Quotes of the Day:  

"The Senator from Wisconsin cannot frighten me by exclaiming, “My country, right or wrong.” In one sense I say so too. My country; and my country is the great American Republic. My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right."

– Carl Schurz (1829–1906)

"My dad - who was a tough guy, a Green Beret - always looked nice and wore these bright Sansabelt pants. He always said, "You have two options: You can be a follower or you can be a leader. And you don't ever want to follow anybody." And that's kind of become my philosophy about everything."

– Bubba Watson

"Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability."

– Marcus Tullius Cicero

1. IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 1)

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14. Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Marine Corps

15. New Tactic in China’s Information War: Harassing a Critic’s Child in the U.S.

16. A Case Study on Integrating Tactical Drones: Israel

17. Allies and Open Sources: Lessons from Northern Raven, the Largest OSINT Collection Operation in NATO’s History

18. The Show Trial of Evan Gershkovich

19. Why Russia's Warships in Cuba Matter to the United States

20. China urges US to stop supporting the Philippines' 'provocations'

21. How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War

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23. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 27, 2024

25. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 27, 2024

1. IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 1)

Where do we find such men? What a great American on so many levels from heroism to humility.

Thank you to "The High Side" for bringing this story to the public.

I look forward to Part 2.

Excerpts:

But despite achieving near-legendary status himself within the communities in which he operated – Special Forces, which made him a recipient of the SF Regimental Honors in 2013, and, especially, the CIA’s Special Activities Center (formerly Division) – Merkerson remains almost completely unknown outside of them. “I’m by nature a guy that does not like a lot of publicity,” he told The High Side recently. “I’d rather keep it on the down low and let my work speak for me.”

Only after The High Side had interviewed several of Merkerson’s former colleagues about his career did he agree to discuss it publicly with The High Side.

This is the story of an extraordinary American life.

To be continued in Part 2: The Gray Unknown

IN THE KILL ZONE: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 1)

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/in-the-kill-zone-the-life-and-times?utm

Part 1: A Gauntlet of Fire

SEAN D. NAYLOR AND JACK MURPHY

JUN 28, 2024

∙ PAID

1^st Lt. Willie Merkerson of 10^th Special Forces Group (right) shakes hands with Brig. Gen. John H. Cushman, commander of Fort Devens, Massachusetts, in 1968, after Cushman had pinned the Distinguished Service Cross on Merkerson for his actions during a battle in Vietnam the previous year. (Courtesy of the Merkerson family)

Face down in the dirt and badly wounded, Sgt. Hubert Bahr had almost given up hope.

A hidden North Vietnamese soldier had shot him in the hip with a three-round burst, leaving his left leg paralyzed. When he pushed himself up on his hands to glance around, another bullet had ripped across his right shoulder blade.

The South Vietnamese irregulars he was leading were reluctant to break cover to help him or otherwise attack the enemy. The rest of their outnumbered force were fighting for their lives and separated from him by 150 meters of open ground covered by enemy fire.

As the sun climbed higher, pushing the temperature into the steamy nineties, death or capture seemed imminent for the 22-year-old Special Forces NCO. Nobody was coming to help.

Or so he thought.

Out of Bahr’s line of sight, a hundred meters away but closing fast, an unarmed and helmetless U.S. soldier was sprinting toward him through the kill zone, zigzagging across the corrugated surface of the paddies as bullets cracked past his head and kicked up soil around his feet. In shock, trying not to get shot for a fifth time as he pressed himself against the ground, Bahr may have been oblivious to the sound of an American voice. But it was there, faint at first but getting louder.

Second Lt. Willie Merkerson Jr. was calling his name.

A withering ambush

It was the morning of June 19, 1967. Merkerson and Bahr were two-thirds of a trio of U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers advising a little more than a hundred South Vietnamese irregulars. Newly arrived from the United States, albeit on his second Vietnam tour as a Green Beret, Merkerson, the most senior American on the mission, had been with their team for only a couple of weeks. Bahr had joined about three months earlier.

They were on the fifth day of a search-and-destroy mission in Binh Dinh province, about 275 miles northeast of Saigon. The plan had been to push any enemy forces they found south to a river, where other teams would be waiting as a blocking force – the anvil to Merkerson’s hammer. But the other teams had failed to show up, and as they crossed a dry paddy field Merkerson’s force had been caught in a withering ambush by a dug-in North Vietnamese Army battalion hidden in thick triple canopy jungle.

As the only U.S. officer, and therefore the de facto commander, Merkerson had ordered his forces to disperse and get on line. They moved south through sniper and mortar fire until they came to a part of the paddy where the berm was high enough to provide some cover, but close enough to an open area that could be used for a helicopter landing zone. There he established a command post and an aid station for the growing number of casualties. “It was temporary, but we had to have something immediately,” he said.

Bahr’s element, on Merkerson’s right, had made the first contact with the enemy – in this case, based on their clothing and weapons, local Viet Cong communist guerrillas firing machine guns from the 20-feet-wide thickets that divided one paddy field from another. At first, Bahr moved among and behind his troops, seeking to rally them and push them forward. “When they got stalled, that’s when I would come up and try to improve the situation for them,” he said.

But as they fought their way through the patch of woodland, the Green Beret sergeant was disappointed with the irregulars, who “were trying to stay away from the gunfire,” he said. “I had a lot of trouble getting the Vietnamese to take part.”

As if that wasn’t bad enough, the South Vietnamese special forces soldier who was supposed to be his interpreter – and who had official authority over the militia company – had disappeared. “After the firefight started, I did not see him,” Bahr said.

Bahr does not recall all the details of what happened next. But the citation for the Silver Star (the Army’s third-highest award for valor) he would be awarded for his actions that day states that, with his company surrounded “and several elements in danger of annihilation,” he took decisive action. “Sergeant Bahr shouted encouragement to his men and led a frontal attack against the enemy through a hail of machine gun and mortar fire,” the citation says. Firing his M16 rifle and throwing grenades, Bahr led four of his troops in destroying the machine gun emplacements that threatened his company. According to the citation, Bahr single-handedly killed three enemy fighters.

Bahr’s first-person observations of the enemy troops he was fighting and killing convinced him that they were Viet Cong, rather than the NVA. “I got the impression we were being delayed by the Viet Cong and they were trying to bring in the NVA to tackle us,” he said later. But, as Bahr was about to discover, the NVA were already there.

“My whole life flashed in front of me.”

After subduing the Viet Cong threat, Bahr and his company were roughly in line with the rest of the force. With casualties mounting, he was worried that any enemy fire from the wood line to his right would threaten a medevac helicopter he believed was inbound. What he didn’t know was that waiting patiently in that wood line, dug in and hidden beneath camouflage netting, was an entire NVA battalion.

(Merkerson said that Bahr must have misunderstood, and that there was no medevac – or “dustoff” – inbound at that point. “Maybe he took one of my conversations that we were going to bring in some fast-movers as an indication that we were talking about clearing the way for dustoff,” he said. “I didn’t say that, but it’s possible that he inferred that.” In an interview with The High Side, Bahr said that 57 years later he cannot recall what led him to believe a helicopter was inbound.)

After trying in vain to gather “a platoon’s worth” of his irregulars to come with him, Bahr broke cover, running ahead and to the right, intending to suppress the enemy fire for long enough to allow the medevac to land.

As far as Bahr was concerned, this was how Green Berets on ODA 223 were expected to fight. “All of us tended to lead more from the front than from the rear,” he said. However, with the benefit of hindsight, “I was obviously stupid in what I was trying to do,” he told The High Side.

Bahr’s first goal was to reach the next thicket, which would offer some cover and concealment from which to engage any enemy hiding in the wood line. He sprinted in that direction but had only covered about 30 meters – less than half the distance – when the three-round burst struck him down. He neither heard the shots nor saw the shooter.

“It knocked my feet out from under me,” he said. “I was flat on my face and had no idea how I got there.”

But he quickly realized that he’d been shot and that at least one of the bullets had done significant damage. “It had caught my left sciatic nerve and partially severed that.” He had lost control over his left leg.

As Bahr tried to raise himself up to get his bearings, another bullet hit him half an inch from his spine, glancing off his right shoulder blade and pushing it into his lung, before exiting through his upper arm. That convinced him to stay flat and still on the ground. “Every time I moved, they’d shoot at me again,” he said.

The Vietnamese irregulars with whom he’d been fighting never came to his aid.

Pinned down, partially paralyzed and losing blood, things were not looking good for the young Green Beret, whose wife Darlene had given birth to a son, Hubert III, shortly after his arrival in Vietnam. “My whole life flashed in front of me,” he said.

Back at the command post, Merkerson was calling for close air support when he heard one of the irregulars yelling about Bahr. “He just said, ‘Trung-si! Trung-si American kakada!’, which meant he’s killed,” Merkerson recalled. (Trung-si is Vietnamese for sergeant.)

Realizing he hadn’t heard from Bahr in a while, Merkerson tried calling him over the radio, with no success. But despite the radio silence and the fact that the volume of fire from the wood line had noticeably increased, he was not convinced Bahr was dead. Telling Sgt. Gary Swartzbaugh, the third Green Beret on the mission, to hold the command post, Merkerson set out to look for missing sergeant.

Sgt. Gary Swartzbaugh, the Special Forces adviser to the Montagnard reconnaissance platoon during the mission. (U.S. Army)

He soon encountered another irregular soldier on the edge of a berm. In a combination of French and Vietnamese, two languages used by the Montagnard (pronounced mon-tan-yard) tribesmen who comprised at least half of the irregular force, Merkerson asked where Bahr was. “La bas! La bas! La bas!” (“Over there!”) answered the Montagnard, pointing vaguely to the southeast, before adding “kakada!” (“dead!”).

“Come with me,” Merkerson told him. The Montagnard refused. “He looked at me like I was crazy,” the U.S. officer recalled.

With no time to debate the issue, Merkerson made himself as light as possible, stripping off his webbing and placing his rifle on the ground. Then the former high school football wide receiver took off running.

“I didn’t do a lot of overthinking – or even thinking,” he said later. “I just moved… Some things you have to do instinctively, or you don’t do it.”

Working with “mercenaries”

The three Green Berets were assigned to A-223, a Special Forces A-team operating from a camp at Van Canh in Binh Dinh province. (Such camps were known as A-camps and were named after the A-teams that occupied them.) Merkerson was the team’s new executive officer, or second in command. He replaced an officer who, having been wounded once, returned to action only to be wounded again.

A-223, in a photo taken prior to Merkerson’s arrival. Sgt. Hubert Bahr is third from right. Team leader Capt. Thomas Vesser is on the far left.

He had joined an outfit that was habitually undermanned. “An A-team is supposed to have 12 people,” Bahr said. “If we had eight, we were doing good … Even as a three-striper [i.e., a buck sergeant] I was the senior weapons NCO on the team.” However, a couple of recent arrivals had raised the team’s strength to 10 – all ODA 223 was missing were two engineer sergeants.

The main combat forces in the camp, according to Bahr, were four companies recruited under the Civilian Irregular Defense Group program and drawn from two distinct ethnic populations: two companies of ethnic Vietnamese; and two companies of Montagnards. The four CIDG companies had their own officers and NCOs. Bahr estimated that the camp was divided “about 50/50” between Montagnards and Vietnamese irregulars. Merkerson, on the other hand, said he thought the Montagnards outnumbered the ethnic Vietnamese.

There was also a recon platoon of irregulars. “Our recon platoons were treated as elite soldiers,” Bahr said. “And certainly, compared to the rest of the soldiers in the battalion, they were.”

Although the Green Berets were technically “advisers” to the irregulars, that word was “a misnomer,” Merkerson said. “We were supposed to be advisers and consultants, but we hired, fired, trained, equipped and paid them – they were mercenaries.”

In addition to the irregular forces, there were “five or six” South Vietnamese special forces (or “LLDB”) personnel at the camp, led by a captain who was officially the camp commander, Merkerson said.

South Vietnam, with the four corps tactical zones (CTZs) identified. The operation in which Merkerson rescued Bahr occurred in Binh Dinh province.

Like other SF soldiers, Merkerson particularly enjoyed working with the Montagnards, hill people from Vietnam’s central highlands who he said had “a chip on their shoulder … with the Vietnamese because the Vietnamese had treated them like ninth-class citizens.” The “’Yards,” as the Americans called them, are typically small in stature, “but they’re strong as oxes, for their size,” Merkerson said.

Many SF camps were located beside Montagnard villages, from which SF teams recruited their indigenous allies. “We needed them, and they needed us,” Merkerson said. “They were hardworking because they were fighting for their lives out there.”

A fateful decision

A couple of days after Merkerson’s arrival, A-223’s leader, Capt. Thomas Vesser, took most of the A-team and more than half the camp’s irregulars off on a big operation. “So, I was there holding down the fort until he returned,” Merkerson said.

Vesser returned after about a week, and almost immediately ordered Merkerson to support another major operation. Thus, barely ten days after showing up, the newly arrived second lieutenant left the camp with two companies and a recon platoon of irregulars, and a couple of teammates he hardly knew.

One of those was Swartzbaugh, a communications NCO. The other was Bahr, who had graduated from Special Forces training barely a year previously and was about nine months into his first Vietnam tour, the initial six months of which he’d spent at a company headquarters in Bien Hoa. (Special Forces company headquarters in Vietnam were much bigger than those of today’s SF companies.) After spending a few weeks at 5^th Special Forces Group in Nha Trang, the top SF command echelon in Vietnam, Bahr was assigned to A-223. “They finally got me to an A-team, [which is] where I’d wanted to be,” he said.

It was a deployment for which the wiry former high school wrestler had volunteered. “I was looking to make it a career,” he said of his Army service, and a lot of military schools were only available to soldiers who had completed a tour in Vietnam.

The mission they were about to conduct would be Bahr’s third with the team, but the young weapons sergeant wasn’t even supposed to be taking part. “I was actually scheduled to go on R&R at that time,” he said. However, he had been training one of the camp’s Montagnard companies and wanted to evaluate its performance in the field, so he decided to defer his R&R and take another Green Beret’s place on the mission.

An aerial view of the A-camp at Van Canh, home of A-223. (Courtesy of Huong Ba Le)

The LLDB captain had assigned a junior enlisted medic from his team to accompany Bahr, and the two of them had spent time training the Montagnards. The medic spoke a smattering of English and was supposed to help translate the Green Beret sergeant’s directives, according to Bahr.

However, the camp commander, who got the final say on which irregular units went on missions with which Green Beret advisers, made a late decision to assign the company Bahr had been training to Merkerson instead. Bahr would be advising an ethnic Vietnamese company on the mission.

The weapons sergeant speculated that this was because he given his LLDB medic/interpreter a public dressing down in front of the Montagnards for refusing to take part in some training sessions, and the South Vietnamese captain may have thought that the ethnic Vietnamese irregulars would still obey the LLDB soldier, whereas the Montagnards probably would not. Whatever the reason, the result was that Bahr was going into combat with a unit he didn’t know.

None of the three Green Berets had ever been on operation with either of the others. The recency of Merkerson’s arrival and the rushed pace of preparations meant they had had very little time to build a rapport with each other. “I don’t imagine I spent more than two or three hours, total, with Lieutenant Merkerson,” Bahr said. “Five minutes here, ten minutes there, that kind of thing.”

But even in those brief exchanges, Bahr impressed the officer. “He was a pretty smart young man,” Merkerson told The High Side. “A good guy.”

And despite his limited interaction with Merkerson prior to the operation, Bahr said, the lieutenant’s competence had convinced him that he was in safe hands: “I was basically under the impression he was going to take care of us.”

Search and destroy

The mission that culminated in the battle in which Bahr was wounded began on June 15 and had three objectives. One was to confirm the presence of the NVA’s 95B Regiment, which intelligence had indicated was operating in the area. The second was to capture an NVA prisoner who could be interrogated for valuable intelligence. The third was to push the NVA forces to the river “where the blocking force could annihilate them or inflict heavy casualties on them,” Merkerson said. “It was a search-and-destroy mission.”

The area in which the mission was to take place was a two-mile wide strip of territory that marked the seam between A-223 and another A-team, an unpatrolled parcel of land that the NVA “used as a resupply path,” Bahr said, adding that when it came to U.S. and South Vietnamese forces, “nobody had been there [since] who knows when.”

Just after daybreak on the morning of June 16, Merkerson’s point element spotted two NVA soldiers walking on a trail going east to west and brought them under heavy fire, killing one of them, who turned out to be a company commander, and capturing the other, the officer’s top sergeant. Immediately thereafter, Merkerson’s troops saw an NVA squad running up a nearby hill “with all of their battledress on,” meaning khaki uniforms with bandoliers crisscrossing their chests, he said.

The LLDB captain, along with an NCO, had accompanied Merkerson on the mission. “[He] was behind me in the formation all the time,” the Green Beret officer said.

Officially, the LLDB officer was the most senior man on the mission, but he made no effort to direct troops or issue orders, according to Merkerson. However, the seizure of the NVA sergeant gave the two LLDB personnel a chance to shine by interrogating the new prisoner immediately, allowing them to take advantage of the shock of capture. Their interrogation revealed that the sergeant and his dead commander were indeed from the 95B Regiment. The initial skirmish had thus accomplished two of the mission’s three objectives. Merkerson had the prisoner flown out on a helicopter and the dead officer buried.

It was also during this June 16 fight that Merkerson first made contact with a forward air controller who was to play a vital role in the mission. Flying overhead in a light aircraft, the FAC (pronounced “fack”) was not dedicated to Merkerson’s little force. His main job was to support a nearby South Korean division. But he was keen to help.

“I established some rapport with that forward air controller and told him that we were going to be out here for a while, if you see anything that could help or harm us, let us know, and he agreed,” Merkerson said. “Any time he’d pass over he’d come up on the God frequency and give my callsign, Blackjack, and say ‘Blackjack … Is there anything I can do for you today?’ He was doing this out of kindness. He wasn’t obligated to do it.”

Early the next morning, Merkerson’s troops were moving south toward the river when they were ambushed, this time by an entrenched NVA force occupying “a linear set of positions,” Merkerson said. “The enemy were well dug in because they had the commo wire already laid out.

At the sound of the first shots, Merkerson got on the radio to the FAC. “He said, ‘I see what’s going on,’ and he kind of walked us through and got us out of the kill zone.”

But before they could get clear, several Montagnards fell victim to the hail of NVA fire. “They were shot down right in front of me,” Merkerson said. “We lost five troops, but it could have been a lot worse.”

Merkerson wanted to send the corpses of his dead soldiers back to the camp, because it was important to the Montagnards – with whom he lived and had to build rapport – that the bodies be returned “so they could give them the right rituals … and a proper burial,” he said. But that presented a challenge: The U.S. Army did not accord the same priority to evacuating Montagnard corpses that it did to fallen U.S. troops, or even wounded Montagnards, meaning no helicopter would have landed to pick up the bodies with enemy forces known to be in the area, according to Merkerson.

To get around this problem, “we had to set up a hasty helipad and get those five out under this guise that they were wounded,” he said. Merkerson and some of his soldiers put the dead Montagnards in body bags, but left their heads and chests exposed and stuck IVs in their arms to make it appear as if they were wounded but still alive.

The medevac helicopter, a UH-1 Iroquois, better known as a “Huey,” duly landed and flew off with the bodies, along with – unbeknownst to the Green Berets – a Montagnard fighter who was very much alive but who had snuck onto the aircraft on the orders of his Montagnard chain of command to ensure the bodies of their comrades were taken care of.

After lifting off, one of the air crew radioed Merkerson to express concern about one of the casualties. “He said, ‘Damn, this guy looks like he’s almost dead,’” Merkerson said. “We said, ‘Thank you very much.’” Without the subterfuge, Merkerson said, “they wouldn’t have taken them, because that wasn’t considered an emergency.”

A woman in red

On June 19, the scout platoon moved out at first light, under Swartzbaugh’s control. Merkerson’s new best friend, the FAC, was overhead. Everything looked clear, he reported, with one exception: a single woman dressed in a red dress who appeared to be doing some field work, even though there were no homes nearby.

“That’s kind of strange, I don’t see any children nor animals, [just] one person by herself,” the FAC said, according to Merkerson. “I hope she isn’t some kind of a bait, but she’s out by herself and that’s unusual.”

Merkerson told the FAC, whose name he never learned, that he’d be on the lookout for the woman as he advanced. “Be careful,” the FAC advised. In response, Merkerson ordered his force to spread out and get on line as they descended from a plateau to a flat, open area of paddy fields flanked by jungle. He put the recon platoon with Swartzbaugh to his left, or east, positioned his company of Montagnards in the center, with Bahr’s company to the right, or west. “I said, ‘Stay in touch with each other and don’t let any gaps get between us,’” Merkerson recalled.

As for the woman in the red dress, she had disappeared. “We never saw that woman,” Merkerson told The High Side. “That woman was gone.” But the FAC’s tone of caution regarding her had served as an alert for Merkerson. “We were warned, thank God,” he told The High Side.

As the Green Berets tried to maneuver their indigenous fighters into a rough line, with the recon platoon out ahead, they immediately ran into problems. The Viet Cong hiding in the thickets took Bahr’s company under heavy machine gun fire, which held up his advance until he had led the way in destroying the machine gun positions and killing several VC fighters.

“He couldn’t get through with any speed at all,” Merkerson said. “I halted my element to allow him to move up and around me to get back on line.”

But as Bahr’s force emerged from the thicket at around 9 a.m., the NVA troops were waiting in the trees on the other side, hidden from view by camouflage netting and triple canopy jungle. It wasn’t until Bahr made his dash for cover that they revealed their presence.

“The enemy laid in until they got him right in position and then started firing,” Merkerson said. “That’s when I lost contact with him.”

“I thought you guys had forgotten me”

Merkerson weaved through the paddies, focused only on finding Bahr, dead or alive. He was oblivious to the automatic weapons fire the NVA troops were pouring towards him. “I didn’t hear shit,” he said. “I didn’t hear nothing.”

Bahr was lying in a patch of open ground between the paddies and the jungle, about 150 meters from the command post but hidden from view by the paddies’ berms. For several desperate seconds Merkerson hunted in vain for his comrade. But as the ground fell away slightly, giving him a better vantage point, he caught sight of something lying flat in the dirt. “I thought it was a coat, but as I got closer, I could see that it was a person,” he said.

Bahr had been running when he was shot and the bullets’ impact had sent his eyeglasses and rifle flying forward into the dirt, Merkerson noticed as he dove into the shallow depression in which the sergeant was lying.

“I thought you guys had forgotten me,” said the sergeant, according to Merkerson, who said he replied, “We’re not going to leave you back here.” (Bahr told The High Side that he does not recall this exchange, “but then again, I was in semi-shock.”)

Bahr was unable to get to his feet, or even onto one knee, so, after grabbing Bahr’s rifle, the 6-feet-4-inch, 215-pound Merkerson hoisted the 5-feet-7-inch, 130-pound sergeant over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Fortunately for me, he was small, and I was much larger than I am now,” Merkerson told The High Side. “He certainly dwarfed me,” said Bahr.

Merkerson began his run back to the relative safety of his command post, only this time with the added weight of Bahr to contend with. “We zigzagged across a series of rice paddies,” Merkerson said. “Don’t ask me why I ran zigzags other than I’ve seen it in the movies – people running zigzags to avoid being hit – and instinctively I started doing it.”

The original citation for Hubert Bahr’s Silver Star. (Courtesy of Hubert Bahr)

The NVA troops unleashed another fusillade at the pair. Miraculously, as Merkerson carried Bahr back through the gauntlet of fire, no bullets hit home. Merkerson hurdled the last low dirt berm and landed in his command post with Bahr, to whom he immediately rendered medical care, trying first to stop the sergeant’s bleeding before he called in a medevac helicopter.

The only medic in Merkerson’s command post was a Montagnard. Together he and Merkerson gave Bahr an IV and treated the dozen or so other casualties. The pair had their work cut out for them.

“We had one guy’s mouth that was shot off, completely off,” Merkerson said. “I’d never seen anything like that.”

Merkerson devoted most of his attention to treating Bahr’s shot-up left hip. “We … protected the wound, cleaned the wound up, wrapped it in gauze and bandaged it,” Merkerson said. “I was trying to keep him alert and encouraged.”

“Coming in hot”

Merkerson knew that in addition to treating the wounded, he also had to suppress the NVA threat to helicopters before the medevac arrived. In doing so, he had help from his new guardian angel.

“Fortunately, that same forward air controller came up, saying ‘What can I do for you, brother?’” Merkerson recalled. “I said, ‘Help – we’re in a heavy firefight.’”

Merkerson gave the FAC the direction and distance of the enemy force from his position and told him to look for an NVA force of “approximately battalion-size, because we could hear the mortars and something sounding like anti-aircraft artillery,” weapon systems that were usually associated with battalion and higher echelons in the NVA.

Armed with that information, the FAC flew in and put a marking round (a 2.75-inch rocket with colored smoke) into the NVA position. Then the FAC called in strike aircraft to destroy those positions using high explosive and napalm. “Okay, coming in hot,” he said, according to Merkerson.

“He came in with those jets, hit ‘em with that napalm and just blew everything up,” Merkerson said.

The napalm immediately burned off the triple canopy jungle and the camouflage netting that were hiding not only the entrenched enemy soldiers, but 23 mm and 12.7 mm anti-aircraft guns. “Then you saw those big guns going ‘boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,’ and that was a shock [for] everybody,” Merkerson said.

Taking advantage of the fast movers keeping the enemy’s heads down, Merkerson brought more of the casualties into the command post. “We were sneaking people in that we couldn’t reach before, bringing them in under that fire cover and getting them all set up so that when the helicopters came in, we could [evacuate] them in a hurry,” he said.

As it turned out, there was only one medevac helicopter. Merkerson estimated that it arrived “at least an hour” after he had carried Bahr back to the command post.

When the Huey landed, Merkerson and his troops managed to fit all 11 wounded and dead inside it. “Fortunately, they were small,” he said. Nonetheless, loading each casualty forced Merkerson to repeatedly expose himself to enemy fire in the sprint between the sheltered command post and the landing zone.

(The total number of friendly casualties for the action varies according to source. An award citation gives a figure of 11 wounded and five killed, while 5^th Group’s operational report for the quarterly period ending July 31, 1967, says two Montagnards were killed. Merkerson told The High Side there were 11 dead and wounded, including Bahr, and that other accounts were confused because five Montagnards had been killed earlier in the operation. What seems most likely is that Merkerson’s numbers are correct, with the 11 total casualties including two dead and eight wounded irregulars, plus Bahr.)

The jets called in by the forward air controller conducted six airstrikes on the NVA positions, after which the NVA survivors withdrew, according to 5^th Group’s quarterly operational report, which states that 17 NVA troops were killed in the fight.

Word that her husband had been seriously wounded reached Darlene Bahr, 21, while she was caring for their infant son at her parents’ home in Archer City, Texas, on June 23, 1967. It was their second wedding anniversary.

An extraordinary life

For his actions that day, Merkerson received the Distinguished Service Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor. “His fearless leadership and sacrifice turned a possible disaster into a decisive victory,” reads the citation, which Merkerson said was probably written by his higher headquarters’ director of personnel with input from the directors of operations and intelligence. Now, as a result of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 memo directing that all Service Crosses awarded to African Americans during the Korean and Vietnam Wars be reviewed for possible elevation to the Medal of Honor, the Army is re-examining Merkerson’s DSC for just such an upgrade.

The original citation for Willie Merkerson’s Distinguished Service Cross. (Courtesy of the Merkerson family)

That June 1967 mission was far from the only highlight of Merkerson’s 54 years of service to his country, but it exemplified how he approached that career: with courage and humility coupled with the intelligence and drive to take advantage of every opportunity that came his way.

It was an attitude that enabled him to pack more than seems possible into his 23 years in the Army: service in the 82^nd Airborne Division and five Special Forces groups; three tours in Vietnam, including one combat jump; two bachelor’s degrees, a master’s degree and a stint teaching college; successful completion of the Special Forces training course, Ranger School, engineer officer candidate school, armor officer advanced course, Marine Corps Command and Staff College, and the Army’s foreign area officer course; and a tour as an Army attache in Africa. And that’s all before spending more than 30 years training allied intelligence services and running spies as a CIA officer.

In that second career Merkerson served from Afghanistan to Zaire. He helped smuggle Israeli intelligence officers out of Sudan in wooden boxes in the middle of a coup, ran a secret airfield operation in the heart of Africa to supply Angolan rebels, and fed and housed a stranded Libyan guerrilla army that the CIA had nowhere else to put.

Along the way Merkerson rubbed shoulders with legendary figures such as Charlie Beckwith, the founder of Delta Force; Robert Howard, the most highly decorated Special Forces officer of the Vietnam War; and Milt Bearden, who ran the covert action campaign to help the Afghan mujahideen defeat the Soviets.

But despite achieving near-legendary status himself within the communities in which he operated – Special Forces, which made him a recipient of the SF Regimental Honors in 2013, and, especially, the CIA’s Special Activities Center (formerly Division) – Merkerson remains almost completely unknown outside of them. “I’m by nature a guy that does not like a lot of publicity,” he told The High Side recently. “I’d rather keep it on the down low and let my work speak for me.”

Only after The High Side had interviewed several of Merkerson’s former colleagues about his career did he agree to discuss it publicly with The High Side.

This is the story of an extraordinary American life.

To be continued in Part 2: The Gray Unknown

2. Deterring Confidently Ignorant Leaders Like Putin and Xi

Excerpts:

U.S. intelligence believes that Putin’s decision for war came from his immediate perception of a closing window of opportunity to establish his legacy, given his 69 years of age, and Europe’s lukewarm support for Ukraine and dependence on Russian energy. Putin also believed that occupying Ukraine would deter the Russian people from succumbing to what he saw as an impending challenge of a color revolution in Moscow. In contrast, French President Emmanuel Macron, in his February 2022 meeting with him, described Putin as being in an irreversibly ideological mind-set. It is possible that Putin’s constant referencing of topics and use of terminology typical of the West’s “cultural wars” of 2021, such as critiques of George Soros, feminism, LGBT rights, transgender athletes, transition surgery, BLM, religion, and U.S. elections interference, suggests he is somehow accessing Western social media, or whatever Rutube (the Russian Youtube) reposts from VPN-accessible TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Putin may actually be watching and reacting to his own televised propaganda, a phenomenon termed “indoctrination blowback.” Toland records that Hitler too was obsessed with reacting and responding to the Western press.

...

Xi’s insecurity makes him fearful of consulting and delegating to his peers, and he consequently feels the need to demonstrate control through a never-ending politically motivated anti-corruption campaign, and an anachronistic personality cult. Deterring the Chinese military against an invasion of Taiwan can be made through easy demonstrations of Taiwanese and U.S. capabilities against an amphibious or blockading force. However, deterring Xi Jinping, who may fall back on nuclear weapons to rescue a catastrophic battlefield defeat, will require undiplomatically direct threats against his person.

Deterring Confidently Ignorant Leaders Like Putin and Xi

By Julian Spencer-Churchill

June 28, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/28/deterring_confidently_ignorant_leaders_like_putin_and_xi_1041009.html?mc_cid=3fbe7e75fa&mc_eid=70bf478f36

The Difficult Problem of Deterring Confidently Ignorant Leaders Like Putin and Xi

The U.S. military believes that the Russian army’s operational planning to invade Ukraine began in early 2021, before the U.S. departure from Afghanistan. According to the CIA, Russian President Vladimir Putin had not yet decided for war until October 2021. With 90,000 Russian troops deployed on Ukraine’s border in November 2021, CIA director Bill Burns flew directly to Moscow to warn Putin personally that he would pay a high price for the invasion. Undeterred, on December 15, Putin delivered his ultimatum to the world: that there be no new Eastern European countries joining NATO, and no new weapons transfers or deployments in the East. On February 5, 2022, Putin visited Xi Jinping for war approval and support against expected Western sanctions.

The resulting invasion fiasco on February 24, 2022, was the product of the traditional Russian elite’s superficial historical knowledge of the changes brought about by modernity on ex-Soviet society, specifically Ukraine’s stubborn determination to resist, and the indifference of Russia’s under-35 military age cohort. Putin is an experienced secret policeman, a remnant of the failed mission to preserve the Soviet politburo, which he is now exercising vengefully in his upholding of the Brezhnev doctrine. He believes this gives Moscow the reflexive right to intervene in any neighboring state that is drifting out of its orbit. The clumsily executed invasion also demonstrated that the survival of Putin’s Siloviki dominated regime depended on a Russian armed forces staffed by loyalists rather than competent military technicians. It is not clear what else the Biden administration could have done to deter Putin, given that it is already widely remembered in Russia that Nikita Khrushchev’s humiliation in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is the reason he was deposed.

However, Putin, like Hitler and Iraq’s President Saddam Hussein, and possibly like China’s leader Xi Jinping, is an improvisational strategist, meaning he creates policies in isolation from advisers. Thus, despite the mainstream view that all of these authoritarian leaders were following a rational long-term design, at least more sophisticated than the equivalent policy based on the brief time horizon of a democratic politician, their plans were in fact incoherent and almost always dependent on a bluff to accomplish a quick fait accompli. Autocrats view politics far more personalistically than do democratic politicians (who focus instead on the triple threat to their power of the media, the electorate, and the judiciary). The two implications for deterrence are first, that the authoritarian institutions implementing these ill-conceived plans are more easily deterred than widely believed. However, the second implication is that the unusual self-confidence of these authoritarian leaders requires that for deterrence to be effective, it must be explicitly targeted at their personal, and not only, political survival. To that end, the CIA could deliver a copy of University of Rochester professor H.E. Goemans’ 2020 book, War & Punishment, which provides a compact statistical breakdown of what variety of personal harm awaits autocrats who fail in disastrous foreign policy ventures.

War planning by autocrat-led regimes suffer from the recurring dysfunction of failing to integrate critical advice from a full cabinet of military, diplomatic, economic, and domestic-political constituencies. The precise combination of excluded constituencies depends on the type of autocracy. Military dominated regimes tend to have the narrowest decision-making cabinets, producing the foreign policy errors typical of Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, which are wars fought without first recruiting allies. Civilian autocrats, like Putin, Hitler, and Saddam, tend to disregard advice from either or both the military and foreign ministries, leading more often to battlefield embarrassment. The most widely accepted technique for measuring the marginalization of information on cabinet decision-making is by Harvard University professor John Steinbruner’s cybernetic decision model. Columbia University professor Richard K. Betts, in his 1977 Soldiers, Statesmen, and Cold War, showed that full cabinets typical of democracies, because they have more complete information, are far more cautious and therefore selective about the use of military force.

Examples of military planning failures caused by poor information are common. Wilhelmine Germany’s 1914 implementation of a modified Schlieffen Plan aimed at seizing Paris, which unexpectedly provoked British involvement, is the most commonly cited. Tokyo’s decision to attack the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941, was predicated on a generations-old confidence in Imperial Japan’s eventual ability to win a decisive major battle at sea. Japan’s military planners failed to account for the stubborn resistance of the U.S. aircraft carriers in the Solomon Islands, followed by an intelligence-driven ambush at the battle of Midway, after which Japan could no longer choose the timing of the culminating naval clash. Pakistan’s 1965 war with India evolved from a tactical solution at the Quetta staff college, and ascended with the rising status of the military, into a wholly inappropriate template for a grand strategy.

John Toland’s 1976 biography of German leader Adolf Hitler, AJP Taylor’s 1961 The Origins of the Second World War, and the CIA and FBI interrogation files of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, all confirm this same planning weakness by civilian autocrats. This is instructive, because it tells us that deterrence warnings must be far more explicit and personalized than the more formal communication between the foreign ministries of well-established countries, typified by U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie’s infamously polite warning to Saddam Hussein against invading Kuwait. Toland’s account of the Munich crisis negotiations actually showed that Chamberlain was a tough negotiator and intolerant of Hitler’s theatrics, but was unwilling to describe in detail what the British would do to Germany in war.

The psychologist Carl Jung (in Toland’s account) based on first-hand evidence provided by Hitler’s long-time political aide and Harvard graduate, Ernst Hanfstaengl, believed Hitler to be a mystical thinker rather than a rationalist. Hitler’s emotional sense of historical mission meant that he adopted risky policies without first investigating to see whether the means of achieving them was possible. This runs counter to the predictions of mainstream realist theory of political scientists like University of Chicago’s professor John Mearsheimer, which argues that interests can be derived from a state’s relative power. Hitler’s policies, including his decisions during crises and for war, were improvisational, meaning he made choices by instinct, without consulting others. Germany’s last cabinet meeting was in February 1938, shortly after which Hitler secured the legality of his direct command of the armed forces. The speed of France’s defeat in June of 1940 was a surprise to the German military, whereas only Hitler was certain because of faith in his own genius.

Toland, who interviewed more than one hundred persons that had close interaction with Adolf Hitler, and AJP Taylor’s once controversial and now mainstream study of how he formulated foreign policy, both agree that Hitler saw war instrumentally rather than as a nihilistic catharsis. His terrifying goal was to conduct a genocidal war to the Urals to accommodate a future German population of 250 million, coupled with Toland’s confirmation that Hitler had rudimentary knowledge of nuclear weapons. Both agree, as measured by a number of plebiscites, and despite post-war revisionism, that Hitler was certain of his overwhelming popularity among Germans, even during the war. As an agent of the military in 1919, Hitler had infiltrated and subverted organized labor, and then exercised his talents in electoral campaigning and intrigue to seize control of Germany by 1934. The liberal Anglo-American journalistic and politicians’ device of making a distinction between Hitler and Germans, never accepted by academics, is substantively wrong. Eleven million communist-voting Germans fought vigorously for the Nazis. Hitler thus felt secure in his understanding of German sentiment that they would bear the tremendous costs of his risky war plans.

Hitler’s distorted knowledge of foreign policy came from the parochially nationalist texts he consumed (now available as the Third Reich Collection at the U.S. Library of Congress), and from his coterie of romantic Teutonophiles, racists, and Southwest African colonialists. Hitler underestimated British influence, Russian tenacity, Japanese desperation, and aroused American impulsiveness. Consequently, the tide had turned against him just three years and four months after the outbreak of hostilities.

The CIA and FBI interrogations revealed that Saddam Hussein’s policies, including his decisions for war, were also improvisational, meaning he made decisions on intuition, confident in his expertise and remarkable sense of the Arab street, despite his demonstrably poor and contradictory knowledge of regional Near Eastern history. Surprisingly, Saddam admitted to FBI questioners his regret of the invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990, a decision that was arrived at in only 30 minutes at a cursory meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council. His interrogators found that he had a high emotional quotient and was able to endear himself, elicit admiration, and manipulate those around him, while also demonstrating ruthless cruelty. Saddam ruled alone, surrounding himself with deferential personalities, gradually bypassing the formal councils of governance. His domination of the military led to its poor performance in both of Iraq’s wars. It was Saddam alone who ordered the Iraqi army in its disastrous attack on Khafji, Saudi Arabia, in 1991.

Saddam was peculiarly prone to personify and feel a need to react to perceptions of insult against Iraq in foreign policy and used parables to explain and justify the consequent need to retaliate. He saw affronts in both Iranian harassment of Iraq in early September of 1980, and by members of the al-Sabah rulers of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. His over-emphasis on personal politics and addressing slights, and his instinctive, isolated, and uninformed decision-making, meant he could not foresee the actions of distant powers, like the prompt U.S. buildup, and French indifference, Soviet preoccupation with the Baltic. A colleague of this author was in contact with the political staff of the Iraqi embassy in Washington during the 1990 phase of the crisis, and it seems they were fully aware of the probable actions of the U.S., but Saddam likely believed he knew better.

U.S. intelligence believes that Putin’s decision for war came from his immediate perception of a closing window of opportunity to establish his legacy, given his 69 years of age, and Europe’s lukewarm support for Ukraine and dependence on Russian energy. Putin also believed that occupying Ukraine would deter the Russian people from succumbing to what he saw as an impending challenge of a color revolution in Moscow. In contrast, French President Emmanuel Macron, in his February 2022 meeting with him, described Putin as being in an irreversibly ideological mind-set. It is possible that Putin’s constant referencing of topics and use of terminology typical of the West’s “cultural wars” of 2021, such as critiques of George Soros, feminism, LGBT rights, transgender athletes, transition surgery, BLM, religion, and U.S. elections interference, suggests he is somehow accessing Western social media, or whatever Rutube (the Russian Youtube) reposts from VPN-accessible TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. Putin may actually be watching and reacting to his own televised propaganda, a phenomenon termed “indoctrination blowback.” Toland records that Hitler too was obsessed with reacting and responding to the Western press.

This is not the first time that a war policy was informed by rage intentionally produced by an algorithm. High levels of literacy at the beginning of the seventeenth century permitted basement pamphleteering to prolong the devastation of the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War, coining the term, propaganda in 1622. During the eighteenth century, the corruption alleged by Jonathan Swift’s texts had a similar impact on undermining the Duke of Marlborough’s defense against the depredations of Louis the XIV. It was popular outrage, triggered by calculated editorial manipulation of the media, which provoked the 1870 Franco-Prussian, and the 1898 Spanish-American Wars. The panicky authoritarian response to this apocalyptic cultural threat is to blame and create buffers against outside influences of liberal democracy, or what Chinese ideologues call “Western constitutionalism.” Both Putin and Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping are making the common error of believing that the stressful changes affecting Russian and Chinese society are primarily influenced by cultural activists from abroad, typically decadent and materialistic Western liberalism acting as fronts for venture capitalists (exemplified by George Soros), rather than changes that are the natural evolution of all industrial societies.

All of the aforementioned leaders were distrustful of their militaries, and therefore dominated their operational plans rather than defer to their expertise. Neither Hitler, Saddam, Putin, or Xi, have experience in military planning, including logistics or the technical requirements to sustain combined arms operations. Nevertheless, Hitler imposed the timing of nearly every Wehrmacht campaign. Saddam Hussein was solely in charge of ordering the Iraqi attack on Iran in 1980 and decided the 1990 seizure of Kuwait in a 30-minute meeting. Putin ordered his muzzled and unprepared military into Ukraine in October of 2021. Most also suffer from ignorance of local history and succumb to their own nationalist hype, all of which fortifies their regimes against the deterrent threats from what they see as morally decadent but cunningly devious democracies.

Similarly, Xi Jinping has played a central role, as Chairman of the Central Military Commission, in permitting the various branches of the People’s Liberation Army to conduct their provocative and arguably counter-productive exercises around Taiwan. Xi is a princeling of the Chinese Communist Party, whose rough upbringing gave him the skills necessary to prevail against political rivals. His serendipitous selection as the various factions’ compromise candidate to lead China was unfortunate, given his obvious lack of charisma, judgment, and historical knowledge. His authority is dependent on military support, and he is coasting on the popularity of the Communist Party as deliverer of the tremendous economic improvements of the last thirty years. Like Putin, Xi is unpopular among the under 35 cohort of military age, who see him as a ham-fisted obstacle to the China Dream which he promised.

Xi’s insecurity makes him fearful of consulting and delegating to his peers, and he consequently feels the need to demonstrate control through a never-ending politically motivated anti-corruption campaign, and an anachronistic personality cult. Deterring the Chinese military against an invasion of Taiwan can be made through easy demonstrations of Taiwanese and U.S. capabilities against an amphibious or blockading force. However, deterring Xi Jinping, who may fall back on nuclear weapons to rescue a catastrophic battlefield defeat, will require undiplomatically direct threats against his person.

Dr. Julian Spencer-Churchill is associate professor of international relations at Concordia University, and author of "Militarization and War (2007) and of Strategic Nuclear Sharing (2014)." He has published extensively on Pakistan security issues and arms control, and completed research contracts at the Office of Treaty Verification at the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the then Ballistic Missile Defense Office (BMDO). He has also conducted fieldwork in Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, and Egypt, and is a consultant. He is a former Operations Officer, 3 Field Engineer Regiment, from the latter end of the Cold War to shortly after 9/11.

3. Chinese Embassy lobbies Hill against DNI report on leaders’ corruption

Excerpts:

Mr. Ogles recently introduced additional legislation that would give the DNI six more months to produce the report and also require officials to testify on the issue.

Companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, and could pass in some form in the coming days, a congressional aide said.

“This will serve as another campaign to slander and defame the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese leadership,” Mr. Wang wrote on June 18, adding the pending report “seriously challenges China’s political red line and constitutes a blatant political provocation.”

Mr. Wang said the Chinese Communist Party “serves the people” and produced “two miracles” — rapid economic growth and social stability.

The Chinese diplomat said U.S. efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the party would produce “a mistaken policy” and sour U.S.-China relations.

Chinese Embassy lobbies Hill against DNI report on leaders’ corruption

washingtontimes.com · by Bill Gertz

By - The Washington Times - Thursday, June 27, 2024

A version of this story appeared in the daily Threat Status newsletter from The Washington Times. Click here to receive Threat Status delivered directly to your inbox each weekday.

A Chinese Embassy official recently wrote to Congress to lobby against legislation requiring Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines to produce a report on corruption and hidden wealth held by Chinese leaders through their relatives, including President Xi Jinping.

Wang Xijun, a counselor at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, wrote to the office of Rep. Andy Ogles, Tennessee Republican, criticizing legislation mandating the DNI report. The DNI report on Chinese corruption was due to Congress in December under a defense bill signed into law in late 2022. A DNI spokesman has said intelligence analysts are working on the legally required report.

Mr. Ogles recently introduced additional legislation that would give the DNI six more months to produce the report and also require officials to testify on the issue.

Companion legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Marco Rubio, Florida Republican, and could pass in some form in the coming days, a congressional aide said.

“This will serve as another campaign to slander and defame the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese leadership,” Mr. Wang wrote on June 18, adding the pending report “seriously challenges China’s political red line and constitutes a blatant political provocation.”

Mr. Wang said the Chinese Communist Party “serves the people” and produced “two miracles” — rapid economic growth and social stability.

The Chinese diplomat said U.S. efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the party would produce “a mistaken policy” and sour U.S.-China relations.

“We hereby urge Congressman Ogles to stop pushing forward this act,” he said.

The Congressional Research Service, in a report previewing the forthcoming DNI report, stated earlier this month that senior Chinese leaders, including Mr. Xi, are engaged in corruption and hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in wealth by using relatives to disguise their illicit activities.

The CRS report stated that Mr. Xi by 2012 had amassed at least $376 million in company investments, an indirect 18% stake in a rare-earth mineral company worth more than $311 million, and $20.2 million holdings in a technology company. The investments were made through relatives, a common practice used in hiding forbidden wealth and corruption by Chinese communist officials in China.

The DNI report is expected to undermine Mr. Xi’s large-scale anti-corruption campaign that included investigations into millions of ruling party members.

Since 2012, 266 members of the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee were ousted, allegedly for corruption. Among them were Defense Minister Li Shangfu, also a former member of the Central Military Commission, and Foreign Minister Qin Gang, the CRS report said.

• Bill Gertz can be reached at bgertz@washingtontimes.com.

Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.

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4. Transitioning Away from the Carrier Strike Group and Toward Distributed Maritime Operations

Conclusion​:

The intent of DMO should not be to render the CSG irrelevant, but rather to ensure that the CSG is not relied upon as the sole vanguard of sea control in the initial stages of a high-end conflict against a peer competitor. DMO must delay and degrade the decision-making of adversaries while denying them the opportunity to engage first. It is about establishing and maintaining temporary sea control for operational needs and sea denial all other times. The transition away from using the air wing to prosecute sea control means fully embracing the true manifestation of DMO – lethal, distributed surface ships that can combine long-range fires across broad geographic spaces.

However, given the state of weapons development and procurement, the Navy’s lack of progress in implementing the DMO concept is concerning. Against a peer competitor, the appropriate type of long-range weapons, fielded in sufficient numbers to support effective DMO, will increase the survivability of fleet and ensure its ability to maintain the initiative by firing effectively first. This transition away from the longstanding muscle memory of fighting under the CWC construct and toward a concept of using large numbers of coordinated but distributed surface units to launch fires will be essential to winning modern fleet warfare.

Transitioning Away from the Carrier Strike Group and Toward Distributed Maritime Operations

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

Fleet Warfare Week

By CDR Anthony LaVopa, USN

The United States Navy and its allies have enjoyed uncontested control of the world’s oceans for over thirty years. But the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been ambitiously pursuing the development of its military to compete with the U.S., specifically in the maritime domain. The PRC has invested in a large Navy, a land-based mobile rocket force fielding long-range anti-ship weapons, and a modernized air force. These investments in military buildup and modernization demonstrate the PRC’s urgency to be ready for a conflict sooner rather than later. President Xi has told the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready for an invasion of Taiwan by 2027.1 However, the U.S. military, specifically the Navy, does not demonstrate that same sense of urgency. Decades spent fighting insurgents have diverted the Navy’s attention away from its original purpose – establishing and maintaining command of the seas through fleet warfare.

Since World War II, the Navy’s principal means of seizing command of the seas has been the carrier group. However, the service’s warfighting concept of Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) is fundamentally predicated on a different set of capabilities and force packages. The Tri-Service Maritime strategy – Advantage at Sea – defines DMO as “an operations concept that leverages the principles of distribution, integration, and maneuver to mass overwhelming combat power and effects at the time and place of our choosing.”2 To effectively win a war against a peer competitor, the Navy should transition to the decentralization and distribution inherent in DMO by empowering the surface fleet to take the lead in prosecuting sea control.

The Challenge to Decentralize and Distribute

The decentralization of combat power is required to conduct effective DMO. Following the logic of the memorable Captain Wayne Hughes, DMO aims to secure the operational advantage of firing effectively first.3 It can enable a good offense and subsequently reduce the requirement for a good defense. However, generations of naval officers have matured through their careers using the carrier-centric Composite Warfare Commander (CWC) construct. This construct is inherent to using the CSG as the primary element of naval power projection, but it is in tension with the broader fleet-level principles of DMO.

Since the Gulf War, the CSG employment model has evolved into a managed defense of an aircraft carrier (High-Value Unit – HVU) to ultimately preserve the capabilities of the carrier air wing. The platforms and weapons in today’s surface fleet are those that have been optimized to support the CWC construct as part of a CSG. They are relatively short-range weapons that rely on exquisite platforms to deliver them in large quantities. Aside from the air wing, the rest of the platforms in the CSG are having their armaments, dispositions, and roles mostly driven by defensive imperatives.

Captain Bill Shafley argued that “as the DMO concept suggests, disaggregation of the CSG is driven now by lethality and survivability.”4 The essence of DMO should be to distribute and decentralize combat power based on the long-range fires capability carried by surface combatants. The vast majority of the Navy’s cruise missile firepower and vertical launch cell capacity is fielded by the surface fleet, which operates significant numbers of platforms compared to the handful of capital ships in the fleet. But the surface fleet currently lacks the long-range weapons required to mass anti-ship firepower in coordinated offensive strikes as envisioned by DMO.

The distribution of ships still assigned to a CSG is not DMO in the fullest sense, but rather just a CSG spread out over larger distances, while still using a centralized model of command and control in the form of CWC. The viability of the CSG in a high-end threat environment depends upon an initial campaign of DMO, which sets the conditions and creates a more permissive operating environment for high-value units. Forces that operate under DMO must be able to penetrate into an adversary’s weapons engagement zone and take on risks that high-value units cannot. Tethering the surface fleet to capital ship defense therefore hamstrings the broader operational potential of the fleet and diminishes the extent of physical distribution that is possible.

To realize the full potential of DMO, the Navy must pivot its focus away from platforms and focus on the underlying weapons and effects that deliver the critical enabling capabilities. As Dmitry Filipoff notes, “The ability to combine fires against warships heavily depends upon the traits of the weapons themselves. These traits offer a valuable framework for defining the aggregation potential of individual weapons and the broader force’s ability to mass fires.”5 The transition to a distributed surface force with widely-fielded anti-ship weapons could tip the operational advantage toward the U.S. Navy and set the stage for new fleet-level force packages that are less centered on capital ships the Navy can ill afford to lose.

(Jan. 22, 2020) Ships from Destroyer Squadron (DESRON) 23 transit the Pacific Ocean. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Nicholas V. Huynh)

Effective DMO Requires Long-Range Fires

The ability to deny an adversary navy the opportunity for a decisive opening salvo depends upon a fleet having a superior first strike capability. However, U.S. naval forces lack meaningful, long-range anti-ship weapons that they can employ in a distributed nature because the fleet has relied principally on the concentrated firepower of the air wing. This critical dependency on carrier aviation’s short-range anti-ship fires significantly limits the degree to which the Navy can effectively execute DMO. In his article “DMO – A Salvo Equation Analysis,” Captain Anthony Cowden (ret.) noted that:

“the single point of failure for a distributed force is the ability to coordinate a strike on another force. This coordination becomes even more complex with greater distribution of one’s force, and even more so when the enemy’s force is distributed. If the distributed force cannot coordinate their fires, they lose in every scenario.”6

This points to how the Navy must ensure it has the requisite long-range anti-ship weapons and the networks to guide them so it has a variety of resilient options for maritime strike. Without the right long-range weapons, the viability of DMO is heavily degraded because forces will struggle to effectively distribute from one another and maintain the ability to concentrate firepower. This is the situation the U.S. Navy is in today with its CSG-centric paradigm that features only a small amount of anti-ship firepower that is almost entirely concentrated in the carrier. As Filipoff notes in his article describing the current state of U.S. anti-ship firepower shortfalls and the challenges of using the air wing to sink warships, “…it would mean coming to terms with how the vast majority of the U.S. Navy’s force structure and missile arsenal is hardly able to threaten modern naval formations with anti-ship firepower.”7 This lack of weapons from a range and quantity perspective severely handicaps the proper implementation of DMO.

The Navy has made some modest strides in increasing the lethality of its surface ships, particularly with SM-6 having the capability of operating in an anti-surface mode. However, the most common variant of SM-6, with a range of about 150 miles, is still well out-sticked by the Chinese surface fleet’s YJ-18 with a range of 330 miles.8 Although newer variants of SM-6 and Tomahawk are expected to provide much longer-range anti-ship capability, it is doubtful whether ships would have the capacity to carry a meaningful amount of these weapons for these roles, since the need for heavily biasing VLS loadouts toward defense is driven by the capital ship-centric design of current U.S. naval operations and force packaging.

The PLA Navy Type-055 guided-missile destroyer Wuxi steams to a designated sea area during a maritime training exercise. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Wang Zezhou)

The transition to surface ships loaded with long-range, offensive weapons substantially changes the overall importance of each individual combatant. No longer will surface ships simply be a defensive adjunct to the carrier and its air wing. Soon surface ships will possess the firepower to execute sea control operations, and in ways that could be more aggressive than what is prudent for capital ships. The transition to fleets centered on numerous distributed surface ships executing core offensive missions, while operating at significant distances from the nearest U.S. capital ship, is the true essence of DMO.

Conclusion

The intent of DMO should not be to render the CSG irrelevant, but rather to ensure that the CSG is not relied upon as the sole vanguard of sea control in the initial stages of a high-end conflict against a peer competitor. DMO must delay and degrade the decision-making of adversaries while denying them the opportunity to engage first. It is about establishing and maintaining temporary sea control for operational needs and sea denial all other times. The transition away from using the air wing to prosecute sea control means fully embracing the true manifestation of DMO – lethal, distributed surface ships that can combine long-range fires across broad geographic spaces.

However, given the state of weapons development and procurement, the Navy’s lack of progress in implementing the DMO concept is concerning. Against a peer competitor, the appropriate type of long-range weapons, fielded in sufficient numbers to support effective DMO, will increase the survivability of fleet and ensure its ability to maintain the initiative by firing effectively first. This transition away from the longstanding muscle memory of fighting under the CWC construct and toward a concept of using large numbers of coordinated but distributed surface units to launch fires will be essential to winning modern fleet warfare.

Commander Anthony LaVopa commanded the USS Hurricane (PC 3) and also served as a DDG-1000 requirements officer at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He recently graduated with a Masters in National Security and Strategic Studies from the U.S. Naval War College as a Halsey Group Fellow and is currently the Prospective Executive Officer (PXO) of USS Bulkeley(DDG 84).

References

1. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/05/07/how-dc-became-obsessed-with-a-potential-2027-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CPresident%20Xi%20has%20instructed%20the,TV%20interview%20in%20February%202023.

2. “The US Tri-Service Maritime Strategy,” Strategic Comments 27, no. 5 (2020): p. iv-vi, https://doi.org/10.1080/13567888.2021.1960095.

3. Wayne P. Hughes and Robert Girrier, Fleet Tactics and Naval Operations (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2018).

4. Shafley, “A NEW DESRON STAFF – BEYOND THE COMPOSITE WARFARE COMMANDER CONCEPT”

5. Dmitry Filipoff, “FIGHTING DMO, PT. 2: ANTI-SHIP FIREPOWER AND THE MAJOR LIMITS OF THE AMERICAN NAVAL ARSENAL,” Center for International Maritime Security, February 27, 2023, https://cimsec.org/fighting-dmo-pt-2-anti-ship-firepower-and-the-major-limits-of-the-american-naval-arsenal/.

6. Anthony Cowden, “DISTRIBUTED MARITIME OPERATIONS – A SALVO EQUATION ANALYSIS,” Center for International Maritime Security, March 23, 2023, https://cimsec.org/distributed-maritime-operations-a-salvo-equation-analysis/.

7. Filipoff, “FIGHTING DMO, PT. 2: ANTI-SHIP FIREPOWER AND THE MAJOR LIMITS OF THE AMERICAN NAVAL ARSENAL”

Featured Image: Ships participating in Valiant Shield 2020 steam in formation while E/A-18G Growlers and FA-18E Super Hornets from Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 5, a P-8 Poseidon assigned to Commander Task Force 72, and U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptors and a B-1B Bomber fly over the formation. (U.S. Navy photo)

cimsec.org · by Guest Author

5. The Navy’s ongoing carrier conundrum

What if we had executed a different campaign and decisively took the fight to the Houthis and destroyed their capabilities to launch all forms of attack as well as the ability to command and control and sustain those attacks? 

Excerpts:

Ike’s latest extended cruise and its replacement once again raises questions about the finite carrier fleet’s ability to respond to a seemingly relentless series of global events that require the uniquely American naval presence of a flattop.

Ultimately, the requirements levied on the carriers by the Navy and combatant commanders are greater than what the 11-carrier fleet can meet, according to Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare officer and director of the RAND Corporation’s National Security Supply Chain Institute.

...

Ike and its strike group–including the cruiser Philippine Sea and the destroyers Gravely and Mason–also have participated in five major joint missions with British forces to target dozens of the militant group’s drones, missile launchers and other facilities and targets in Yemen.

All told, Ike’s air wing has flown more than 12,100 sorties, totaling over 27,200 flight hours, and the strike group has launched more than 350 air-to-surface weapons and more than 50 air-to-air missiles.

The warships have each traveled more than 55,000 miles, and they’ve launched more than 100 Standard and Tomahawk missiles. In all, the strike group has gone after about 430 either pre-planned or dynamic targets in its mission to defend U.S., coalition and merchant ships.

The Navy’s ongoing carrier conundrum

navytimes.com · by Diana Correll · June 27, 2024

After a grueling eight months leading the Navy’s effort to counter Iran-backed Houthi rebel attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower received a reprieve this month when it transited the Suez Canal and headed into the Mediterranean Sea, on its way back home to Norfolk.

During more than 200 days taking down a barrage of Houthi drones and missiles, the Ike became the latest East Coast-based carrier to see its deployment extended multiple times.

Dating back to 2021, carriers Harry S. Truman, George H.W. Bush, and most recently, the Gerald R. Ford, also encountered extended periods underway to fulfill American naval presence requirements amid pressing global events.

Altogether, these carriers spent roughly nine months at sea – up from the standard seven-month deployment schedule.

And while the Ike is now wrapping its deployment, another East Coast carrier isn’t ready to replace its presence in the region – prompting an already deployed West Coast carrier Navy to replace it.

Naval air crewmen (Helicopter) return after conducting search and rescue training aboard an MH-60S Sea Hawk helicopter, attached to the "Dusty Dogs" of Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 7, in the Red Sea on Feb. 15. (Navy)

Ike’s latest extended cruise and its replacement once again raises questions about the finite carrier fleet’s ability to respond to a seemingly relentless series of global events that require the uniquely American naval presence of a flattop.

Ultimately, the requirements levied on the carriers by the Navy and combatant commanders are greater than what the 11-carrier fleet can meet, according to Bradley Martin, a retired surface warfare officer and director of the RAND Corporation’s National Security Supply Chain Institute.

RELATED

Eisenhower carrier strike group deployment extended

The strike group, which for months has launched crucial strikes against Houthi rebels, will remain in the Red Sea for at least another month.

By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

“There really just aren’t enough ships to go around,” Martin told Navy Times. “Now, that’s not necessarily strictly, or always, a carrier problem. It’s also a destroyer or [amphibious assault ship] problem. But it’s a problem of size, it’s a problem of capacity.”

As Ike left the theater and a Houthi battle that officials say is the Navy’s most kinetic since World War II, the Pentagon announced that the San Diego-based carrier Theodore Roosevelt would steam into the Middle East from the Asia-Pacific to replace Ike’s presence and capability.

It will be the first time a non-East Coast carrier has operated in the Middle East since the Japan-based Ronald Reagan headed there in 2021 to oversee the American pullout from Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Martin said he suspects that such extended deployments will become the norm, given the need for carrier presence in the Middle East, the Pacific and around Europe as the Ukraine war rages on.

An aviation structural mechanic cleans pad eyes on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea on June 7. (Navy)

Carriers like the Truman, Bush and Ford faced roughly nine months at sea during their respective deployments in recent years – up from the standard seven-month deployment schedule.

Out on the West Coast, the carrier Nimitz underwent a roughly 11-month deployment that spanned most of 2020 and the first part of 2021.

“As long as combatant commanders want to have these ships on a fairly constant basis, these types of situations are going to come up,” Martin said. “For the foreseeable future, these types of delays, extended deployments, are probably likely.”

As Ike’s deployment fate hung in the balance before leaving the Middle East this spring, Navy officials said in a statement to Navy Times that “the flexible nature of a carrier strike group allows us to be prepared to conduct operations for as long as needed.”

Capacity Issues

Experts say the taxed carrier fleet comes from a mix of too few ships and global events that are beyond the control of anyone in Washington.

Events like the Israel-Hamas war have unexpectedly placed an additional strain on the fleet – especially for ships based on the East Coast.

RELATED

Ike carrier heads home as Houthi attacks continue in the Red Sea

The San Diego-based USS Theodore Roosevelt will take the Eisenhower's place after a scheduled exercise in the Indo-Pacific, U.S. officials said.

By Jon Gambrell, The Associated Press

The composition of the carrier fleet allows the Navy to deploy a carrier in the Indo-Pacific, but not in both the Middle East and European theaters simultaneously, where the Iran-Hamas and Russian threats linger, respectively, according to Bryan McGrath, a former destroyer captain and head of the FerryBridge Group defense consulting firm.

Before Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the East Coast carrier Ford was operating in the Mediterranean Sea, serving a deterrence role against Russia, as carriers have since the outbreak of the Ukraine war in early 2022.

But after that, Ford and then Ike’s, focus turned toward Israel and the Middle East.

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower transits the Suez Canal on Nov. 4. (MC2 Keith Nowak/U.S. Navy)

“We are a nation that has a need for three [carriers] out and about all the time,” McGrath said. “And we are a nation that possesses essentially enough to do two at a time…The bottom line is that these assets are tremendously in demand because nothing says you care more than an aircraft carrier.”

“This just so seriously undercuts the case of the people who talk about the aircraft carrier being obsolete – and it’s not,” McGrath added.

This capacity issue would be exacerbated in the event of multiple global crises, experts warn. Countering multiple threats across the globe was the focus of the Navy and Marine Corps’ Large Scale Exercise in 2023, testing the services’ ability to globally synchronize operations to defeat several threats in different geographic regions at the same time.

The Navy has not made the results of that exercise public.

An Information Systems Technician cleans an antenna aboard the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea on April 10. (U.S. Navy)

Outside of exercises, experts agree the Navy would encounter difficulties juggling simultaneous conflicts in various geographic areas.

The current fleet, Martin said, “is not sufficient to meet multiple crises at once without taking some extraordinary measures.”

RELATED

A look at where the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers are now

Here's where the service's carriers stand, whether preparing to deploy, currently deployed or undergoing maintenance and repairs.

By Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

Ships, including carriers, would face extended deployments and maintenance delays, an arrangement that would be difficult to sustain for an extended period, he said.

While the Navy likely won’t build any more aircraft carriers beyond what’s already scheduled, given technological advancements and the fact that multiple Ford-class carriers are still years away, Martin said the service could reevaluate its force structure and identify ways to meet requirements that carriers provide through alternative means.

“Ultimately, it’s going to take more of something in order to meet what I think are bonafide national needs,” Martin said.

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower arrives in Souda Bay, Greece, June 25, 2024. (MC2 Samantha Alaman/U.S. Navy)

The Navy’s new long-range shipbuilding plan released in March calls for an inventory of 11 or 12 aircraft carriers over the course of the next decade. Overall, the proposal sets a goal of 381 ships by the year 2042 – up from the previous target of 373 ships by that time.

Still, accomplishing these numbers are dependent on the industry eliminating lengthy backlogs and cost overruns, coupled with consistent congressional funding.

McGrath said pouring more funding into a bigger fleet could mitigate some of today’s challenges.

“Money doesn’t solve everything, but it solves an awful lot of things, and right now we are spending woefully less money than we need to,” McGrath said.

Why additional strain on the East Coast?

Experts attribute part of this strain to East Coast carriers having to shoulder more geopolitical hotspots than their brethren elsewhere.

Currently, the West Coast hosts the aircraft carriers Carl Vinson, Abraham Lincoln, Nimitz and Theodore Roosevelt.

The carrier George Washington is completing a deployment to South America this summer as it moves from the East Coast to Japan after wrapping up an extended and oft-delayed mid-life refueling and complex overhaul, or RCOH, in Virginia.

GW will replace Ronald Reagan, which will leave Japan and undergo maintenance at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Washington.

An Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Equipment) participates in flight operations aboard the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea on April 18. (U.S. Navy)

The Ike, Truman, Bush, Ford, George H.W. Bush and Stennis call the East Coast home.

Unlike the West Coast carrier fleet, nearly all those East Coast carriers are unavailable to deploy due to various maintenance needs.

Stennis will be out of the picture for some time as it undergoes its own mid-life overhaul.

Bush returned home from its own extended deployment last year and entered maintenance in December, and Ford got home from its extended cruise in January and is expected to undergo roughly a year of work before it can go again.

That leaves Truman as the next East Coast carrier up.

It wrapped up a maintenance period in December, and the Navy initially said it would deploy in early 2024, which would have seen it eventually replacing Ike in the Middle East.

But that didn’t happen, and officials now say Truman likely won’t deploy until later this year, following its pre-deployment Composite Training Unit Exercise, or COMPTUEX, this summer.

While West Coast carriers are largely able to focus solely on Indo-Pacific deployments, East Coast carriers are having to navigate cruises in Europe and the Middle East, given the current state of the world.

“The East Coast is under pressure,” McGrath said. “Again, fewer carriers servicing a larger number of hotspots creates deficits.”

Cyclical Maintenance Problems

While the carrier deployment schedule is designed to accommodate the extensions facing East Coast carriers, the main consequence of these lengthy deployments is the maintenance the carriers must undergo once they return, said Bryan Clark, a retired submarine officer and director of the Hudson Institute think tank’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology.

In addition to throwing the maintenance schedule out of whack, extended deployments wear the aging carriers down faster, increasing the likelihood of new breakdowns accumulating, which presents additional challenges when those carriers go into the yards, Clark said.

RELATED

Despite false Houthi claims, the Ike aircraft carrier fights on

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower is battling not only Houthi attacks, but also bad gouge that the Iran-backed rebels sunk the ship.

By Jon Gambrell, The Associated Press

Scant data exists for how a carrier reaching the 45 or 50-year point will perform, and what kind of maintenance such a ship will require, Clark said.

“You’re seeing that with some of the older carriers, how they get delayed coming out of maintenance, because new stuff is breaking that has not broken before,” he said.

The Eisenhower, the second oldest carrier in the fleet, commissioned in 1977, underwent 15 months of maintenance after it returned from a double-pump deployment in 2021.

Following this most recent cruise, McGrath predicted Ike would “almost certainly” face another lengthy period in the yard.

Aviation Machinist's Mates conducts preservation maintenance on an F/A-18E Super Hornet, attached to the "Wildcats" of Strike Fighter Squadron 131 aboard the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea on March 27. (U.S. Navy)

“Without regular maintenance, the more things break, the more things get added to packages, those packages get bigger and the potential time that the ship spends in the yard potentially increases,” McGrath said. “The more you spend in the yard, the less time you have to get ready to get back out and get going next time.”

In the end, the Navy has limited options to remedy the strain currently afflicting its carriers, McGrath said.

“There are only two levers to pull: a larger Navy, smaller requirements,” McGrath said. “Either the nation decides that it has fewer things for the Navy to do…or it builds a bigger Navy.”

Under the Navy’s Optimized Fleet Response Plan, introduced in 2014, aircraft carriers follow a 36-month cycle for maintenance, training and deployments. But across the fleet, surface ships remain plagued with maintenance delays.

Specifically, the Government Accountability Office found there was a seven-day increase in maintenance delays for aircraft carriers between 2014 and 2021, according to a report released last year.

Another GAO report from 2022 found the Navy projecting that it faced a maintenance backlog that totaled nearly $1.8 billion.

Aviation Ordnancemen wait to inspect ordnance attached to an F/A-18E Super Hornet, attached to the "Gunslingers" of Strike Fighter Squadron 105, aboard the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Red Sea on April 12. (U.S. Navy)

On the bright side, that report noted that “aircraft carriers have experienced minimal increases in backlog” and the bulk of the backlog stemmed from other surface ships.

“There are still difficulties getting ships out of shipyards on time, and I think that that’s something that’s going to take a long time to get corrected,” Martin said.

Doing the work

Pentagon officials argue that the mission performed by Ike and its strike group was critical to keeping the region from exploding since Hamas’ attack on Israel.

They say a significant U.S. naval commitment to the region sends a strong signal to the commercial shipping industry that vessels can get protection as they travel the crucial transit route through the Red Sea, from the Suez Canal to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait.

About 12% of the world’s trade typically passes through the waterway that separates Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, including oil, natural gas, grain and everything from toys to electronics.

The aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower approaches the Mubarak Peace Bridge while transiting the Suez Canal on May 5. (U.S. Navy)

The Houthis have attacked ships since November, saying they want to force Israel to end its offensive in the Gaza Strip against Hamas. But the ships targeted by the Houthis have largely had little or no connection to Israel, the U.S. or other nations involved in the war. The rebels have also fired missiles toward Israel, though they have largely fallen short or been intercepted.

Ike and its strike group–including the cruiser Philippine Sea and the destroyers Gravely and Mason–also have participated in five major joint missions with British forces to target dozens of the militant group’s drones, missile launchers and other facilities and targets in Yemen.

U.S. Navy Lt. Parker Bailey signals the launch of an E/A-18G Growler, attached to the "Zappers" of Electronic Attack Squadron 130 aboard the aircraft carrier Dwight D. Eisenhower in the Gulf of Oman on Nov. 20, 2023. (MC3 Janae Chambers/U.S. Navy)

All told, Ike’s air wing has flown more than 12,100 sorties, totaling over 27,200 flight hours, and the strike group has launched more than 350 air-to-surface weapons and more than 50 air-to-air missiles.

The warships have each traveled more than 55,000 miles, and they’ve launched more than 100 Standard and Tomahawk missiles. In all, the strike group has gone after about 430 either pre-planned or dynamic targets in its mission to defend U.S., coalition and merchant ships.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Share:

navytimes.com · by Diana Correll · June 27, 2024

6. House shoots down amendment to cut F-35 purchase

House shoots down amendment to cut F-35 purchase

Defense News · by Bryant Harris · June 27, 2024

Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee are lambasting appropriators who want to buy additional F-35 fighter jets in fiscal 2025 above the Pentagon’s budget request.

The House’s FY25 defense spending bill would procure 76 new F-35s, eight more than the 68 requested by the Defense Department. This puts the spending bill at odds with the House’s FY25 National Defense Authorization Act, passed 217-199 earlier this month, which would cut F-35 procurement down to 58 aircraft.

“At a projected total lifecycle cost of over $2 trillion dollars, the F-35 is the largest program in DoD history despite routinely not meeting cost, schedule, and performance metrics,” Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the committee, said in a Wednesday statement with Rep. Donald Norcross of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the tactical air and land forces panel.

“This is unacceptable program execution and Congress should not reward this behavior by buying additional aircraft above the President’s budget request,” the statement read.

Smith and Norcross highlighted that the Defense Department stopped accepting F-35 deliveries from manufacturer Lockheed Martin last year “until the enterprise could successfully deliver, test, and field the next version of the Operational Flight Program” — a benchmark it has not yet met nearly a year later.

The two Democrats and Rep. Jen Kiggans, R-Va., introduced a bipartisan amendment that would have cut F-35 procurement in the spending bill and bring it in sync with the 58 F-35s authorized in the National Defense Authorization Act.

But the House Rules Committee, which oversees amendment votes, opted not to put Smith’s proposed F-35 reduction on the floor for a vote. The new House Appropriations Committee chairman, Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., previously chaired the Rules Committee.

Smith’s proposed reduction of 18 fighter jets from the spending bill would have amounted to a roughly $2 billion procurement cut for the Air Force and Navy.

The Smith amendment would have shifted funds in the form of $526 million to the Air Force to help address F-35 performance issues with development, production and testing.

“It is the duty of Congress to support the long-term viability of the F-35 program and ensure the vast sums of taxpayer money footing the bill are spent where they can ensure program success,” said Smith and Norcross. “A simple short-term reduction in acquisition rates would enable us to mitigate the known systemic problems, correct course and get the F-35 program and workers up and running at full speed.”

Lockheed Martin has faced intense bipartisan scrutiny from the Armed Services Committee for repeated F-35 delays, most recently with the Technology Refresh 3 upgrades. The TR-3 hardware and software upgrades would provide F-35s with better displays, computer memory and processing power.

Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., attempted to amend the NDAA with a provision that would have authorized the defense secretary to seize intellectual property from Lockheed Martin and open it up to competition, taking aim at the F-35′s software problems.

Moulton sought a vote on the amendment when the Armed Services Committee marked up the legislation in May but had to withdraw it after a Congressional Budget Office cost determination. But multiple committee members, including several Republicans, said they would support Moulton’s efforts to seize intellectual property from Lockheed Martin in the years ahead should F-35 issues persist.

Smith urged caution on Moulton’s efforts, despite his shared frustrations with Lockheed’s execution of the F-35 program.

“In law, we would possibly have to compensate them for that, which would be really, really, really expensive,” Smith said.

Despite efforts from Smith and his fellow Armed Services Committee members to cut F-35 procurement next year, appropriators will have the final word on how many of the aircraft to buy in the defense spending bill.

Further compounding the uncertainty, the Senate version of the FY25 NDAA would procure 68 F-35s — the same number requested by the Pentagon. It remains unclear how many F-35s Senate appropriators seek to procure, as they have yet to release their FY25 defense spending bill.

About Bryant Harris

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

7. We Got Islamism Wrong By Robert Harward & Jacob Olidort

Excerpts:

Winston Churchill warned American audiences in his famous 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri that “[w]e cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength.”

Nearly eight decades later, the United States sees at home the fruits of working on the margins when it comes to the Islamist threat. It is no wonder therefore that U.S. campuses are a breeding ground for terror sympathizers. Students or other participants can passionately wave the flags of terrorist groups, even dress as Hamas operatives, seeing no contradiction with their life and privileges in the United States.

As the United States twists itself into a linguistic pretzel, Israel is conducting a serious military campaign to send a message to Iran that it can strike inside its turf whenever it chooses to, and that it will not stop until Iran and its terror proxy network cease to threaten the people of Israel. Israel’s time and resources are precious, and there appears to be an understanding that those cannot be wasted on anything not directly tied to eliminating the terrorist threats on its borders.

Whatever comes next, whether in Gaza or as far as Iran’s regional escalation, Israel’s response will not include the naval-gazing nuisance that has prevented serious U.S. counterterrorism policy over the last two decades.

Perhaps Israel’s actions can be a starting point for a new U.S. approach on the basis of what Israel has thus far demonstrated works so well against those seeking to harm its citizens.

We Got Islamism Wrong

By Robert Harward & Jacob Olidort

June 28, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/06/28/we_got_islamism_wrong_1041015.html?mc_cid=3fbe7e75fa&mc_eid=70bf478f36

We Got Islamism Wrong; Israel Cannot Afford to For Its Sake, and for the West

Contrary to public commentary, Iran’s direct and proxy threats against America and Israel in the Middle East is neither new nor uniquely about October 7. 

In fact, the threats from the Iranian regime as well as other Islamist actors has only escalated since its inception in 1979 predicated on counterproductive U.S. Foreign Policy in the region.

From a military planning standpoint, the campaign Iran drafted in 1979 appears to have been brilliantly executed over the last 44 years. Today the Revolutionary Regime virtually controls Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza, through its proxies. A reemergence of the Persian Empire.

All of this was aided by a U.S. policy of denial, if not accommodation, which has precipitated the success of political Islam, particularly of the Iranian form. Iran’s destructive agenda has emboldened and enabled other strains of Islamism to flourish. In 2024, the United States has not changed much—whether myopic calls for pivoting to the Indo-Pacific, non-enforcement of sanctions against the Iranian regime, or a refusal to enable Israel—the first in the fight, and always in the fight—to finish the job with Hamas. This, even as Hamas holds Americans hostage and Hezbollah synchronizing its efforts in the north.

Coupled with other current policy failures and gaps, the lights are once again blinking red. Indeed, it is no wonder that several ISIS-linked individuals were apprehended trying to enter the United States illegally through the southern border; the only surprise is why it took this long.

The threat that was born in 1979 has metastasized in complexity and scope. Today, Iran and other adversaries are aligning their efforts to realize the most of these opportunities—whether global jihadists cheering on the campus protests, Iran facilitating Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, or deepening economic ties by both with China. 

The threats posed by today’s strategic adversaries to the United States is exacerbated by and intertwined with an evolving Islamist threat, one whose course was defined by U.S. willful ignorance.

Iran’s actions in the region are consistent with the regime’s destructive agenda since its founding, as well as the broader ecosystem of groups subscribing to an Islamist (otherwise known as political Islam) worldview. 

What is new is Israel’s actions. Unlike the United States, Israel is defining and addressing the threat consistently and clearly on its own terms—and therefore responding to it accordingly—rather than projecting unrelated policy ambitions onto a narrower problem set, which has characterized the approach of the United States.

The loss of innocent lives among the Gazan population is a tragedy with global ramifications and needs to be resolved. At the same time, eradicating Hamas and pushing Iran back in the region is required to restore peace and stability to the region, and prevent additional future tragedies.

Although the Islamism of the Iranian regime and the Sunni global jihadist groups like al-Qaeda are different in their theologies, both have borrowed from contemporary totalitarian doctrines in their evolution over the last several decades, and both traditions exploit failed and fragile political environments to sow destruction and oppress innocent local civilians. Both traditions share objectives of weakening the United States, its allies, and annihilating Israel.

Israel’s leadership holds that its mission in Gaza is not complete until Hamas governance ends. It also demonstrates through its actions in Syria and inside of Iran that it is committed to use force to push back the military presence and threat posed by the Iranian regime and its proxies. There is, in other words, no stronger language than force in addressing groups committed to violence and destruction. Defeat of Islamism requires not only an appreciation of its ideological underpinnings and objectives, but also the fact that addressing it requires military force.

It is this clear-eyed and consistent objective—across its southern, northern, eastern and far eastern (viz. inside Iran) fronts—as well as its bold commitment to using force to achieve it that is not only the right approach to restore security to its citizens, but should serve as a lesson for the United States.

America, by contrast, has consistently made the policy decision to define Islamism based on whatever political ambitions a U.S. administration faced, whether domestically or abroad. This has been true since the founding of the Iranian regime and has remained the case in its view of jihadists.

Many in America touted Khomeini’s return to Iran in 1979 through the lens of America’s liberal democratic tradition. A New York Times column about the event dismissed Khomeini’s “anti-Americanism” as something that could be “altered [by] the reality of power.”  An account of Khomeini’s return featured in Time Magazine observed that “for all the problems ahead, there was a sense of controlled optimism in Iran last weekend. Now that the country’s cry for the Ayatullah’s return has been answered, Iranians will surely insist that the revolution live up to its democratic aims.” U.S. policy regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions in more recent years has almost consistently focused on negotiations, trusting that the processes and institutions that have maintained world peace can ensure Iran remain an honest broker and not seek the destructive ends around which its ideology is based.

The U.S. could not view the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan beyond its Cold War terms. The United States therefore began providing resources, including Stinger missiles, to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan as a deterrent against the Soviets. Although Stingers were the single capability in Afghanistan that could push back the Soviets by eliminating their airpower, it became part of a new arsenal that would be used to target Americans several decades later. Indeed, it was this very environment that molded the group that would become al-Qaeda, as well as its leader, Osama bin Laden. 

More recently, during the two decades of the War on Terror, U.S. policy consistently reflected what we aspired to achieve rather than the growing threat of the adversary.

Despite a robust immediate response by the Bush administration following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the objective of defeating terrorist groups soon became indistinguishable from the objective of promoting democratic governance in parts of the world where the concept could not be more foreign. A still unclear legacy in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which still contain havens for terrorist groups, is the result of this muddled approach.

Under the Obama administration, a repentant tone about America’s purpose and recent policies during the War on Terror meant terrorism could no longer be associated with religion. In a 2009 speech then-Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan explained that President Obama does not “see this as a fight against ‘jihadists’”—a term Brennan noted refers to purification of oneself—and that the focus must be on countering “violent extremism.” The solution, to Brennan, does not require “a military operation but a political, economic and social campaign to meet the basic needs and legitimate grievances of ordinary people; security for their communities, education for children, a job and income for parents, and a sense of dignity and worth.”

In other words, by becoming about literally everything (other than the religious ideology) the terrorist threat became about nothing. 

The Biden administration projected its own views about equity and inclusion into how to define and address terrorism. A recent Intelligence Community newsletter on the one hand dismissed any terminology that associates terrorists with Islam while, on the other hand, recommending a polemical theological term. The recommended term, “Khawarij,” refers to an early Islamic sect that was known to have employed extreme measures in its observance of the faith. It’s because of those methods that mainstream Sunnis describe jihadists as “Khawarij,” but otherwise the term has no connection to contemporary terrorist groups. In other words, use of the word is confounding for practitioners without this sectarian context, while unnecessarily complicating the policymaking process.

Winston Churchill warned American audiences in his famous 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri that “[w]e cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins, offering temptations to a trial of strength.”

Nearly eight decades later, the United States sees at home the fruits of working on the margins when it comes to the Islamist threat. It is no wonder therefore that U.S. campuses are a breeding ground for terror sympathizers. Students or other participants can passionately wave the flags of terrorist groups, even dress as Hamas operatives, seeing no contradiction with their life and privileges in the United States. 

As the United States twists itself into a linguistic pretzel, Israel is conducting a serious military campaign to send a message to Iran that it can strike inside its turf whenever it chooses to, and that it will not stop until Iran and its terror proxy network cease to threaten the people of Israel. Israel’s time and resources are precious, and there appears to be an understanding that those cannot be wasted on anything not directly tied to eliminating the terrorist threats on its borders.

Whatever comes next, whether in Gaza or as far as Iran’s regional escalation, Israel’s response will not include the naval-gazing nuisance that has prevented serious U.S. counterterrorism policy over the last two decades. 

Perhaps Israel’s actions can be a starting point for a new U.S. approach on the basis of what Israel has thus far demonstrated works so well against those seeking to harm its citizens.

VADM Robert Harward, (U.S. Navy, ret.) is the former Deputy Commander of U.S. Central Command and is a 2022 participant in JINSA’s Generals & Admirals trip to Israel. Dr. Jacob Olidort is Director of Research at JINSA’s Gemunder Center for Defense & Strategy.

8. Can four big commands prepare the Air Force to win wars?

Excerpts:

ACC will need to work with the other commands to ensure airmen across the force are getting the training they need, beyond the fighter units it has traditionally managed.

“There’s going to be this relationship in building the exercises, building the training mechanism for the whole force that deploys not just what has traditionally been the fighter force,” Allvin said. “That’s where ACC is going to be really accountable and responsible for the readiness of the whole force. That’s a big mission.”

If executed well, the revamp could benefit the service, said Clint Hinote, who worked on the reorganization before retiring from the Air Force as its three-star strategy boss in 2023. He cautioned that it could encounter opposition if the service opts to move the three- and four-star leadership positions that currently govern those commands. But he argues failing to evolve would be a mistake.

“I think they do it wrong by not changing,” Hinote said.

Can four big commands prepare the Air Force to win wars?

militarytimes.com · by Courtney Mabeus-Brown · June 27, 2024

The Air Force is mulling a bureaucratic shuffle that would refocus the service on four key areas it believes can improve how it organizes, trains and equips airmen for war.

Those core missions — combat readiness, careerlong training, acquisition and future force planning — will eventually fall under the purview of four major organizations, dubbed “institutional commands,” in charge of force-wide planning and policymaking, Air Force officials said in public remarks earlier this month.

The plan aims to streamline the Air Force’s fragmented internal structure, which currently spreads those missions across nine major commands that oversee various types of aircraft and geographic regions, to become more effective and mirror other branches of the armed forces.

The four commands would include:

• Air Combat Command, which would expand its focus on fighter, intelligence and other units to instead manage readiness for the entire service;
• Airman Development Command, which would handle education and training over the course of a service member’s career;
• Air Force Materiel Command, which would run acquisition programs across the force; and
• Integrated Capabilities Command, which would handle long-term planning.

Those core commands would absorb some assets from current Air Force major commands, like Air Mobility Command and Air Force Global Strike Command, to give them the resources they need to manage troops and weapon systems across the force, Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said in a talk at the Air and Space Forces Association June 13 and in a roundtable with reporters at the Pentagon the following day.

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In practice, it could look much like the Army, which since 2018 has spread those missions across Army Training and Doctrine Command, Army Forces Command, Army Materiel Command and Army Futures Command.

It’s unclear how the other current major commands will interact with the four overarching organizations, or whether the service will look to add more subordinate commands as well.

The Air Force would also turn each of its service components into standalone organizations that supply forces to higher combatant commands around the globe. Right now, some service components, like Air Forces Cyber, fall under Air Combat Command’s purview, while others like Pacific Air Forces and U.S. Air Forces in Europe, don’t report to a higher Air Force command and have more control over their own planning.

“We adapted to the time that we were in. ... But when you think about the things that the environment asked of us, it drove us to be a little bit more diffuse and distributed,” Allvin said. “We didn’t have a clear existential threat like we had in the Cold War.”

The reorganization is the latest piece of a sweeping effort launched in February to realign the Air Force to outpace China and other advanced militaries after decades of fighting in the Middle East, when the Air Force responded piecemeal through siloed commands that focused on a single type of air mission, like bombers or tankers. Now the service wants a more holistic approach to lending those air packages to the joint force.

Some pieces of the plan, including standing up the new Integrated Capabilities Command and turning Air Education and Training Command into the new Airman Development Command, were unveiled by Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall in February.

Now, additional parts of the puzzle are beginning to emerge.

Air Forces Northern, Air Forces Southern and Air Forces Central — which supply forces to commanders in North and South America and the Middle East — would move out from under Air Combat Command to instead sit on par with the other service components like U.S. Air Forces in Europe-Air Forces Africa and Pacific Air Forces.

With less to watch over, ACC would work with “other institutional commands to generate the readiness, the exercises, have the inspections to ensure that we’re mission-ready, not just task-ready,” Allvin said.

“ACC is transitioning into a different type of a command,” he said.

That would include ensuring the Air Force’s combat wings are prepared to fight, including the attack assets that fall under so-called “deployable combat wings” or the wings that will supplement them with airlift and other assets, referred to as “combat generation wings.” They’ll leave behind separate units tasked with keeping Air Force bases running at home during deployments, as well as wings that perform their mission from home station, like intercontinental ballistic missile units.

Lt. Gen. Adrian Spain, the service’s deputy chief of staff for operations, said the Air Force predicts it will be eventually be able to resource 24 deployable combat wings, 16 of which would be active duty and the remainder from the reserves. Those wings are expected to dispatch teams of airmen from the same bases who have already trained together, rather than filling empty jobs overseas as needed from different squadrons.

Their precursor units, referred to as air task forces, are spinning up this summer at six bases across the country in preparation for deployments to the Middle East and the Pacific in October 2025. Another three are slated to replace them overseas in 2026.

ACC will need to work with the other commands to ensure airmen across the force are getting the training they need, beyond the fighter units it has traditionally managed.

“There’s going to be this relationship in building the exercises, building the training mechanism for the whole force that deploys not just what has traditionally been the fighter force,” Allvin said. “That’s where ACC is going to be really accountable and responsible for the readiness of the whole force. That’s a big mission.”

If executed well, the revamp could benefit the service, said Clint Hinote, who worked on the reorganization before retiring from the Air Force as its three-star strategy boss in 2023. He cautioned that it could encounter opposition if the service opts to move the three- and four-star leadership positions that currently govern those commands. But he argues failing to evolve would be a mistake.

“I think they do it wrong by not changing,” Hinote said.

Courtney Mabeus-Brown is the senior reporter at Air Force Times. She is an award-winning journalist who previously covered the military for Navy Times and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va., where she first set foot on an aircraft carrier. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and more.

9. A Den of Spies: Vienna Emerges as Hub for Russian Espionage

A Den of Spies: Vienna Emerges as Hub for Russian Espionage

Moscow allegedly plotted to kill an investigative journalist in Austria. Now his home is protected by officers with submachine guns.

https://www.wsj.com/world/a-den-of-spies-vienna-emerges-as-hub-for-russian-espionage-9dda8b4d?mod=hp_lead_pos8

By Bojan PancevskiFollow

Updated June 28, 2024 12:06 am ET

VIENNA—Inside a stately art nouveau building in central Vienna, special-forces officers armed with submachine guns guard the home of Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist whose Academy Award-winning documentary exposed the Kremlin’s attempt to kill opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Two years ago, Austrian intelligence and U.S. law enforcement warned Grozev that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s spies were plotting to kill him. After living with his family for two decades in Austria, the Bulgaria-born Grozev fled to the U.S. in 2023. Now, when he returns to visit his family, who remained behind in Vienna, he receives a degree of state protection that rivals that of Austria’s chancellor, officials say.

The failed murder plot is one of a series of incidents that show how Vienna has emerged as Russia’s new espionage hub in Europe after capitals there expelled 600 spies posing as diplomats in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine. 

Dozens of these spies have since resurfaced in Austria, intelligence officials there say. In the past two years, the number of Russian state employees in Austria swelled to over 500 from 300 to 400, over a half of whom are diplomats and administrators, according to intelligence officials. Up to a half of them operate as spies, Austrian intelligence officials estimate.

Investigative journalist Christo Grozev was warned that Russian spies were plotting to kill him. PHOTO: JULIEN DE ROSA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Last year, neighboring Germany closed the Russian consulate in Munich, which German officials said was hosting a number of spies. The Russian staff simply relocated to Salzburg, an Austrian city across the border to the east, Austrian intelligence officials say. 

Vienna is now a base for Russian clandestine operations, including financing and logistical support for murder, sabotage and recruitment across Europe, as well as industrial espionage and influence operations, according to over a dozen Austrian, European and U.S. intelligence and government officials.

The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Russian diplomats and support staff operate in Vienna from over 40 properties owned by Moscow and people or companies linked to the Russian state. Surveillance equipment has sprouted up on the roofs of such properties, some used to tap satellite telecommunications.

An Austrian Interior Ministry spokesman said that Austria is one of the safest countries due to its well-functioning security agencies. The spokesman said that the country’s intelligence agency is aware that Austria has become a target for Russian espionage and influence operations and that the agency counters threats from state actors within its legal limits.

During the Cold War, the city was a notorious international spying hub, as immortalized in the Hollywood classic, “The Third Man.” Espionage is legal in Austria, which is a member of the European Union, as long as it isn’t directed against Austria itself. A neutral country outside military alliances, Austria hosts international organizations, including United Nations agencies and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, some of which have long had spies in their delegations, according to multiple Austrian and foreign officials.

Russian influence runs deep in Austria, dating back to when Moscow was an occupying power of the country after World War II.

The Russian Embassy in Vienna. The number of Russian state employees in the country swelled to over 500 from 300 to 400 in the past two years. PHOTO: TASS/ZUMA PRESS

Austria’s Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl dancing with Russian President Vladimir Putin at her wedding in 2018. PHOTO: ROLAND SCHLAGER/PRESS POOL

For instance, in 2018, photos of Putin dancing with Austria’s Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl at her wedding caused an uproar. The Foreign Ministry is in charge of approving diplomats’ accreditations—as well as expelling them. In 2023, Kneissl moved to Russia, where she runs a think tank. The Russian air force helped move her household, including her ponies.

Vienna-based Russian operatives are suspected of helping with the recruiting and financing of Russian operations such as tracking Western arms shipments to Kyiv in Poland and killing a Russian military helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine and was living in Spain, Western security officials say. The killers, who shot the man five times and then ran him over with an SUV, were criminals paid with cash provided by Russian state employees from Vienna, these officials say.

“We are now becoming a liability for our neighbors because Russia is using us as an operational base,” a senior Austrian intelligence official said. 

Maksim Kuzminov, a Russian military helicopter pilot who defected to Ukraine, was killed in Spain. PHOTO: MAXYM MARUSENKO/NURPHOTO/GETTY IMAGES

Kuzminov was shot and killed in a parking garage in Spain. PHOTO: JOHANNES SIMON/GETTY IMAGES

Russia sends large volumes of cash into neighboring countries such as Lithuania by road, an Austrian intelligence official said. From there, Austria-based diplomats ferry it across Europe, often in diplomatic pouches that can’t be checked by police.

Now, other EU nations are considering a Czech proposal for a ban on Russian diplomats traveling outside the country where they are posted.

“If these diplomats want to work in Vienna, then that is perfectly fine…but I see no reason why they should have free access to the Czech Republic,” the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said, claiming that Russian diplomats engage in nefarious activities. Russian or Russian-paid saboteurs were found by Czech police and prosecutors to be behind a number of attacks on ammunitions factories and civilian targets. 

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The Austrian government must end its “extremely dangerous inaction” on Russia spying, which is “weakening efforts to curb Russian influence in Europe,” said Stephanie Krisper, an Austrian opposition legislator who sits on the committee scrutinizing intelligence operations.

Russia is rebuilding its spying network by recruiting civilians, organized-crime figures, hackers and private detectives for attacks on and surveillance of critical infrastructure and other operations across the continent.

Czech police and prosecutors say Russian sabotage was behind a number of attacks on ammunitions factories.  PHOTO: CZECH REPUBLIC POLICE/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

“Russian intelligence is now like an octopus using every tentacle at its disposal, and the head is currently in central Europe,” a European intelligence officer said.

The U.S. also keeps a large spying contingent in Austria, which is the seat of the Central Intelligence Agency’s regional center overseeing activities in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Some U.S. officials believe that Russia grew bolder in recent years and began targeting American personnel. In 2021, 20 U.S. Embassy staff, including CIA officers, based in Vienna became ill with a mysterious condition known as the Havana Syndrome, according to several U.S. and Austrian officials.

The Russians possibly used acoustic or “directed energy” weapons against the U.S. personnel, said Amb. John Bolton, former President Donald Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, when some of the reported Havana Syndrome incidents occurred in various countries. The inability of the U.S. to protect personnel from the attacks “means that the Russians or whoever is doing it are way ahead of us,” he said.

In 2023, the U.S. intelligence community said there was no evidence that a foreign adversary had used any such weapon. 

A view of the Vienna skyline. PHOTO: JOE KLAMAR/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Austria’s intelligence service itself has allegedly been penetrated by Russian spies. Earlier this year, Egisto Ott, a senior undercover operations official, was arrested on various charges including accusations of spying for Russia. Ott’s lawyer Jürgen Stephan Mertens didn’t immediately respond for a request for comment. Mertens told Austrian media that the accusations against Ott were unfounded and lacking solid evidence. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal before his arrest, Ott denied he was a Russian spy.

The agency’s former head of operations Martin Weiss, also suspected by Austrian investigators of being a Russian spy, fled to Dubai in 2021. Austria is seeking his extradition for a number of accusations, including some related to the Grozev case, such as using Ott to obtain the journalist’s personal details. Weiss didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Both men worked for Jan Marsalek, the Austria-born former chief operating officer of fintech group Wirecard, which collapsed in a major fraud case in 2020. Marsalek, who fled to Moscow to avoid arrest, has been working for Russian intelligence for over a decade and now holds a senior role with the FSB, Russia’s main intelligence service, according to European officials.

Marsalek coordinated at least one team that participated in the plot against Grozev, according to legal documents. Moreover, Austrian authorities have accused Ott in their arrest warrant, seen by the Journal, of using his intelligence connections to obtain Grozev’s address and passing it on to Marsalek and to Russian agents.

A team coordinated by Marsalek then began following Grozev. They stole electronic equipment including laptops from his homes in Vienna and Bulgaria, according to investigators in several European countries. The goal was to capture and kill him, say investigators.

Several people involved in the plot have since been arrested. One was identified after Grozev’s teenage daughter took a picture in 2022 of a man loitering outside a cafe where she was lunching with her father.

After the plot was discovered, the new head of the Austrian intelligence agency, Omar Haijawi-Pirchner, who has been cleansing the body of suspected Russian sympathizers, personally vouched for the security of the Grozevs.

Jan Marsalek, the Austria-born former chief operating officer of fintech group Wirecard, fled to Moscow to avoid arrest. PHOTO: DPA/ZUMA PRESS

Russian spies have photographed the Grozevs’ security team in an attempt to establish their identities, according to Austrian intelligence officials.

On Tuesday, Grozev said the Austrian government must do more to curb Russian espionage, saying it had penetrated Austrian institutions and its business community.

“Austria only has the counterespionage infrastructure of a very small country, although given the concentration of spies and its importance as a hub for intelligence services, it should have that of a much larger country,” he said in the presence of armed guards.

In the wake of the investigation, Austria’s justice minister has said he wants to change the law that allows for spying.

In the past two years. Haijawi-Pirchner, a former police officer without prior links to the agency, successfully pushed for the expulsion of 11 Russian spies accredited as diplomats, according to several Austrian officials. He has asked for the expulsion of over a dozen other Russian diplomats, but the government has yet to react, two officials said. 

Some Western intelligence agencies that had curbed their cooperation with Vienna during the recent scandals said they had re-established some intelligence sharing with Austria after Haijawi-Pirchner purged the service of Russian influence. 

A spokeswoman for the Austrian Foreign Ministry said it supports requests to expel all diplomats who violate laws and regulations when firm evidence is presented. The Chancellery didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The scandals are sparking a reassessment of Austria’s ties to Russia—potentially to the benefit of the U.S.

The U.S. had already sought to pull Austria away from Russia in recent years, said Trevor Traina, U.S. ambassador to Vienna between 2018 and 2021. He said he persuaded his hosts to expel a Russian spy accredited as a diplomat, at the time viewed as a great success for U.S. policy. 

Then last year, the U.S. grew alarmed at a plan by Austria’s Raiffeisen Bank International to compensate Putin ally Oleg Deripaska for a $1.6 billion stake in a local construction company that was frozen due to U.S. sanctions against the oligarch. Raiffeisen has come under fire for being the biggest Western bank still operating in Russia.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken asked Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer to block the plan, according to officials familiar with the talks. The Austrian government scuttled the deal.

Raiffeisen Bank International has come under fire for being the biggest Western bank still operating in Russia. PHOTO: LEONHARD FOEGER/REUTERS

Write to Bojan Pancevski at bojan.pancevski@wsj.com

10. Iran Election Pits Engagement With West Against More Confrontation

Iran Election Pits Engagement With West Against More Confrontation

Voter turnout will also signal whether Iranians are getting fed up with their system of governance

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/iran-election-candidates-young-voters-1268dd43?mod=hp_lead_pos9

By Benoit FauconFollow

 in London and Aresu Eqbali in Tehran

Updated June 28, 2024 2:21 am ET

Iran’s presidential election on Friday will decide not only who leads a country increasingly antagonistic to the West but also help shape succession plans for the next supreme leader and indicate whether Iranians are giving up on their system of Islamic governance.

The election pits a reformist candidate leading in the polls, Masoud Pezeshkian, who favors re-engaging with the West, against several hard-liners who want to deepen Iran’s relationships with Russia and China, fortify its alliance of anti-Israel militias and forge ahead with its nuclear program. There is no clear favorite, and there would be a runoff between the two top vote-getters if no one wins a majority.

The election was sparked by the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month. Raisi, a hard-line cleric serving his first term, was viewed as a contender to succeed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is 85 years old and in poor health. Though no one outside a small circle in Iran is privy to succession talks, Iran analysts said Raisi’s death removed a safe choice.

People mourn the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May.

MARYAM RAHMANIAN FOR WSJ

The ballot will be an informal referendum on the Iranian regime, two years after protests calling for its downfall rocked the streets and were put down violently. Raisi was elected in 2021 in the first Iranian presidential ballot in which fewer than 50% of voters participated, and polls show turnout could be even lower this time. 

Still, many Iranians are unconvinced that it is worth voting for the narrow list of candidates Khamenei allows. Andia, a 37-year-old Tehran resident who joined the 2022 protests, said she wouldn’t vote because a popular moderate, Ali Larijani, was banned from participating. 

“This election won’t make any difference to me,” she said. 

After casting his ballot, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei encouraged Iranians to vote. PHOTO: OFFICE OF THE IRANIAN SUPREME LEADER/WANA/REUTERS

After Khamenei voted on Friday morning, an event broadcast on state television, he pressed Iranians to cast their ballots, saying the country’s future depended on it. “To prove the Islamic Republic system’s honesty and validity, the people’s participation is a must and a necessity,” he said.

Most polls suggest the campaign is dominated by three candidates: Pezeshkian, who favors resuming nuclear talks with Washington and other world powers to lift international sanctions in exchange for curbs on Tehran’s nuclear program; hard-liner Saeed Jalili, a Khamenei adviser who is opposed to compromise on Iran’s nuclear program and any relaxation of the regime’s compulsory veil for women; and the speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, known as a pragmatic conservative seeking a limited re-engagement with the West. 

On Wednesday, Pezeshkian was leading with 33.1%, followed by Jalili at 28.8% and Ghalibaf with 19.1%, according to a poll published by the Iranian Students Polling Agency, which is affiliated with a research center close to the government.

From left, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Saeed Jalili and Masoud Pezeshkian.

ROUZBEH FOULADI/ZUMA PRESS (2); VAHID SALEMI/AP

The election is happening at a critical time for Iran. It is under heightened international scrutiny over its nuclear program, which it says is peaceful, and its military support to Russia in the war against Ukraine. It nearly went to war with Israel in April, when the two countries attacked each other on their soil for the first time. 

And it is dealing with lingering frustrations among young people over the crippled economy and restrictions on freedom, which broke into the open in 2022 in mass protests after the death of a woman in police custody following her arrest for not wearing a proper headscarf.

Polls will close Friday, but the final results might not be released until Sunday. If no candidate gets more than 50%, the two lead contenders will compete in a second round on July 5.

Under the theocratic system established by founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after the 1979 revolution, the president has much less power than the supreme leader, the de facto head of state who must be a senior cleric. The supreme leader has a final say on the country’s most critical matters, from political and social changes to its nuclear program.

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Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash. WSJ correspondent Sune Rasmussen explains the impact of Raisi’s death on Iran and a region already in turmoil. Photo: ​​Willy Kurniawan/Reuters

The president can, however, steer the nation into a hawkish or flexible direction, and the presidency is seen as a steppingstone to becoming supreme leader; Khamenei was Iran’s president in the 1980s. 

Analysts view Ghalibaf as the favored choice of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the paramilitary force that defends against anything that threatens the country’s system of governance. 

Ghalibaf, himself a retired IRGC commander, was involved in violent crackdowns on Iranian university students in 1999 and 2003. Since then, his positions moderated, and he even called for limited changes and argued against excessive crackdowns during the 2022 protests. In foreign policy, he backed the 2015 nuclear deal before rejecting it after Iran’s economy failed to improve.

By contrast, Jalili represents a faction known as “super revolutionaries,” a group that seeks a return to the firebrand spirit of the regime’s early days. Jalili has slammed the 2015 nuclear deal, saying it favored countries “that have the greatest hostility toward the Iranian people.”

Pezeshkian before a campaign meeting in Tehran on Monday. PHOTO: ROUZBEH FOULADI/ZUMA PRESS

A woman holds an electoral sign during a rally for Ghalibaf. PHOTO: ATTA KENARE/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Ghalibaf has shown “total dedication for the Islamic system but it is channeled in a pragmatic way,” said Mostafa Pakzad, an independent Iranian geopolitical analyst.

Pezeshkian, the only reformist among five approved conservatives, has suggested Iran was responsible for its economic woes—later citing mismanagement and international sanctions tied to its nuclear program. “We are to blame,” he told state television on Monday.

Pezeshkian was allowed to run to ensure citizens disgruntled with the regime would turn up at the polls, Iran analysts said. Khamenei is concerned that most Iranians have simply stopped voting for his narrow list of candidates—and the resulting loss of legitimacy. 

“Khamenei and the core nucleus recognize a need for more competitive elections,” said Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank.

In a town hall meeting with reformist Pezeshkian, young Iranians said they had little hope for change. 

“Your generation reached the conclusion it didn’t have a common language with the government and did a revolution,” one woman said in an exchange broadcast on state TV. “Our generation is reaching this level.”

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

11. Was the Military Uprising a Coup or a Hoax? Bolivians Aren’t Sure

Yes, very curious.

Where is Christopher Walken and the Dogs of War - maybe they should have had a mercenary force. (note attempt at humor).

Was the Military Uprising a Coup or a Hoax? Bolivians Aren’t Sure

Government rejects allegations of a false-flag operation while it makes arrests

https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/was-the-military-uprising-a-coup-or-a-hoax-bolivians-arent-sure-6020fb50?mod=latest_headlines

By Juan Forero

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June 27, 2024 6:53 pm ET

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Bolivian soldiers occupied a key square in La Paz and tried to enter the presidential palace in an apparent coup attempt that failed not long after it began. PHOTO: AIZAR RALDES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

A day after Bolivia’s unpopular president stood down military officers who had launched an apparent coup, his political adversaries and ordinary people are poking holes in the leftist government’s version of events.

After President Luis Arce confronted the leader of the dissident officers at the presidential palace in a scene captured on social media, the soldiers retreated and order was restored, without the fatalities of the many coups that have marked Bolivian history. 

Sixteen military officers and a university professor were arrested for allegedly plotting the rebellion since May, government officials said Thursday. Among those held are two high-ranking commanders the government identified as ringleaders, General Juan José Zúñiga, the former commander of the army who Arce confronted, and Vice Admiral Juan Arnés, commander of Bolivia’s navy.

Hector Arce Zaconeta, Bolivia’s ambassador to the Organization of American States, in a speech Thursday in Washington, credited “the brave and decisive actions by President Luis Arce to directly and personally confront the insurrectionist general.”

Bolivian President Luis Arce appeared outside the presidential palace surrounded by supporters and media. PHOTO: JUAN KARITA/ASSOCIATED PRESS

But what could have been a celebratory moment for Arce had by Thursday been overshadowed by various campaigns to control the narrative. Questions emerged over why Zúñiga, who had been close to the president, would turn on him so suddenly as part of what appeared to have been a poorly planned, even comedic plot.

“People now believe the narrative that this is now a fake coup, that this was all staged,” said Eduardo Gamarra, who tracks Bolivia at Florida International University and grew up in Bolivia at a time of numerous coups. “So the government is having a very, very hard time.”

Among those raising doubts was a former president, Carlos Mesa, Senate President Andronico Rodríguez and Samuel Doria Medina, a businessman and former presidential candidate who is among the more prominent opposition leaders.

“This erratic act by a military man has left Bolivians confused,” Doria Medina said. “We ask for a deep investigation on what happened so we know what really transpired and can establish responsibility.”

Bolivian General General Juan José Zúñiga has been arrested in connection with the apparent coup attempt. PHOTO: CLAUDIA MORALES/REUTERS

The Arce administration on Thursday sought to show it remained in control of the levers of power while looking to quash accusations from those who claimed that the uprising might have been orchestrated to boost the president’s low popularity and distract from the country’s economic challenges. 

“I strongly reject those kinds of assertions, which are totally reckless, because they go against our state policies to preserve our democracy,” said Maria Prada, a senior aide to Arce. 

Prada said she was with the president and cabinet members in a meeting on the 22nd floor of the nearby presidential residence Wednesday in La Paz when they saw from their window armored vehicles approaching the Murillo Plaza. She said Arce began phoning Zúñiga, but the calls went unanswered. 

The revolt had been set in motion with the deployment of a few dozen soldiers and armored vehicles to the plaza, where the presidential palace and Congress are located. Traveling in one of the vehicles, Zúñiga smashed into the historic doors of the palace—known as the Burned Palace because it was set on fire in an unsuccessful 1875 coup—as soldiers breached the building.

Soldiers massed as military vehicles pulled up to the doors of the presidential palace Wednesday. PHOTO: LUIS GANDARILLAS/SHUTTERSTOCK

When Zúñiga emerged, he was quickly challenged by a president who has been publicly criticized for being indecisive. 

“If you respect the military chain of command and are a good military man,” Arce told Zúñiga, “then withdraw all these forces at this moment. That’s an order.”

Bolivia has weathered dozens of coups, and the president’s actions and the end of the uprising just three hours after it began was welcomed. Opposition leaders on the right and left as well as the U.S. and other governments, condemned the mutiny. And it provided Bolivians with another look at Arce, who, until becoming president, had been known as a bookish technocrat and former economy minister.

“That’s the photo op you want,” said Jim Shultz, author of books on Bolivia who closely follows Bolivian politics. “Instead of looking like a technocratic president over an economy in trouble, he’s now a defender of democracy.”

Tear gas was deployed in La Paz as the apparent uprising got under way. PHOTO: MARCELO PEREZ DEL CARPIO/BLOOMBERG NEWS

But politicians, analysts and ordinary Bolivians—many of whom recall how there was once a board game here called “Coup”—wonder why commanders would have launched a planned overthrow without the support of civilians, lawmakers and the press. They also ask why Zúñiga—when facing off with the president inside the palace and backed by soldiers—didn’t at that moment detain the leader.

Zúñiga’s odd actions in recent days also drew scrutiny.

On Monday, the general had given an interview to Jimena Antelo of the “No Lie” televised talk show and railed against the powerful former president, Evo Morales, who had helped Arce rise to power but now opposes him and wants to run for president next year.

Calling Morales a power-hungry liar, Zúñiga said he would stand up against him and even arrest him if needed.

“That Señor can never again be president of this country,” Zúñiga said on “No Lie,” a show whose host is allied with the government. Earlier in the day, in a radio interview, Morales had directed criticism at the general, saying that Zúñiga planned to kill him, without offering evidence

The next day, Tuesday, officials said that Zúñiga had been relieved of duty, but no one was named in his place. By Thursday, the general, officers who supported him and soldiers and police who Arce Zaconeta—the ambassador to the Organization of American States—said numbered 200 were rebelling in the heart of La Paz.

Elements of the Bolivian army guarded an entrance to Murillo Plaza in La Paz as an apparent rebellion unfolded. PHOTO: CLAUDIA MORALES/REUTERS

People filming in the plaza during the revolt and later when Zúñiga retreated captured tantalizing and contradictory comments from him.

He said in the plaza that he was “protesting abuses” and called for the government to free political prisoners. Hours later, as he was being detained, he said that that coup was orchestrated by the president.

Arce had earlier asked Zúñiga for his help “to prepare something to lift my popularity,” Zúñiga said.

“I asked him, ‘Should we take out the armored (vehicles)?’” Zúñiga said.

“‘Take them out,’ he told me,” the general recounted.

In a news conference late Wednesday, after Zúñiga comments were ricocheting across social media, Prada held up a document that she said was Zúñiga’s confession to leading the coup. Authorities charged Zúñiga on terrorism and rebellion charges.

Zúñiga told investigators the plan failed because military and police chiefs who had been expected to take part in the uprising didn’t show up, according to Prada. She said the government was committed to bringing all the conspirators to justice.

On Thursday, talking to Colombia’s Blu Radio, she said that Zúñiga’s comments were “a last play to try to evade responsibility he had as head of the failed coup d’état.”

 Rafael Archondo, a Bolivian political analyst and professor at the Ibero-American University Puebla in Mexico, said Wednesday’s deployment on the Murillo Plaza was “the most televised coup in Bolivian history and that surely feeds the spectacle.”

After soldiers who apparently were in rebellion left the scene, crowds gathered outside the presidential palace in La Paz. PHOTO: MARCELO PEREZ DEL CARPIO/BLOOMBERG NEWS

But he said that Arce “is in a very weak and compromised position.” He said that “in other countries, a ball of support like this would give a leader lots of oxygen, but in Bolivia it’s worth maybe just a breath.”

Over the last year, Arce has seen lawmakers from his Movement Toward Socialism party shift their allegiance to Morales, leaving the president with minority support in Congress.

An economist trained at the U.K.’s University of Warwick, Arce has seen Bolivia’s natural gas reserves dry up, stripping the government of an income source that had fueled Morales’s government from 2006 to 2019. The country, once a major gas exporter to neighbors, is now a net importer of fuels such as diesel. 

And despite big spending on studies and promoting mining, the government’s plans to attract development of vast lithium reserves have failed to increase production.

Facing critical dollar shortages, the government last year sold about half of the gold held in Central Bank vaults. As of April, the bank’s reserves—mostly gold—stood at $1.9 billion, down 41% from a year earlier, according to official data. 

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com and Kejal Vyas at kejal.vyas@wsj.com

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

Appeared in the June 28, 2024, print edition as 'Was It Coup or Hoax? Bolivians Aren’t Sure'.

12. The 51 Intel Know-Nothings

The simple problem and simple lesson is this: Prominent people - e.g., former government officials should not sign letters for political purposes.

Of course they have every right to express themselves for political purposes (without violating any NDAs/classified information) . But they should consider the impact of them doing so. And of course if you do sign a letter you had better make sure it is 100% accurate.

Some of the 50 or so signers are "Flounder" in Animal House, "You effed up, You trusted us."

But here is the real danger in all this. Russia, China, Iran, north Korea, and others are actively trying to influence the US election and this letter episode undermines our ability to defend against this.

After all former President Trump signed this statement:

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

Access NSS HERE

President Trump is exactly right in the statement above. Will we defend our democracy against these external attacks or will we crumble from within from our partisan infighting (which would make our adversaries just as happy because that is partly their intent).

The 51 Intel Know-Nothings

New revelations on the 2020 attempt to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-51-intel-know-nothings-report-hunter-laptop-69a903e1?mod=hp_opin_pos_5#cxrecs_s

By Kimberley A. Strassel

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June 27, 2024 5:10 pm ET

Donald Trump and Joe Biden participate in the final presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., Oct. 22, 2020. PHOTO: MORRY GASH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

As Joe Biden headed into his Thursday night brawl with Donald Trump, he was missing a key ally from his 2020 debates. He doesn’t have the backing of an intelligence community that Democrats once promised would kneecap Mr. Trump “six ways from Sunday.”

We learned more this week about those 51 former intelligence officials who in 2020 pulled their own version of the 2016 Hillary Clinton-James Comey Russia-collusion hoax. In October 2020 the 51 released a public statement declaring that emails “purportedly” belonging to Hunter Biden’s laptop exhibited “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Joe Biden used this to deflect a debate question about the laptop as “a bunch of garbage”; social-media companies used it to justify censoring the New York Post’s laptop stories; and American voters were kept in the dark about the Biden family business in the runup to November’s razor-thin election result.

House investigators revealed last year the partisan truth: It was the Biden campaign that ginned up the letter. Campaign adviser Antony Blinken (now secretary of state) called former Obama Deputy Central Intelligence Agency Director Mike Morell three days after the Post published the Hunter emails (and just before the second Trump-Biden debate), a chat investigators wrote “led to the issuance of the public statement.” Mr. Morell testified the goal was, among other things, to “help Vice President Biden” “win the election.”

But the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees this week released a second report that exposes the lengths to which this cabal went to craft their own disinformation campaign. Recall the slippery cleverness of the original statement. The signers went out of their way to include their prior official titles and experience—to boost the legitimacy of their declaration—alongside analysis suggesting special abilities that enabled them to credibly brand the emails Russian “disinformation.” Yet they included a careful caveat: They explained they didn’t have any direct “evidence” of Russian involvement—i.e., no access to classified information.

It turns out this know-nothingness was deliberate—making the letter even more scandalous. The new House report says that at least two signatories were CIA contractors at the time of the statement, while others retained access to classified material. All it would have taken was one call or briefing to ascertain that the laptop wasn’t part of a Russian campaign. The federal government certainly knew it. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had been in possession of the Hunter laptop since 2019, while Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, on the same day as the statement, said that the laptop was “not part of some Russian disinformation campaign.”

Instead, these “professionals” with access to the truth purposely kept themselves in the dark—so as to retain their ability to engage in wild (and false) speculation in aid of a political campaign. In an interview with House investigators, former Obama CIA Director James Clapper—whose name appeared at the top of the statement—was asked why he didn’t first request a briefing on such a specific topic, given that he “had the clearance.” Mr. Clapper said he “didn’t think it was appropriate” because “I didn’t want to be tainted by . . . access to classified information.” Asked how the truth would possibly count as “tainted,” he dug himself a bigger hole: “Bad choice of words. . . . I wanted only to go on what I had seen publicly.” He didn’t want any truth to get in the way of the story.

Mr. Morell similarly told House investigators that he hadn’t engaged in any conversations with the FBI, received a classified briefing, or availed himself of any investigative material, prior to organizing a bombshell claim that a foreign government was interfering in a U.S. election. The House reports that Mr. Morell was an active CIA contractor at the time of the statement. (In an email to the Post on Tuesday, Mr. Morell denied it.) Never forget: Those at the top of the intel game are there because they know the art of cons, double-cons, and plausible deniability.

The House report divulges other disturbing info, including that the CIA’s internal review board (which scours proposed publications for classified information) may have rushed its process at the request of the vaunted 51. Also, that while the highest echelons of the CIA were alerted to the statement prior to publication, nobody took any action to set the signers straight. Then there are the ethical problems of CIA contractors brazenly engaging in partisan politics and elections.

This year’s Biden campaign hasn’t (yet) been dumb enough to try to sell the voting public on another Russia-election plot. But it’s a long way to November, and this week’s report serves as a sharp reminder of the outsize and repugnant political roles the FBI and intelligence community played in the past two presidential elections. With a track record like this, voters should treat any wild claim with the distrust it deserves—and remember just which political party has proven itself more adept at spewing disinformation.

Write to kim@wsj.com.

WSJ Opinion: The Hunter Biden Debate

WSJ Opinion: The Hunter Biden Debate

Play video: WSJ Opinion: The Hunter Biden Debate

Potomac Watch: Joe Biden may have successfully minimized his Hunter liability in the 2020 presidential debates, but there’s no hiding in 2024. Image: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

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

Appeared in the June 28, 2024, print edition as 'The 51 Intel Know-Nothings'.

13. New commander leads school house for Army special operation forces at Fort Liberty

I served with BG Slider in the Philippines. He is a good man.

New commander leads school house for Army special operation forces at Fort Liberty

https://www.fayobserver.com/story/news/military/2024/06/27/new-leader-at-john-f-kennedy-special-warfare-center-at-fort-liberty/74205823007/?utm

Rachael Riley

Fayetteville Observer

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FORT LIBERTY — A new commander is in charge of overseeing the training and development of Army spe

Brig. Gen. Guillaume ”Will” Beaurpere turned over command of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School to Brig. Gen. Jason Slider during a ceremony Friday.

Slider arrives from his most recent assignment as deputy commander of operations for the French army’s 3rd Division through an Army personnel exchange program.

Beaurpere, who has led the command since August 2022, will head to Tampa, Florida, as the next chief of staff for the U.S. Special Operations Command.

The Special Warfare Center oversees the Special Forces assessment and selection course, training for Special Forces and special operation forces and foreign language training, with more than 100 courses for civil affairs, psychological operations, Special Forces, allied and sister service students.

Under SWC are the school, the Special Forces Warrant Officer Institute, the Noncommissioned Officers Academy, the 1st Special Warfare Training Group, the 2nd Special Warfare Training Group and the Special Warfare Medical Group.

Outgoing commander

During his time as commander of the Special Warfare Center and School, Beaurpere led more than 3,200 soldiers and civilians, which included 1,100 students from the joint force, said Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, commander of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, who oversaw the command change.

During Beaurpere’s time as commander, 839 Special Forces soldiers, 404 civil affairs soldiers and 461 psychological operations soldiers completed SWC’s qualification course, Braga said.

“Your team created an incredible culture that embodies the transformation required for us to overcome the challenges we face now,” Braga told Beaurpere.

He said Beaurpere helped update SWC’s 2030 transformation guide, which also provides guidance for National Guard and Reserve teammates; and “significant modifications were made to the qualifications course incorporating large-scale combat operations.”

Beaurpere also helped stand up SWC’s irregular warfare academy and update the psychological operations warfare school to account for lessons learned in the Russian and Ukranian war and future warfare with robotics and unmanned systems, Braga said.

“You’ve been a true master of the Army and continue to lead the way as a proponent of irregular warfare,” Braga told Beaurpere.

Beaurpere thanked his family, command team, staff, cadre and the soldiers and civilians in SWC.

“I firmly believe that shaping up the future force is the most rewarding job,” he said.

Beaurpere said SWC is “strategically driven” to transform “leaders of character” and stewards of Army special operation forces “who must be ready to fight at a moment’s notice.”

“Dominating our role means no fail commitment to assessing, electing and training the best Special Forces, psychological operations and civil affairs soldiers for USASOC and the total Army,” he said.

New commander

Beaurpere told Slider that the job is rewarding, and said Slider has the right credentials for overseeing SWC’s leader development and advanced skills training.

“I’m excited for the way ahead in the next chapter of this very precious institution, and I know the unit is now in very capable hands,” Beaurpere said.

According to Slider's biography, he enlisted in the Army as an infantryman in 1990, before completing the Army’s Officer Candidate School in 1992.

His previous assignments have included commanding 1st Special Forces Command teams and brigades since 2004; serving as deputy commander for the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade; serving as chief of staff for the 18th Airborne Corps and being commander of the 95th Civil Affairs Brigade from 2016 to 2018 and chief of staff of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

“To the leaders and soldiers of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, past and present, since 1952, this command has trained and produced the finest special operators on the face of the planet,” Slider said. “My promise to you is that the standard continues here today and into the future.”

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

​14. Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Marine Corps

Conclusion: 

Senior leaders across the Department of Defense and Marine Corps have stated that AI and machine learning are the way forward for the future force. The efficiency loss created by the service’s current analog processes and static data (let alone the risk to mission and risk to force associated with these antiquated processes in a combat environment) is enough reason to adopt this approach. However, discussions with currently serving practitioners reveal that the Marine Corps needs to move more quickly. It has pursued a two-track model with innovation at the lowest levels and resources at the highest. Bridging the gap between these parallel efforts will be critical to meaningful progress.

If the Marine Corps intends to incorporate AI and machine learning into its deployed operations, it should build the groundwork by training its workforce and building familiarity during garrison operations. Once marines are familiar with and able to employ these tools in a stable and predictable environment, they will naturally use them when deployed to a hostile littoral zone. Designating one major command to act as the service lead would go a long way toward accomplishing that goal. This proposed command would follow the 18th Airborne Corps’ model of linking the strategic and tactical echelons of the force and implementing new and innovative ways of automating day-to-day tasks and data analysis. Doing so will streamline garrison operations and improve readiness.

Integrating Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in the Marine Corps - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Will McGee · June 28, 2024

Every day, thousands of marines perform routine data-collection tasks and make hundreds of data-based decisions. They compile manning data on whiteboards to decide to staff units, screenshot weather forecasts and paste them into weekly commander’s update briefings, and submit training entries by hand. But anyone who has used ChatGPT or other large-scale data analytic services in the last two years knows the immense power of generative AI to streamline these processes and improve the quality of these decisions by basing them on fresh and comprehensive data.

The U.S. Marine Corps has finally caught wind. Gen. Eric Smith’s new message calls for the service to recognize that “[t]echnology has exponentially increased information’s effects on the modern battlefield, making our need to exploit data more important than ever.” The service’s stand-in forces operating concept relies on marine operating forces to integrate into networks of sensors, using automation and machine learning to simplify decision processes and kill chains. Forces deployed forward in littoral environments will be sustained by a supply system that uses data analysis for predictive maintenance, identifying which repair parts the force will need in advance.

However, there is a long way to go before these projections become reality. A series of interviews with key personnel in the Marine Corps operating forces and supporting establishment, other services, and combatant commands over the past six months reveal that the service needs to move more quickly if it intends to use AI and machine learning to execute this operating concept. Despite efforts from senior leaders to nudge the service towards integrating AI and machine learning, only incremental progress has been made.

The service depends on marines possessing the technical skills to make data legible to automated analytic systems and enable data-informed decisions. Designating a Marine expeditionary force or one of its major subordinate commands as the lead for data analysis and literacy would unify the service’s two-track approach by creating an ecosystem that will allow bottom-up creativity, scale innovation across the force, and speed the integration of these technologies into the fleet and supporting establishment.

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New Technology’s Potential to Transform Operations, Logistics, and Education

AI, machine learning, and data analysis can potentially transform military education, planning, and operations. Experiments at Marine Corps University have shown that they could allow students to hone operational art in educational settings by probing new dimensions of complicated problems and understanding the adversary’s system. AI models, trained on enemy doctrinal publications and open-source information about troop employment, can use probabilistic reasoning to predict an enemy’s response. This capability could supplement intelligence red teams by independently analyzing the adversary’s options, improve a staff’s capacity for operational planning, or simply give students valuable analytic experience. And NIPRGPT, a new Air Force project, promises to upend mundane staff work by generating documents and emails in a secure environment.

Beyond education and planning, AI and machine learning can transform how the Marine Corps fights. During an operation, AI could employ a networked collection of manned and unmanned systems to reconnoiter and attack an adversary. It could also synthesize and display data from sensor networks more quickly than human analysts or sift through thousands of images to identify particular scenes or locations of interest. Either algorithms can decide themselves or enable commanders to make data-informed decisions in previously unthinkable ways. From AI-enabled decision-making to enhanced situational awareness, this technology has the potential to revolutionize military operations. A team of think tank researchers even used AI recently to rethink the Unified Command Plan.

But, achieving these futuristic visions will require the service to develop technical skills and familiarity with this technology before implementing it. Developing data literacy is a prerequisite to effectively employ advanced systems, and so this skill is as important as anything else the service expects of marines. Before the Marine Corps can use AI-enabled swarms of drones to take a beachhead or use predictive maintenance to streamline supply operations, its workforce needs to know how to work with data analysis tools and be comfortable applying them in everyday work settings.

Delivering for the Marine Corps Today

If the Marine Corps wants to employ machine learning and AI in combat, it should teach marines how to use them in stable and predictable garrison operations. Doing so could save the service tens of thousands of hours annually while increasing combat effectiveness and readiness by replacing the antiquated processes and systems the fleet marine force relies on.

The operating forces are awash with legible data that can be used for analysis. Every unit has records of serialized equipment, weapons, and classified information. Most of these records are maintained in antiquated computer-based programs of record or Excel spreadsheets, offering clear opportunities for optimization.

Furthermore, all marines in the fleet do yearly training and readiness tasks to demonstrate competence in their assigned functions. Nothing happens to this data once submitted in the Marine Corps Training Information Management System — no headquarters echelon traces performance over time to ensure that marines are improving, besides an occasional cursory glance during a Commanding General’s Inspection visit. This system is labor intensive, requiring manual entries for each training event and each individual marine’s results.

Establishing and analyzing performance standards from these events could identify which units have the most effective training regimens. Leaders who outperform could be rewarded, and a Marine expeditionary force could establish best practices across its subordinate units to improve combat readiness. Automating or streamlining data entry and analysis would be straightforward since AI excels at performing repetitive tasks with clear parameters. Doing so would save time while increasing the combat proficiency of the operating forces.

Marines in the operating forces perform innumerable routine tasks that could be easily automated. For example, marines in staff sections grab data and format it into weekly command and staff briefings each week. Intelligence officers retrieve weather forecast data from their higher headquarters. Supply officers insert information supply levels into the brief. Medical and dental readiness numbers are usually displayed in a green/yellow/red stoplight chart. This data is compiled — by hand — in PowerPoint slide decks. These simple tasks could be automated, saving thousands of hours across an entire Marine expeditionary force. Commanders would benefit by making decisions based on the most up-to-date information rather than relying on stale data captured hours before.

The Marine Corps uses outdated processes and systems that waste valuable time that could be used on training and readiness. Using automation, machine learning, and AI to streamline routine tasks and allow commanders to make decisions based on up-to-date data will enable the service to achieve efficiency savings while increasing its combat effectiveness. In Smith’s words, “combining human talent and advanced processes [will allow the Marine Corps] to become even more lethal in support of the joint force and our allies and partners.”

The Current Marine Corps Approach

The service is slow in moving towards its goals because it has decided, de facto, to pursue a two-track development strategy. It has concentrated efforts and resources at the highest echelons of the institution while relying on the rare confluence of expertise and individual initiative for progress at the lowest levels. This bifurcated approach lacks coherence and stymies progress.

Marine Corps Order 5231.4 outlines the service’s approach to AI. Rather than making the operating forces the focus of effort, the order weights efforts in the supporting establishment. The supporting establishment has the expertise, resources, and authority to manage a program across the Marine Corps. But it lacks visibility into the specific issues facing individuals that could be solved with AI, machine learning, or automated data analysis.

At the tactical levels of the service, individuals are integrating these tools into their workflows. However, without broader sponsorship, this mainly occurs as the result of happy coincidence: when a single person has the technical skills to develop an automated data solution, recognizes a shortfall, and takes the initiative to implement it. Because the skills required to create, maintain, or customize projects for a unit are uncommon, scaling adoption or expanding the project is difficult. As a result, most individual projects wither on the vine, and machine learning, AI, and data analysis have only sporadically and temporarily penetrated the operating forces.

This two-track approach separates resources and problems. This means that the highest level of service isn’t directly involved in success at the tactical level. Tactical echelons don’t have the time, resources, or tasking to develop and systematize these skill sets on their own. What’s needed is a flat and collaborative bottom-up approach with central coordination.

The 18th Airborne Corps

Marine Corps doctrine and culture advocate carefully balancing centralized planning with decentralized execution and bottom-up refinement. Higher echelons pass flexible instructions to their subordinates, increasing specificity at each level. Leaders ensure standardization of training, uniformity of effort, and efficient use of resources. Bottom-up experimentation applies new ideas to concrete problems.

Machine learning and data analysis should be no different. The challenge is finding a way to link individual innovation instances with the resources and influence to scale them across the institution. The Army’s use of the 18th Airborne Corps to bridge the gap between service-level programs and individual initiatives offers a clear example for how to do so.

The 18th Airborne Corps fills a contingency-response role like the Marine Corps. Located at Fort Liberty, it is the headquarters element containing the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions, along with the 10th Mountain and 3rd Infantry Divisions. As part of a broader modernization program, the 18th Airborne Corps has focused on creating a technology ecosystem to foster innovation. Individual soldiers across the corps can build personal applications that aggregate, analyze, and present information in customizable dashboards that streamline work processes and allow for data-informed decision-making.

For example, soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division created a single application to monitor and perform logistics tasks. The 18th Airborne Corps’ Data Warfare Company built a tool for real-time monitoring of in-theater supply levels with alerts for when certain classes of supply run low. Furthermore, the command integrates these projects and other data applications to streamline combat functions. For example, the 18th Airborne Corps practices integrating intelligence analysis, target acquisition, and fires through joint exercises like Scarlet Dragon.

As well as streamlining operational workflows, the data analytics improve training and readiness. The 18th Airborne Corps has developed a Warrior Skills training program in which they collect data to establish a baseline against which it can compare individual soldier’s skills over time. Finally, some of the barracks at Fort Liberty have embedded QR codes that soldiers scan to check in when they’re on duty.

These examples demonstrate how a unit of data-literate individuals can leverage modern technology to increase the capacity of the entire organization. Many of these projects could not have been scaled beyond institutional boundaries without corps-level sponsorship. Furthermore, because the 18th Airborne Corps is an operational-level command, it connects soldiers in its divisions with the Army’s service-level stakeholders.

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Designating a Major Command as Service Lead

If the Marine Corps followed the 18th Airborne Corps model, it would designate one operating force unit as the service lead for data analysis and automation to link service headquarters with tactical units. Institutionalizing security systems, establishing boundaries for experimentation, expanding successful projects across a Marine expeditionary force, and implementing a standardized training program would create an ecosystem to cultivate the technical advances service leaders want.

This proposed force would also streamline the interactions between marines and the service and ensure manning continuity for units that develop data systems to ensure efforts do not peter out as individuals rotate to new assignments. Because of its geographic proximity to Fort Liberty, and as 2d Marine Division artillery units have already participated in the recent Scarlet Dragon exercises and thus have some familiarity with the 18th Airborne Corps’ projects, II Marine Expeditionary Force is a logical choice to serve as the service lead.

Once designated, II Marine Expeditionary Force should establish an office, directorate, or company responsible for the entire force’s data literacy and automation effort. This would follow the 18th Airborne Corps’ model of establishing a data warfare company to house soldiers with specialized technical skills. This unit could then develop a training program to be implemented across the Marine expeditionary force. The focus of this effort would be a rank-and-billet appropriate education plan that teaches every marine in the Marine expeditionary force how to read, work with, communicate, and analyze data using low- or no-code applications like PowerBI or the Army’s Vantage system, with crucial billets learning how to build and maintain these applications. Using the work it is undertaking with Training and Education Command, combined with its members’ academic and industry expertise, the Marine Innovation Unit (of which I am a member) could develop a training plan based on the Army’s model that II Marine Expeditionary Force could use — and would work alongside the proposed office to create and implement this training plan.

This training plan will teach every marine the rudimentary skills necessary to implement simple solutions for themselves. The coordinating office will centralize overhead, standardize training, and scale valuable projects across the whole Marine expeditionary force. It would link the high-level service efforts with the small-scale problems facing the operating forces that data literacy and automation could fix.

All the individuals interviewed agreed that engaged and supportive leadership has been an essential precondition for all successful data automation projects. Service-level tasking should ensure that all subordinate commanders take the initiative seriously. Once lower-echelon units see the hours of work spent on rote and mundane tasks that could be automated and then invested back into training and readiness, bureaucratic politics will melt away, and implementation should follow. The key is for a leader to structure the incentives for subordinates to encourage the first generation of adopters.

Forcing deploying units to perform another training requirement could overburden them. However, implementing this training carefully would ensure it is manageable. The Marine expeditionary force and its subordinate units’ headquarters are not on deployment rotations, so additional training would not detract from their pre-deployment readiness process. Also, implementing these technologies would create significant time savings, freeing up extra time and manpower for training and readiness tasks.

Conclusion

Senior leaders across the Department of Defense and Marine Corps have stated that AI and machine learning are the way forward for the future force. The efficiency loss created by the service’s current analog processes and static data (let alone the risk to mission and risk to force associated with these antiquated processes in a combat environment) is enough reason to adopt this approach. However, discussions with currently serving practitioners reveal that the Marine Corps needs to move more quickly. It has pursued a two-track model with innovation at the lowest levels and resources at the highest. Bridging the gap between these parallel efforts will be critical to meaningful progress.

If the Marine Corps intends to incorporate AI and machine learning into its deployed operations, it should build the groundwork by training its workforce and building familiarity during garrison operations. Once marines are familiar with and able to employ these tools in a stable and predictable environment, they will naturally use them when deployed to a hostile littoral zone. Designating one major command to act as the service lead would go a long way toward accomplishing that goal. This proposed command would follow the 18th Airborne Corps’ model of linking the strategic and tactical echelons of the force and implementing new and innovative ways of automating day-to-day tasks and data analysis. Doing so will streamline garrison operations and improve readiness.

Become a Member

Will McGee is an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves, currently serving with the Marine Innovation Unit. The views in this article are the author’s and do not represent those of the Marine Innovation Unit, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Defense Department, or any part of the U.S. government.

Image: Midjourney

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Will McGee · June 28, 2024

15. New Tactic in China’s Information War: Harassing a Critic’s Child in the U.S.

New Tactic in China’s Information War: Harassing a Critic’s Child in the U.S.

By Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu

• June 27, 2024

The New York Times · by Tiffany Hsu · June 27, 2024

Deng Yuwen, a Chinese dissident writer and scholar whose 16-year-old daughter has faced online harassment from a disinformation campaign believed to be operated by a Chinese ministry.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

A covert campaign to target a writer critical of the country’s Communist Party has extended to sexually suggestive threats against his 16-year-old daughter.

Deng Yuwen, a Chinese dissident writer and scholar whose 16-year-old daughter has faced online harassment from a disinformation campaign believed to be operated by a Chinese ministry.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

Deng Yuwen, a prominent Chinese writer who now lives in exile in the suburbs of Philadelphia, has regularly criticized China and its authoritarian leader, Xi Jinping. China’s reaction of late has been severe, with crude and ominously personal attacks online.

A covert propaganda network linked to the country’s security services has barraged not just Mr. Deng but also his teenage daughter with sexually suggestive and threatening posts on popular social media platforms, according to researchers at both Clemson University and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.

The content, posted by users with fake identities, has appeared in replies to Mr. Deng’s posts on X, the social platform, as well as the accounts of public schools in their community, where the daughter, who is 16, has been falsely portrayed as a drug user, an arsonist and a prostitute.

“I tried to delete these posts,” Mr. Deng said of the attacks online, speaking in Mandarin Chinese in an interview, “but I didn’t succeed, because today you try to delete and tomorrow they just switch to new accounts to leave attacking text and language.”

Vulgar comments targeting the girl have also shown up on community pages on Facebook and even sites like TripAdvisor; Patch, a community news platform; and Niche, a website that helps parents choose schools, according to the researchers.

The harassment fits a pattern of online intimidation that has raised alarms in Washington, as well as Canada and other countries where China’s attacks have become increasingly brazen. The campaign has included thousands of posts the researchers have linked to a network of social media accounts known as Spamouflage or Dragonbridge, an arm of the country’s vast propaganda apparatus.

China has long sought to discredit Chinese critics, but targeting a teenager in the United States is an escalation, said Darren Linvill, a founder of the Media Forensics Hub at Clemson, whose researchers documented the campaign against Mr. Deng. Federal law prohibits severe online harassment or threats, but that appears to be no deterrent to China’s efforts.

“There’s no question that this crosses a line that they hadn’t previously crossed,” Mr. Linvill said. “I think that suggests that the lines are becoming meaningless.”

China’s propaganda apparatus has also stepped up attacks against the United States more broadly, including efforts to discredit President Biden ahead of the presidential election in November.

“They’re exporting their repression efforts and human rights abuses — targeting, threatening and harassing those who dare question their legitimacy or authority even outside China, including right here in the U.S.,” Christopher A. Wray, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, told the American Bar Association in Washington in April.

Mr. Wray said China was exerting “intense, almost Mafia-style pressure” to try to silence dissidents now living legally in the United States, including activities online and off, like posting fliers near their homes.

A spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement that he was not aware of the Deng case and had no comment. He added that the government’s State Council issued regulations in China last year to protect the safety of teenagers online.

In a statement, Meta said it had taken down Facebook accounts targeting the Dengs as part of its monitoring of Spamouflage’s activities. The statement said the activity hadn’t gained much traction on Facebook. Patch and Niche said they, too, had removed the accounts for violating their standards for use. X and TripAdvisor did not respond to requests for comment.

Not all the posts targeting the Dengs were removed, according to Mr. Linvill’s team at Clemson. New posts also continue to appear, and traces even of posts that are removed can linger online for years. Spamouflage’s attacks still appear in searches for Mr. Deng and his daughter on Google, for example.

The attacks from China have been a challenge for government and law enforcement officials in the United States. Last year, the Justice Department indicted 34 officers working for China’s Ministry of State Security on charges of harassing residents of the United States like Mr. Deng, but the officers live — and presumably continue to work — in China, outside the reach of American law enforcement.

Some have called for a more aggressive response, including Representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Communist Party of China.

“We need to educate and empower law enforcement officers and the American people to understand the C.C.P.’s tactics,” he said in a statement, referring to the party, “and protect the people seeking safe haven in our country.”

The Spamouflage network was first identified in 2019 during mass anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong. It creates inauthentic accounts on social media or tech platforms to bombard actual users with spamlike content — hence the name researchers have given the network. While the content often fails to go viral, the swarming nature of the attacks can be a nuisance, or worse, for those targeted.

The network, which Meta last year linked to law enforcement agencies in China, once focused most of its attention domestically to discredit and intimidate critics of the Communist Party, like the protesters in Hong Kong.

It has become increasingly active abroad, seeking to influence political debates and elections in Taiwan, Canada and, since at least the 2022 midterm election, the United States. An American Olympic figure skater and her father, a former political refugee from China, were targeted by what the Justice Department described as a spying operation ordered by Beijing. Chinese journalists working abroad, especially women, have likewise been depicted in fake escort ads and faced bomb and rape threats.

The Justice Department indictment of the officers at the Ministry of State Security did not link them explicitly to the Spamouflage network, but the activities described mirror its work closely and appear “extremely likely” to be the same operation, according to a recent report by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research group. The institute also warned that the network was focusing increasingly on the American presidential election.

In Mr. Deng’s case, as with others, the intent seems to be to silence criticism. Mr. Deng, who was born in Xinyu, in southeastern China, once served as an assistant editor at Study Times, a weekly journal of the Central Party School of the Communist Party that trains rising officials.

An article written by Mr. Deng that was published in the Autumn 2023 edition of Contemporary China Review.Credit...Bing Guan for The New York Times

His commentaries sometimes pushed the envelope of the party line. He was dismissed in 2013 after he wrote an opinion essay for The Financial Times — which appeared in its Chinese and English editions — calling for China to abandon its strategic ties with North Korea’s erratic authoritarian leader, Kim Jong-un. He eventually left the country.

Mr. Deng, who is 56, has lived in the United States with his wife and two children since 2018. He continues to publish essays in a variety of news outlets and books on Chinese politics and foreign policy. The latest book was “The Last Totalitarian,” published in Chinese in April by Bouden House in New York. In it, he argues that the Communist Party has lost the faith of the people and needs to reform.

In the interview, Mr. Deng said he was used to criticism from China’s officialdom, but the personal attacks began after he published an article in February in which he compared Mr. Xi’s cadre of top officials to the Gang of Four under Mao Zedong.

The first post that Clemson’s researchers spotted appeared that month on X, where Mr. Deng’s account has more than 100,000 followers. It mentioned a middle school in the family’s town and his daughter. The harassment spread to other accounts on X and then to numerous platforms, including Facebook, Medium, Pinterest, DeviantArt and Pixiv, a Japanese site for artists.

The posts denounced him as a traitor, a plagiarist and a tool of the United States. More than 5,700 posts to date on X alone have singled out his daughter, according to Clemson’s research.

The users’ profiles often made them appear to be American, though with few or even no followers. Many posts featured stilted, ungrammatical English, a signature of Spamouflage campaigns.

They became increasingly lurid and threatening. Doctored images appeared on Facebook with the face of Mr. Deng’s daughter superimposed on scantily clad women, advertising sex for $300. At least one post called for her to be sexually assaulted, offering a bounty of $8,000.

His daughter, who speaks English with a teenager’s fluency in Gen Z slang, was initially angry about the attacks, as well, Mr. Deng said, but at his encouragement, she has also tried to shrug them off. “I want to try my best not to get my family involved in my affairs,” he said.

Meta, Google and other major tech platforms have long been aware of Spamouflage’s activities and have sought to blunt their reach. Last year, Meta announced that it had removed more than 7,700 fake accounts on Facebook linked to the network in one quarter alone.

Mr. Linvill of Clemson said China’s tactics were likely to continue because the country had “yet to face any meaningful repercussions beyond accounts’ being taken down, and that is no cost at all from their perspective.”

Bing Guan contributed reporting.

Steven Lee Myers covers misinformation and disinformation from San Francisco. Since joining The Times in 1989, he has reported from around the world, including Moscow, Baghdad, Beijing and Seoul. More about Steven Lee Myers

Tiffany Hsu reports on misinformation and disinformation and its origins, movement and consequences. She has been a journalist for more than two decades. More about Tiffany Hsu

The New York Times · by Tiffany Hsu · June 27, 2024

16. A Case Study on Integrating Tactical Drones: Israel

Conclusion:

Integrating tactical UAS into ground forces will not happen easily or overnight. It requires resource allocation, a change in doctrine, new and updated training, and fresh perspectives in the field. While case studies like Ukraine, Russia, and Israel are instructive, each nation must contextualize this capability in its own units with their idiosyncratic structures and cultures. It will inevitably entail a period of trial and error as militaries develop their preferred equipment and tactics, techniques, and procedures. That means it must begin or continue at a fast clip now to be prepared for tomorrow’s encounters.

A Case Study on Integrating Tactical Drones: Israel - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, Ori Swed · June 28, 2024

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“Commentators . . . say that Russia overslept the UAV revolution, that Russian generals did not prepare the army for such a massive use of drones. . . . But we weren’t the only ones sleeping. The whole world fell asleep. All military scientific organizations, academies and experts talked about the need to build ever more powerful, long-range drones. . . . But in Ukraine . . . the most useful drone is a trifle—quadcopters.”

In a short time, scholars, practitioners, and astute spectators have pivoted from perceiving small drones as hobbyists’ toys to recognizing them as a crucial for modern ground warfare. Ukraine’s large-scale use of commercial unmanned aircraft systems in its war against Russia, in particular, has offered compelling evidence of this new reality. Russia has rebuffed criticism of its initial oversight of tactical drones and redoubled its efforts to develop acquisition pathways. Militaries across the world, including in China, have taken note.

The United States is no exception. Recently, the United States Army announced plans to provide small drones to infantry units for experimentation. The route toward effective integration of tactical unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) into combat formation is not linear, however. Several integration models and methods of use exist along multiple forking paths. Deciding among them can be daunting and each of those decisions can make future decisions path dependent. While most eyes have been on Ukraine and Russia, there is another state whose extensive experience with small UAS holds important lessons: Israel.

Of course, Israel’s conduct of its military campaign in Gaza has divided observers and produced no shortage of international criticism, not least because of the number of civilians who have been killed or wounded. But the enhanced situational awareness that follows from integrating small UAS into combat operations makes these tools among the most effective in limiting collateral damage and civilian casualties. That makes a careful study of the Israeli model instructive. That model rests on four fundaments:

1. Existing knowledge and expertise in the development, integration, and deployment of larger drones used for objectives principally at the strategic level.
2. Specialized field intelligence units that bridge the gap for infantry units, offering them personal eyes in the sky.
3. Existing knowledge and expertise in tactical drone use by special operations units.
4. The development of a specialized unit that organically used and tested all types of drones and derived knowledge to diffuse to other units.

Drawing on those pillars, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have been able to rapidly adjust and expand the deployment and use of tactical drones in the Gaza conflict, providing a precedent for other militaries operating in a variety of combat environments.

Israel’s Awakening to Small UAS

Israel was a pioneer of modern drone technology and has since stayed at the forefront of military drone use. When the IDF debuted drones in the 1980s, they were limited to a handful of advanced platforms operated by air force or intelligence units, restricting access and information to few people at strategic levels. This persisted until the 2000s with the introduction of the Skylark, a smaller reconnaissance drone that works in close support and under the command of ground units. Even then, however, at the tactical level, drones were reserved for special operations forces that developed in-house capabilities. Thus, the democratization of tactical airpower did not reach the rank and file until recently, with the war in Gaza. One commentator notes that observations made even five years ago seem irrelevant given the momentum of technological and doctrinal development. Now, “drones proliferate like a menagerie of animals at all levels of the army,” including models like the Lanius (shrike), Maoz (firefly), Ninox (viper), Wolverine, and Rhino.

The unique challenges of this war—high-intensity fighting in a mixture of civilian-saturated urban and subterranean environments, amid information operations aimed at delegitimizing any Israeli military action—required fast solutions. For the versatility they offer, tactical drones were rapidly introduced into fighting units in creative ways. They became an extension of platoon-level soldiers, deployed to see beyond the next corner in the urban jungle, to explore a subterranean complex, to offer cover fire from an unexpected angle, to break a window, or to be used as guided missiles.

The deployment of reservists into battle also introduced eclectic and informal innovations with hobbyist and commercial drones. For instance, the 55th Paratroopers Brigade bought over a hundred commercial drones to generate unit-level tactical UAS capabilities. As the campaign progressed, tactics changed. Units began using small drones for initial screening before forces advanced, to search for improvised explosive devices, to identify enemy positions, and to instantly screen buildings or suspicious infrastructure. Upon identifying terrorists, the drones have been used to direct fire or in some cases to communicate with those who want to surrender. The brigade even uses drone mapping and analysis software to update offensive and defensive battle plans as terrain quickly changes amid destruction, both engineered and collateral. Successful initiatives from below have acted as a proof of concept for the utility of these platforms, inviting the military to provide standardized solutions.

While the war’s exigencies and bottom-up momentum accelerated the process, the IDF had a preexisting body of knowledge and expertise on tactical drones. Israel had been running pilot programs to test applications of small UAS. The onset of the Hamas-Israel war accelerated many into action. Suddenly, existentially exposed to urban and subterranean warfare, experimental units and approaches have been tested by fire, then spread like wildfire.

The peak of tactical UAS experimentation and integration in Israel originated in its Refaim (Ghosts) unit—established as what the IDF referred to as a multidimensional unit—well before the war. IDF units are generally more siloed in the capabilities they field than other militaries with combined arms formations. For instance, armored units do not possess organic infantry or close air support capabilities, and forces have had difficulties with coordination and communication in complex operations. The ghosts are unique in that they meld functions into a single dexterous unit. Furthermore, they receive new gadgets to field test and refine in a bottom-up acquisition approach.

The Ghost unit innovated to integrate small UAS into more autonomous ground forces, enabling them to precisely close the circle on enemy combatants—progressing from identification to targeting, authorization, and elimination—with drones rather than relying on other units. This approach has quickly spread to the rest of the army during the Gaza campaign. This integration of small UAS into ground units grants commanders a fuller, more detailed picture of the battlefield. The ghost unit’s elements have also been referred to as drone bands since the unit operates packs of reconnaissance and attack UAS. The swift movement from enemy identification to fire has also earned them the moniker of exposure-attack units.

Multiuse Applications

As the war in Gaza wages on, the IDF has increasingly integrated tactical drones into a broader variety of operations and for a wide set of purposes. Exploring some of the primary functions of the IDF’s small UAS offers lessons for other militaries.

Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance

The most common use of small UAS in most combat settings is for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR). Israel is no exception, exploiting the vertically elevated vantage point to enrich field commanders’ information. For instance, all ground forces were equipped with Maoz drones, which debuted operationally a month before the Hamas-Israel war, during the Jenin refugee camp raid. Although technically a loitering munition, the distinction between these and ISR drones is narrowing as weaponized platforms are equipped with cameras and other sensors and are easily used during operations solely as reconnaissance platforms.

Humanitarian Applications

Beyond their role during planning and mission execution phases, Israel also uses UAS in the aftermath of operations to verify the number and identity of targets neutralized. This is meaningful for operational metrics, but also for transparency and reporting on human rights and the laws of armed conflict. In the current war—characterized as it is by urban terrain, humanitarian concerns, and information warfare regarding numbers of civilian and combatant casualties—this capability is crucial. Further, the IDF flew small drones with speakers announcing and urging civilians to evacuate in advance of the invasion of Hamad City, demonstrating another clever function.

Limiting Risk

Another asset is that drones improve unit survivability, a tall order in urban and other confined environments. An ad for the Xtender shows a kitted-out team member donning a visor, activating a drone, and leading the unit through a scenario in a building complex concealing hostiles. Ironically, it ends with the punchline “First soldier into battle.” Mini-UAS are especially useful in built-up and booby-trapped environments, exact markers of the Hamas-Israel conflict. Able to conduct ISR in tight quarters, map ahead, detect and classify objects like weapons stations, determine whether humans are armed, and clear obstacles and hazards, small drones have faced and defused several traps and ambushes to date.

Urban and Subterranean Warfare

Fighting in Gaza is taking place primarily in cities and tunnels. These operating environments are considerably complex, congested, and contested. Cities provide exceptional cover for embedded fighters, not to mention the remaining civilian population that can make discrimination a challenge. Tunnel fighting is highly hazardous with limited vision, constrained and canalized movement, and traps. Since several kit components do not function underground—navigation devices, imaging tools, and others—it has been analogized to underwater fighting.

The IDF tried many methods to explore, demine, and decommission the “Gaza metro,” composed of five hundred kilometers of tunnels. Between the Oketz dog units, Samur subterranean commandoes, and Yahalom team of combat engineers, they quickly learned that small quadcopters were the cheapest and most effective. Some have shrouded rotors to prevent damage from contact with walls, enabling them to fit through tight spaces.

Drones can also function as communication relays in the signal-degraded underground or in GPS-scrambled cities. Furthermore, in urban theaters UAS like the Xtender or Wolverine, a micro-drone with robotic arm and cyber capabilities, can carry through-the-wall life-detection radar. They can also attach charges to break down doors or grab and remove hazards like explosives, and the Maoz can home in on, keep pace with, and strike terrorists even in moving vehicles.

Cyber Discrimination

Although it is unclear how operational they are currently, the IDF debuted drone-cyber capabilities at a live-fire exercise in 2022. Mimicking cell towers, a formation of quadcopters hovers over buildings and tricks phones into connecting and downloading a software payload. This would allow soldiers and officers to quickly determine whether known combatants are inside. In irregular warfare, where terrorists and combatants intentionally blend into a surrounding population, this capability will improve discrimination and decrease unintended civilian casualties. Of course, even if this capacity is still emerging, forces can fly small ISR UAS into terrorist strongholds to detect targets.

Challenges and Prescriptions

In addition to illustrating the specific missions small UAS can enhance, an examination of Israel’s model of UAS development and employment also reveals challenges to integrating drones into combat formations—and points toward ways to overcome them.

Defense Industrial Base

Although the lowest tier of small UAS in Israel includes commercial off-the-shelf models, the IDF has cracked down on their use in Gaza and made efforts to standardize deployed platforms. Standardization elongates lifespans by minimizing mistakes in the heat of battle and facilitates transferability and cross-unit collaboration. Purely commercial models are sufficient and appropriate for some tasks—perhaps for border patrol or infrastructure security. For others that require more reliable, ruggedized performance and depend on a secure datalink, commercial models must undergo proprietary or aftermarket conversions.

Consequently, the first challenge is to mobilize the defense industrial base to accommodate these solutions at scale and at an acceptable cost. Israel has a more vibrant base than many Western nations, with the government cooperating with startups, ordering small-scale pilot projects, and providing timely and pointed feedback. Even under these conditions, though, establishing an innovative defense startup is difficult. The market is already crowded with large, established firms and the industry is highly regulated, complex, expensive, and often slow. Defense acquisition pathways must be reformed to allow for smaller, nimbler companies to participate. Furthermore, to maintain a stock of more expendable drones, those pathways must be shorter and faster than routes for exquisite military technology.

Cost

Taking the brunt of scouting and frontline dangers, the survivability of small UAS will be low in order to maximize soldier survivability. Reportedly, Ukraine loses approximately ten thousand drones per month due to their dense deployment in the war. The per-unit price, including any military upgrades or modular packages, must not be unsustainable. Israeli reservists acquired three robot dogs from Ghost Robotics using donated funds at the start of the Hamas-Israel war to explore tunnels and perform border security. Why only three? The price tag of $130,000 per unit becomes prohibitive at any larger scale. In addition to purchase price sustainability, maintenance costs for mechanical wear must also not undermine a UAS program. The IDF’s Panda bulldozers—an unmanned variant of the Caterpillar D9 bulldozers—which demolish barriers in built-up areas, are sparingly allocated for this very reason.

Counter-UAS

While leveraging the power of small UAS wielded by ground forces, militaries must simultaneously prepare for adversaries making similar moves. Counter-UAS solutions, therefore, should be assimilated into units with the same urgency. In addition, states must identify ways to distinguish ally, enemy, and civilian drones in an increasingly dense littoral airspace. Israel’s initial solution has been to compel civilian drones to be registered and operate remote identification in real time. Although it is less clear how it was accomplished, Israel also appears to have degraded Hamas drone attacks, perhaps deploying disrupters, since the start of the war.

Logistics

One challenge Israeli soldiers have encountered in Gaza is simply how to charge its drones in theater. Small UAS might be cheaper and more plentiful than larger UAS, but they typically have less endurance, and there is a limit to how many batteries soldiers can carry on their backs. When units must stay in a combat zone, they have to port the energy source along with them. Observing voltage gaps between tactical drones and tanks or transport vehicles, an IDF unit tasked to find a fix developed energy packages to taper electricity to a relevant voltage. Using commercial generators and 3D-printed cables, this not only served as a solution but doubled the charging rate. This brigade went on to develop waterproofing, pocket chargers, and rollable solar panels to add to Israel’s battery repertoire.

Integrating tactical UAS into ground forces will not happen easily or overnight. It requires resource allocation, a change in doctrine, new and updated training, and fresh perspectives in the field. While case studies like Ukraine, Russia, and Israel are instructive, each nation must contextualize this capability in its own units with their idiosyncratic structures and cultures. It will inevitably entail a period of trial and error as militaries develop their preferred equipment and tactics, techniques, and procedures. That means it must begin or continue at a fast clip now to be prepared for tomorrow’s encounters.

Kerry Chávez, PhD is an assistant professor in the Military and Strategic Studies Department at the US Air Force Academy. She is also a nonresident research fellow with the Institute for Global Affairs, a two-time nonresident research fellow with the Modern War Institute at West Point, and an advisor for Project Air and Space Power at the Irregular Warfare Initiative. Her research focusing on the politics, strategies, and technologies of modern conflict and security has been published in several venues.

Ori Swed, PhD is an assistant professor in the Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work Department and director of the Peace, War, and Social Conflict Laboratory at Texas Tech University. His scholarship on nonstate actors in conflict settings and technology and society has been featured in multiple peer-reviewed journals and his own edited volume. He also gained twelve years of field experience with the Israel Defense Forces as a special forces operative and reserve captain, and as a private security contractor.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or any organization the authors are affiliated with, including the United States Air Force Academy and the Department of the Air Force.

Image credit: Israel Defense Forces

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Kerry Chávez, Ori Swed · June 28, 2024

17. Allies and Open Sources: Lessons from Northern Raven, the Largest OSINT Collection Operation in NATO’s History

Excerpts:

In less than a year, Northern Raven has evolved from a series of bilateral engagements into persistent cooperation across the entire intelligence cycle. Northern Raven enhances units’ readiness, preparing soldiers from all nations to write OSINT products that can be quickly released for consumption across the coalition. Training between partners, with real data on real networks, builds OSINT capacity across Europe, bringing us closer to a world in which every ally is a sensor. Finally, Northern Raven’s evolution into a multifaceted program integral to day-to-day operations creates opportunities for professional growth while exposure to partners’ analytic techniques upskills every analyst in the operation.

Though barriers to cooperation remain, relationships are no longer confined to physical engagement. Partners plan, train, and operate as one multinational team. With US and NATO military planning increasingly integrated, the ability to merge national-level processes into a single operation that capitalizes on partner expertise has never been more important. Knowing the enemy through open-source intelligence is not just our work, it is our intelligence team’s central purpose.

Allies and Open Sources: Lessons from Northern Raven, the Largest OSINT Collection Operation in NATO’s History - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Christina Bembenek, Chels Michta · June 28, 2024

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“It’s not my work. It is my existence.”

This simple statement from a Latvian captain participating in the Northern Raven combined collection operation clarified the grave importance he, and many of his fellow analysts from the Baltics, placed on this particular mission. To them, Russia is an existential threat, and the insight this week-long combined open-source intelligence collection operation—the largest in NATO’s history—provided was critical to understanding Russian actions and intentions. Under the auspices of Northern Raven—US Army Europe and Africa’s multinational open-source intelligence (OSINT) program—thirty analysts representing eleven countries had gathered in Finland to collect OSINT, guided by a collection plan developed six months earlier.

While this operation marked the culmination of months of work, its roots stretched back to 2019 when Soldiers from the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade (Theater) met with Polish partners in Bydgoszcz, Poland to collect OSINT on Russian cyberattacks. The operation demonstrated the powerful effect partners can achieve when they align their capabilities: the Poles provided linguistic knowledge while the Americans employed data-mining tools to streamline collection. More bilateral exchanges followed with Canadian, Finnish, Croatian, and Romanian partners. By 2023, Northern Raven had expanded to include staff visits as well as training events and seminars in OSINT tradecraft best practices.

Though Northern Raven had grown in number of participants, its members were not collaborating with one another, just with their American partners. The program’s hub-and-spoke structure—with the United States at the center—didn’t encourage communication among other participants. To maximize its effectiveness and leverage partners’ collection strengths, Northern Raven needed to expand its charter. The solution was to provide a common purpose and operationalize the network—to bring everyone under one roof for a combined collection operation that would harness the expertise of all members and incorporate each step of the intelligence cycle: plan and direct, collect, process and exploit, analyze and produce, disseminate, and assess.

Merging the intelligence priorities, collection methods, and analytic techniques of eleven countries required careful planning. In December 2023, the Army Europe Open Source Center (AEOSC)—the OSINT cell of the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade (Theater)—hosted partners in Wiesbaden for a working group to define and direct collection requirements. This led to the creation of the first standing Northern Raven collection plan, which set requirements for fiscal year 2024. Rather than attempting during the operation to temporarily synchronize collection efforts designed to address divergent priorities, partners hardwired interoperability into their intelligence activities from the start.

In the months after the working group, partners communicated regularly on the results of their collection. They shared requests for information, refined the collection plan, and uploaded relevant products to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Protected Internet eXchange (PIX) website, a secure but unclassified US government-sponsored information dissemination and sharing tool. Such routine collaboration transformed intelligence sharing from ad hoc exchanges—uncoordinated and often reliant on strong personal relationships—to formalized practice. Cooperation was persistent and focused on shared requirements, rather than episodic.

Eleven NATO nations gathered in Riihimäki, Finland in May 2024 for the culminating combined collection operation. Once in Finland, the group divided into five collection teams based on preassigned requirements. Each was structured to reflect a range of skills, nationalities, and collection capabilities. Partners with access to nonstandard tools such as the AI-powered Babel Street Insights platform were placed on different teams while each team was allocated at least one Russian speaker. The fact that most European partners were permitted to use burner phones to create accounts on social media platforms significantly enhanced the group’s ability to provide critical information to commanders. The organizational structure was decidedly flat: participants operated as a constellation of dynamic teams, experimenting and improvising with the best techniques for collection, processing, and exploitation.

For example, when a partner stumbled across a Telegram post by a Ukrainian milblogger that listed towns where Russian forces were alleged to be unloading equipment, he passed the locations to a member of his team currently serving in a cyber defense unit. Using a Python script he developed, the programmer-turned-intel officer was able to extract usernames and photos associated with Telegram accounts in the area. (Several photos featured soldiers posing in uniform, their unit patches clearly visible.) The partner plugged the usernames into other Russian social media platforms to gather more information before passing the photos to another colleague who proceeded to geolocate some of the buildings. After performing additional searches, the partner discovered videos of the same unit in three of the identified locations, corroborating his colleagues’ earlier findings. With this information, the team was able to map the logistical and transit routes taken by units moving toward Kharkiv.

By leveraging partners’ complementary strengths—whether regional knowledge, language ability, or access to specialized tools—Northern Raven created powerful synergies. Months of planning had bred trust and a shared sense of the operation’s overarching purpose. Everyone owned the mission. This made the teams agile and adaptive, able to craft a coordinated response to real-time developments.

Pooling partners’ skill sets and best practices expanded and sharpened the collection and processing of intelligence. It also reinforced the need to better integrate emerging technologies into OSINT operations. Northern Raven presents a unique opportunity to combine these activities: improving interoperability with partners and embracing new technologies to collect and evaluate open-source information. To that end, partners are creating a repository on a software developers’ platform that allows members to create, store, manage, and share their code. This enables partners to exchange tools and technical data, including software, map layers, AI models, and OSINT source lists. Its goals are twofold: to improve efficiency by sharing resources and increase interoperability through the use of common formats for data exchange. The platform could also serve as a test bed for technologies that hold the potential to unlock deeper and wider data-driven insights. By tapping the rich vein of Northern Raven’s growing network, NATO allies can capitalize on existing efforts to develop and adopt new capabilities.

While it is too soon to draw firm conclusions about the impact of Northern Raven’s approach to partner relationships, several initial takeaways emerge. First, it is not enough to set requirements and build collection plans together; to increase buy-in, the United States must empower partners to shape the collection effort in areas of particular importance to their intelligence enterprises. An approach that centers partners in the pursuit of their own priorities—areas where they are likely to possess special expertise—also optimizes collection capabilities, allowing for greater burden-sharing.

Second, partners must build ownership for Northern Raven among their leadership and secure resources. While AEOSC has lent structure and predictability to multinational OSINT—formalizing its processes and programming—long-term success will depend on sustained funding and organizational buy-in. As NATO members establish permanent OSINT organizations within their militaries, Northern Raven can serve as a unifying operation by which all analysts regularly coordinate and communicate, but that will also require programmed, predictable budgets.

Next, from a US Army perspective, Army OSINT must develop a rigorous framework for assessing the effectiveness of Northern Raven’s burgeoning suite of programs. Doing so will require the AEOSC to articulate what it wants to accomplish and identify the causal relationships that link Northern Raven’s activities to those outcomes. The team’s members must continuously ask themselves: What is working, what is not, and how does this achieve commanders’ requirements?

To meet the demands of this comprehensive approach to partner engagement, OSINT teams may also need to create new roles and responsibilities for their soldiers. The AEOSC created a new position, the partner integration lead, responsible for securing PIX and Digital Globe accounts for partners, as well as a dissemination manager to improve the reach—and track the circulation—of multinational products. To mitigate training shortfalls among partners, the AEOSC developed an exportable OSINT course, tailored for both in-person and virtual learning environments, which noncommissioned officers on the team instruct.

These types of activities not only present US soldiers with unique and meaningful opportunities, but also provide a purpose that increases their commitment to Army service. Exposure to new tools and data practices deepens their OSINT tradecraft knowledge while frequent interactions with partners prepare them to operate in culturally diverse coalition environments. Northern Raven also serves as a retention incentive. As one soldier remarked recently, “If I got out of the Army, I wouldn’t be able to call my mom and say, ‘Today I helped Sweden stand up its OSINT shop.’”

In less than a year, Northern Raven has evolved from a series of bilateral engagements into persistent cooperation across the entire intelligence cycle. Northern Raven enhances units’ readiness, preparing soldiers from all nations to write OSINT products that can be quickly released for consumption across the coalition. Training between partners, with real data on real networks, builds OSINT capacity across Europe, bringing us closer to a world in which every ally is a sensor. Finally, Northern Raven’s evolution into a multifaceted program integral to day-to-day operations creates opportunities for professional growth while exposure to partners’ analytic techniques upskills every analyst in the operation.

Though barriers to cooperation remain, relationships are no longer confined to physical engagement. Partners plan, train, and operate as one multinational team. With US and NATO military planning increasingly integrated, the ability to merge national-level processes into a single operation that capitalizes on partner expertise has never been more important. Knowing the enemy through open-source intelligence is not just our work, it is our intelligence team’s central purpose.

Colonel Christina Bembenek is the commander of the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade (Theater). She has served in multiple tactical, operational, and strategic intelligence assignments and was the first commandant of the Military Intelligence Corps.

Captain Chels Michta was the former officer in charge of the Army Europe OSINT Center and currently serves as an intelligence officer in the 66th Military Intelligence Brigade (Theater) All Source Control Element. She is also a 2023 Atlantic Council Millenium Fellow.

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

Image credit: Staff Sgt. Chad Menegay, US Army

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Christina Bembenek, Chels Michta · June 28, 2024

18. The Show Trial of Evan Gershkovich

The Show Trial of Evan Gershkovich

For Putin, journalism is more a danger to the regime than espionage.

thedispatch.com · by Kevin D. Williamson · June 28, 2024

In Russia, the trial—“trial”—of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich is under way.

The “trial” is being held in secret, though Gershkovich was displayed—locked in a glass box with his head shaved—for the benefit of the press and the amusement of the Russian people. U.S. Embassy personnel have been banned from the proceedings, as have Gershkovich’s supporters, as have reporters, as have all others who are not carefully pre-screened participants in the show-trial pageant being put on by the state security apparatus. Gershkovich is charged with espionage. There is no evidence that Gershkovich was involved in anything other than journalism, but if you are Vladimir Putin, journalism—real, honest journalism—is at least as much of a danger to your regime as is espionage, and probably more of one.

Mark Leonard of the European Council on Foreign Relations offers a useful analogy: In the era of globalization, rival countries end up being something like estranged spouses who use the things that link them together—the children, the family home—as weapons against one another. We have seen this with trade, with travel, with participation in multinational institutions, and much else. And we have seen it with journalism. The foreign correspondent is as ancient a figure in international relations as the diplomat, and it is an increasingly dangerous occupation. Authoritarians fear journalists, for obvious reasons. The so-called People’s Republic of China is a prolific jailer of domestic journalists—half of them Uyghurs—and Beijing has made a special example out of Hong Kong media entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, who is a British national. Like Gershkovich, Lai is accused of espionage: “collusion with foreign forces” and “illegally supplying state secrets overseas.”

As George Orwell doesn’t seem to have actually said, news is what they don’t want you to print—the rest is advertising. And those are good, bold, true words, but a tough credo to live up to when the people who don’t want you printing things have a gestapo and a gulag and Polonium-210.

The Russian show trial is an established national tradition. It is a feature of whatever we want to call the form of government practiced by Putin. It was a feature of the communist regime that preceded the current era, and it was a feature of the czarist regime that preceded the communists. Russia has had many revolutions of sorts, but wherever it has gone, it has found itself there. As the Economist once put it: “Peter the Great, tsar from 1682 to 1725, set out to modernise a medieval theocracy, and produced a militaristic police state based on slave labour.”

Peter the Great would recognize what is being done to Evan Gershkovich, as he, too, constructed special displays for his political enemies: stone pillars with iron prongs radiating out from them, upon which we hung the heads of those who got on the wrong side of the czar. His former brother-in-law was decapitated and his head displayed on such a structure in St. Petersburg for years; there was still some of it left when the deposed governor of Siberia was pinned up next to it. These Russian “spectacles of suffering” were not just manifestations of psychotic cruelty—they were intentional strategies of statecraft.

And so it goes. Russia is not a failed state but a series of failed (and failing) states, with something much more enormously failed behind them.

The perversity of the contrast between Russian culture and Russian public life should be held onto as a kind of civilizational memento mori by those of us who have, over the years, made the profound error of investing our hopes in intellect and high culture. Russia has those gifts in excess: in literature, in music, in science, in philosophy—in almost everything except creating the conditions under which ordinary life may be lived decently and securely by ordinary people. It is as though Russian public life knows how to create only geniuses and monsters, along with a few men who were both.

But Americans can no longer allow ourselves to be shocked by that: If we did not learn the lesson of Germany—when the most cultured, urban, and educated elements of Europe’s most intellectually advanced country carried out the Holocaust—then we have our own contemporary example, less monstrous but no less illuminating. Men of culture and intellectual achievement have proven to be easily seduced by the scanty rewards—a little bit of money and some transitory notoriety—that go along with being the house philosophers of the Trump movement.

If not intellect and culture, then what is reliable proof against illiberalism, tyranny, and monstrosity? Catholics could not be tempted for a second to indulge the notion that our religion nurtures the kind of civilizations that are resistant to that sort of thing—cf. Franco, Pinochet, Salazar, Trujillo, Mussolini, etc.—but the heirs of the Reformation can hardly have failed to notice that so many “neutral” Protestant countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden) found it relatively easy to establish a modus vivendi with the Third Reich. Danish resistance to the Nazi occupation lasted only two hours, during which time the Danes seem to have inflicted … zero casualties, though they did capture two Germans.

So: Not intellect, not high culture, not religion. In what should Americans trust? The Constitution? Maybe. But it is worth noting that the same element in American life that cheers on Putin’s forces in Ukraine is also cheering on the effort to elect as the next president of these United States a man who not long ago insisted that the Constitution must face “termination” if its rules would keep him out of office.

I think our best defense is the people in Evan Gershkovich’s business—I mean the actual journalists, not the rodeo clowns who play at journalism. (Putin has suggested he is open to a prisoner swap for Gershkovich; the inconvenient fact is that the best candidate for such a swap, a man who is much more valuable to Putin than he is to us—I mean, of course, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson—is not a prisoner.) Thomas Jefferson thought so: “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter.”

There is a reason Vladimir Putin cannot abide Evan Gershkovich and those who do that kind of work. God bless and keep them.

thedispatch.com · by Kevin D. Williamson · June 28, 2024

19. Why Russia's Warships in Cuba Matter to the United States

Why Russia's Warships in Cuba Matter to the United States

Newsweek · by Mike Kelly U.S. Representative · June 27, 2024

Published Jun 27, 2024 at 2:39 PM EDTShare

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Winston Churchill once said, "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." That saying especially holds true today as we watch foreign political influence spreading across the Western Hemisphere at an alarming rate.

In recent weeks, a fleet of Russian warships pulled into Cuban waters, less than 100 miles off the Florida coast. The deployment of warships, including a nuclear submarine, is Vladimir Putin's latest direct provocation to the West, particularly to the United States. We should not take this move lightly. It's Moscow's latest attempt to exert the type of influence in Latin America and the Caribbean region that it did during the Cold War, threats which ultimately led to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Previously, I have warned about the threats made by China in and around the United States. In 2023, the world watched as a Chinese-owned high-altitude balloon criss-crossed the country for nearly a week, hovering over U.S. military bases and potentially collecting secret and sensitive information.

Last summer, we learned China has been operating a spy base in communist Cuba since 2019. Reports indicated the two nations held joint military training in Cuba, which is also home to deep-water ports critical for China to sustain its own naval fleet. Here is why that matters: China now has the world's largest navy, "operating 234 warships to the U.S. Navy's 219," according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

This is why, in recent years, I've called attention to two longstanding principles of American foreign policy: the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt Corollary. Both address foreign intervention in the Western Hemisphere and offer guidance to counter provocative acts by foreign adversaries.

Issued in the early 19th century by President James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine established that a foreign state's intervention in the political affairs of the Americas was potentially a hostile act against the United States. In the 1900s, President Theodore Roosevelt built upon it with what is known as the Roosevelt Corollary. Under this policy, the United States could directly intervene in the internal affairs of Latin American countries if they did not do enough to prevent European aggression.

MOSCOW, RUSSIA - JUNE 22: Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) looks at Russian military officers during a wreath laying ceremony at the Unknown Soldiers's Tomb near the Kremlin, marking the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow,... MOSCOW, RUSSIA - JUNE 22: Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) looks at Russian military officers during a wreath laying ceremony at the Unknown Soldiers's Tomb near the Kremlin, marking the Day of Remembrance and Sorrow, on June 22, 2024, in Moscow, Russia. Russians and Belarusians mark June 22nd as the anniversary of Nazi Germanys invasion of USSR in 1941. Getty Images

Today, both China and Russia are expanding their influence in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean. A February 2024 report from the Atlantic Council put it this way: "China and Russia operate and influence in a myriad of ways, but the core of their influence is through covert and overt strategies to undermine the US position in the region and to shape the foreign policy preferences in Latin America and the Caribbean."

The report notes that while China has been able to economically connect itself to the region, Russia has not. But Russia "seeks to sustain state-to-state security relationships with Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela" to both expand its military influence in the region and sustain the Russian economy through military asset sales to Latin American countries.

China's military positioning coupled with its economic influence are parts of its broader Belt and Road Initiative, a global infrastructure and economic development plan involving nearly two dozen Latin American and Caribbean countries. Russia is also a member of Belt and Road. Through the initiative, China has leveraged its economic power to advance its military interests in our backyard.

We also cannot forget about the Panama Canal. Although the United States built the canal over 100 years ago to expand and ease international travel and trade, today China increasingly controls ports on both ends of it. The waterway is a key piece of Belt and Road expansion in Latin America. This development is incredibly concerning. A top American adversary is in a position to control the canal that we built.

President Joe Biden and his administration must show strength on the world stage. Drawing a proverbial "red line" only to later allow someone to cross it without recourse shows weakness. Withdrawing from Afghanistan only to allow the Taliban to retake the country showed weakness. Appeasing dictators in Latin America and letting Russia escalate tensions in our backyard shows weakness.

History has shown that bad actors will fill a power vacuum unless the United States takes the wheel. In an era of rising global tensions, and with China and Russia seeking greater global influence, now is a time for unwavering American leadership both at home and abroad.

U.S. Representative Mike Kelly is a Republican representing Pennsylvania's 16th Congressional District. He currently serves as a member of the U.S.-China Working Group and as the Chairman of the Ways & Means Subcommittee on Tax.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

20. China urges US to stop supporting the Philippines' 'provocations'

China urges US to stop supporting the Philippines' 'provocations'

28 Jun 2024 05:41PM

(Updated: 28 Jun 2024 05:44PM)

channelnewsasia.com

BEIJING: China urged the United States on Friday (Jun 28) to stop tolerating and supporting "provocations" by the Philippines, after Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell expressed concern about Beijing's "destabilising actions in the South China Sea".

China and the Philippines have recently traded accusations over "dangerous and illegal manoeuvres" affecting their respective vessels in the area around the Second Thomas Shoal, a disputed atoll in the busy waterway.

"The United States should stop condoning and supporting the Philippines' provocations and nuisance and take practical actions to safeguard peace and stability in the South China Sea," said Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning.

The Philippines has sent missions to resupply soldiers living aboard a rusty, ageing warship deliberately grounded by Manila in 1999 at the atoll to reinforce its sovereignty claims.

At a regular briefing, Mao added that the Philippines had turned its back on a consensus with China, challenging its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and insisting on delivering construction materials to the warship.

On Jun 17, a Philippine sailor was injured after what the Southeast Asian nation's military called "intentional-high speed ramming" by the Chinese Coast Guard, an assertion China has disputed, saying the actions were lawful.

Campbell made the remarks to China's Vice Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu during a telephone call on Thursday, the US State Department said.

The day before, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and his Philippine counterpart, Eduardo Ano, discussed shared concerns over China's "dangerous and escalatory actions".

The United States reaffirmed its commitment to the Philippines' security, the White House said.

China claims almost the entire South China Sea, including portions claimed by Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam.

21. How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War

Nothing like a winner?

Excerpts:

In the past, Russian elites had little desire to chance nuclear conflict. But now many of them are persuaded that NATO would not dare to respond. They see the West as tired and divided and, therefore, far less interested in a struggle against Russia. They believe U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are weak. In this context, they think that NATO would not unanimously rally to defend an attacked country. Instead, Russian elites believe that NATO will be overwhelmed with so much panic and chaos that it would do little at all—ruining the credibility of Western governments.

Not everyone in Russia thinks the war will end if Trump is elected.

A provocation like this could be particularly helpful to Russia in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election. The Kremlin may even believe that such a crisis would fatally undermine Biden’s odds. An emergency in the Baltics in which Biden stumbles could paint the U.S. president as weak and incompetent, and prove former U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that NATO is obsolete.

Putin, of course, may also try to weaken Biden without attacking the Baltics. Most of my sources believe that Putin could deal blows to the president by simply winning more battles in Ukraine—and that he will try to do just that. The Kremlin wants to weaken Biden so that Trump can win, given the latter candidate’s vocal fondness of Russia. Trump, for example, has promised to end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” if elected.

But not everyone in Russia thinks the war will end if Trump is elected. Some believe that the war will not end in any situation. As a businessman close to the Kremlin told me, Putin has grown too fond of the war, which has helped him mobilize society, imprison some dissidents, kill others, and force most of the rest out of the country. The war has also united the elites, who now feel unwanted in the West and see Putin as their only hope for a good life. As a result, the invasion means there is less pressure on Putin than ever before.

The notion of an endless war in Ukraine terrifies Russia’s elite, who still hope that the invasion will conclude. They dream of returning as quickly as possible to the peaceful time of February 23, 2022. But for now, they are silent. They see no way back.

How Russian Elites Made Peace With the War

Moscow’s Victories Have Dampened Opposition to the Kremlin

By Mikhail Zygar

June 28, 2024

Foreign Affairs · June 28, 2024

When the war in Ukraine began, the Russian elite entered a state of shock. As the West imposed sanctions and travel bans, Russia’s rich and politically connected citizens became convinced that their previous lives were over. Battlefield losses quickly piled up, and many deemed the invasion a catastrophic mistake. “The Russia we deeply love has fallen into the hands of idiots,” Roman Trotsenko, the former head of the country’s largest shipbuilding company, told another businessperson during a phone conversation that was leaked in April 2023. “They adhere to bizarre, outdated nineteenth-century ideologies. This cannot end well. It will end in disaster.” In another leaked conversation, the famous music producer Iosif Prigozhin (not related to Yevgeny Prigozhin) called Russian President Vladimir Putin and his government “fucking criminals.” Some of the oligarchs who were abroad at the time of the invasion refused to return to Russia, including Mikhail Fridman, the owner of the country’s largest private bank.

But that was then. As 2023 wound on, elites started endorsing the war. More musicians began traveling to perform in the occupied territories. In October, Fridman returned to Moscow from London, having decided that life in the West under sanctions was unbearable and that the situation in Russia was comparatively comfortable. And there have been no new recordings of oligarchs grousing about the war. In fact, it is hard to imagine such conversations happening.

That is because Russian elites have learned to stop worrying about the conflict. They have concluded that the invasion, even if they do not support it outright, is a tolerable fact of life. As a result, the odds that they might challenge the Kremlin’s decisions—which were always slim—have gone away entirely. And instead of debating whether to support Putin, Russian elites are now discussing a different question: how the war might end.

They have different answers. Some believe that a big battlefield win would allow Putin to claim a partial victory and, therefore, pause the war. Others think that Putin will not stop until he has gone all the way to Kyiv. Some are convinced that what truly matters to Putin is confrontation with the West, not victory in Ukraine, and that he will thus attack another state in Europe irrespective of what happens with the current conflict. But a few pessimists maintain that the premise of the question itself is wrong. As they see it, the war suits Putin’s political interests, and so he will keep fighting for as long as he lives.

HOW THEY LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING

There are multiple reasons why Russian elites have shifted toward Putin. One is that they have become more cautious as Moscow cracks down on dissent. Another, relatedly, is that they understand it is meaningless to protest. But perhaps the biggest reason for their change is they have begun to see the invasion in a fundamentally different light. Today, they believe Russia is prevailing. Moscow, after all, is making steady, if slow, battlefield gains. Ukraine is battered and outgunned, operating with a massive artillery-shell disadvantage. And Western support for Kyiv is waning, jeopardizing Ukraine’s access to military supplies.

“It’s bad to be an outcast as a winner, but it’s worse to be an outcast as a loser,” one Russian oligarch, one Russian oligarch, who had criticized the war before but now seems to understand it, told me. (He, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity, to protect his safety.) The oligarch said that everything in Russia has changed: attitudes toward Putin, views of Ukraine, and outlooks on the West. “We must win this war,” he told me. “Otherwise, they won’t allow us to live. And, of course, Russia would collapse.”

With this switch in perspective, oligarchs are now discussing what conditions in Ukraine might constitute a victory. For the relative optimists, any major successful offensive would be enough. To these elites, such a victory would satisfy Putin and break Ukraine’s will to liberate more territory, even if it doesn’t deter the country from defending what it has left. They believe the most probable target of this sort of offensive to be Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city.

It’s bad to be an outcast as a winner, but it’s worse to be an outcast as a loser.

An all-out assault on Kharkiv would be gruesome. The city, Ukraine’s capital from 1919 to 1934, was a vibrant hub of Ukrainian and Russian culture, science, and education before the war began. If Russia tries to take it, Kharkiv will experience the near-total destruction of its remaining infrastructure, leading to rapid depopulation as already scant essential services become impossible to maintain. The people who stick around would then have to survive under Russian occupation.

But as horrible as this outcome is, it is the least terrible vision championed by Russia’s elite. According to one businessman with close connections to the Kremlin, Putin won’t be satisfied by winning Ukraine’s northeast. The only outcome he will accept is the capture of Kyiv. Putin harbors a special, almost mystical connection with the Ukrainian capital, which he views as the cradle of Russian civilization. Putin has a particular fondness for the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra, an old Orthodox monastery where he spent nearly all his time during his last official visit to the city, in 2013. The Lavra is the resting place of several venerated Russian saints and historical figures, including the imperial Russian Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin, whom Putin deeply admires. Putin even commissioned a statue of Stolypin that now stands near the Kremlin. His desire to preserve the Lavra may explain why Russia has not heavily bombed Kyiv in the way it has other Ukrainian cities. (Russia’s new defense minister, the deeply religious Andrei Belousov, also has a strong affinity for the Lavra.)

If Russia launches a second campaign to capture the Ukrainian capital, the military would likely begin its offensive in Belarus, just as it did in the winter of 2022. It would probably involve, as it did then, Russian troops driving through the radioactive wasteland surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But many in Moscow believe that this time, with Russia’s military hardened and Ukraine’s reserves weakened, their country could win. In the view of Russian elites, Ukrainians are simply too tired to put up another tenacious defense.

NO WAY OUT

For Putin, however, the war in Ukraine is not only—or even mostly—about Ukraine. Instead, people close to Russia’s president say that he sees the invasion as just one front in a conflict with the West. That means Russia’s battlefield success may not be enough to please Putin. To defeat his real foes, in Brussels and Washington, Putin may feel like he needs to attack a NATO member.

According to Russia’s elites, the most likely target would be Estonia or Latvia: the two Baltic countries with large Russian minorities. Moscow would follow a familiar playbook. First, members of the Russian Federal Security Service would get Russian speakers in one of the two countries to claim they are being oppressed by a neo-Nazi government and are in need of the Kremlin’s aid. In response, Russian troops would cross the border and take control of municipalities in an eastern part of either state, such as the predominantly Russian-speaking Estonian city of Narva. This territorial seizure would issue a momentous challenge to NATO, an alliance based on the principle that an attack on one of its members, no matter how small, is an attack on all. By taking Narva, Putin would test whether the bloc is really willing to risk a third world war over a few square miles on the Russian border.

In the past, Russian elites had little desire to chance nuclear conflict. But now many of them are persuaded that NATO would not dare to respond. They see the West as tired and divided and, therefore, far less interested in a struggle against Russia. They believe U.S. President Joe Biden and European leaders are weak. In this context, they think that NATO would not unanimously rally to defend an attacked country. Instead, Russian elites believe that NATO will be overwhelmed with so much panic and chaos that it would do little at all—ruining the credibility of Western governments.

Not everyone in Russia thinks the war will end if Trump is elected.

A provocation like this could be particularly helpful to Russia in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election. The Kremlin may even believe that such a crisis would fatally undermine Biden’s odds. An emergency in the Baltics in which Biden stumbles could paint the U.S. president as weak and incompetent, and prove former U.S. President Donald Trump’s assertion that NATO is obsolete.

Putin, of course, may also try to weaken Biden without attacking the Baltics. Most of my sources believe that Putin could deal blows to the president by simply winning more battles in Ukraine—and that he will try to do just that. The Kremlin wants to weaken Biden so that Trump can win, given the latter candidate’s vocal fondness of Russia. Trump, for example, has promised to end the war in Ukraine “within 24 hours” if elected.

But not everyone in Russia thinks the war will end if Trump is elected. Some believe that the war will not end in any situation. As a businessman close to the Kremlin told me, Putin has grown too fond of the war, which has helped him mobilize society, imprison some dissidents, kill others, and force most of the rest out of the country. The war has also united the elites, who now feel unwanted in the West and see Putin as their only hope for a good life. As a result, the invasion means there is less pressure on Putin than ever before.

The notion of an endless war in Ukraine terrifies Russia’s elite, who still hope that the invasion will conclude. They dream of returning as quickly as possible to the peaceful time of February 23, 2022. But for now, they are silent. They see no way back.

• MIKHAIL ZYGAR is a columnist at Der Spiegel, founding Editor in Chief of the independent Russian television channel TV Rain, and the author of War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.

Foreign Affairs · June 28, 2024

22. The Most Dangerous Game – Do Power Transitions Always Lead to War?

Excerpts:

By taking such steps, the United States can better respond to rising powers that may reject important elements of the international order yet still buy into much of it. India is the chief example here. Although it is one of Washington’s strategic partners, New Delhi holds positions on trade and liberalism that depart significantly from the principles endorsed by the United States.

India has a lax approach to intellectual property rights, for instance, and under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its government has been accused of dramatically eroding civil liberties. But given both countries’ wariness about China, they need each other. By rebuilding the order to include new areas or issues in which India has a deep interest—technology and cyberspace, for example—the United States can induce more buy-in from India and set the norms for future cooperation or restraint.

For now, however, the main focus should be China. A power transition is coming: China is still rising and could soon have the capability to revise the international order, which could ultimately unseat the status quo great power. That is what challengers do once they have risen. If the United States hopes to avoid that outcome, it cannot simply rely on confronting China or complaining about how China is playing the game. It will need to change the game itself.

The Most Dangerous Game

Do Power Transitions Always Lead to War?

By Manjari Chatterjee Miller

July/August 2024

Published on June 18, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power · June 18, 2024

At first, many in Washington assumed that China’s rise could be managed. In response to the inexorable logic of modernization and some coaxing, China would become, as U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick put it in 2005, a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system. For a time, Beijing did seem to be tamed, as it appeared to embrace Western norms and international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Today, however, that hope is dying. On issue after issue, Beijing seems to be rejecting rather than accepting the U.S.-led global order, putting it on a collision course with Washington and prompting endless discussion about how to solve the “China challenge.” But for all the specificity of the debate—how to deter an invasion of Taiwan, what to do about Beijing’s expansionist claims in the South China Sea, and whether the West should economically and technologically decouple from China—at the heart of the matter lies a much bigger and older conundrum in international relations. How does a status quo power handle a rising power, and do moments of transition inexorably lead to war?

The political scientist Graham Allison has called the seemingly inevitable clash between the United States and China “the Thucydides trap.” The phrase refers to the pattern first laid out by the fifth-century Greek historian in his study of the conflict between Sparta, then the dominant power in ancient Greece, and Athens, its rising challenger. In The History of the Peloponnesian War, he famously concluded that “what made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” In the modern era, international relations scholars have come up with a name for this dynamic: power transition theory.

Pointing to history, the theory holds that ascendant powers routinely emerge to challenge the dominant power and the international order established by it, eventually leading to conflict. Far from remaining confined to the ivory tower, this conceptual framework has long guided official thinking. After World War II, for example, policymakers in Washington and Moscow worried that the Cold War between the established American power and the rising Soviet one might turn hot.

But power transition theory offers another implicit, and often overlooked, truth: that the way the established power manages the international order can matter as much as, if not more than, the ambitions of the challenger. Precisely because they are still rising, challengers generally have to act within the existing laws, norms, and institutions that govern international relations, even when they disagree with them. By contrast, established powers have the ability to adjust those rules and institutions in ways that sustain or enhance their own position. In other words, for a long-dominant hegemon, the best response to a threatening upstart may not be to confront or try to defeat it but to use the international order to contain it.

HOME-FIELD ADVANTAGE

Modern power transition theory originated with the political scientist A. F. K. Organski, who gave a general theoretical foundation to the problem first articulated by Thucydides. In 1958, Organski identified what he called a “recurring pattern” in international relations: in every era of history, he argued, there is a status quo power that eventually faces a challenger. During the Cold War, scholars such as Robert Gilpin, Jacek Kugler, and Ronald Tammen expanded on Organski’s thesis, agreeing that a rising power tends to be “dissatisfied” with the way that the dominant power influences the distribution of goods in the international system, thus preventing the challenger from reaping equal benefits. And so it rises to displace the status quo power, a confrontation that often leads to war.

In line with this thesis, most policymakers and analysts thinking about China today have been concerned almost exclusively with the direct threat posed by Beijing’s rise. This is not surprising, since power transition theory’s primary implication is that challenges by rising powers can lead to war. For this reason, the first generation of power transition theorists tended to focus on how the distribution of power affected the probability of war and peace: a concentration of power in a single hegemon could, in their view, stabilize the system until a challenger became sufficiently strong to contest that power. Applied to the United States and China today, this framing suggests a dire outcome. Even if a full power transition does not occur—that is, even if China eventually stagnates—Beijing might attain enough economic and military power to push back against Washington, raising the odds of war.

But the emphasis on China’s trajectory ignores the theory’s second implication—the part that attempts to explain why rising powers seek to challenge the great power in the first place. Power transition theorists argue that conflict emerges not simply as a consequence of a challenger’s growing power but because of the challenger’s relationship to the international order. Specifically, a rising power may be dissatisfied with existing international arrangements and may seek to gain sufficient power to eventually change them. Therefore, the way the status quo power manages the international order can determine whether rivalry turns into conflict.

Challengers generally have to act within existing norms, even when they disagree with them.

To understand why, it is necessary to grasp exactly which aspects of the existing order rising powers wish to change and how. Most rising powers are not wholly revisionist. Rather, they tend to dislike some elements of the international order while accepting others. Thucydides himself implicitly made this point: in his view, it was not just Athens’s rising power that led to the Peloponnesian War but also its dissatisfaction with some of the cultural and political norms that Sparta embraced. As Laurie Bagby has observed, Thucydides argued that the clash between the “national character” of Sparta (reticent, inward-looking) and that of Athens (daring and glory seeking) influenced how they approached the distribution of power and the international order. For example, Sparta was slow and hesitant to defend friendly states. This emboldened Athens to invade and annihilate a neutral state—the island of Melos—to demonstrate its strength and power. In his Melian Dialogue, Thucydides’s dramatic narration of the negotiations between Athens and Melos, Athens declares, in a show of the cultural norms that drove it, that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

Over the past decade or so, a new generation of power transition scholars has paid more attention to how rising powers, both past and present, interact with the international order. Stacie Goddard has studied the ways that rising powers justify their actions, showing, for example, that the long-dominant United Kingdom chose to accommodate the upstart United States in the 1820s because London recognized that Washington, through the Monroe Doctrine, was upholding existing norms of free trade, international law, and noninterference. Xiaoyu Pu has explored how rising powers strategically frame their views of order to domestic and foreign audiences. China, for example, has engaged in “conspicuous giving” and charity through its Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in an effort to convert economic power into diplomatic power. Rohan Mukherjee has looked at the tendency of challengers to sacrifice material interests in order to be accepted as a part of the great-power club. Japan, for instance, agreed to limit the size of its fleet at the Washington Naval Conference of 1921–22, notwithstanding its drive to become a major naval power, and China, despite its efforts to build a larger nuclear arsenal, agreed to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996.

Michelle Murray has shown how rising states seek to be recognized as full equals of established powers, as both the United States and imperial Germany did at the beginning of the twentieth century, and how denial of that recognition can fuel a “forceful contestation.” Joshua Shifrinson has noted that, contrary to what one might expect, rising powers are often careful to avoid antagonizing a declining great power, as the United States did when it supported the United Kingdom at the start of the Cold War. By accommodating the incumbent, a rising power can more quickly expand its own capabilities. And Kristen Hopewell, Emma Mawdsley, and Khalid Nadvi have each sought to identify the ways in which rising powers want to change the international order and why, concluding that they often cooperate with each other to modify the existing structures of global governance.

Watching Chinese President Xi Jinping speak about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Hong Kong, September 2023

Tyrone Siu / Reuters

This growing body of work has added important insights about how rising powers navigate the international order: rather than challenging it outright, they tend to accept many existing norms, cooperate to reject other aspects, and are sensitive to accusations of being overthrowers of existing arrangements. In doing so, they are playing a long game aimed at two objectives: using the arrangements of the current order to bolster their own rise, and weakening the architect of that order until they can attain sufficient power to create a new one. Yet this research also offers insights into how the great power can avoid this outcome. Left untended, the international order may facilitate a challenger that seeks to manipulate existing norms to gain advantage or to draw other countries into its own orbit. But the great power also has the ability to change the order in ways that limit these dangers.

As Sevasti-Eleni Vezirgiannidou has pointed out, it matters not only how the great power manages its relations with the rising power but also whether the great power is prepared to rethink the order it built. She argues that the United States has avoided contemplating changes to the liberal international order that could help slow its decline. Rather than strengthening or even reforming existing international institutions, Washington has often turned to ad hoc informal institutions and diplomacy, making the international order more fragmented and contested than ever. For example, Vezirgiannidou notes that the United States has sanctioned Iran, a fellow member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, for its nuclear program yet sought to legitimize India, which is not a member of the treaty, as a nuclear weapons state—an approach that may ultimately weaken international arms control arrangements. Such erosion of international institutions could accelerate China’s rise, making China more likely to challenge the existing order or even to precipitate a direct conflict with the United States.

By instead rethinking the formal institutions and existing practices of the international order, the United States can fortify its own position and diminish China’s influence, thus reducing the chance of conflict. But Washington should act quickly. For now, Beijing is still a hegemon in the making and lacks the clout and capability to impose a new order: even as it seeks to get around some of them, it must generally play by established practices and norms. At some point, however, American leaders could find that it is China, not the United States, that is writing the rules of the game.

PLAYING TO WIN

To put the more recent insights of power transition theory into practice, it is important to identify the aspects of the liberal international order that China and other challengers accept, not only those that they reject. As my own research has shown, rising powers often have to embrace important elements of the international order to gain recognition as a future dominant power. At the end of the nineteenth century, both the United States and Meiji Japan understood that owning and administering colonies signified great-power status, even if, in the case of the United States, there was great debate about the moral, racial, and economic implications of doing so. Both rising powers accepted the need to become a colonizer to achieve status, with Japan acquiring a vast empire and the United States annexing Hawaii and the Philippines.

China’s behavior today is analogous. Consider the Belt and Road Initiative, its vast infrastructure and investment program. Western analysts have criticized the BRI for “debt-trap diplomacy,” arguing that Beijing extends loans to smaller countries in the global South as a way of gaining inordinate influence over their affairs. But it is hard to dispute that the initiative was built on the established multilateral principles underpinning the U.S.-led liberal international order—namely, facilitating global trade and economic growth through interconnectivity. Accusing China and the BRI of wholesale revisionism not only leaves the United States open to charges of hypocrisy but also creates the perception that the United States is simply not able to compete with China in the global economy. A smarter approach would be to offer a better alternative to the BRI. So far, Washington has not done so. The West’s supposed answer to the BRI—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, a $600 billion initiative launched by the G-7—is hampered by its members’ domestic political constraints and their limited ability to control private-sector investments.

Rather than seeking to confront China directly—a strategy that could itself lead to conflict—the United States should determine how to change the order to reinforce its own power. To begin with, this means recognizing that a challenger is far more likely to disrupt than disfigure the order. In Tanzania, for example, China has established an academy where young leaders from various African ruling parties are taught about the subordinate position of courts and the importance of rigid party discipline. But even this project seeks only to offer—rather than impose—China’s authoritarian model of governance and development. And at any rate, Beijing’s broader efforts to spread its ideology on the continent have had mixed success. The United States, by contrast, has the power and authority to press for changes in the order that could strengthen African support or existing institutions.

Yet Washington’s management of the order has been underwhelming. The Biden administration’s 2021 Summit for Democracy, for example, was intended to shore up liberalism. But the meeting included countries such as India and Nigeria that today are hardly considered paragons of democratic practice; it also largely sidelined civil society and had no concrete agenda or outcomes. On economics, the United States has to a significant degree abandoned its long-held belief in trade liberalization, yet it has not even bothered to frame its aggressive use of tariffs and industrial policy as part of a systematic rethinking of the global economic order.

MORE FRIENDS, MORE POWER

If recent power transition theory makes clear that the United States needs to rebuild the liberal order to sustain American power, it leaves open how. One promising approach is to address issues that are not yet governed by international norms. Take cybersecurity. To address the growing threat of Chinese and Russian hackers, the Biden administration has made cybersecurity a national priority, yet it has failed to establish broader international cooperation, including by setting down international regulations and penalties for cyberattacks. Other issues for which international standards are deficient or lacking include social media, cross-border data flows, food security, pandemic preparedness, and artificial intelligence.

To truly restructure the order, however, the United States also needs buy-in from its allies. An international order cannot be built or rebuilt by the hegemon alone; it takes a coalition of the willing. Consider the Cold War, which could be described as a successful case of a power transition that did not end in direct conflict between the hegemons themselves: confronted by the rise of the Soviet Union, the United States was able to use its alliances to build a liberal international order in ways that strengthened the West and helped contain the Soviet challenge. Indeed, the communist threat gave Washington’s allies and partners an unambiguous rationale for supporting such efforts. The new Western-led order was expressed both in military alliances such as NATO and in international institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the precursor to the WTO.

Today, the rationale for supporting U.S.-led innovations to the order is not as clear. Many countries are glad to do business with both China and the United States and want to preserve that flexibility. Nonetheless, the United States has an advantage. Building on its decades-old alliances and international relationships, it has introduced several new formal arrangements with other countries, such as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, with Australia, India, and Japan, and AUKUS, with Australia and the United Kingdom, which are both underpinned by the desire to contain China. By contrast, China has no special friendships or strategic partners, let alone formal military allies; its emerging partnership with Russia is still fragile. Not surprisingly, the international institutions that Beijing has spearheaded, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization of Eurasian countries and the BRICS—the group founded by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—have limited influence.

Washington’s management of the international order has been underwhelming.

Still, as power transition theory shows, Washington cannot rest on its laurels. For several decades, the center of gravity in world politics has been shifting away from the West. China and India have been vying to lead the developing world, and both have sought to highlight the divide between the global South and the West. The United States needs to show that its interests are not in opposition to those of non-Western countries. At the WTO, for example, Washington has wisely supported changes that aim to be inclusive but are also pragmatic and efficient. These include the increasing use of multilateral negotiations, or negotiations that are in principle open to all parties but are in fact mostly undertaken by only those members that are particularly interested in the issue at hand—an approach that is endorsed by most developing countries but opposed by India. Similarly, the Biden administration’s promotion of “friend shoring,” or bringing supply chains out of China and onto less hostile territory, holds tremendous potential for building more trade links with developing countries. But Washington needs to go further. With friend shoring, it needs to explain what its criteria for friendship are and what exactly its friends will get, beyond merely more bilateral trade.

By taking such steps, the United States can better respond to rising powers that may reject important elements of the international order yet still buy into much of it. India is the chief example here. Although it is one of Washington’s strategic partners, New Delhi holds positions on trade and liberalism that depart significantly from the principles endorsed by the United States.

India has a lax approach to intellectual property rights, for instance, and under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, its government has been accused of dramatically eroding civil liberties. But given both countries’ wariness about China, they need each other. By rebuilding the order to include new areas or issues in which India has a deep interest—technology and cyberspace, for example—the United States can induce more buy-in from India and set the norms for future cooperation or restraint.

For now, however, the main focus should be China. A power transition is coming: China is still rising and could soon have the capability to revise the international order, which could ultimately unseat the status quo great power. That is what challengers do once they have risen. If the United States hopes to avoid that outcome, it cannot simply rely on confronting China or complaining about how China is playing the game. It will need to change the game itself.

• MANJARI CHATTERJEE MILLER is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and Associate Professor of International Relations at Boston University. She is the author of Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power.

Foreign Affairs · by Why Nations Rise: Narratives and the Path to Great Power · June 18, 2024

23. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 27, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, June 27, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-june-27-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Russian forces have sustained the tempo of their offensive operations in the Toretsk direction since activating in the area on June 18 and likely aim to reduce a Ukrainian salient in the area, but there is little current likelihood of rapid Russian gains near Toretsk. Russian forces have committed only limited forces to this operation so far, which suggests that Russian forces continue to prioritize gradual advances through consistent grinding assaults over operationally significant gains through rapid maneuver.
• Slow grinding Russian offensive operations in the Toretsk direction are in line with Russian President Vladimir Putin's articulated theory of victory that posits that Russian forces will be able to continue gradual creeping advances indefinitely, prevent Ukraine from conducting successful operationally significant counteroffensive operations, and win a war of attrition against Ukrainian forces
• Ukraine signed long-term security agreements with the European Union (EU), Lithuania, and Estonia on June 27.
• Russian officials and information space actors continue to frame migrants as a threat to Russian society amid ongoing efforts to utilize migrant communities to address Russia's force generation needs.
• The Kremlin may be using indirect means to bypass Russian law and codify a state ideology that emphasizes Russia's "traditional" social values while attempting to increase Russia's birth rate.
• There is currently no evidence supporting recent reports that North Korea may be sending engineering forces to rear areas of occupied Ukraine, and ISW has been unable to locate the North Korean confirmation that some Western amplifications allege has been made.
• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Siversk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City.
• Russian President Vladimir Putin held a meeting on the long-term future of the Russian Navy and Russian shipbuilding on June 26 and noted that the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) plans to introduce more than 40 new ships and vessels to the Russian Navy in 2024.

24. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 27, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, June 27, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-june-27-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Iranian hardliners have made only limited progress toward uniting behind a single candidate ahead of the Iranian presidential election. Remaining divisions among hardliners significantly increases the likelihood of a runoff vote.

• Iraq: Iran and Lebanese Hezbollah are reportedly concerned that Iranian-backed Iraqi militias could escalate the war with Israel too far. Iran has thus hesitated to approve the militias’ plans to intervene if Israel launched a major military offensive into Lebanon.

• West Bank: PIJ detonated a deep-buried IED targeting Israeli forces in the West Bank, killing one Israeli soldier and wounding 16 others. Palestinian militias previously conducted an EFP attack targeting Israeli forces in the area in July 2023.

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