democratic nations must be able to make hard decisions about strategic influence operations that are aimed at the populations of enemy states – and defending against enemy misinformation operations.
A sixth lesson is about the the possibility of war. Contemporary political cultures in western nations are not well informed about war and its consequences. The past thirty years, described by some as the long peace, has seen the Cold War generation of political leaders and staffers move on and be replaced by a new generation. This new generation, seduced by the economic growth and increased globalisation of the past three decades have largely come to believe that large scale war was not possible in the 21st century. At the same time there has been a decline in war studies in western universities.
The experience of the war in Ukraine should have taught this generation that large-scale war is always possible when there exist authoritarian leaders with few limits on their domestic power and who wish to either expand their influence or remove examples of other political systems from the view of their repressed citizens. War, unfortunately, is constantly looming over humankind, and is made more likely by those who avoid understanding war and its causes. The current generation of political leaders in the west must refamiliarize and re-educate themselves on this terrible scourge.
Related to this a seventh observation on leadership: the need for humility. The war in Ukraine, and all wars throughout history, have shown that national leaders who do not understand their adversary or who do not sufficiently invest in the intelligence and intellectual efforts to understand their adversary often lead their nation to strategic failure. This is a phenomenon I have examined and written about recently. The last 26 months have seen several examples of a lack of humility that have resulted in tragic outcomes for the military forces involved, particularly the Russians in 2022; and the Ukrainians (and their western supporters) in 2023.
A final lesson for political leaders from the war in Ukraine is about will. The key lesson is that no one will help a nation that doesn’t demonstrate the will to defend itself. It is a lesson about will, and one that politicians everywhere must learn. There are many dimensions to this demonstration of will. Ultimately it is about building national resilience in all of its forms.
Sovereign resilience, which also includes the requirement to mobilise people and industry people for large military and national challenges, must be led from the very top of a nation’s political leadership. It requires that they be able to explain the rationale for defending a nation and for the sacrifices needed. It is something that the Ukrainian president has done from the beginning of the Russian large-scale invasion in February 2022. In essence, a key observation from Ukraine is that political leaders must be able to ask themselves whether they would pass ‘the Zelensky test’ and hopefully the answer is ‘yes’.
On Leadership: Learning from Ukraine
That concludes this first of two articles that provide a deeper look at the lessons that might be learned about leadership from the war in Ukraine. There are a couple points that should be made before progressing to the next part of this exploration. First, none of these lessons are new. They have been learned multiple times throughout human history. Second, each of the themes in political leadership explored above deserve much more analysis than I have provided here. They are certain to receive this attention in the coming years and decades. Finally, it is far from certain that all of the current generation of political leaders will heed all of these lessons. It is up to voters in democracies to select those political candidates for office who are most likely to have learned from them.
In the next part, I will shift to the examination of leadership at the strategic level and combat leadership. While getting political leadership right it’s important, and setting national direction is crucial, so too is leading at other levels of that most difficult of human endeavours: war.
THE FUTURE OF WAR
Leadership Lessons from Ukraine
https://mickryan.substack.com/p/leadership-lessons-from-ukraine?utm
Part two of my special examination of the key lessons about modern leadership from the war in Ukraine. In this final part, strategic and combat leadership are the focus.
MICK RYAN
JUN 27, 2024
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Image: @DefenceU at Twitter / X
In the first part of this two-part series on leadership lessons from Ukraine, I examined the purpose of collection observations about leadership – at different levels – from the war in Ukraine. Further, I explored one of those levels, the political level. In this second part, I explore two other important forms of leadership on which the war in Ukraine has provided many observations. These are strategic leadership and combat leadership.
The British Army defines leadership as “a combination of character, knowledge and action that inspires others to succeed.” This is a variation on the other definitions of leadership that I provided in the first part of this series, but I quite like this British approach. It contains the fundamental elements of leadership, and it is applicable to the different levels at which leadership must be exercised.
This ability to scale for different parts of a hierarchy inside an institution is important for several reasons. Possessing a common leadership ethos at every level in an organization is a key element of achieving unity of purpose and building an effective strategic culture. It also allows different sub-elements within an institution, who may not have collaborated before, to quickly integrate, align and tackle a common problem or mission.
In this second part of examining the leadership lessons from the war in Ukraine, two important levels of command and leadership are explored. First, strategic leadership. And, finally, the crucial skill of combat leadership.
Strategic Leadership Lessons
A first order question is this: what is strategic leadership?
Strategic leadership at heart is the leadership that occurs at the highest level of an institution. This might be a military institution, with the strategic leaders being the Chief of a unified defence organisation or a military service chief. Alternatively, in government service, it might be the head of national intelligence, cyber, border security or civil defence agency. And, outside of the government, strategic leaders are the most senior officers in a corporation.
There are many civil and military publications that explore the responsibilities of strategic leaders. Military strategic leaders, according to one US Army War College publication, must possess conceptual competencies, including the thinking skills to understand a complex and ambiguous strategic environment. They must also have technical competencies, which includes the skilled application of specialised knowledge and institutional resources to achieve strategic goals, and appreciating the political, cultural and economic elements that influence military institutions. Finally, they need interpersonal competencies to build effective teams, negotiate with other strategic stakeholders and build consensus within one’s own organization.
But non-military organizations also possess insights into the competencies of strategic leaders. One particular article from the Harvard Business Review contains a set of strategic leadership skills which are common to many other scholarly articles on this topic. The recommended skillset are as follows: alignment of goals and stakeholders; the ability to make decisions; the capacity to interpret conflicting and ambiguous information; to challenge current circumstances; to anticipate future challenges; and, to learn and adapt.
Of course, there is one key difference between strategic leadership in the military and that conducted in other entities. In the military, personnel are subject to an unlimited liability, which means they may be called upon to risk their lives, give their lives and to take the lives of others on behalf of their nation. No other organisation does this. As such, the imperative for identifying, developing and appointing the right people to strategic leadership positions in military organizations is clear.
While lessons in strategic leadership might have broader applications, for the purposes of this article, the strategic lessons that might be drawn about leadership from the war in Ukraine are those that concern strategic military and other national security leaders. This might include military commanders-in-chief, national intelligence chiefs and others such as national security advisors. All have leadership functions during peace and war.
The first lesson regards civil-military relations. In his book, Supreme Command, Eliot Cohen describes civil-military relations as an unequal dialog. In democracies, there may be a robust interchange of ideas between civilian and military leaders, but ultimately, the civilian political leadership always makes the final decision. While imperfect, this is a better system than the alternatives we might view in other historical eras or in authoritarian regimes. In Ukraine, we have seen civil-military relations play out during the war with the civilian president being the clear individual in charge. However, there have been tensions with the military at times, which came to a head with the civil-military crisis in November-December 2023 between Zelensky and General Zaluzhnyi. This was ultimately resolved with the removal of General Zaluzhnyi.
The key lessons from Ukraine on this subject include the need for democracies to have updated concepts for civil-military interaction for a quickly moving 21st century, and that politicians and military leaders must have clear, legislated functions in a democratic polity. The central functions of strategic military leaders in this civil-military environment, including winning resources from government, providing long-term vision for institutions and setting their culture, as well as communicating widely about the institution they lead, must be appreciated by political leaders.
Senior military leadership functions, and their interactions with political leaders, should not be solely based on conventions or individual preferences but should instead possess legal foundations as well. It is worth noting that developing and sustaining effective civil-military relations is one of the ‘interface issues’ that I referred to in the first article in this series. It is not only a responsibility of strategic military leaders but of political leaders as well.
A second lesson is that strategic leaders need to possess the intellectual capacity to lead the development of the military strategies that comprise a key element of any theory of victory in war. Ultimately the political leadership must build a whole of nation theory of victory for a conflict, but the military component will be a crucial aspect of it. Early in 2024, when President Zelensky appointed the new Ukrainian commander-in-chief, one of tasks given to Ukraine’s most senior military officer was to develop a new military strategy. While we are yet to see any public version of this new strategy, it is an example of the important role strategic military leaders play in formulating the core ideas for how nations might win modern wars.
A third lesson for strategic leaders is about alignment and integration. The strategic leaders in a military institution must align their operations with desired policy outcomes of the civilian government. In peacetime, this can be challenging. In wartime, it is very difficult, but essential. An example of this from Ukraine was the build up to, and conduct of, the 2023 counteroffensive. At a certain point, the conduct of a counteroffensive became a political inevitability, regardless of whether the military was fully prepared for it. The successful 2022 Ukrainian offensives in Kherson and Kharkiv had elevated the stature of the Ukrainian armed forces in western media and political circles, who then assumed a subsequent offensive would also be successful. The addition of a massive influx of western military aid including tanks and HIMARS in the second half of 2022 also placed pressure on the Ukrainian government to act, which then placed pressure on the Ukrainian military.
Political imperatives about the timing for the offensive, and the location, had to be somehow aligned with military realities by the Ukrainian high command. As the results show, this was an impossible task given also lack of time to train new brigades and the changes in Russian posture and tactics in 2023. In a similar fashion, Putin did not align military resources with his maximalist objectives for the 2022 large-scale invasion
Related to this need for strategic leaders to align policy and military strategy is the requirement for them to integrate the many elements of military operations. This deeper integration of military operations is one of the key trends in 21st century military affairs that I explored in War Transformed. Unlike the single or dual-domain counterinsurgency operations of the past two decades, Ukraine has demonstrated the need for military institutions to operate in all domains concurrently and more effectively integrate military affairs into broader national strategies. Ukraine has integrated several ground campaigns, a strategic strike campaign against Russia, a strategic influence campaign, a cyber-Defence campaign, its air and missile defensive campaign, the Black Sea maritime denial campaign and its civil defence operations throughout the war. While not likely to be replicated exactly in other theatres, it is representative of the kind of multi-domain integration challenges that will be faced my military strategic leaders elsewhere. And, it should go without saying that strategic leaders must communicate a vision or, purpose, for how and why this integration is required.
A fifth observation, which is related to the integration function, is about raising, sustaining and employing a military force in modern conditions. The Ukrainians undertook a massive expansion of their military in the first year of the war, almost quadrupling its size. All the functions related to this mobilization of the military, including recruiting, equipping, training, leading and prioritizing investment and force apportionment, offer potential lessons for the leadership of military institutions beyond Ukraine. While the raising, training and sustaining of a force is a normal peacetime function for military service chiefs, in wartime, the pace and scale of these wartime mobilization activities provides a challenge that is an order of magnitude beyond that faced in peacetime. The expansion of the Ukrainian armed forces overseen by their strategic leadership should offer useful insights for other western military strategic leaders should they also need to oversee a large-scale mobilization effort.
A sixth observation about strategic leaders in the Ukraine war has been the imperative to drive learning and adaptation. While hardly a new requirement for the most senior leaders of a military organization, the constantly evolving technologies, tactics and strategic imperatives in the Ukraine war have driven the need to learn and adapt quickly, and for lessons to be provided to industry, training and other institutional endeavors. While combat leaders must learn and adapt to survive the next day, this learning imperative for strategic leaders is somewhat different. Not getting the settings right for strategic learning and adaptation can have a significant impact on the outcome of a war. Ensuring that a military institution has a learning culture before conflict will make the learning and adaptation during war a less challenging undertaking. Strategic adaptation does not just happen, it must be led by the most senior leaders in a military institution.
Integrating new technologies of the right type and quantity, along with supporting operational concepts, is a key strategic leadership function. Image: @DefenceU at Twitter / X
Finally, strategic leaders need to make judgements about the balance of old and new technology in their organizations. Military organizations are traditionally conservative about new technologies, particularly if there are ‘tried and true’ technologies that are widely deployed and well understood. However, new and disruptive technologies can offer tactical and strategic advantages if introduced and absorbed properly into military organizations. Examples of this in the Ukraine war include drones (in the air, on land and at sea), new digitised command and control (C2) systems, as well as the application of AI in many intelligence and C2 functions. Much of the introduction of these new technologies has been driven from the bottom up in the Ukrainian military, often supported by crowd-funding initiatives.
This is not a bad thing. However, there is a need to balance this bottom-up innovation with top-down, strategic adaptation that takes battlefield lessons and rolls them out across an entire institution. To do this, there has to be a process of strategic prioritization – even in war there is still only so much money a military can be allocated by the state. Importantly, it is incumbent upon strategic leaders to ensure that new technologies have maximum impact by meshing them with new operational concepts and, if necessary, new kinds of organizations and units to employ them. This can only be led by those at the highest levels of a military institution because in addition to the functions described above, they must also communicate across the institution about the scope of changes being proposed and explain why they are required. This requires excellent communication skills from strategic leaders and their subordinates.
In concluding this section, there are many lessons on strategic leadership from the war in Ukraine. It behoves western military and national security institutions to study these lessons to constantly test their assumptions about what makes a good strategic leader and to improve their selection and development. It is, after all, a very challenging level of leadership, and success as a combat leader does not guarantee success in higher level leadership appointments. As the US Army War College Strategic Leadership Primer (4th edition) notes:
Many leaders who are successful in early-mid career fail to make the second transition to the enterprise level effectively. Part of their struggle is typically tied to a lack of understanding of the strategic competitive environment where problems are far more complex and previous experiences, while important, are insufficient to solve multi-domain, joint warfighting level challenges. This environment often rewards clarity and punishes those who wait for certainty.
It is now time to turn to the final level of leadership to be examined in this article. It is a form of leadership that comprises the ‘entry point’ for most military leaders and for most, it is a crucible experience. It is also where bad leadership has the fastest feedback loop of all the levels examined in this study of leadership lessons from Ukraine. As such, it is time to explore the lessons of combat leadership from the war in Ukraine.
Combat leadership
Just as strategic leadership was defined earlier in this article, so too must combat leadership be defined if we are to ensure the right lessons can be collected, assessed and absorbed by western military institutions. Combat leadership is that leadership that occurs in tactical units during wartime. These units might be the size of squad/section, they might be a company, ship or air force squadron or as large as an army or marine division or naval task force.
The common thread in combat leadership is that unlike the other two forms of leadership examined thus far, combat leaders and their subordinates are directly exposed to mortal danger. Therefore, as I alluded to above, it is the one form of leadership where there is a direct, rapid feedback loop on performance.
The complexities of military operations mean that military leadership must be taught, practiced and continually honed by institutions. Neglecting the development of military leaders has proven, throughout time, to have profoundly bad outcomes for military organisations, and sometimes, for their countries. Based on the overall lessons from the Ukraine war in the past 26 months, war’s enduring nature, and the ongoing changes in the character of war, I propose the following areas where Western military institutions can learn from Ukraine and develop the next generation of combat leaders.
Tactical Mastery. A key element of any military leaders’ professional growth is building tactical acumen within their own service and specialisation. This might seem obvious, but the training programs of officer academies and training institutions often come under pressure to also include in their programs all kinds of superfluous training outcomes that have almost no relevance to the modern battlefield. As such, this emphasis on tactics, all arms integration at the lowest levels, giving succinct tactical orders and excellence in tactical operations is the first responsibility of every combat leader. It is an area that must be prioritized all other leadership concern in combat leaders. They must be effective combat leaders, who are able to achieve missions while also ensuring they do not place their personnel at unacceptable risk.
Tactics is cool, but many military institutions do not act like this. Senior service leaders must incentivise good tactical proficiency, for existing as well as new technologies and organisations. And it goes without saying that if you can’t win battles, you probably won’t win wars. Just ask the Russians.
Giving orders - a crucial combat leadership skill. Image: @3BrigaeeTSV at Twitter / X
Mission Command. Combat leaders need a good knowledge of tactics, and experience, to exercise mission command. Mission command, drawn from the German concept of auftragstaktik, is where subordinate leaders at various levels execute decentralised operations based on mission-type orders. This gives combat leaders flexibility in how they execute tactical operations, based on their superior knowledge of the local situation. It also ensures that military organizations can continue to fight with a common purpose when the enemy inevitably uses EW or some other method to break down the C2 systems of a formation in combat. The other integral element of true mission command, which is often overlooked, is that combat leaders must provide constant feedback up the chain of command to inform subsequent mission orders.
While not universal throughout the ground forces, there appears to be a greater degree of this approach in the Ukrainian military when compared to the Russian Army. The mission command approach to leadership will continue to be effective into the 21st century where distributed operations are likely to be the norm to preserve deployed combat power. It should be noted however that brand new combat leaders probably have less capacity for this style of command than more experienced combat leaders. It is one aspect of leadership where commanders have to make judgements about the capacity of individual leaders under their command and apply the right balance of mission command and directive control.
Human-machine integration. The war in Ukraine has seen an explosion in the use of robotic systems across the air, land and maritime domains. Indeed, there is a convergence in the application of robotic systems, big data, high-performance computing, and algorithms in the Ukrainian military which offers an array of lessons for different levels of leadership. Digitised command and control, with embedded AI, is an essential part of combat operations particularly in the planning and employment of drones as well as rapidly sharing data with fire units. Future leaders must be proficient in employing and integrating these systems not only in combat, but for logistics, reconnaissance, as well as disaster relief missions. Human-machine integration, while also a responsibility of military institutions, will remain a function of combat leaders as new technologies are rapidly inserted into combat units in the field. There may not always be time for higher level institutional integration activities so more junior leaders must be adept at human-machine integration.
Communication and Influence Skills. The ability to communicate is one of the most basic, yet crucial functions of leadership at every level. Combat leadership requires the ability to communicate with subordinates as well as superiors, and quickly convey tasks and intent. The capacity to provide purpose, work with peers, generate influence and conduct information warfare, has always been important but has again been highlighted on the battlefield in the Ukraine War.
More broadly, Ukrainian combat leaders have developed a capacity for effective strategic communication through the use of social media. This has provided analysts and western publics with a more informed and gritty view of what is occurring in the war. While the Ukrainian approach to using social media appears to be more liberal than many other western military institutions, there is much that can be learned from allowing soldiers to communicate directly with their citizens about the conduct of modern war.
Creativity and Curiosity. Ukrainian combat leaders have demonstrated creativity in many endeavours during this war, including the marriage of drones and artillery, new digital command and control systems and the conduct of influence activities. There has been an explosion of bottom-up innovation which has often been supported by crowd funding new technologies for units. Creativity is a foundation for new tactics and strategic approaches, and it should also influence combat leaders’ self-learning activities to build and sustain excellence in their profession. Combat leaders who demonstrate higher levels of curiosity are more likely to develop new tactics and organizational approaches when new problems or new technologies appear.
But this creativity must also be nurtured by senior leaders and institutional culture if it is to reach peak effectiveness. While this nurturing may not have always been the case in Ukraine, there is sufficient evidence from Ukraine and other conflicts that where senior leaders nurture creativity and invest in new innovations, those organizations are more likely to be successful in a rapidly evolving tactical and technological environment. Military institutions must have the right incentives to nurture curiosity in their leaders. This has not always been the case in many Western institutions. Despite the rapidly evolving capacity of computing power and artificial intelligence, creativity and ingenuity will be critical skills for future military leaders.
Adaptive Combat Leaders. As has been seen throughout the 26 months since Russia’s large-scale invasion, the battlefield can change rapidly. The way the Ukrainians and Russians fought in the first weeks of the war is drastically different to how combat operations are conducted now. This is due to new technologies being introduced, the introduction of western weapons to the Ukrainian armed forces, and the changes in Russian tactics. Tactical adaptation, the ability to learn and adapt to win battles, is a crucial skill for combat leaders. It must be practiced in peacetime in a training culture that uses failure as a mechanism for learning.
The development of combat leaders in the west, learning from the lessons of Ukraine, must also emphasise a working understanding of organisational theory, institutional cultures, and adaptation theory. They will require the cognitive capacity and mental agility to appreciate when the external environmental demands are changing, to know and understand the capacity for the military to adapt, and moreover, encapsulate the ability to lead that change at the decisive point. These are important battlefield, as well as senior leader, skills.
Strategic Foundations: Building Leaders for Modern Wars
While this examination of leadership in the Ukraine War has been divided into the political, strategic and combat function, there are some common requirements which provide the strategic basis for modern leaders involved in preparing for, and leading, their nations wars.
First, military institutions must build a professional foundation for all of their leaders. From initial training, future military leaders must establish a foundation for leadership in military institutions. This is a critical phase for inculcating the values, attitudes and behaviours demanded by military organisations. As observed in Ukraine, those institutions that pay attention to the basics of the profession – including ethical behaviour, military effectiveness and good leadership – are more likely to be successful on the battlefield and victorious in war.
Second, military institutions must improve at developing a broad technological literacy in all of its leaders. The Human-Robot-Algorithmic teaming examined above is a specific skill set within a broader need to maintain a knowledge existing, evolving and new technologies that are either used by the military or have an impact on the military. In Ukraine, soldiers and officers have applied their technological literacy to battlefield adaptation; this is essential at all levels of military endeavour. Military leaders must appreciate the challenges and opportunities of employing these technologies, and must pay constant attention to technological education, literacy and ethics. And political leaders must be well versed in relevant technologies when making policy decisions about either investing in the industries to develop them, or passing the legislation that regulates their employment.
Third, all leaders must provide purpose to those that they lead. Whether they are political leaders leading a nation at war or combat leaders on the front line, the provision of purpose is crucial. Purpose inspires citizens and soldiers and allows for the full expression innovation and different ideas in free societies. This purpose must also be communicated effectively, a skill not always in evidence in some contemporary leaders.
Finally, there is one particular lesson that is a common requirement for all leaders engaged in a war: they must know how to win. War is a competition, and we have again witnessed just how brutal this competitive environment is in Ukraine. As Clausewitz wrote “to overcome the enemy or disarm him – call it what you will – must always be the aim of warfare.” Military institutions must develop leaders who know how to win, but also how to do so within the values and ethical frameworks of their institution and the nation they serve. There are no silver medals in the military profession nor in war. You win, or you lose everything you hold dear. We should not shy away from using the term ‘win’ in modern discourse on competition and conflict or the strategic patience required to win wars. And nor should our political leaders.
Learning from Ukraine to Lead and Win
The most fundamental human skill in any institution is effective leadership. While important in civil and commercial entities, the value of good leadership in military affairs can literally be the difference between life and death. Those who are appointed to lead nations, military and national security institutions or directly command military personnel on operations must be able to lead and to influence. To be an effective leader, they must develop the skills and interpersonal approaches to convince others to do very difficult things in demanding and dangerous circumstances.
The aim of this article has been explore some of the lessons from Ukraine for the development of effective leaders in wartime. While this study was undertaken by viewing leadership through the lens of political, strategic and combat leaders, there are undoubtedly other frameworks which might be employed in studying leadership lessons from the war. And it goes without saying that every lesson identified in the two articles in this short series on leadership lessons from Ukraine could be the subject of entire books. They probably will be in due course.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated, again, that good leadership matters. It has provided many lessons, although in almost every case, these are not new lessons. But whether it is has been the Ukrainian President or a squad leader in charge of combined arms assault, the skill of leaders has provided the essential foundation for success where it has occurred. And while some of the qualities of good leaders continue to evolve as they always have, the identification and nurturing of good leaders remains the core of effective modern institutions.
6. Pentagon's Efforts on Traumatic Brain Injuries to Get Government Watchdog Review
Pentagon's Efforts on Traumatic Brain Injuries to Get Government Watchdog Review
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · June 26, 2024
A government watchdog will probe the Pentagon's efforts to identify, treat and prevent traumatic brain injuries caused by blast exposure.
The Government Accountability Office has accepted a request from two dozen lawmakers in both parties and chambers of Congress to conduct a review in response to their concerns that the Pentagon is not taking the issue seriously enough, according to a copy of a letter the GAO sent to the lawmakers that was obtained by Military.com.
"DoD has spent billions on researching traumatic brain injuries, but there are still major gaps in getting service members the help that they deserve," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said in a statement to Military.com about the GAO agreeing to investigate. "We must act to protect our service members, and the GAO will help us review those efforts and identify key areas to mitigate the impacts of blast overpressure on service members."
The GAO expects to formally start its review in about four months, according to the letter.
The request -- which was led by Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., in addition to Warren -- came after a hearing earlier this year in which Pentagon officials frustrated senators with a seeming lack of urgency in addressing a top health concern for service members.
At the hearing, held by the Senate Armed Services Committee's personnel subcommittee chaired by Warren, Pentagon officials vowed to collect more data on troops' exposure to blasts. But they also said more research would be needed before taking some of the steps that lawmakers were advocating for, such as more frequent cognitive testing and defining safety limits for using certain weapons.
Lawmakers have been pushing for more immediate action amid a growing pile of evidence detailing the devastating symptoms service members and veterans are suffering as a result of traumatic brain injury, or TBI. Mounting evidence also indicates that troops are at risk of exposure to dangerous blast pressure not just from enemy bombs and attacks but also from routine military activities such as repeat artillery fire.
Military.com has reported extensively on evidence that TBI is linked to an increased risk of suicide among veterans and that Pentagon officials squandered opportunities to get ahead of the issue.
In addition to pushing for a GAO investigation into the issue, Warren, Ernst and Khanna introduced a sweeping bill earlier this year intended to better prevent and treat TBI among service members.
Elements of that bill were included in both the House and Senate version of the annual defense policy bill. The defense bill is working its way through Congress right now, with a full Senate vote pending followed by negotiations between the House and Senate on a final version that will become law.
military.com · by Rebecca Kheel · June 26, 2024
7. Analysis: Poland Continues to Prepare Citizens for War With Russia
all military failures result from a failure to learn, a failure to adapt, and a failure to anticipate (Cohen and Gooch in Military MIsfortune). It seems like Poland is trying to avoid all three failures.
Analysis: Poland Continues to Prepare Citizens for War With Russia
kyivpost.com · by Steve Brown · June 27, 2024
Poland increasingly sees war with Moscow as being inevitable and it doesn’t intend for its armed forces or its citizens to be found wanting as it prepares to defend itself.
By Steve Brown
June 27, 2024, 12:58 pm
Screenshot from Associated Press video of volunteers for Poland’s “Holidays with the Army” training program.
Poland has seen what has happened to its Ukrainian neighbor since Russia's full-scale invasion and doesn’t intend to be caught unprepared as Kyiv was.
Even before Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine began in February 2022 Poland had decided to modernize and rearm its armed forces, but that process really took off because of the invasion, with Warsaw declaring it wanted to create the largest, best-equipped armed forces in Europe by 2035.
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According to a September article by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Poland was already spending 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense but decided to increase that to 4 percent in 2023 with more than 50 percent of that to be spent on weapons and equipment.
The country plans to double its land forces to 300,000 accompanied by huge purchases of equipment including 366 Abrams tanks and 96 Apache attack helicopters; 980 K2 tanks and 648 self-propelled howitzers from South Korea; hundreds of US HIMARS rocket launchers; large numbers of Patriot air defense systems; 22 UK-made air defense batteries and three UK-designed frigates; as well as 48 South Korean FA-50 combat aircraft and 32 US F-35 aircraft to add to its existing fleet of 48 F-16s.
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It is not just its armed forces that will be better prepared. Warsaw has also unveiled plans to physically strengthen its borders with Belarus and Russia – a strategy it calls “Eastern Shield, for which it has allocated 10 billion zlotys ($2.5 billion) over five years.
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When the Russian assaults began, life in the town, some 40 kilometres (25 miles) north of Donetsk city, deteriorated drastically.
In March the government announced new legislation to increase Poland’s ability to defend its citizens which would include greater funding for first aid training, improved public warning systems, and the construction of more emergency shelters.
The Polish people appear enthusiastic about their leaders’ proposals and learning to defend themselves.
Holidays with the Army
Poland is aiming for its future army of 300,000 to be filled totally with volunteers, while its current strength is around 198,000. The latest initiative designed to both sensitize its citizens towards the need for defense and to attract potential recruits to the armed forces is a new program launched this summer by the Polish Armed Forces they have called “Holidays with the Army.”
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The “vacations” are being held in 70 locations throughout Poland, several near the borders between Russia and Belarus. The program is open to both men and women aged between 18 and 35 years old. A training module lasts for 28 days for which attendees are paid 6,000 zlotys ($1.5 thousand).
Col. Pavel Galazka, commander of the 18th Lomza Logistics Regiment, a unit training the volunteers said: “The Army wants to train as many citizens as possible. Everyone knows about the threat that comes from the east.”
He said that at the end of the training, the successful volunteers will take a soldier's oath in which they swear “to serve loyally the Republic of Poland ... even at the cost of losing their life or blood.”
The recruits are given the option to enlist at the end of the course either directly into a branch of the professional armed services, the Territorial Defense Forces or be on standby as reservists.
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Maj. Michal Tomczyk, a spokesperson at the Defense Ministry, told AP news that Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has invigorated Poles’ desire to defend their nation. He said they had planned for 10,000 volunteers for the program and have to date received more than 11,000 applications.
The program is no holiday, despite its name. It is run as a “boot camp” so the recruits understand exactly what is needed for a 21st-century soldier. They rise early and work until late learning combat and survival skills. They are confined to the base for the 28-day duration of the course.
In some of the areas used for training, there are still remnants of the Polish defensive lines from the 1939 German invasion in the prelude to World War II. Galazka said this has motivated many of the young people who have volunteered for the program and reinforced the patriotism already cultivated by the history they learned at school.
The Financial Times previously reported on military shortages suffered in European NATO countries and their inability to rapidly mobilize their forces in the event of a war with Russia.
Russia's initial seizure of Ukrainian territory in 2014 raised some concerns but very little action. The full-scale invasion has brought the threat from Russia sharply into focus, particularly among the Baltic and Nordic nations. In Poland, a member of both NATO and the European Union, the war is taking place just across the border and stray Russian missiles have landed on their territory.
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Sweden and Finland broke away from centuries of neutrality to join NATO, while some nations, such as Denmark, are considering introducing or extending compulsory conscription for both men and women.
Earlier Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s military committee, warned alliance members in January they should prepare for a full-scale war with Russia anytime in the next 20 years. He warned that if hostilities broke out, a large number of citizens will need to be mobilized and governments should already be creating systems to manage and educate its people to understand that “they will have a role.”
The message has certainly been received and understood in Warsaw.
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Steve Brown
After a career as a British Army Ammunition Specialist and Bomb Disposal Officer, Steve later worked in the fields of ammunition destruction, demining and explosive ordnance disposal with the UN and NATO. In 2017, after taking early retirement, he moved to Ukraine with his Ukrainian wife and two sons where he became a full-time writer. He now works as a senior writer and English language editor with the Kyiv Post.
kyivpost.com · by Steve Brown · June 27, 2024
8. New Attacks Suggest Moscow Rapidly Losing Control Over Dagestani Population
New Attacks Suggest Moscow Rapidly Losing Control Over Dagestani Population
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 21 Issue: 96
jamestown.org · by Paul Goble · June 25, 2024
Executive Summary:
- The deadly Islamist violence against Christian and Jewish centers in two Dagestani cities is the latest in a string of such actions involving Dagestanis and a continuation of the tectonic shifts there that cast doubt on Moscow’s control.
- These developments are rooted in Dagestani society but have been exacerbated by Kremlin policies that undermine Moscow’s ability to rely on repression alone.
- As a result, more Russians are questioning Putin’s claim to have pacified the North Caucasus—a major reason the population has backed him—and are pointedly asking why he has failed to protect Russia against Islamist violence.
On June 23, three Islamist militants in Makhachkala, Dagestan’s capital, attacked a Russian Orthodox church and a Jewish synagogue. The assault damaged both buildings and killing one religious leader and wounding several others. They also injured some of the law enforcement guarding the facilities (Nemoskva.net, June 24). Three other militants simultaneously attacked religious buildings in Derbent, inflicting similar damage. In both places, the Dagestani police and Russian security services intervened. After a lengthy exchange of gunfire, they killed all six militants, but only after the militants had killed ten people and wounded 34 more, according to official accounts (Chernovik.net, June 23; Zona.media; The Moscow Times, June 25). The Russian siloviki declared parts of both cities counter-terrorist zones, only to announce a day later that those designations had ended. Dagestani leaders announced a three-day period of mourning, and officials in Dagestan and elsewhere in the North Caucasus have put their republics on high alert (Kavkaz.Realii, June 24). These attacks reflect growing domestic instability as the Kremlin is fixated on Ukraine and suggest that Moscow is struggling to maintain control over parts of the North Caucasus.
Discussion of these latest terrorist acts, as Moscow immediately christened them, has dominated Russian media. The reaction of most officials and commentators initially followed the now-conventional script of declarations that the local population was and remains completely united in opposition to the terrorists; that the acts were therefore the work of outsiders, such as ISIS or Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); and that the attacks in Dagestan were not the result of degrading conditions there or the actions/inaction of officials in Moscow and Makhachkala.
Three aspects of the current situation, however, have reduced the number of observers ready to believe that narrative. First, many violent actions involving Dagestanis have taken place in recent months, particularly the anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic actions in Makhachkala last October and the Crocus City Hall attack in Moscow in March. As a result, increasingly fewer Russians and Russian commentators are accepting the Kremlin’s version of events as the only possibility. They are now asking many questions, including the most dangerous of all: why has the Vladimir Putin regime not learned anything and stopped this chain of events, preferring instead to pursue imaginary enemies and leaving Russia undefended?
Second, the terrorists carried out two coordinated attacks in different places at the same time, something that has rarely been seen in Russia in the past. This clearly suggested to even the most casual reader or listener that the terrorist acts were well organized and not the work of a few disgruntled individuals. Unsurprisingly, many are ready to accept that ISIS was the organizer of the attacks (Kommersant; T.me/tass_agency, June 23; Kavkaz-uzel, June 24; citing Institute for the Study of War, June 23).
Third, and perhaps most important, stories about the attacks featured a new and disturbing element. The father of two of the terrorists had been a policeman and was a senior Dagestani official until the attacks occurred. He has since been forced to resign and was arrested. The father likely knew that his sons were Islamists, which suggests he may have been himself or was at least sympathetic to their cause. To the extent that this is true, it already indicates to Russians that Islamism in Dagestan is not some marginal phenomenon but has spread into the elite. Some are even talking about “nomenklatura terrorism” (Newizv.ru; Forum-msk.ru, June 24). That reaction has prompted some Russians to demand a thorough “house cleaning” in the republic. It remains unclear, however, whether Moscow is even capable of such a response, given the cutbacks in the security forces since the war against Ukraine began (Regnum, June 23).
As a result, the Kremlin has lost control of the narrative about the Dagestani events and other issues. Dmitry Rogozin, former head of Roskosmos, for example, says that blaming Ukraine or NATO for Islamist actions “lead us to big problems” by distracting the authorities from the real threats (T.me/Rogozin_do, June 23). Commentator Aleksandr Rodnyansky argues that the events in Dagestan prove that “the thread of Islamism is greater today than ever before” (T.me/alexander_rodnyansky, June 24). Journalist Kirill Shulika says that the attacks demonstrate that Moscow does not know how to fight this growing threat because the government is focusing on the wrong issues (Rosbalt, June 24). And observer Aleksandr Baunov contends that all this shows that Moscow is losing control over Dagestan and possibly more (T.me/baunovhaus, June 23).
The most thorough critique has come from former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov. He argues that the developments in Dagestan signal that Putin’s claims about pacifying the Caucasus are total fictions—thus depriving the Kremlin leader of a major reason Russians have supported him (T.me/mozhemobyasnit, June 24). Gallyamov adds that few people will believe the regime’s claims that Ukraine or NATO are involved in Dagestan, or that the Kremlin is blameless for what has happened, just as they now question many of Putin’s statements. “As for the Islamists, with their attempts to stop modernity, turn back time, and recreate medieval archaism in the country,” he continues, “the authorities themselves are creating a favorable environment for them. When domestic violence is declared to be almost the main spiritual bond, is it any wonder that people who practice it … feel more and more confident? They gain an appetite and begin to make greater and greater claims, demanding that the country live by their rules. Here United Russia members can put aside the party charter and pick up the Quran with a machine gun.”
Three other analysts, one Polish and two Russian, earlier provided support for what Moscow commentators are now saying. First, in a new book, For Putin and for Sharia: Dagestani Muslims and the Islamic State (DeKalb, 2023), Polish anthropologist Iwona Kaliszewska argues that Dagestan is already “the freest republic in Russia” because “decolonization based on religion has already occurred there” (Kavkaz.Realii, December 8, 2023). Second, Moscow sociologist Evgeny Varshaver says that the preconditions were laid by the Putin regime itself, which has reduced the salience of nationality and allowed the various nations of Dagestan to come together on the basis of religion. This is a major reason why they act as Muslims even more than as Dagestanis, let alone as Avars or Dargins (Nemoskva.net, November 28, 2023). Third, Moscow lawyer Dmitry Krasnov asserts that more than anywhere else in Russia, Dagestan is the place where the preconditions for mass protests are now in place (see EDM, November 21, 2017; Mk.ru, November 9, 2023; Trtrussian.com, February 10).
For all these reasons, the events in Makhachkala and Derbent may be a harbinger of Moscow’s loss of control over Dagestan and, even more fatefully, Putin’s loss of influence in Russia as a whole.
jamestown.org · by Paul Goble · June 25, 2024
9. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 26, 2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 26, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-26-2024
Key Takeaways:
- The likely Islamic State (IS) affiliate Wilayat Kavkaz terrorist attacks in the Republic of Dagestan on June 23 have increased fears within the Russian information space about further attacks and instability in the North Caucasus.
- The June 23 terrorist attacks in Dagestan also prompted Chechen Republic Head Ramzan Kadyrov to double down on his image as a ruthless autocratic strongman capable of protecting the North Caucasus from religious extremism.
- North Korea will reportedly send military construction and engineering forces to participate in "reconstruction work" in occupied Donetsk Oblast as early as July 2024.
- Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated that Russia is not interested in any negotiations that do not result in Ukrainian territorial concessions beyond the parts of Ukraine Russian forces already occupy.
- New Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov used his first phone call with US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin on June 26 to reiterate standard Russian threats meant to coerce the US out of supporting Ukraine as part of the wider Russian reflexive control campaign targeting Western decision-making.
- Russia and Ukraine exchanged 90 prisoners of war (POWs) each in a one-to-one POW exchange on June 25 amid United Nations (UN) reports of Russia's continued abuse of POWs.
- Russia and Iran signed a memorandum on June 26 regarding the supply of Russian gas to Iran, following reported disagreements between Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the Russian supply of gas to the PRC.
- Ukraine’s pervasive shortage of critical air defense missiles is inhibiting Ukraine’s ability to protect its critical infrastructure against Russian strikes.
- Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Kupyansk.
- Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) published a report on June 26 detailing a significant increase in Russia's military equipment and weapons production in 2023.
10. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 26, 2024
Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 26, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-26-2024
Key Takeaways:
- Iran: Hardline candidate Amir Hossein Ghazi Zadeh withdrew from the Iranian presidential election. Ghazi Zadeh did not appear to have a serious chance at winning and withdrew to avoid splitting votes across too many hardline candidates.
- Iraq: A member of an Iranian-backed militia became the deputy chief of staff of the Iraqi PMF. The appointment reflects the significant control and influence that the loyal Iranian-backed militia has in the Iraqi security apparatus.
- Gaza Strip: Israeli forces conducted airstrikes killing two Palestinian militia members involved in manufacturing and smuggling weapons in the Gaza Strip.
- Yemen: The Houthis claimed that they conducted a combined drone attack with the Islamic Resistance in Iraq into Israel for the fourth time.
11. Report to Congress on Use of Force in Cyberspace
Download the 3 page report at this link: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24778027/use-of-force-in-cyberspace-june-25-2024.pdf
Report to Congress on Use of Force in Cyberspace - USNI News
news.usni.org · by U.S. Naval Institute Staff · June 26, 2024
The following is the June 25, 2024, Congressional Research Service In Focus report, Use of Force in Cyberspace.
From the report
Introduction
There are presently no internationally accepted criteria for determining whether a nation state cyberattack is a use of force equivalent to an armed attack, which could trigger a military response. Likewise, no international, legally binding instruments have yet been drafted explicitly to regulate inter-state relations in cyberspace. Self-defense and countermeasures for armed attacks are permitted in international law when a belligerent violates international law during peacetime, or violates the law of armed conflict (LOAC) during wartime. However, the term “armed attack” has no universally accepted definition with respect to cyberattacks. In addition to what constitutes an armed attack in cyberspace, questions remain over which provisions of existing international law govern the conduct of war in cyberspace.
United States Doctrine
In September 2012, the State Department took a public position on whether cyber activities could constitute a use of force under Article 2(4) of the United Nations (U.N.) Charter and customary international law. According to State’s then-legal advisor, Harold Koh, “Cyber activities that proximately result in death, injury, or significant destruction would likely be viewed as a use of force.” Examples included triggering a meltdown at a nuclear plant, opening a dam and causing flood damage, and causing airplanes to crash by interfering with air traffic control. By focusing on the ends achieved rather than the means with which they are carried out, this definition of cyber war arguably fits within existing international legal frameworks. If an actor employs a cyber weapon to produce kinetic effects that might replicate fire power under other circumstances, then the use of that cyber weapon rises to the level of the use of force. However, the United States recognizes that cyberattacks without kinetic effects are also an element of armed conflict under certain circumstances. Koh explained that cyberattacks on information networks in the course of an ongoing armed conflict would be governed by the same principles of proportionality that apply to other actions under the LOAC. These principles include retaliation in response to a cyberattack with a proportional use of kinetic force. In addition, “computer network activities that amount to an armed attack or imminent threat thereof” may trigger a nation’s right to self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter. The 2011 International Strategy for Cyberspace affirmed that “when warranted, the United States will respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country.” The 2024 International Cyberspace & Digital Policy Strategy states that the United States is working to advance responsible state behavior based on a U.N.-endorsed framework on “the applicability of existing international law, adherence to globally accepted and voluntary norms of state behavior in peacetime, development and implementation of confidence-building measures to reduce the risk of conflict in cyberspace.” It refers to the 2023 Department of Defense (DOD) Cyber Strategy goal “to reinforce responsible state behavior by encouraging adherence to international law and internationally recognized cyberspace norms.” Chapter XVI of the DOD Law of War Manual notes that the United States strives to work with other states to clarify not whether international law applies to cyberspace, but how. Both the Departments of State and Defense contend that cyberattacks rising to the level of an armed attack may trigger mutual defense treaty obligations, though an armed attack in cyberspace remains undefined.
NATO Doctrine
In 2009, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Cooperative Cyber Defense Center convened an international group of independent experts to draft a manual on the law governing cyber conflict. The first Tallinn Manual, as it is known, was published in 2013 and offers 95 “black letter rules” addressing sovereignty, state responsibility, the LOAC, humanitarian law, and the law of neutrality. The Tallinn Manual is an academic text and as such nonbinding. The February 2017 Tallinn Manual 2.0 expands upon the first and offers 154 black letter rules governing cyber operations, including in peacetime. In the provisions of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on one member is considered an attack on all, affording military assistance in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.
Download the document here.
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news.usni.org · by U.S. Naval Institute Staff · June 26, 2024
12. Have China’s Wolf Warriors Gone Extinct?
Excerpts:
The rise and fall of wolf warrior diplomacy was, ultimately, a function of Chinese leaders’ perception of the international environment and the threat it posed to the security of their regime. This central insight leads to two important conclusions for U.S. policymakers. For one, the decline of heated Chinese rhetoric may not be permanent. China’s diplomatic corps has proved its ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions, and party leaders may once again unleash the proverbial wolves if it suits their interests.
Additionally, Washington must consider how its pronouncements about the way the Chinese government rules may undermine opportunities to maintain lines of communication. American policymakers often, and oftentimes rightly, feel the urge to criticize the actions of foreign governments when those actions contravene American values. When it comes to issues such as the repression of ethnic minorities, the United States can and should continue to speak out for what it believes.
Wolf warrior diplomacy was undermining China’s public image.
Fair as its criticism may be, however, such rebukes do not come without cost. The United States benefits from diplomatic engagement with China that allows both sides to clarify their positions, demarcate redlines, and defuse tensions. As the 2021 talks in Alaska illustrated, however, such opportunities are squandered when Beijing’s diplomats instead use them to make the case for the regime’s right to rule. Efforts to publicly defend China’s national honor by lashing out at foreign critics, moreover, add noise to communication channels, which can make China’s actual position even more difficult to discern. Even if the United States has come to embrace a competition-based relationship with China, encouraging Chinese emissaries to use their finite diplomatic bandwidth to stage confrontations is not in the U.S. national interest.
U.S. policymakers must thus bear in mind the tradeoffs when they make statements that China’s leaders perceive as an attempt to undermine their domestic legitimacy. A common trap that Washington falls into is to view its criticism of a foreign government as merely an affirmation of U.S. values—and to overlook the possibility that the leaders of that government will see the criticism as a threat to their political survival. There are times when the United States may consider it appropriate, or even desirable, to censure China. But if the type and frequency of its condemnations reach the point of threatening the CCP’s sense of security, Washington should expect a wolf warrior reaction. U.S. policymakers will have to decide whether the costs to diplomatic channels are worth it.
Have China’s Wolf Warriors Gone Extinct?
Why Beijing Embraced Combative Diplomacy—and Why It Might Do So Again
June 27, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation · June 27, 2024
Five years ago, in 2019, China’s diplomats stopped being diplomatic. High-profile ambassadors and foreign ministry spokespeople began to make acerbic, sarcastic, and negative statements on Twitter (now X), in press conferences, and behind closed doors. The contrast to Chinese diplomats’ previously tactful and circumspect rhetorical style was so striking that observers at home and abroad conferred a colorful new moniker on China’s emissaries: “wolf warriors.”
The primary aim of wolf warrior diplomacy was to disarm foreign critics through public confrontations, often using emotionally evocative language. In July 2019, for example, one of China’s senior diplomats in Pakistan traded barbs with a former U.S. national security adviser on Twitter. In November, the Chinese ambassador to Sweden made headlines when he said, “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” During diplomatic talks in Alaska in March 2021, China’s senior diplomat Yang Jiechi publicly warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to “smear China’s social system” and a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson criticized the U.S. delegation for creating a hostile atmosphere “filled with the smell of gunpowder.”
Yet the peak of wolf warrior diplomacy has now passed. Over the last three years, Chinese diplomats have gradually returned to a more traditional approach. Likely under orders from President Xi Jinping, they have toned down their public statements and focused on improving relations with the United States, western Europe, and the developing world. Social media accounts linked to the Chinese foreign ministry remain active, but their messaging has become less biting and confrontational. Foreign ministry press conferences, too, have become more subdued. Several of the diplomats whose statements made international news in 2019 and 2020 have retired or moved on to new assignments.
Many scholars and policymakers attribute the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy to the nationalism of the Chinese public and Xi’s personalist leadership. Yet more important than any domestic factor is the change in China’s international environment. In the year or so before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese leaders were reacting to a sharp increase in foreign criticism—most notably from the United States—which they perceived as a threat to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As foreign criticism softened, so did China’s approach to diplomacy.
Going forward, U.S. policymakers must consider the effects of their public comments carefully. If Beijing again believes itself to be under siege, the wolf warriors may come back—damaging the prospects of constructive dialogue between China and the United States.
THE RISE OF THE WOLF WARRIOR
China’s diplomats are not fundamentally different from those of other countries. The country’s foreign ministry conducts the same activities as any other, relaying messages to and from foreign counterparts and reporting developments abroad. Chinese emissaries are not the only ones whose job requires them to engage with hostile countries, deliver coercive threats, and explain their country’s actions to foreign critics. Typically, however, diplomats in China and abroad relay even the most unpleasant news in language that carefully calibrates and precisely identifies the message that political leaders wish to convey.
Chinese diplomats have generally embraced that professional ethos since the founding of the People’s Republic. Zhou Enlai, the country’s first premier and foreign minister, oversaw initiatives in the 1950s and early 1960s to build a large, well-trained corps of foreign emissaries. After a dramatic detour during the Cultural Revolution, which upended China’s diplomatic activities, the foreign ministry became even more professionalized. By the late 1980s, the vast majority of senior Chinese diplomats had a college degree. They routinely drafted white papers, held press conferences, and engaged counterparts abroad. The country’s diplomats grew more skilled at communicating with foreign audiences, too. As the political scientists Taylor Fravel and Evan Medeiros noted in Foreign Affairs in 2003, China’s emissaries had become “more sophisticated in their articulation of the country’s goals.”
In 2019, China’s diplomats stopped being diplomatic.
The diplomatic corps became more assertive as China’s economic and military power rose, especially after Xi became general secretary of the CCP, in 2012. But the real turning point in Chinese diplomatic practices—what would become known as wolf warriorism—came in the late 2010s. Between 2017 and 2020, the proportion of hostile responses to foreign ministry press conference questions roughly doubled, according to analysis conducted by Yaoyao Dai and Luwei Rose Luqiu. In particular, as research by Weifang Xu illustrates, the frequency at which diplomats described foreign countries in unfavorable terms during these press conferences increased substantially in 2019. From 2018 to 2019, Chinese diplomats opened more than 100 new Twitter accounts. Although much of the content posted on these accounts was unremarkable, many Chinese diplomats used these platforms to spar with foreign critics.
The term “wolf warrior” was already in the Zeitgeist at the time of the Chinese foreign ministry’s diplomatic shift. Wolf Warrior 2, the second installment of a popular action film series, was released in 2017. The series followed a fictional special operations unit charged with unconventional missions to defend China’s interests. The tagline of both films—“Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay”—seemed to fit Beijing’s diplomatic campaign to stand up to foreign critics. By 2020, audiences at home and abroad were describing China’s real-life diplomats as “wolf warriors.”
UNDIPLOMATIC DIPLOMACY
Although wolf warrior diplomacy emerged amid China’s broad transition to a more assertive grand strategy under Xi, the term referred to a narrow phenomenon. Above all, it was describing a communicative style. In contrast to the pleasantries and palatable language that typically fill the world of diplomats, wolf warriors employed a negative and, more important, emotionally evocative tone. In both professional circles and public communication, they deliberately chose colorful phrasing and eschewed tact.
A prominent feature of wolf warrior diplomacy was its emphasis on divisions between “us” and “them.” Chinese diplomats characterized foreign officials as hypocritical, unvirtuous, or irrational compared with Chinese leaders, who exhibited consistency, moral rectitude, and common sense. In June 2021, for instance, the Chinese ambassador to France said that he was “honored” to be called a wolf warrior and he commented that such diplomats were simply protecting China from “mad dogs”—the country’s critics abroad.
The meaning of Chinese emissaries’ evocative statements was often in the eye of the beholder. Foreign audiences generally perceived the new diplomatic style as impolite and tactless. Scholars and foreign policy commentators in the United States, for example, have described China’s wolf warriors as “impassioned,” “zealous,” “strident,” “confrontational,” and “aggressive.” Yet according to Chinese diplomats themselves, their statements were a defensive response to the hostility around them. In May 2020, China’s foreign minister said that the country’s representatives were simply correcting “malicious slanders” and “gratuitous smears” directed at China. Another Chinese diplomat commented that the “need to fight wolf wars” stemmed from the fact that “there are wolves in this world.”
FOREIGN ORIGINS
Across periods of nationalist fervor and quiescence, across collective and personalist rule, one trend in Chinese politics stands out: the CCP is allergic to criticism that questions the regime’s right to govern. This criticism rarely sparks debate in the halls of power in Beijing. Instead, it prompts Chinese leaders to shut down dialogue and lash out against the critics. Thus, when international criticism directed at China increased in the late 2010s, the Chinese government responded by mobilizing its diplomats.
During this time, China faced rising foreign opprobrium for its internment camps in Xinjiang and its crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. As U.S.-Chinese relations deteriorated under President Donald Trump, too, U.S. officials became increasingly critical of Beijing. Criticism was not absent at the start of Trump’s term; the administration’s National Security Strategy, released in December 2017, labeled China a revisionist power. But its censure of the Chinese political system picked up after October 2018, when Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute in which he condemned China for “meddling in America’s democracy.”
International criticism came to a head with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although some admonition could be dismissed as a xenophobic reaction to the virus’s origins in China, the responses of foreign leaders and media also called into question the legitimacy of China’s domestic institutions. Why, they asked, had the Chinese government been slow to contain the virus? Was Xi unable to extract quality information from the bureaucracy? Had Chinese scientists been silenced? Had local authorities ignored the central government’s rules and regulations? Throughout the pandemic, too, Western commentators debated whether China’s top-down system would fare better or worse than democratic models, raising doubt about China’s ability to produce effective vaccines and stop the spread of disease.
Much of the criticism of Beijing’s decisions may well have been justified. The pertinent point, however, is not the merit of the criticism but its timing: the strongest international censure coincided with the peak prominence of China’s wolf warriors.
U.S. and Chinese officials meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, March 2021
Frederic J. Brown / Pool / Reuters
Chinese emissaries made the connection between foreign opprobrium and their own diplomatic tactics explicit. In late 2019, Zhao Lijian—a paradigmatic wolf warrior who was then serving in the foreign ministry in Beijing—told BuzzFeed that it was “time for Chinese diplomats to tell the true picture” in response to U.S. officials who were “slandering” and “badmouthing China.” In December 2020, Chinese Vice Minister Le Yucheng made similar comments, declaring, “Now that [foreign critics] are coming to our doorstep, interfering in our family affairs, constantly nagging at us, insulting and discrediting us, we have no choice but to firmly defend our national interests and dignity.”
Some analysts have argued that domestic dynamics were the main cause of wolf warriorism. They generally attribute its rise either to the demands of the Chinese public or lower-level officials’ desire to appease the country’s supreme leader. In the first account, Chinese diplomats, aware of high levels of nationalist sentiment at home, decided to cater to bottom-up appeals for a more assertive posture toward foreign countries. And in the second, following Xi’s anticorruption campaign and consolidation of power, diplomats worried that Xi and higher-ups within the foreign ministry would question their political bona fides, and this concern compelled them to independently adjust their messaging in a direction that they believed Xi, who is known for his foreign policy ambitions, would approve.
Both accounts leave much unexplained. There is little evidence that Chinese public opinion shifted dramatically enough during the late 2010s to drive a spike in wolf warrior tactics. Nationalism has been salient in China since the 1990s, and especially so since Beijing hosted the Olympic Games in 2008—long before the sharp change in China’s diplomatic approach. Assigning Xi a shadowy role in generating a climate of fear also obscures the fact that he intervened directly in diplomatic practice. In 2019, as the recent wave of wolf warrior diplomacy began to build, Xi reportedly ordered Chinese diplomats to exhibit a “fighting spirit” as they carried out their duties. Sources in China suggest that Xi’s direction may have been a result of his frustration with the state of the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Xi seemingly believed that China had no choice but to confront the barrage of international criticism it faced—and he instructed his emissaries to do just that.
RETURN TO NORMAL
China’s wolf warrior diplomacy began to recede in 2021. In May of that year, Xi convened a Politburo collective study session, a forum for the senior party leadership to listen to briefings and issue guidance, to discuss China’s international communications. The proceedings of the meeting are not available to the public, but it is possible that Xi used the venue to order the bureaucracy to ratchet down hostile diplomacy toward the United States and western Europe. The scholars Samuel Brazys, Alexander Dukalskis, and Stefan Müller Tdetected changes in the messages directed toward OECD countries from Twitter accounts linked to the Chinese foreign ministry and other parts of the Chinese government in the months after the study session.
Not coincidentally, China’s shift toward less aggressive diplomacy occurred just as the international environment became less hostile toward Beijing. Foreign criticism, particularly from the U.S. government, tempered under the Biden administration. To be sure, U.S. officials have condemned human rights abuses, touted the superiority of democratic institutions, and called out Chinese leaders for choices with which it disagrees. Yet the White House and the State Department have also more readily offered assurances that Washington’s aim is not to change the regime in Beijing. In May 2022, Blinken affirmed that the United States and China would “have to deal with each other for the foreseeable future.” And in June 2024, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell stated explicitly that seeking regime change in China would be “reckless and likely unproductive.”
The CCP is allergic to criticism that questions the regime’s right to govern.
Meanwhile, Chinese leaders may have seen a window of opportunity to stabilize relations with foreign countries, particularly the United States and western Europe. Chinese decision-makers do not want to drift into prolonged isolation, which would undermine China’s prospects for economic growth and its search for international status. China’s flagging economy has undoubtedly made the case to soften Beijing’s diplomatic approach more compelling.
In addition to this impulse to mend fences, Xi may also have chosen to rein in wolf warrior diplomacy because it was undermining, rather than strengthening, China’s public image. The best available evidence suggests that China’s rhetoric did not shift foreign public opinion in the country’s favor. Survey experiments by Weifang Xu have instead showed that defamatory messaging tended to increase American public support for hard-line policies toward China. Similarly, experiments by Daniel Mattingly and James Sundquist have found that negative messaging about the United States did not consistently improve attitudes toward China in third-party countries, such as India—and may have had a negative effect when issued during military confrontations with Beijing. Interviews conducted by Dylan Loh suggested that at least some Chinese diplomats and scholars recognized that wolf warriorism was ineffective. Yet it is unclear whether their observations reached the ears of high-level decision-makers and, even if they did, whether this shaped the decision to subdue the wolf warriors.
DIPLOMATIC TRADEOFFS
The rise and fall of wolf warrior diplomacy was, ultimately, a function of Chinese leaders’ perception of the international environment and the threat it posed to the security of their regime. This central insight leads to two important conclusions for U.S. policymakers. For one, the decline of heated Chinese rhetoric may not be permanent. China’s diplomatic corps has proved its ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions, and party leaders may once again unleash the proverbial wolves if it suits their interests.
Additionally, Washington must consider how its pronouncements about the way the Chinese government rules may undermine opportunities to maintain lines of communication. American policymakers often, and oftentimes rightly, feel the urge to criticize the actions of foreign governments when those actions contravene American values. When it comes to issues such as the repression of ethnic minorities, the United States can and should continue to speak out for what it believes.
Wolf warrior diplomacy was undermining China’s public image.
Fair as its criticism may be, however, such rebukes do not come without cost. The United States benefits from diplomatic engagement with China that allows both sides to clarify their positions, demarcate redlines, and defuse tensions. As the 2021 talks in Alaska illustrated, however, such opportunities are squandered when Beijing’s diplomats instead use them to make the case for the regime’s right to rule. Efforts to publicly defend China’s national honor by lashing out at foreign critics, moreover, add noise to communication channels, which can make China’s actual position even more difficult to discern. Even if the United States has come to embrace a competition-based relationship with China, encouraging Chinese emissaries to use their finite diplomatic bandwidth to stage confrontations is not in the U.S. national interest.
U.S. policymakers must thus bear in mind the tradeoffs when they make statements that China’s leaders perceive as an attempt to undermine their domestic legitimacy. A common trap that Washington falls into is to view its criticism of a foreign government as merely an affirmation of U.S. values—and to overlook the possibility that the leaders of that government will see the criticism as a threat to their political survival. There are times when the United States may consider it appropriate, or even desirable, to censure China. But if the type and frequency of its condemnations reach the point of threatening the CCP’s sense of security, Washington should expect a wolf warrior reaction. U.S. policymakers will have to decide whether the costs to diplomatic channels are worth it.
Foreign Affairs · by Bureaucracies at War: The Institutional Origins of Miscalculation · June 27, 2024
13. Joe Biden's Failed Strategy Against the Houthi Threat in the Red Sea
Conclusion:
Rather than disengage from Yemen, now is the time to double down and recognize the United States has potential local partners from Saada to Seiyun and from ‘Amran to Aden who wish to see the end of the Houthi reign of terror.
Joe Biden's Failed Strategy Against the Houthi Threat in the Red Sea
Despite their attacks on global shipping, the Houthis are much weaker than they appear.
The National Interest · by Michael Rubin · June 26, 2024
With their increasing attacks on shipping passing through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait and the Red Sea, the Houthis, an Iranian-backed tribal group from the Saada region of Yemen who seized power a decade ago, continue to endanger freedom of navigation and trade. The Biden administration initially used the U.S. Navy to counter the threat, but this was, at best, whack-a-mole and, at worst, military virtue signaling that wasted tremendous resources for little result. The Biden administration has quietly acknowledged failure by withdrawing the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group from the Red Sea to the eastern Mediterranean should fighting escalate between Israel and Hezbollah.
From the very beginning, a far better military strategy to counter the Houthi threat might have been to use the Somaliland airport at Berbera to run operations to counter Houthi threats and protect shipping. While it takes 4,000 men to crew an aircraft carrier, it takes only four to crew an Osprey or two to fly and fight in an F-16. President Joe Biden’s team, however, often downplays military strategies in favor of the belief that diplomacy alone can end threats posed by ideological and aggressive adversaries.
Here, too, though, a lack of creativity and attention to local dynamics lead the White House and State Department to miss opportunities to end the Houthi threat and bring stability and prosperity to the Yemeni people.
Throughout much of the country’s civil war, southern Yemen has been relatively peaceful and stable. Just as with Somaliland, South Yemen, with Emirati support, closed the door on Al Qaeda. Local attitudes matter, and if tribal leaders and politicians reject Al Qaeda, the group moves on to find more fertile ground. To recognize South Yemen’s and Somaliland’s rights to self-determination rather than sacrifice freedom of navigation and U.S. interests to a pro-Iranian regime in Sana’a and a pro-Chinese one in Mogadishu should have been an easy decision for U.S. policymakers seeking to consolidate stability and deny ungoverned space where Al Qaeda or other extremist groups could thrive.
Local politics also matter. In the run-up to and immediately following the 2020 election, Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan all declared, “Diplomacy is back.” By allowing Saudi Arabia to host the American mission to Yemen rather than operate a consulate in Aden, the State Department slammed the door on opportunities for diplomacy.
This leads the State Department to miss opportunities to checkmate the Houthis and return peace to the Arabian Peninsula. On June 22, 2024, Major General Aidrous Al Zubaidi, president of the Southern Transitional Council and Vice Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, met a dozen anti-Houthi officials from Saada in the northwest portion of the country. Zubaidi promised to support anti-Houthi resistance in Saada and across the Houthi-occupied provinces in Yemen. That tribal leaders from the Houthi heartland are willing to turn their back so publicly on the Houthis signal that the pro-Iranian tribal group has lost local legitimacy. Zubaidi’s meeting is akin to the flight of Afghans away from the Taliban after September 11, 2001.
Too often, the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs appears more inclined to preserve the status quo rather than recognize the benefit of its collapse. For more than a decade before the Syrian civil war, American diplomats parroted the line, for example, that Hezbollah was a Lebanese nationalist organization that the United States must not simply dismiss as a foreign-backed terror organization. However, Hezbollah’s willingness to deploy units to fight for Bashar al-Assad during the Syrian Civil War belied this notion, as Lebanese from southern Lebanon are the first to point out.
The Zubaidi meeting reflects a similar dynamic. The notion that the Houthis have popular support is risible, especially when public opposition emerges in their home province. It is time to recognize that the Southern Transitional Council and Yemenis from both north and south have now turned the corner.
The Biden administration has again imposed sanctions on the Houthis entity after lifting them in the first weeks of 2021. It also recognizes that the Houthi drug trade fuels instability across Yemen and the Middle East.
Rather than disengage from Yemen, now is the time to double down and recognize the United States has potential local partners from Saada to Seiyun and from ‘Amran to Aden who wish to see the end of the Houthi reign of terror.
About the Author: Dr. Michael Rubin.
Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Main Image: Mohammed al-Wafi / Shutterstock.com. The text image is from the U.S. Navy.
The National Interest · by Michael Rubin · June 26, 2024
14. Protecting America’s cybersecurity demands showing our teeth
Excerpts:
In other words, we need our cyber warfighters to emerge from the shadows and bare their teeth. Because the essence of deterrence is ensuring the adversary is scared. And they only become scared if they believe that we have both the capability and will to hold them in harm’s way as they now hold us.
Unfortunately, neither the Chinese Communist Party nor the Russian military seem filled with existential dread that their own critical infrastructure might be compromised. In fact, they may not care at all if their populations are put in peril as long as the elites are secure. We need to think broadly and boldly about making the world aware of our capability to do serious damage if we are attacked.
It won’t be easy showcasing this offensive cyber capability. We may need a good bit of “strategic declassification” of our offensive cyber capabilities. We may need to take more public credit for offensive operations that our incredible government cyber defenders are currently doing around the world. Smarter people than us will have to figure out how to make our cyber deterrence not only visible but palpable.
Deterrence is about making sure your adversary is afraid of what you might do to them. It must be scary for them. And, to be honest, it will be scary for us, as we contemplate the risk that our effort to deter will lead to escalation. But signaling that we will avoid conflict at all costs will never inspire fear from our adversaries. Russia, China, Iran and others have demonstrated they can strangle our economic and security lifelines.
It is past time we demonstrated that we are ready, willing, and able to return the favor.
Protecting America’s cybersecurity demands showing our teeth
Deterring U.S. adversaries from attacking American infrastructure requires making clear that the United States can strike back in kind.
BY
SEN. ANGUS KING
AND
SAMANTHA RAVICH
JUNE 26, 2024
cyberscoop.com · by eliasgroll · June 26, 2024
A poisoned Potomac River flowing through Washington, D.C. Drones crashing into public buildings. Railways being weaponized. When the Cyberspace Solarium Commission released our initial recommendations in March 2020, we listed these fictional dangers to our nation’s grid and infrastructure from a cyberattack.
Four years later, we’ve averted those specific fictions from becoming reality, but our nation remains far too vulnerable to adversaries hacking our most critical infrastructure. Although our global foes have so far only compromised our country’s communication, energy, health care, transportation and water sectors on smaller, local scales, a larger attack may be looming.
Alongside our fellow commissioners, we have long decried the escalation of cyber hostilities on our free markets, on our system of governance, and on our health and welfare. We have not been shy in calling this threat existential. It’s well past time for us to boost our nation’s cybersecurity — both from a defensive position, but also with a visible, muscular deterrence.
Where do we go from here? Certainly, we need more defense. The U.S. government must fill the thousands of open cybersecurity billets and modernize vulnerable legacy computer systems. The companies that build and maintain the software and hardware that power our economy must be obligated to ensure the security of their creations. At the individual level, we must do what we can to safeguard our digital security.
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Stronger cybersecurity alone, however, cannot ensure our safety. We are being attacked; we will continue to be attacked; some of those attacks will be successful; successful attacks will inflict physical and economic hardship on the American people.
As a country, we must prepare and practice responding, recovering and reconstituting, if and when we are struck. This is why we supported the successful inclusion of Section 1517 in last year’s National Defense Authorization Act that tests the cyber resiliency and reconstitution of critical infrastructure that supports military installations. In the event of an overseas conflict, the adversary would likely attack the electricity, water and telecommunications surrounding U.S. military bases. Once those critical services are brought down, the military would have a hard time deploying to even get into the fight.
Further downstream, we need to show that our citizens won’t give in to extortion from bad actors — be they individuals or nation-states. That means we — you, me, and our neighbor down the street — need to be prepared for an attack on our critical infrastructure. We support civilian preparedness training and other measures so that Americans are equipped for whatever foes hit us with.
But we are living in a fantasy if we think that we can protect ourselves and our country through defensive actions alone.
We must face up to the hard truth that we must embark on a radically different way to deal with adversaries within cyberspace. If we want Beijing or Moscow or Tehran to stop building their weapons into our infrastructure, we can’t rely on asking nicely. Rather than more words, we must show the world that continuing to mine our water and power systems will yield a painful response.
In other words, we need our cyber warfighters to emerge from the shadows and bare their teeth. Because the essence of deterrence is ensuring the adversary is scared. And they only become scared if they believe that we have both the capability and will to hold them in harm’s way as they now hold us.
Unfortunately, neither the Chinese Communist Party nor the Russian military seem filled with existential dread that their own critical infrastructure might be compromised. In fact, they may not care at all if their populations are put in peril as long as the elites are secure. We need to think broadly and boldly about making the world aware of our capability to do serious damage if we are attacked.
It won’t be easy showcasing this offensive cyber capability. We may need a good bit of “strategic declassification” of our offensive cyber capabilities. We may need to take more public credit for offensive operations that our incredible government cyber defenders are currently doing around the world. Smarter people than us will have to figure out how to make our cyber deterrence not only visible but palpable.
Deterrence is about making sure your adversary is afraid of what you might do to them. It must be scary for them. And, to be honest, it will be scary for us, as we contemplate the risk that our effort to deter will lead to escalation. But signaling that we will avoid conflict at all costs will never inspire fear from our adversaries. Russia, China, Iran and others have demonstrated they can strangle our economic and security lifelines.
It is past time we demonstrated that we are ready, willing, and able to return the favor.
Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, serves on the Senate Armed Services Committee as well as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He served as the co-chair of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, which has seen over 80 of its cybersecurity recommendations enacted into law.
Samantha F. Ravich, Ph.D., was a commissioner on the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. She is also the chair of the Center for Cyber and Technology Innovation at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
cyberscoop.com · by eliasgroll · June 26, 2024
15. Hamas’s Ruthless Long-Term Strategy of Necessary Sacrifice
Conclusion:
When the Wall Street Journal published Sinwar’s comments about “necessary sacrifices” a few weeks ago, such sentiments should have come as no surprise to the observant who have followed the “no blood, no news” perspective of the Gazan terrorist regime. This strategy has been a major element of Hamas’s plan for the last eight months. Yet, more importantly, it has been a fundamental component of their ruthless strategy for the last seventeen years. Sadly, for the last three months, this strategy has been unwittingly supported by the United States. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to sacrifice civilians while the world blames Israel, whose suffering is only eclipsed by the Hamas-induced suffering of the Palestinian people themselves.
Hamas’s Ruthless Long-Term Strategy of Necessary Sacrifice
By John Teichert
June 27, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/27/hamass_ruthless_long-term_strategy_of_necessary_sacrifice_1040754.html?mc_cid=8d0cc266fd&mc_eid=70bf478f36
The world continues to trace the sufferings of the Palestinian people in Gaza back to October 7th, 2023, blindly blaming Israel’s response to Hamas’s barbaric attack as the root cause of all subsequent suffering. Even setting aside the twisted perspective that views Israel’s challenging response as morally equivalent to Hamas’s ruthless and deliberate attacks on civilians, two timelines must be added to our consideration to fully contextualize Palestinian human suffering beyond the clock that started eight months ago. These milestones remind humanity of a long-term strategy of suffering and sacrifice that has been carefully crafted and finely calibrated by Hamas’s terrorist regime.
In January 2006, Hamas gained power by winning the elections in Gaza. In June 2007, these terrorists successfully purged their remaining competitors and removed all alternative governing options in Gaza. The Palestinian Authority and Fatah were not sufficiently radical for Hamas, who eliminated anything that would moderate their authoritarian influence.
Hamas has ruthlessly ruled Gaza for the last seventeen years, creating squalor for the Palestinian people through a plan of single-party rule that provides no redress, no options, and no franchise for the two million people who have suffered under their radical, fundamentalist control. Hamas’s priority has been to remain in power, recklessly seeking their genocidal aims against the Jewish state and eliminating those Palestinians who would challenge their authority. Thrusting “necessary sacrifices” on the Palestinian population has formed a core component of their strategy.
Eight months ago, Hamas raised its strategy of civilian sacrifice to a horrifying level. After a barbaric attack that required an Israeli response, Hamas sprinted back to their sanctuary and surrounded themselves with their already suffering citizens to amp up the human costs. Through Hamas’s deliberate activities that formed military headquarters in schools, established arms depots in hospitals, and magnified collateral damage through the military’s intentional integration into civilian neighborhoods, the Palestinian people faced an onslaught that they couldn’t avoid.
Meanwhile, Hamas’s leader Yehya Sinwar continues to viciously disregard the well-being of the Palestinian people who he has forced to helplessly aid in his cause. Any aid provided or left in place by Israel has been co-opted by Hamas forces for their own nefarious efforts, with the dismantling of the freshwater infrastructure to create rockets as a prime example. He and his Hamas leadership team even threaten Palestinians who seek to ease the costs of human suffering by providing aid to their fellow citizens, because such support undermines Hamas’s aims that are furthered by civilian sacrifice.
Three months ago, President Joe Biden provided mutual support to Hamas’s inhumane strategy. On the verge of worldwide hope for a pre-Ramadan ceasefire, Biden threatened Israel by establishing a redline. Subsequent peace talks were scuttled because the President of the United States had provided top cover to the terrorists while undermining Israel’s negotiating position. Meanwhile, Israeli, and American hostages languish while Palestinian civilians suffer.
Hamas has walked away from every ceasefire offered since then, approaching talks with obvious and reckless bad faith tactics. Their evilly devised plans for collateral damage prompt the world to blame Israel while bringing Hamas closer to its maximalist aims. The more Hamas prompts Palestinian suffering, the stronger their negotiating position becomes to achieve their long-term ends and further the next cycle of genocidal activities by using Gazans as their pawns. Tragically, this cycle of Palestinian suffering will never end until Hamas is eliminated as a ruling entity and as a fighting force.
When the Wall Street Journal published Sinwar’s comments about “necessary sacrifices” a few weeks ago, such sentiments should have come as no surprise to the observant who have followed the “no blood, no news” perspective of the Gazan terrorist regime. This strategy has been a major element of Hamas’s plan for the last eight months. Yet, more importantly, it has been a fundamental component of their ruthless strategy for the last seventeen years. Sadly, for the last three months, this strategy has been unwittingly supported by the United States. Meanwhile, Hamas continues to sacrifice civilians while the world blames Israel, whose suffering is only eclipsed by the Hamas-induced suffering of the Palestinian people themselves.
Brigadier General John Teichert (U.S. Air Force, ret.) is a prolific author and a leading expert on foreign affairs and military strategy. He led as the Commander of Joint Base Andrews and Edwards Air Force Base, served as the U.S. senior defense official to Iraq, and recently retired as the assistant deputy undersecretary of the Air Force, international affairs. General Teichert can be regularly seen on NewsNation, Fox News, and Newsmax. His activities can best be followed on johnteichert.com and LinkedIn.
16. How the military is preparing for AI at the edge
How the military is preparing for AI at the edge
c4isrnet.com · by Steve Orrin · June 26, 2024
The Defense Department has long used artificial intelligence to detect objects in battlespaces, but the capability has been mainly limited to identification. New advancements in AI and data analysis can offer leaders new levels of mission awareness with insights into intent, path predictions, abnormalities, and other revealing characterizations.
The DoD has an extensive wealth of data. In today’s sensor-filled theaters, commanders can access text, images, video, radio signals, and sensor data from all sorts of assets. However, each data type is often analyzed separately, leaving human analysts to draw — and potentially miss — connections.
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Using AI frameworks for multimodal data analysis allows different data streams to be analyzed together, offering decision-makers a comprehensive view of an event. For example, Navy systems can identify a ship nearby, but generative AI could zero in on the country of origin, ship class, and whether the system has encountered that specific vessel before.
With an object of interest identified, data fusion techniques and machine learning algorithms could review all the data available for other complementary information. Radio signals could show that the ship stopped emitting signals and no crew members are using cell phones. Has the vessel gone dark to prepare for battle, or could it be in distress? Pulling in recent weather reports could help decide the next move.
This enhanced situational awareness is only possible if real-time analysis happens at the edge instead of sending data to a central location for processing.
Keeping AI local is critical for battlefield awareness, cybersecurity, and healthcare monitoring applications requiring timely responses. To prepare, DoD must adopt solutions with significant computing power at the edge, find ways to reduce the size of their AI/ML models and mitigate new security threats.
With most new AI tools and models being open, meaning that the information placed into these technologies is publicly available, agencies need to implement advanced security measures and protocols to ensure that this critical data remains secure.
Pushing processing power
Historically, tactical edge devices collect information and send data back to command data centers for analysis. Their limited computing and processing capabilities slow battlefield decision-making, but they don’t have to. Processing at the edge saves time and avoids significant costs by allowing devices to upload analysis results to the cloud instead of vast amounts of raw data.
However, AI at the edge requires equipment with sufficient computing power for today and tomorrow’s algorithms. Devices and sensors must be able to operate in a standalone manner to perform computing, analysis, learning, training, and inference in the field, wherever that may be. Whether on the battlefield or attached to a patient in a hospital, AI at the edge learns from scenarios to better predict and respond for the next time. For the Navy crew, that could mean identifying what path a ship of interest may take based on previous encounters. In a hospital, sensors could flag the symptoms of a heart attack before arrest happens.
Connectivity will be necessary, but systems should also be able to operate in degraded or intermittent communication environments. Using 5G or other channels allows sensors to talk and collaborate while disconnected from headquarters or a command cloud.
Another consideration is orchestration: Any resilient system should include dynamic role assignments. For example, if multiple drones are flying and the leader gets taken out, another system component needs to assume that role.
Shrinking AI to manageable size
A battlefield is not an ideal environment for artificial intelligence. AI models like ChatGPT operate in climate-controlled data centers on thousands of GPU servers that consume enormous energy. They train on massive datasets, and their computing requirements increase exponentially in operational inference stages. The scenario presents a new size, weight, and power puzzle for what the military can deploy at the edge.
Some AI algorithms are now being designed for SWAP-constrained environments and novel hardware architectures. One option is miniaturizing AI models. Researchers are experimenting with multiple ways to make smaller, more efficient models through compression, model pruning, and other options.
Miniaturization has risks. A trained model could undergo “catastrophic forgetting” when it no longer recalls something previously learned. Or it could increasingly generate unreliable information — called hallucinations — due to flaws introduced by compression techniques or training a smaller model pulled from a larger one.
Computers without borders
While large data centers can be physically walled off with gates, barriers, and guards, AI at the edge presents new digital and physical security challenges. Putting valuable, mission-critical data and advanced analytics capabilities at the edge requires more than protecting an AI’s backend API.
Adversaries could feed bad or manufactured data in a poisoning attack to taint a model and its outputs. Prompt injections could lead a model to ignore its original instructions, divulge sensitive data, or execute malicious code. However, defense-in-depth tactics and hardware features like physical access controls, tamper-evident enclosures, along with secure boot and trust execution environments / confidential computing can help prevent unauthorized access to sensitive equipment, applications, and data.
Still, having AI capabilities at the tactical edge can provide a critical advantage during evolving combat scenarios. By enabling advanced analytics at the edge, data can be quickly transformed into actionable intelligence, augmenting human decision-making with real-time information and providing a strategic advantage over adversaries.
Steve Orrin is Federal Chief Technology Officer at Intel.
17. Reimagining the Arsenal of Democracy
Conclusion:
Washington will always argue about when to use our arsenal of democracy. But there should be no debate about guaranteeing to the American people, our allies, and our adversaries (a) that the arsenal will always be there for us, and (b) that it always works as intended when called upon. Today it’s not, and it doesn’t.
Reimagining the Arsenal of Democracy
By Dominique L. Plewes
June 27, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/27/reimagining_the_arsenal_of_democracy_1040741.html?mc_cid=8d0cc266fd&mc_eid=70bf478f36
America’s “arsenal of democracy” is not the vending machine — money in, weapons out — that so many pundits and policymakers seem to assume. It’s an unimaginably complex and finite network of public and private physical infrastructure, intellectual property, global supply chains, and of course special-interest politics. Yet, no matter how vehemently Washington argues about whether the United States should continue to arm our embattled allies, no one seems to ask how we can best do so. This needs to change, and quickly. Because right now, the facts on the ground — in Ukraine, Israel, and across our military supply chains — represent grave security and strategic threat.
With this in mind, the most dangerous feature of Congress’s recent debate about foreign aid legislation was neither its divisiveness nor any one side’s misconceptions. Rather, it was all sides’ blinkered detachment from the serious challenges: exhausted stockpiles, diminished production capacity, and outdated thinking. These shortfalls are already undermining U.S. national security, let alone our ability to help our allies.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’ latest war against Israel did not create any of the problems now besetting America’s defense industrial base. They only exposed and exacerbated longstanding shortcomings that most Americans would be shocked to learn even exist.
For instance, the 2,000 artillery shells Ukraine’s army is firing every day is not only just one-fifth the number of shells the Russians are firing back, it’s also more than the United States is even capable of manufacturing right now. Our enervated defense industrial capacity is one reason why, at any given moment, one-third of the roughly 350 howitzer guns Western allies have donated to Ukraine are out of action. According to an analysis by the non-profit Center for Strategic and International Studies, America’s current production capacity would need five years to replenish America’s supplies of 155mm shells and Javelin missiles. The hard truth is that our weapons reserves were already bare, and our supply chains were already strained before the advent of the Ukrainian and Middle East conflicts.
The war in Israel has exacerbated all of the above challenges, and exposed yet another: the economic asymmetry of modern warfare. Iran’s April 14 attack against Israel illustrates the point. The attack consisted of roughly 300 drones and missiles. According to an analysis by a scholar at MIT, Iran’s unmanned military aircraft (equipped with ever-cheaper targeting technology) can be built for about $20,000 each, while each cruise missile costs $100,000. By contrast, the Sidewinder missiles the U.S. Air Force uses to intercept them cost us $500,000 a pop. The problem here sounds fiscal, but it’s actually strategic. Is the United States really willing to continue the practice of shooting down $20,000 drones with $500,000 missiles?
Our adversaries are carefully monitoring both our choice of weapons and how we use them. Especially in Beijing. The Chinese Communist Party is well aware that recent Pentagon war-games simulating a Chinese invasion of Taiwan concluded that U.S. “stocks of precision and standoff weapons [would be] expended in as little as a few days.”
These facts do not by themselves argue either for a more hawkish or non-interventionist U.S. foreign policy. The point is simply that current events — while we’re still technically at peace — have already “exposed the fragility” of our defense industrial base — a fragility that is leaving our allies and homeland more vulnerable by the week.
Nor is this story new. Americans learned all about the inadequacy of our global supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic. We learned in Afghanistan and Iraq (to say nothing of Vietnam) how asymmetric, low-budget, analog tactics could neutralize our technological advantages on the battlefield.
We watched for decades as our defense industrial base acted in the interests of corporate profits rather than national security. As early as the 1960s, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara urged defense contractors to be more “efficient,” dangerously unaware of the life-and-death difference between demand cycles for cars vs. munitions. More recently, we’ve witnessed a post-Cold War consolidation of the defense industry. The Pentagon’s network of “prime contractors” has shrunk from 51 companies in 1993 to five today.
Today, this consolidated defense industrial base is hollowed out and overstretched. There is plenty of blame to go around for it — in both parties, on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue, and in both the public and private sectors. But rather than litigate responsibility for past mistakes, policymakers must quickly take responsibility for correcting them. And they must do it now, while there is still time not merely to rebuild America’s arsenal of democracy — but to reimagine it.
And “reimagine” is the word. The recent rash of weapons programs with Hollywood-inspired names, like Replicator, are a welcome addition to the national defense conversation. But we need more than a few cleverly named programs. We need to transform our industrial base, prioritizing creativity, flexibility, and speed.
To do that, we must rekindle old relationships and build new private-sector partnerships.
The many wars of this century have proven the persistent value of pre-information age materiel and asymmetric strategies. Spending $825 billion every year on national defense does Americans no good if with all that money we build a ponderous, short-sighted military Goliath in a world of sling-wielding challengers. To defend ourselves, our allies, and the future, we have to be David.
We have to build a defense manufacturing infrastructure tailored to our strategic needs, not the other way around. What does that look like?
First, Congress and the Pentagon need to change incentives for our defense manufacturers to fuel a rapid upscaling of production capacity (that, under ideal circumstances, will never be used).
A more stable, streamlined, future-focused congressional budgeting process could create a system capable of supplying the U.S. military and allied nations whenever needs arise. Washington could also establish an industrial reserve policy similar to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve: paying companies to maintain excess capacity and warehouse critical components.
The Pentagon, in turn, can reform the way it does business with contractors. It can refine procurement and acquisition practices to eliminate those infamous $640 toilet seats. It can examine the value of longer-term supply contracts and encourage investment in new manufacturing approaches and technologies such as robotic assembly and additive manufacturing. It can “onshore” or “friendshore” production of critical components. Finally, it can expand its supplier base, and strengthen the resiliency of our supply chain by reviving the practice of “second sourcing.”
Some of these changes may seem disruptive. But remember, we are spending more on national defense than ever before. And the status quo has exhausted our stockpiles, kneecapped our production capacity, compromised the real-world effectiveness of the weapons we do have, and left multiple allies on the brink of national annihilation. Maybe some disruption is long overdue.
Washington will always argue about when to use our arsenal of democracy. But there should be no debate about guaranteeing to the American people, our allies, and our adversaries (a) that the arsenal will always be there for us, and (b) that it always works as intended when called upon. Today it’s not, and it doesn’t.
Dominique L. Plewes is founder of 501(c)3 Special Operations Forces (SOF) Support Foundation, dedicated to educating Americans on the purposes and uses of our special operations forces.
18. "People's Satellite" Helped Ukraine Hit Over 1,000 Targets Spy Agency Says
Resilience. Innovation. Will of the people.
"People's Satellite" Helped Ukraine Hit Over 1,000 Targets Spy Agency Says
A crowd-funded satellite has enabled Ukraine to have a much better independent view of the battlefield, as well as targets in Russia.
HOWARD ALTMAN
POSTED ON JUN 26, 2024 8:18 PM EDT
5 MINUTE READ
twz.com · by Howard Altman
More than 1,500 Russian targets worth billions of dollars have been destroyed over the past two years thanks to imagery from a crowd-funded satellite, Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence Directorate (GUR) said on Wednesday.
The spy agency said that 38% of the nearly 4,200 images collected by a satellite provided for Ukrainian use in August 2022 by the California-based ICEYE company were used to strike Russian targets during that period. The satellite has taken images over both Ukraine and Russia.
“The entire array of data obtained thanks to ICEYE was used for direct preparation of fire damage to the enemy,” according to GUR. “This is billions of dollars in losses for Russia, and the price of its aggression will grow!” While The War Zone could not independently verify that claim, a former U.S. official last year confirmed to us that Ukraine was putting the ICEYE satellite to good use on the battlefield.
Просто космос ― результати використання «народного супутника» ICEYE
Новий рівень якості та оперативності отримання розвідувальних даних став можливим завдяки @CharityPrytula і пожертвам українців на «народний байрактар».
https://t.co/4zS5dgcvkO pic.twitter.com/8NyYpLVCme
— Defence intelligence of Ukraine (@DI_Ukraine) June 26, 2024
The satellite and more than an additional two dozen others Ukraine has access to has enabled its forces to observe and strike a wide range of targets it would otherwise not have been able to see.
“During the period of use of the ‘people’s satellite’ and access to the ICEYE satellite constellation, our specialists took a total of 4,173 pictures of enemy objects,” said GUR. That includes 370 airfields, 238 air defense and radio technical intelligence positions, 153 oil depots and fuel warehouses, 147 missile, aviation weapons and ammunition warehouses and 17 naval bases.
The ICEYE satellite has captured points Russian permanent deployment locations, as well as training grounds, military towns, and mobilization deployment centers, the spy agency said.
You can see an image of Russian troops and vehicles at a training facility in Luhansk Oblast taken by the satellite below.
A satellite image of Russian vehicles and other equipment in Luhansk oblast. GUR
The following image shows an advanced Russian Nebo-M radar system as well as electronic and signals intelligence and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment in Russia’s Belgorod Oblast.
The ICEYE satellite picked up images of Russian radar systems. GUR
The satellite also took images over Russia’s Rostov Oblast. You can see camouflaged Russian vehicles there.
Ukraine used the ICEYE satellite to take images over Russia. GUR
ICEYE agreed to “transfer full capabilities of one of its [Synthetic Aperture Radar] SAR satellites already in orbit for the Government of Ukraine’s use over the region,” the company said in its media release at the time. “The SAR satellite will be operated by ICEYE. In addition, ICEYE will provide access to its constellation of SAR satellites, allowing the Ukrainian Armed Forces to receive radar satellite imagery on critical locations with a high revisit frequency.”
Unlike optical satellites that rely on natural light conditions, SAR systems can capture images despite cloud cover, smoke, or dust that might block the view visually, and also do so at night. Metal objects in particular stand out in the imagery created by the active radar sensor, which can defeats camouflage efforts.
The company says it owns “the world’s largest synthetic aperture radar satellite constellation” and employs more than 700 people in the U.S., Finland, Poland and Spain.
A rendering of an ICEYE satellite constellation in space. ICEYE
Aside from the intelligence that the U.S. and NATO allies provide Ukraine, its own ability to observe enemy activities from above are relegated to the tactical level with drones and on a wider but still limited scope via commercial satellite imagery. So, having constant and independent access to eyes in space is a major boon for the war torn country.
Reconnaissance from Earth’s orbit “allows receiving data both on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine and in other places on the planet where the military forces and means of terrorist Russia are located,” GUR stated.
“This allows tracking the dynamics of Russia’s personnel movements, revealing its military intentions with the aim of disrupting them,” according to GUR. The satellite “allows you to monitor the objects of the aggressor’s military-industrial complex and its logistics network, which includes the illegal bridge between Russia and occupied Crimea.”
The Kerch Bridge has already been attacked twice and is an ongoing target of Ukraine.
‘It’s not a question of will we strike or won’t we strike,” Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov told The War Zone last September. “We’re doing that regularly so we will finish it. It’s just an issue of time.”
You can see a view of that bridge as viewed from the SAR satellite below.
The Kerch Bridge as seen from space. GUR
“The huge advantage of the ICEYE space vehicle is its ability to clearly see a cluster of even carefully camouflaged enemy mechanized units with its equipment,” GUR added. “What do you think happens to them later?”
A fundraising effort for the satellite began in June 2022 by the Serhiy Prytula Charitable Foundation and blogger Ihor Lachenkov.
“One satellite fully operates for the needs of our defense, nearly two dozen more are involved when necessary,” then-Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov said that the time.
A rendering of an ICEYE satellite. Ukraine MoD
Ukraine first reported its use of the satellite and how it helped them on Sept. 29, 2022.
“Combat teams of the Armed Forces of Ukraine have been receiving a stream of data from ICEYE satellites for some time now,” Reznikov said. “The shots are directly deciphered and processed by the military intelligence specialists of the Ministry of Defense who have undergone relevant training.”
Reznikov could not reveal too many specifics, but said “in the first two days of the satellite operation, more than 60 units of combat equipment were discovered that the enemy was trying to disguise in the forest lanes and other obstacles. It was discovered because ICEYE satellites collect information using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) technology. This technique would be very difficult or impossible to notice by the means of optical satellites.”
Those coordinates were “promptly transferred to inflict a fiery effect” in Kherson and Donetsk oblasts, he added. “In fact, only in these two days, the enemy has lost armor equipment for more than the entire satellite project costs.”
Given the success Ukraine says it has had with the ICEYE satellite and associated constellation, it is very likely is Russia is watching them closely, though any moves to counter it has not been disclosed. Russia has a growing array of anti-satellite capabilities, including relatively exotic on-orbit platforms. As we reported last month, Russia has already launched some kind of clandestine testbed in space as part of its development of a nuclear-armed on-orbit anti-satellite weapon, which serves as a reminder of just how serious Moscow takes the need for expanded counter-space capabilities.
While having control over one SAR satellite and access to dozens is far from matching the space capabilities enjoyed by Russia, this arrangement has clearly helped Ukraine, adding another layer of organic surveillance to the ubiquitous drones that patrol the much-lower skies over the battlefield.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
Senior Staff Writer
Howard is a Senior Staff Writer for The War Zone, and a former Senior Managing Editor for Military Times. Prior to this, he covered military affairs for the Tampa Bay Times as a Senior Writer. Howard's work has appeared in various publications including Yahoo News, RealClearDefense, and Air Force Times.
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twz.com · by Howard Altman
19. Senate committee looks to withhold funding for Cybercom capability architecture
Excerpts:
Part of NextGen is aligning the various program offices that the services run on behalf of Cybercom to be value-stream-related and associated with the operational functional needs, such as software agile methodologies.
But until Cybercom gains more authority from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment to affect programs run by the services, everything is still based upon handshake agreements, Bennett said. The J9 does not have the authority to tell the services how something should look, which is a power retained by the Pentagon’s A&S. Rather, they rely on verbal agreements between the command and service program managers to shape the end state of what Cybercom would like.
“We need that acquisition authority, which is why we’ve got to convince A&S that we can do this so that they can grant it to us. But in the meantime, we can do this,” Bennett said.
Senate committee looks to withhold funding for Cybercom capability architecture
As the command builds a program executive office for its warfighting architecture, the Senate Armed Services Committee wants a more detailed plan on the future of its vision.
BY
MARK POMERLEAU
JUNE 26, 2024
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · June 26, 2024
BALTIMORE — The Senate Armed Services Committee plans to put a hold on funding for U.S. Cyber Command’s warfighting platforms until the command provides details on the next steps of the architecture’s development.
The funding limitations stem from the committee’s annual defense policy bill, which passed the Senate panel June 13. It pertains to Cybercom’s Joint Cyber Warfighting Architecture (JCWA), designed in 2019 to get a better handle on the capabilities, platforms and programs the command was designing, and set priorities for the Department of Defense as well as the industry partners that would be building them. It includes large programs for data analytics, operations conducted outside DOD networks, dashboards to command forces, and smaller components for individual tools and sensors.
When Cybercom was first created, it relied heavily on intelligence personnel, infrastructure platforms and tradecraft to build its enterprise. But just like the Army needs tanks and the Air Force needs planes to conduct missions, cyber troops need their own military-specific cyber platforms separate from the National Security Agency, which conducts foreign intelligence.
According to a summary of the Senate Armed Service’s bill — the full text of which has not been released as of publication — the committee will limit the funding available for JCWA until the Cybercom commander provides a plan to minimize work under the current architecture and creates a baseline plan for a “Next Generation JCWA.”
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According to staff on the committee, they want the DOD to pause the current architecture to make sure it is looking at what the next iteration looks like and how it evolves. The Defense Science Board conducted a study on the architecture.
While staff noted there isn’t any indication the DOD isn’t looking at the next generation, they didn’t want to go too far down the current path before devising plans for how the architecture will evolve.
Cybercom has been on a long journey to develop its own capabilities, stemming from being granted limited acquisition authority in 2016 to realizing full control over its budget beginning in fiscal 2024. One of the main issues is the services still procure many of the capabilities needed by the cyber forces they provide to Cybercom, which over time, has created a hodgepodge of distinct and disparate capabilities that are not well integrated.
As a joint organization overseeing joint cyber teams, the command envisions a warfighting architecture that has the same look and feel across all teams — offensive and defensive — and services. The current architecture encompasses several components built by each of the services on behalf of the joint cyber mission force. The services provide them to Cybercom to conduct cyber operations, as executive agents. As such, JCWA is thought of as a singular platform to conduct military cyber operations, comprised of the sum of its parts.
Officials have alluded to the next generation of JCWA in the past, previously dubbed JCWA 2.0, to better integrate the disparate parts after an in-depth review found some pretty significant deficiencies in the architecture.
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Now, the nomenclature has shifted to NextGen, through which Cybercom hopes to evolve the architecture into a more common and integrated platform, Col. Seth Bennett, deputy director of Cybercom’s cyber acquisition and technology directorate, J9, said at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber conference in Baltimore on June 25. Many of the major cyber acquisition programs to date did not have integrated requirements, something that will change going forward while also trying to work backward to integrate what’s already been built retroactively.
“To realize the JCWA Design, USCYBERCOM must balance the need to coalesce around a unifying architectural vision with the fact that the disparate programs already exist in some capacity today, and that the cyber operations forces need capabilities now—they do not have time to wait for a perfectly realized end state,” a chard from Bennett’s presentation read.
JCWA NextGen looks like a “Common Platform Runtime. Today, there are multiple, independently mange [sic] Kubernetes-based service meshes. Work toward a common platform architecture to reduce variance across PMOs. Imagine a fleet of vehicles of varying types, styles, brands, and fuel types for which the team of drivers must learn each vehicle’s needs, idiosyncrasies, and procedures, resulting in significant inefficiencies and delays,” the slide continued, referencing the current state of capabilities.
Also at issue is Congress’ requirement for Cybercom in the fiscal 2023 annual defense policy bill to create a program executive office for JCWA to manage all the capabilities and programs by 2027.
To get there, the command has drafted and outlined its path to initial operational capability and full operational capability. The roadmap includes areas for acquisition policies, hiring and improving the architecture, among others.
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The initial operational capability involves continuing to plod along on the current path, something Bennett described as JCWA 1.X, essentially working to lay the groundwork for integration while it works on further developing the programs in progress.
“The idea is that we’ve got to do integration steps along the way. Just because we’re building the PEO and the personnel, doesn’t change the fact that we’ve got to be able to do integration steps,” Bennett said. “There’s clearly spots that we’ve evaluated in that giant architecture where that’s not efficient, that doesn’t make sense, why are there two of those, why are there six of these. We’re picking those spots with our lead architecture and trying to lay out when we’re going to work on integration points.”
The services will continue their work — for which now they will be reimbursed through Cybercom under its new authorities — while the J9 develops the programmatic, organizational and technical outlook for the PEO.
Some examples include aligning and integrating the various software factories across the services. Currently, services run software factories independent and distinct from each other.
“You can’t get to the other software factory from there to see what the amazing tools they’ve developed. Just something as silly as that needs to be integrated, because if you sign into JCWA, you need to be able to go see, look at all the tools, whether it be a Marine, Army, Navy, they should absolutely have them all in one spot so we can go find out how best to use them,” Bennett said. “That’s what we’re going to do in JCWA 1.0 is make those better.”
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While the organization continues on its current work, it is also working with the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment to prove it can perform the necessary duties, manage programs and gain milestone decision authority.
Efforts are also underway to gain more staff and acquisition expertise. While the command has gained significantly more authority and funding, its acquisition staff and expertise have remained relatively flat from when it first gained acquisition authority and a budget nearly eight years ago, which was only $75 million per year compared to nearly $3 billion now.
While Cybercom can reach IOC with current staffing, Bennett said, “We will need more billets to get to a full operating capability, no question. I don’t have an answer for you yet on what’s next. How do we get more than what we have today? We’re all working. We’re all trying to do manpower studies and discuss that right now.”
Getting to FOC, on the other hand, will require addressing the findings of the Defense Science Board study, such as redundancy.
“Now we’re faced with: Why are we running six or seven different service mesh clusters when the truth is we can manage them all as a common runtime environment, create the JCWA common runtime environment and manage that in the central spot so that it can maintain its uptime and have its appropriate backups and not waste a lot of money, time and energy?” Bennett said. “That’s what the JCWA NextGen is supposed to be focusing on, making that common runtime environment all at the same time.”
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Part of NextGen is aligning the various program offices that the services run on behalf of Cybercom to be value-stream-related and associated with the operational functional needs, such as software agile methodologies.
But until Cybercom gains more authority from the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment to affect programs run by the services, everything is still based upon handshake agreements, Bennett said. The J9 does not have the authority to tell the services how something should look, which is a power retained by the Pentagon’s A&S. Rather, they rely on verbal agreements between the command and service program managers to shape the end state of what Cybercom would like.
“We need that acquisition authority, which is why we’ve got to convince A&S that we can do this so that they can grant it to us. But in the meantime, we can do this,” Bennett said.
Written by Mark Pomerleau
Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.
defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · June 26, 2024
20. Africa Needs More American Involvement—Not Less
Excerpts:
But the region’s challenges demand sustained interest from the highest levels of U.S. government, as well as more innovation and investment. The United States will have to better support Africa’s capacity to prevent, mediate, and resolve conflicts. U.S. training, expertise, and convening power are essential, as is an increase in staffing on Africa and the allocation of new resources. Issues in Africa need time and attention from the president, the U.S. Congress, and the American public. Some of the most important achievements in U.S.-African history, from the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s to curbing the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s, have benefited from presidential decisions, congressional action, and public agitation for change.
Washington’s efforts in Africa have had an uneven track record.
Furthermore, a new U.S. strategy necessitates new tools. Some promising nontraditional efforts are already underway. In Gabon, the United States has restored some assistance to incentivize further progress toward a democratic transition. In Somalia, where the terrorist group al Shabab remains a threat, Washington is working closely with Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, and the United Kingdom to advance shared security goals. In eastern Congo, the U.S. director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has helped broker temporary cease-fires between the parties to the conflict. In late December, the United States joined its fellow UN Security Council members in a resolution to fund up to 75 percent of African regional peacekeeping operations. The United States also is financing a transportation corridor connecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia with global markets through Angola.
Washington must build on this momentum. Unlike in the 1990s, it cannot go at it alone. It needs to work more closely with India, Japan, and South Korea on economic issues and with eastern European partners on security challenges in the Sahel. The U.S. government must pursue direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversations with the Gulf about arming combatants in regional conflicts. Washington must also engage African leaders such as Angola, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa—whose new coalition government may result in more centrist policies—on global and regional challenges, and it must continue to help Nigeria regain its capacity to lead the continent.
Persistent, widespread unrest in Africa is not a foregone conclusion. For U.S. policymakers, the lesson of post–Cold War chaos in the early 1990s is simple: the region’s challenges require high-level attention, sufficient resources, and creativity. Washington must execute its new vision and implement new policies, programs, and partnerships. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Sudan, where suffering is extreme and consistently overlooked as other hot spots around the world claim attention. A successful effort in Sudan could be a test case for a new approach in an era of global disorder. After all, if the course be departed from, the ends will change.
Africa Needs More American Involvement—Not Less
As in Past Periods of Turmoil, Washington Can Help
June 27, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Judd Devermont · June 27, 2024
Sub-Saharan Africa is facing headwinds it hasn’t experienced in more than 30 years. Since 2020, the region has been buffeted by coups, conflicts, and crises, with nine military takeovers in the past five years, more than the total number of coups d’état in the region between 2010 and 2020. In 2023, the region had the highest number of state-based conflicts (28) in the world and accounted for nearly half of all internally displaced people (34.8 million) worldwide. Governments are trampling on democratic norms—manipulating election results in Zimbabwe (2023), jettisoning term limits in Togo (2024), and postponing elections in Senegal (2024). The junta in Mali kicked out United Nations peacekeepers last December. The one in Niger expelled U.S. forces in March. Russia subsequently expanded its footprint in both countries.
The current level of upheaval in Africa is staggering but not unprecedented. It recalls another period of turmoil and volatility on the continent in the early 1990s. Then, as now, the old international system was unraveling while a new world order remained unformed. Geopolitical shifts, such as the rejection of international norms and the rise of new major and middle powers, have rendered sub-Saharan Africa more susceptible to internal mischief and external manipulation.
But a painful moment of transition need not calcify into a permanent state. Under the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, the United States invested heavily in African leadership and capacity, invigorated U.S. development and trade initiatives, and leveraged presidential engagement to counter the forces of disorder. These approaches ushered in years of positive outcomes for the United States and its African partners, including the end to six major conflicts by 2005 and significant improvements in education, health, and reducing poverty. It is possible to again help Africa get back on its feet and play an essential role in shaping global affairs—but only if policymakers in Washington resource and execute a sound strategy for doing so.
TURBULENT TIMES
The end of the Cold War was a mixed blessing for sub-Saharan Africa. On the positive side of the ledger, it ushered in multiparty democracy in many countries. Several African countries that had been led by authoritarian rulers backed by the Soviet Union or the United States became more responsive to their own publics. Incumbents lost at the ballot box in Benin in 1991, in the Republic of Congo in 1992, and in Burundi and the Central African Republic in 1993. In other places, the Cold War’s end radically changed the domestic calculus, compelling belligerents to sue for peace because the flow of weapons had been cut off or obliging autocratic rulers to open political space because the support of external powers had faded. In 1990, Namibia won its independence from South Africa. Two years later, a 14-year civil war in Mozambique came to an end. And in 1994, South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime dissolved into a vibrant multiracial democracy led by Nelson Mandela.
But behind this highlight reel was a far more turbulent reality.As Russia and the United States backed away from their Cold War–era client states and as the International Monetary Fund started to impose austerity measures and conditions-based assistance on African nations, much of the region tipped into conflict and crisis. Long-standing regimes that had been propped up by foreign money and military support swiftly lost their strangleholds on power. Unable to dole out patronage or repress political opponents, these teetering governments suddenly faced violent rebellions and revolts.
In December 1989, the Liberian rebel leader Charles Taylor launched an insurgency that sparked a 14-year civil war. Later, he backed guerrilla fighters in Sierra Leone, adding fuel to an 11-year civil war. In 1990, Somalia’s civil war intensified, leading to the collapse of the central government and de facto control by rival militias, often along clan lines. In 1994, ethnic Hutu extremists in Rwanda assassinated President Juvénal Habyarimana, triggering genocide against the Tutsi and mass killings of moderate Hutu and other groups. And in 1997, a rebel coalition in Zaire ousted President Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocratic and enfeebled regime, setting the stage for what came to be known as Africa’s World War; seven countries deployed troops to back proxies in a country the size of Western Europe. This period, from the early 1990s to early 2000s, represented a nadir for the region, resulting in the deaths of six to seven million people. While the circumstances underlying each conflict differed, the constant was that the end of decades of predatory and divisive rule bankrolled by external powers unleashed pent-up public anger and uncuffed rebel leaders determined to seize power at all costs.
During this period, the American government’s focus lay elsewhere. Washington had other priorities, such as evicting Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990-91 and reunifying Germany. U.S. bilateral aid to Africa had reached a peak of $1.2 billion in 1992 but did not return to that level until 2011. Starting in 1993, the U.S. government stripped away resources and reassigned personnel from Africa. The State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs lost 70 positions and closed consulates or embassies in Cameroon, Comoros, Kenya, and Nigeria. The Central Intelligence Agency shuttered 15 stations in Africa, according to press reports. “There’s a profound lack of interest [in Africa] in this town and in the White House right now,” an anonymous U.S. policymaker told the newsletter Africa Confidential in 1991. “There’s a feeling that with the Cold War over, we don’t really need a policy.”
Although the cessation of U.S. efforts to use African states as Cold War proxies was a welcome development, the United States’ drawback from the continent greatly exacerbated its difficulties. Africa’s multiple and expanding conflicts proved highly resistant to diplomatic resolution. UN missions established in Angola and Rwanda in 1988 and 1993 had been configured to observe elections and monitor cease-fires, not respond to outbreaks of major fighting or genocide. Even on the limited occasions when the United States did step in, the results were tragic. President George H.W. Bush’s deployment of U.S. troops to Somalia in 1992 ended with the slaughter of 18 soldiers during the Black Hawk Down incident in October 1993. The same year, Clinton’s backing of the deployment of West African troops in Liberia failed to prevent a brutal massacre of 600 civilians at a camp for displaced people.
A CHANGE OF COURSE
In 1994, Clinton sent a heavily underlined copy of an Atlantic article by Robert Kaplan titled “The Coming Anarchy” to Donald Steinberg, his senior director for African affairs at the National Security Council. “West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real ‘strategic’ danger,” Kaplan concluded in the article. Across the front page, Clinton had scribbled, “is this true?”
Steinberg responded with a long memo, including a cover sheet with a passage from A Christmas Carol in which Scrooge asks, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of the things that may be, only?” Scrooge answers his own question: “If the courses be departed from, the ends will change.” Clinton marked the memo with a big exclamation point and returned it to Steinberg. The White House jumped into action, crafting a new approach to Africa. This included partnering with African governments to demobilize bloated African armies, clear land mines, and train an estimated 6,000 African peacekeepers, as well as increasing U.S. staffing and appointing special envoys to manage the increased workload. Notably, in his second term, Clinton traveled twice to the region and signed the landmark African Growth and Opportunity Act, which allowed U.S. companies and consumers to import thousands of products from African countries duty-free.
The George W. Bush administration took U.S. policy on Africa to new heights, thanks in part to the president’s personal interest in the region. His government supported more robust UN missions to Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan and significantly expanded security training and nonlethal assistance to 55,000 peacekeepers from 18 African countries. In 2007, the U.S. Department of Defense established the U.S. Africa Command, responsible for U.S. military activities in all of Africa except Egypt. The command has helped African countries respond to a range of security and nonsecurity crises, including the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Bush’s contributions to African development and public health were even more impressive. The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, launched in 2003, has helped more than 25 million individuals living with HIV/AIDS. From the despair and uncertainty of the early 1990s, the Clinton and Bush administrations constructed a new policy framework for the post–Cold War era. Based on building African capacity, increasing U.S. investment, and leveraging presidential engagement, it not only yielded positive results for American and African interests but also became the bedrock of Africa strategy for every successive U.S. administration.
ECHOES OF HISTORY
Today, U.S. strategy on Africa faces a similar test. As in the early 1990s, Africa’s outlook is not unremittingly grim. Since 2020, opposition parties have won national elections and taken power peacefully in ten countries. Smooth successions followed the deaths of leaders in Tanzania and Namibia in 2021 and 2024. The media and civil society continue to hold governments to account for corruption and abuse in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. In late June, young Kenyans protested a new tax law, forcing President William Ruto to withdraw his support following deadly clashes in front of the parliament building. After the shocks of COVID-19 and rampant inflation triggered by Russia’s war against Ukraine, sub-Saharan Africa’s economic picture is starting to brighten: average growth in the region is expected to hit 3.8 percent this year, slightly better than the global average.
Yet the breakdown of the international rules-based order is already inflicting real damage in sub-Saharan Africa as major powers turn their attention elsewhere—or backpedal on their commitments to norms as they jostle for influence in contested regions of the world. This damage is most evident in the recent spate of military takeovers. Africa has long been prone to coups—of 492 attempted or successful coups carried out around the world since 1950, it has seen more than any other region. After the Cold War ended, however, stronger global standards against military takeovers began to take hold: during the Cold War, only 30 percent of all coups received international condemnation from the West, but as a new consensus emerged, most coups were condemned by at least one Western government or multilateral institution in the late 1990s. Building on this trend, every coup between 2005 and 2009 was denounced by a Western power. Even Russia observed this norm for a spell, calling for the restoration of democratic rule following a 2003 coup in Guinea-Bissau in 2003 and a 2008 coup in Mauritania.
This anti-coup norm is no longer operative today, making it easier for ambitious military leaders to overthrow civilian governments while facing little to no consequences. Vigorous responses by African regional bodies and by the United States, which is required by law to restrict its assistance to junta-led countries, have become the exception. Africa’s military rulers have had no shortage of external partners that leverage these illegal power grabs to secure influence and resources. Russia is the main culprit, using its political capital and mercenaries to gain favor with African military leaders in exchange for geopolitical influence and the right to exploit the continent’s minerals. The Malian military, for instance, shielded by its Russian backers, has repeatedly extended its hold on power and committed horrific abuses against the civilian population without concern for international censure. In Niger, the military junta that assumed power last year has cemented its control by exploiting global fissures, courting Russian military support and reportedly negotiating with Iran over access to Nigerien uranium.
The rise of new foreign actors has also contributed to Africa’s volatility, enflaming regional tensions and prolonging civil wars. There has been a marked increase in new embassies, military agreements, and trade links between African countries and external partners over the past decade. The Gulf states and Turkey’s gains have been the most spectacular: since 2012, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates have each at least doubled the number of embassies they maintain in sub-Saharan Africa. Saudi Arabia plans to increase its diplomatic posts from 28 to 40. While a closer trade relationship is usually a net positive, these new actors also have increasingly inserted themselves into African conflicts, including by transferring weapons and facilitating gold smuggling. Iran, Turkey, and the UAE have supplied drones to Ethiopian security forces to turn the tide in Addis Ababa’s war against ethnic Tigrayans. Iran and the UAE are arming opposing sides in the Sudanese civil war, which has already displaced ten million people, claimed more than 150,000 lives, and spurred fears of another genocide in Darfur.
There has not been a new peacekeeping mission to Africa since 2014.
As in the early 1990s, the global struggle to define the future of the international system is driving disorder in Africa. With Western powers focused on addressing the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, they are not directing enough attention and resources to meet the current challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa. To be sure, the Biden administration has made important strides. It staged the 2022 U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit, which resulted in pledges to spend $55 billion on landmark infrastructure, clean energy, and digital connectivity projects; it hosted the Kenyan President this spring in the first state visit by an African leader in 16 years, which led to an upgrade in Kenya’s status as a major non-NATO ally. But these efforts fall short of meeting the region’s needs and have necessitated difficult tradeoffs. President Joe Biden did not fulfill his pledge to travel to Africa in 2023, and the White House withdrew a $200 million supplemental request to help counter the destabilizing activities of malign Russian actors in African countries.
In another echo of the 1990s, the policy toolkit for the region has lost its potency. The UN Security Council has become paralyzed. In 2013, it spent some 50 percent of its time discussing African crises; in 2023, African issues constituted only 38 percent of council discussions, UN documents show. Moreover, there has not been a new peacekeeping mission to Africa since 2014. U.S. sanctions have become easier to evade because the individuals targeted conduct business in nondollar denominations. Third-party countries, especially in the Gulf, have refrained from acting against sanctioned entities, such as companies based in the UAE with links to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan.
At the same time, the United States can no longer rely on its traditional partners in Europe or Africa to help it respond to emerging crises in the region. Since Brexit, the United Kingdom has been distracted with domestic politics, and France’s brand has become increasingly toxic in swaths of French-speaking Africa because of Paris’s political, economic, and security ties to unpopular African leaders. Kenya still consistently deploys troops and dispatches diplomatic envoys to neighboring conflict zones. But Ethiopia, Nigeria, and South Africa, the region’s powerhouses, are too overwhelmed by their own internal security and political crises to step up.
REIMAGINING OLD APPROACHES
The Biden administration’s U.S. strategy toward sub-Saharan Africa, which I took the lead in drafting while serving at the National Security Council as a special adviser from October 2021 to June 2022 and then as the senior director for African affairs until late February of this year, seeks to reimagine old approaches that are insufficient to meet the challenges of a more contested and competitive world. Thus far, Washington’s efforts—based on establishing real partnerships, elevating African voices, and pioneering new approaches—have had an uneven track record. Judging from history, it will take time to build and stress-test new tools to address the region’s complex and evolving challenges. It is vital for the United States to replicate the ingenuity that steered the U.S.-African relationship through the last period of global transition.
As the world’s youngest and fast-growing region, sub-Saharan Africa is playing a decisive role in determining the balance of global opinion on every issue that matters. The current U.S. strategy acknowledges that Africans want to pick their own partners and that Washington should not press Africans to choose between the United States and its adversaries in a simplistic us-versus-them fashion. It calls for constructive dialogue, privileging consultation and engagement especially on areas of disagreement. To address Africa and the broader international community’s challenges, the strategy recognizes that African leaders are prepared to work with the United States but also with China and regional powers in Europe, the Gulf, East Asia, and South Asia. At every step of the way, Africa should be in the lead. That conviction led President Biden to press for a permanent seat for Africa at the UN Security Council, the inclusion of the African Union in the G-20, and the expansion of African voices in the IMF and other multilateral development banks.
But the region’s challenges demand sustained interest from the highest levels of U.S. government, as well as more innovation and investment. The United States will have to better support Africa’s capacity to prevent, mediate, and resolve conflicts. U.S. training, expertise, and convening power are essential, as is an increase in staffing on Africa and the allocation of new resources. Issues in Africa need time and attention from the president, the U.S. Congress, and the American public. Some of the most important achievements in U.S.-African history, from the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s to curbing the genocide in Darfur in the 2000s, have benefited from presidential decisions, congressional action, and public agitation for change.
Washington’s efforts in Africa have had an uneven track record.
Furthermore, a new U.S. strategy necessitates new tools. Some promising nontraditional efforts are already underway. In Gabon, the United States has restored some assistance to incentivize further progress toward a democratic transition. In Somalia, where the terrorist group al Shabab remains a threat, Washington is working closely with Qatar, Turkey, the UAE, and the United Kingdom to advance shared security goals. In eastern Congo, the U.S. director of national intelligence, Avril Haines, has helped broker temporary cease-fires between the parties to the conflict. In late December, the United States joined its fellow UN Security Council members in a resolution to fund up to 75 percent of African regional peacekeeping operations. The United States also is financing a transportation corridor connecting the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia with global markets through Angola.
Washington must build on this momentum. Unlike in the 1990s, it cannot go at it alone. It needs to work more closely with India, Japan, and South Korea on economic issues and with eastern European partners on security challenges in the Sahel. The U.S. government must pursue direct, sometimes uncomfortable conversations with the Gulf about arming combatants in regional conflicts. Washington must also engage African leaders such as Angola, Kenya, Senegal, and South Africa—whose new coalition government may result in more centrist policies—on global and regional challenges, and it must continue to help Nigeria regain its capacity to lead the continent.
Persistent, widespread unrest in Africa is not a foregone conclusion. For U.S. policymakers, the lesson of post–Cold War chaos in the early 1990s is simple: the region’s challenges require high-level attention, sufficient resources, and creativity. Washington must execute its new vision and implement new policies, programs, and partnerships. Nowhere is this more urgent than in Sudan, where suffering is extreme and consistently overlooked as other hot spots around the world claim attention. A successful effort in Sudan could be a test case for a new approach in an era of global disorder. After all, if the course be departed from, the ends will change.
- JUDD DEVERMONT is Operating Partner for Innovation at Kupanda Capital. He served on the U.S. National Security Council as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for African Affairs.
Foreign Affairs · by Judd Devermont · June 27, 2024
21. Should Americans Die for a Single Filipino?
From one of our most outspoken isolationists, my friend Doug Bandow. Needless to say we do not agree on all national security issues.
But I agree that US troops should not die for a single Filipino (harsh as that sounds but that is the response to the hyperbolic headline). But we do have to fight to protect US interests and we have US national security interests in the Philippines and the region that we have to be prepared to defend. So in the end we need to be prepared to fight shoulder to shoulder (Balikatan) with our Filipino allies.
Should Americans Die for a Single Filipino?
President Biden might soon have to decide.
The American Conservative · by Doug Bandow · June 27, 2024
China and the Philippines are battling over control of contested waters in the Pacific. So far there has been no shooting, but there have been casualties. And the Biden administration has committed Americans to go to war if even one Filipino dies—or so Manila apparently believes.
That would be madness, of course. The Philippine archipelago isn’t vital for America’s defense. No one imagines a Chinese armada proceeding inexorably eastward, set to conquer Hawaii and then California. Of course, Washington would prefer to hem in the People’s Republic of China with a network of allies and bases. Most of Asia would like to see the PRC’s military so constricted. Nevertheless, that desire is not worth war with a nuclear-armed power determined to prevent the U.S. from dominating its own neighborhood, rather as the latter does the Americas.
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The latest outburst is focused on Manila’s attempt to resupply the occupants of a naval outpost—the Sierra Madre, an old vessel given the Philippines by Washington and beached on a reef—in waters also claimed by the PRC. Several Filipino sailors were injured, one seriously.
“We will not be deterred,” insisted Roy Trinidad, a Philippine navy spokesman. Last month, President Ferdinand Marcos, Jr., declared that “I do not intend to yield. Filipinos do not yield.” He also promised a response that would be “proportionate, deliberate and reasonable in the face of the open, unabating, and illegal, coercive, aggressive and dangerous attacks by” Chinese agents.
Any country planning to go mano-a-mano with the world’s second greatest naval power should possess at least a capable, even if not equal, military. That is not the Philippines. America’s first colonial conquest is a semi-failed state. Politics is corrupt and economics is inefficient. The Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) are no better.
With what does Marcos plan to take on the PRC? In Asia alone the Philippine military lags behind those of Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, and India, as well as China. A quarter century ago, Defense Minister Orlando Mercado observed that his nation had “a navy that can’t go out to sea and an air force that cannot fly.” At the time, Manila had precisely one frigate, along with 60 coastal and patrol ships. The government had 47 combat aircraft and 97 armed helicopters. Readiness was dismal.
Alas, not much has changed. Today the Philippines has two frigates and 52 coastal and patrol vessels. There are 36 combat aircraft and 80 helicopters. Reported the International Institute for Strategic Studies: “Despite modest increases in defense funding in the decade up to 2023, the capabilities and procurement plans of the [AFP] remain limited.” That puts it mildly.
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With these “armed forces,” Manila is aggressively challenging the PRC—which possesses 101 principal surface combatants (including 49 frigates), 59 submarines, 142 coastal and patrol combatants, 2919 combat aircraft, and 117 helicopters. Beijing’s forces are much better trained, equipped, and supported. The Chinese state is anything but failed.
Manila, however, expects America to do any real fighting. Unfortunately, as an ally the Philippines brings to mind the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany’s main military partner in World War I. German officers recognized that their country was “shackled to a corpse.” In making the Philippines a major military commitment, one could be forgiven for believing that Uncle Sam views alliances as an eleemosynary exercise, a gift for the incompetent and ineffective. The less desirable you are as a military partner, the more likely, it seems, that Washington will insist on protecting you. In this case, if Manila and Beijing come to deadly blows, there will be wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments on a Biblical scale in the Philippines, along with demands for the U.S. to put China in its place.
How did it come to this? A half century after battling against Filipino independence activists, killing some 200,000 Filipinos along the way, the U.S. government granted the archipelago independence. Washington inked the “Mutual Defense Treaty” in 1951, during the Korean War. Although Washington was forced from its bases in 1992, ties have since increased, with the U.S. gaining access to several Filipino facilities. Joint exercises, including cooperating to sink the ships of an unnamed power, also have expanded. However, the US wants even more. Aries Arugay of the University of the Philippines Diliman opined, “This is really a big deal and a big shift from where the alliance was.” In his view, “it shows that the U.S. is really eyeing the Philippines as a critical part of its geopolitical strategy in the Indo-Pacific.”
Thus, the administration says it will defend everything in the archipelago, even contested territory and water. A couple years ago, Vice President Kamala Harris sought to reassure Filipinos. She declared “an unwavering commitment,” explaining: “As an ally, the United States stands with the Philippines in the face of intimidation and coercion in the South China Sea.” In 2001, State Department spokesman Ned Price said: “An armed attack against the Philippine armed forces, public vessels, or aircraft in the Pacific, including in the South China Sea, will trigger our obligations under the U.S.-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty.”
In March, Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited the Philippines. He tied Americans more tightly to the Filipino state corpse, declaring,
It’s why we stand with the Philippines and stand by our ironclad defense commitments, including under the Mutual Defense Treaty. Article IV extends to armed attacks on the Filipino armed forces, public vessels, aircraft—including those of its coast guard—anywhere in the South China Sea. Most important is we stand together in our determination to uphold international law—for the Philippines, for everyone else—against any provocative actions.
A month later, the Financial Times reported that administration officials planned to warn the PRC that the military pact specifically covered the Sierra Madre.
Marcos, son of the dictator ousted during the Reagan administration, has won favor in Washington by taking a tough stand against China. Two years ago, Marcos announced, “I will not preside over any process that will abandon even one square inch of territory of the Republic of the Philippines to any foreign power.” Last month, he reinforced his position, declaring that “If a Filipino citizen is killed by a willful act, that is, I think, very, very close to what we define as an act of war and therefore we will respond accordingly.”
Not only that, however. he added, “Our treaty partners, I believe, also hold that same standard.”
The Marcos government is not unique in this regard. The former President Rodrigo Duterte, who served 2016–2022, had a tempestuous relationship with both Beijing and Washington. Amid similar violent naval maneuvers five years ago, Duterte entered a pro-American phase and announced that “I am invoking the RP-U.S. pact, and I would like America to gather their Seventh Fleet in front of China.”
What then? “When they enter the South China Sea, I will enter. I will ride with the American who goes there first. Then I will tell the Americans, ‘Okay, let’s bomb everything’.”
Like America’s “mutual defense” treaties with South Korea and Japan, the Philippine pact is mutual in name only. Manila’s main commitment is to agree to be defended. Washington forever takes on new and expanded military responsibilities, while its allies cheer it on. The US hopes that the Philippines will provide base access to fight China over Taiwan, but in 2022 the Philippine ambassador to America, Jose Manuel Romualdez explained that Manila would assist only “if it is important for us, for our own security.” In short, the Philippines would continue to look after number one, probably a wise course given internal divisions over confronting the PRC.
Should the U.S. go to war because of a few violent bumps between Filipino and Chinese vessels? The RAND Corporation’s Derek Grossman contended that the latest incident “clearly shows a Chinese attack on Philippine military assets,” which is supposed to trigger an allied response. Manila has yet to declare war, at least temporarily taking the Biden administration off the hook.
Nevertheless, China hawks are proposing to confront the PRC directly. Suggestions include detailing American engineers to bolster the rusting Sierra Madre, sending U.S. vessels and warplanes through the region, and even providing Philippine missions with an American escort and daring China to intervene. Grant Newsham of the Center for Security Policy would go even further: “Don’t just resupply. Help the Philippines build a permanent structure on Second Thomas Shoal—and help them defend it. And send the U.S. Navy along with Philippine ships to Scarborough Shoal and remove all Chinese boats squatting in the area. Make it clear to Beijing that if it wants a fight it will get one.” What could possibly go wrong with such a strategy?
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American national security should be defined by U.S., not Philippine, interests. Deescalation is essential, lest Americans find themselves fighting and dying over geopolitical trivialities. Even Marcos recognized the danger: “We worry in the Philippines because [war] could come from not a strategic decision by anyone saying, ‘OK, we’re going to war,’ but just by some servicemen making a mistake, or some action that’s misunderstood.”
More fundamentally, the U.S. should step back. Washington should shift responsibility to rather than share responsibility with allied and other friendly states. Americans have an interest in preserving the Philippines’ independence, which, notably, Beijing has shown no inclination to threaten. Yet there is no reason to ensure Manila’s every territorial claim.
A looser cooperative relationship with the Philippines would avoid putting the US on a collision course with the PRC. Manila should both enhance its military forces and improve security relationships with its neighbors. Just as China is following an anti-access/area denial policy, the Philippines and its neighbors should do the same. The U.S. should assist them in moving toward strategic independence, cooperating among themselves to constrain Chinese activity in the region. In doing so Washington would be putting the interests of the American people first.
The American Conservative · by Doug Bandow · June 27, 2024
22. Resilience and Resistance Post-Raisi: A Data-Centric Approach to Iran
Excerpts;
Tehran’s low governance ratings and high fragility assessment pose a significant dilemma for the Islamic Republic and a considerable opportunity for the United States. The Iranian election process and new government formation may yield some valuable insights to steer our Iranian foreign policy. Should the United States promote: (1) a more resilient Iranian theocracy, (2) support external and internal resistance activities to collapse the regime, or (3) actively shape the strategic environment and defer to a future opportunity? A comprehensive assessment of the resilience metrics and exploring resistance strategies may lead U.S. policymakers to a more effective approach.
In conclusion, a fact-based methodology for analyzing the resilience and resistance of the Islamic Republic of Iran may inform U.S.-Iranian foreign policy decisions. The U.S. joint operational planning process and conventional war plans have not adequately addressed the competition domain in the Middle East. Current DoD force posture and activities appear merely reactive to current events. Utilizing a data-centric analysis, the DoD can measure the potential resistance within Iran, as well as identify the many nonviolent and violent groups opposing the Islamic Republic. The United States wields many instruments of national power – diplomatic, information, military, and economic – that can influence Iran’s resilience or support resistance to inspire and lead governance reforms. Making such choices requires an interdisciplinary approach and a thorough understanding of the operational environment.
Resilience and Resistance Post-Raisi: A Data-Centric Approach to Iran - Irregular Warfare Initiative
irregularwarfare.org · by Robert S. Burrell, David DiOrio · June 27, 2024
The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19, 2024, may provide an opportunity to usher in a new destiny for the Iranian people. Many considered the hard-liner to be the Supreme Leader Khamenei’s enforcer in consolidating the clerics’ power through the executions of dissidents and the jailing of political prisoners. He mobilized America’s rivals by pursuing a military alliance with Russia and economic ties with China to weaken the grip of Western political and commercial dominance in the region. The former president was the mastermind of a proxy-based militarization campaign to make a Western presence in the Middle East so costly that the United States and its allies would withdraw. Despite the recent escalation of hostilities against Israel and the West, the United States remains committed to maintaining a forward presence to strengthen regional partnerships and protect vital trade routes.
Resilience and Resistance Post-Raisi: A Data-Centric Approach to Iran – Insider: Short of War
The Islamic Republic of Iran will choose a new President on June 28, 2024. Iran’s Guardian Council, a conservative 12-member oversight board, chose six candidates: 5 far-right hardliners and one moderate, Masoud Pezeshkian, who is open to renewed diplomacy with the United States. The high popularity of Pezeshkian is a sign of the Iran people’s desire to seek less stringent Islamic codes and friendlier relations with the West. The election outcome is uncertain. The Supreme Council’s biased support toward and election of a far-right candidate may widen the prevalent trust gap and ignite widespread protest. Still, the successful election of the moderate may present a renewed opportunity to reduce historical tensions and establish a pro-Western partnership. This election presents an excellent opportunity to review our foreign policy stance and strategize our approach no matter the election’s direction.
Considering the considerable sea change in Iranian politics, we advise the DoD to take a fresh look at its analysis of one of America’s long-standing adversaries. Since 2021, two events have dramatically shifted the subject of irregular warfare within the Department of Defense. The first was House Resolution 5130, Consortium to Study Irregular Warfare Act of 2021. Congress mandated a more data-centric (not theoretical) analysis of irregular war. The second was the change of the irregular warfare definition released in Joint Publication 1: Volume 1, Joint Warfighting in August 2023, which expanded irregular warfare to encompass activities taken before conflict and during competition. The upcoming election and forming of a new government present an opportune time to design and implement a comprehensive operational plan to advance our national interests. We recommend utilizing a fact-based methodology (leveraging analytical data from top universities, financial institutions, governmental agencies, and nongovernmental organizations) to analyze the resilience of and resistance to current Iranian governance systems. Such an assessment can better inform DoD activities, force posture, and interagency collaboration to achieve U.S. national objectives, not just in the case of war but in competition.
The Islamic Republic has been a destabilizing force in the Middle East since its ascension to power after the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The Iranian leadership has provoked violent conflict and destructive activities to assert its hegemonic aspirations. Iran’s government is a complex blending of theocratic and political elements that pursues expanding Islamification in conformity with “Khomeinism,” a radicalized ideology to reassert Shi’ism as the dominant Islamic moral authority. Tehran views the United States and Israel as their main threats and focuses their foreign policy on eliminating their regional influence. With a relatively small regular military, the regime relies on specialized forces to lead a network of proxies that engage in surrogate terrorism, political agitation, and paramilitary violence as the main instruments of power projection. The best strategic approach to stabilize the political situation and curtail Iranian hostilities needs reconsideration.
The 2022 National Security Strategy delineates the current U.S.-Iranian policy initiatives. The U.S. is presently pursuing diplomacy backed by limited sanctions to dissuade Iran from threatening U.S. personnel and developing a nuclear weapon but stands prepared to use other means should diplomacy fail. The policy provides a commitment to stand with the Iranian people, striving for human rights and dignity. Strategic decision-makers should assess the resilience of the Islamic Republic by examining its perceived legitimacy by the Iranian people, who have demonstrated a significant measure of resistance against the abuses and corruption of the Tehran regime.
Given their ethnic, cultural, and, to a lesser extent, religious diversity, the Iranian people and the Muslim Shi’a community at large have mixed views on the regime’s strategic goals. The clerics profess that the Islamic Republic is the only righteous governance path within the Islamic world. Theocratic truth-seekers advocated a sociopolitical sect based upon traditional Shi’a jurisprudence, believing that global liberation movements against colonialist oppressors were a justified obligation. Many Iranians are skeptical of the regime’s professed commitment to jihad against the West because the policy has degenerated the country’s social conditions and heightened fears of unleashing external aggression. The Muslim World generally views Iran negatively, believing that a Shi’a worldview is not a legitimate moral authority and that Tehran’s strategic approach does not contribute to peace and stability in the region.
The following chart utilizes governance metrics from the World Bank (accountability, stability, effectiveness, regulation controls, rule of law, and controlling corruption), along with fragility metrics from the Fund For Peace, to illustrate the Islamic Republic’s resiliency in comparison with Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. The illustration provides a relative governance scale where a higher level of governance indicators represents a more capable, less corrupt, and more stable government. Lower governance metrics imply the regime is fragile and susceptible to violent or nonviolent social movements.
RR
Illustration 1: Comparison of Governance in the Middle East (illustration by authors)
Contributing to the Islamic Republic’s perceived illegitimacy includes significant human rights abuses, lack of religious freedom, corrupt judiciary, and poor social conditions. Governance indicators improve to the right on this comparison with countries that espouse transparency, combat corruption, and enforce the rule of law, which is more apparent in the regimes of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The Erdogan government remains effective and enforces regulations, but nearly all its metrics remain lower than those of Saudi Arabia. Both Saudi Arabia’s and Egypt’s regimes remain unaccountable to their people, yet the House of Saud wields considerable strength in regulation control and the establishment of law and order. Compared with its near competitors, the Islamic Republic’s governance indicators demonstrate that it is dramatically unsuccessful on all fronts, causing instability and fragility that a unified social movement or violent rebellion may exploit.
A lack of public confidence undermines the strength of the Islamic Republic. Iran’s resiliency emanates from the people’s perceptions and motivations, and poor governance performance erodes public trust. Iran’s authoritarian system failed to produce meaningful political reform or social development. Severe restrictions on personal freedoms and a violent suppression of dissenting views diminish popular support for Tehran. These abuses foster resentment within the population and significantly degrade national morale and confidence in Iranian leadership. In a globalized world where information travels at the speed of the internet, social media exposes many Iranians to alternate political views and alluring social policies that make them question the efficacy of the cleric’s hard-line approach to the West.
Tehran’s low governance ratings and high fragility assessment pose a significant dilemma for the Islamic Republic and a considerable opportunity for the United States. The Iranian election process and new government formation may yield some valuable insights to steer our Iranian foreign policy. Should the United States promote: (1) a more resilient Iranian theocracy, (2) support external and internal resistance activities to collapse the regime, or (3) actively shape the strategic environment and defer to a future opportunity? A comprehensive assessment of the resilience metrics and exploring resistance strategies may lead U.S. policymakers to a more effective approach.
In conclusion, a fact-based methodology for analyzing the resilience and resistance of the Islamic Republic of Iran may inform U.S.-Iranian foreign policy decisions. The U.S. joint operational planning process and conventional war plans have not adequately addressed the competition domain in the Middle East. Current DoD force posture and activities appear merely reactive to current events. Utilizing a data-centric analysis, the DoD can measure the potential resistance within Iran, as well as identify the many nonviolent and violent groups opposing the Islamic Republic. The United States wields many instruments of national power – diplomatic, information, military, and economic – that can influence Iran’s resilience or support resistance to inspire and lead governance reforms. Making such choices requires an interdisciplinary approach and a thorough understanding of the operational environment.
Dr. Robert S. Burrell is a resilience and resistance interdisciplinary scholar using data-driven and human-centric methodologies to analyze intrastate conflict ranging from nonviolent protest through belligerency. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Global and National Security Institute of the University of South Florida. From 2020-2024, he taught irregular warfare at Joint Special Operations University and was the former editor-in-chief of special operations doctrine from 2011-2014.
Dr. David R. DiOrio (CAPT Ret.) is a National Security Professional with a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Public Policy and Administration from Walden University. He served as the Deputy Director at the Joint Forces Staff College of the National Defense University and is currently Adjunct Faculty at the Joint Special Operations University.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.
Main Image: Malekpour, Hamed. 2016 Iranian General Elections. 2016. (Tasnim News Agency via Wikimedia)
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23. The All-Airborne 'Remembrance Bowl' in Normandy Should Be a Bigger Deal Than the Army-Navy Game
I was unaware of this interesting military history (both in 1944 and 2018).
The All-Airborne 'Remembrance Bowl' in Normandy Should Be a Bigger Deal Than the Army-Navy Game
military.com · by Blake Stilwell · June 26, 2024
NORMANDY, France -- The match became known as "The Game That Never Happened," a planned football exhibition between teams formed within the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division, held amid a winter rest during World War II. Officially dubbed "The Champagne Bowl," it was a game between the 506th and the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiments that was due to be held on Christmas Day 1944.
Unfortunately, the game plan was interrupted by a massive German offensive through the Ardennes Forest. The 101st was rushed to the Belgian city of Bastogne, where they would mount their now-famous defense of the city. The football game was tabled permanently so the Army could focus on turning back the Battle of the Bulge and winning the war. The rest of the conflict is history, but the idea of putting on "The Game That Never Happened" was revived in 2018, and finally happened in 2022.
It has since been renamed "The Remembrance Bowl" and is now an annual flag football competition between paratroopers, where members of the Army's 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions square off in Normandy every year as part of the massive commemoration of the June 6, 1944, D-Day landings.
(U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Rene Rosas)
As fall turned to winter in 1944, World War II was tipping decidedly in favor of the Allies. Paris had been liberated the previous August and all fronts were pushing their way toward Germany. The men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division -- as depicted in the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers" -- settled down into a kind of winter quarters at Mourmelon-le-Grand, near Reims, for rest, training and preparation for what might come next.
They weren't the only units in the area. Reims was where Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower made his headquarters. The 82nd Airborne was also stationed near Mourmelon. As historian Stephen E. Ambrose noted in his bestselling book about Easy Company, "There was plenty to drink, and thus plenty of drunks and plenty of men who wanted to fight." In order to give the troops something to do (other than fight) while burning off their excess energy, the U.S. Army organized a wintertime morale booster: a Christmas Day football game.
Christened "The Champagne Bowl" in a nod to Reims' status as the center of France's Champagne wine region, units formed teams, held tryouts and were allowed to practice for hours a day, even at the expense of their official duties. There would even be a large turkey dinner after the game.
"It [the 101st] borrowed football equipment from the Air Force, flown in from England," Ambrose wrote, noting that as time in Mourmelon went on, "betting was already heavy on the football game, the practice sessions were getting longer and tougher."
But the Allies had allowed themselves to be lulled into a false sense of security; the Germans were far from finished. On Dec. 16, 1944, they launched an attack through the Ardennes Forest, catching the Americans by surprise. Eisenhower, with very few resources available, used his paratroopers near Reims to plug the holes in the Allied lines, declaring the defense of Bastogne to be the single-most important mission of the battle. Within 48 hours, 60,000 men were on trucks and headed to the largest battle the U.S. Army would fight throughout the entire war.
Soldiers from the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions play in an annual "Remembrance Bowl" football game during the D-Day commemorations in Normandy, France. (U.S. Army/Staff Sgt. Rene Rosas)
The bowl game might never have happened, but the idea of it was revived by Patton Legacy Sports as part of its ongoing efforts to honor the legacy of Gen. George S. Patton Jr. Though Patton is long remembered for his skill as a soldier, he is less often remembered for his abilities as an athlete. Those soldierly skills in which he excelled -- running, fencing, shooting and riding -- made him an excellent competitor for the modern pentathlon (which also includes swimming). He was even a member of the U.S. Olympic team during the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm.
In May 2018, the newly renamed "Remembrance Bowl," sponsored by Patton Legacy Sports, was added to the list of D-Day commemoration events and was held in Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Normandy. The first game took place in 2022, and the divisions' generals played the game alongside their soldiers. Maj. Gen. Christopher C. LaNeve played for the 82nd while Maj. Gen. Joseph P. McGee played with the 101st. Meanwhile, XVIII Airborne Corps commander Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue wore a neutral jersey and switched teams after halftime.
The Remembrance Bowl Trophy. (U.S. Army/Maj. Mackenzie Deal)
The first Remembrance Bowl saw the 82nd beat the 101st, but the Screaming Eagles came back to win the next year. The series only has three games, but currently sits at 2-1, with the 82nd Airborne in the lead after topping the 101st in 2024. For the soldiers, it's more than just football (although many remember to pack their cleats before shipping to France for D-Day). The game is meant to bring them closer together and even incorporates a jersey signing event afterward.
It's also meant to remember the sacrifice the paratroopers made as they fought in Bastogne instead of celebrating Christmas. The men of Easy Company were more than a little disappointed to give up their long-anticipated football game. Gordon Carson was especially disappointed, looking forward to the long, hard hours of football practice.
"As the trucks pulled out," Ambrose wrote, "Carson thought about the football practice he had been anticipating with relish, contrasted it with his actual situation, and began singing 'What a Difference a Day Makes.'"
To learn more about the Remembrance Bowl, visit the Patton Legacy Sports website.
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military.com · by Blake Stilwell · June 26, 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
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