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Quotes of the Day:
"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. That intellectuality is more vigorous that has attained its strength gradually. It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider — and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation — persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree."
– Alexander Graham Bell
"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
– C. S. Lewis
"If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity."
– John F. Kennedy
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 19, 2024
2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 19, 2024
3. U.S. Launches Effort to Stop Russia From Arming Houthis With Antiship Missiles
4. U.S. Detainees Provide Russia With Valuable Leverage
5. The Software Patch That Shook the World
6. From Honor Student to the Gunman Who Tried to Kill Donald Trump
7. What Happened to Digital Resilience?
8. How Americans Justify Political Violence
9. The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast
10. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, July 19, 2024
11. How Israel Turned the Tide in Rafah
12. Irreconcilable Differences: A guide to plans for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. by Sir Lawrence Freedman
13. The Crumbling Edifice of Conventional Deterrence
14. Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern
15. Confusion reigns as people turn to misinformation to understand Trump shooting
16. Making sense of rumors about the Trump assassination attempt
17. A Russian Bot Farm Used AI to Lie to Americans. What Now?
18. Force Design: Where is the Evidence of Revolutionary Change?
19. Rotting From the Corps? (Critique of the Army officer corps)
20. Secret Service's Lack Of Red Dot Pistol Optics Puzzles SWAT Officers
1. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 19, 2024
Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 19, 2024
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-19-2024
Key Takeaways:
- Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky reiterated the importance of developing an international consensus for pursuing peace negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.
- Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban appears to be augmenting several Russian information operations amid continued efforts to present himself as a possible future mediator between Russia and Ukraine.
- New United Kingdom (UK) Defense Secretary John Healey stated on July 19 that Ukraine can use UK-provided weapons to strike military targets in Russia, despite previous reports that the UK had not permitted Ukraine to use UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles to strike military targets within Russia.
- The Kremlin is reportedly concerned about the long-term social and political implications of Russian veterans returning from the war in Ukraine.
- The Russian government is reportedly considering stricter measures to directly censor critical voices on Russian social media.
- Russian authorities continue to propose stricter migration legislation as Russia's ultranationalists continue to espouse xenophobic rhetoric and complain about the Russian government's perceived lenient migration policy.
- Russian forces recently advanced near Siversk, Toretsk, and Avdiivka.
- Disorganization continues to plague Russian efforts to integrate personnel who served in Russian proxy forces in occupied Ukraine into the Russian military bureaucracy.
2. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 19, 2024
Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 19, 2024
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-july-19-2024
Key Takeaways:
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Yemen: The Houthis launched a one-way attack drone into Tel Aviv for the first time. The Houthis have conducted reconnaissance in force against Israeli air defenses in recent months, which may have enabled the attack.
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Gaza Strip: Israel announced that there are “increasing indications” that Hamas’ top military commander, Mohammad Deif, is dead. The IDF conducted an airstrike targeting Deif in the southern Gaza Strip on July 13.
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Iran: US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stated that Iran has reduced its nuclear breakout time to one to two weeks. His comments come as Iran has in recent months expanded its nuclear program and run computer simulations that could help build a nuclear weapon.
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Lebanon: The IDF conducted airstrikes into southern Lebanon, killing two officers from Lebanese Hezbollah’s Radwan unit. The Radwan unit is Hezbollah’s elite commando force and is designed to conduct ground attacks into Israel.
3. U.S. Launches Effort to Stop Russia From Arming Houthis With Antiship Missiles
Excerpts:
Though Kurilla called for an intensified “whole of government” effort, a Biden administration official said some measures have already been taken to complement the military actions.
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on individuals and entities providing funding to the Houthis, as well as on Houthi leaders, the official added. On Jan. 10, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution sponsored by the U.S. and Japan demanding that the Houthis end the attacks. On Jan. 17, the U.S. designated the Houthis as specially designated global terrorists, reversing a February 2021 decision to take them off that list.
On Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller announced the sanctioning of several individuals and entities, along with five ships, “that have played critical roles in financing the Houthis’ destabilizing activities.”
U.S. Launches Effort to Stop Russia From Arming Houthis With Antiship Missiles
A U.S. commander sent confidential letter warning that U.S. is failing to deter Red Sea attacks on shipping
https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-launches-effort-to-stop-russia-from-arming-houthis-with-antiship-missiles-98131a8a?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1
By Michael R. GordonFollow
and Lara SeligmanFollow
Updated July 19, 2024 8:28 am ET
WASHINGTON—U.S. intelligence agencies are warning that Russia might arm Houthi militants in Yemen with advanced antiship missiles in retaliation for the Biden administration’s support for Ukrainian strikes inside Russia with U.S. weapons.
The new intelligence comes as the top U.S. Middle East commander recently advised in a classified letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin that military operations in the region are “failing” to deter Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and that a broader approach is needed, according to U.S. officials.
The White House has launched a confidential push to try to stop Moscow from delivering the missiles to the Iranian-backed Houthis, who have been attacking shipping in the Red Sea for eight months in a show of solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza.
The Houthi threat was highlighted early Friday local time when an armed drone that the Israeli military said was launched from Yemen struck Tel Aviv, the militant group’s first successful targeting of the city since the beginning of the Gaza war. One person was killed and several people were injured by the blast, which hit an apartment near a U.S. diplomatic building, authorities said.
The administration’s diplomatic effort to head off Moscow’s transfer of missiles to Yemen involves using a third country to try to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin not to join Iran in providing weapons to the Houthis, according to U.S. officials, who declined to identify the country.
The combination of intelligence that Moscow might be planning to provide military support in Yemen and the warnings from Gen. Erik Kurilla, the head of U.S. Central Command, has raised the question of whether the White House is doing enough to halt the attacks in the critical waterways.
A mock drone and missile at a square in Sana’a, Yemen, last week. PHOTO: YAHYA ARHAB/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK
An administration official said Central Command has been asked to prepare a broader list of potential targets, including specific militants, for possible strikes.
Some U.S. officials say, however, that more could have already been done to better protect the commercial shipping, including hitting larger weapons-storage facilities, targeting Houthi leaders and picking targets with a somewhat higher potential casualty count.
A decision by Moscow to arm the Houthis would mark an escalation in its confrontation with Washington, which has been playing out mostly over the conflict in Ukraine. Moscow has already sparked deep concern among U.S. officials by solidifying ties with North Korea and Iran and securing China’s help in strengthening the Russian defense industry.
Some analysts think Russians might be brandishing the threat of sending antiship missiles to discourage the administration from taking additional steps to assist Kyiv, such as authorizing Ukrainian forces to use U.S.-supplied Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, weapons against airfields on Russian territory.
A rocket fired by a mobile launcher in Ukraine in September 2022. PHOTO: ADRIENNE SURPRENANT/MYOP FOR WSJ
Kurilla called in his letter to Austin for a stepped-up “whole of government” effort against the Houthis, employing economic, diplomatic and potentially stronger military pressure to discourage attacks on ships in the Red Sea and a narrow strait known as Bab el-Mandeb, off Yemen’s coast, officials said. At least 30 ships have been damaged, and two have sunk.
“Many people found the tone of the memo to be a bit shocking,” a defense official said. It said essentially that “U.S. service members will die if we continue going this way.”
The White House has authorized the military to conduct strikes against Houthi missiles and drones about to be launched and taken other limited steps, which have included seven planned military operations.
A second defense official who defended the current policy said that the U.S. and its partners have destroyed “a significant amount of Houthi capability,” including hundreds of missiles and launchers, hundreds of attack drones, dozens of storage facilities for weapons and equipment, numerous command and control targets, air defense systems, radars and several helicopters.
But some Central Command officials say their forces have been unable to prevent the Houthis from regularly threatening commercial shipping in the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb because they haven’t had the approval to carry out a broader range of strikes.
The Houthi attacks have continued to disrupt shipping and keep the U.S. and its allies tied down, frustrating the Navy’s decades-old mission of keeping open the region’s critical sea lanes.
“If you tell the military to re-establish freedom of navigation and then you tell them to only be defensive, it isn’t going to work,” said one U.S. official. “It is all about protecting ships without affecting the root cause.”
Ships including the USS Eisenhower aircraft carrier sailing in the Red Sea last month. PHOTO: U.S. NAVY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The Houthis have a diverse arsenal of weapons to attack ships, including attack drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and unmanned boats. Many of the drones and missiles have been provided by Iran or use technology supplied by Tehran.
But the possibility that the Yemeni rebels might receive advanced Russian missiles presents a new danger.
“The Houthis have the most robust antiship capabilities among Iran’s regional proxy network,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank. “But Russian antiship weapons would represent a qualitative leap and add more teeth to the existing Houthi maritime threat.”
Middle East Eye, a London-based news site, reported last month that Russia has previously considered providing antiship cruise missiles to the Houthis but was talked out of doing so by the Saudis.
Since then, U.S. officials have seen continuing indications that Putin might yet provide the missiles.
Last month, Putin explicitly warned that Moscow might provide weapons to U.S. adversaries because of the White House Ukraine policy. “The response can be asymmetrical, and we will think about that,” Putin told journalists at an international economic forum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The nature of the intelligence pointing to a possible Russian move to arm the Houthis is unclear. While no missiles have been delivered yet, Houthi representatives have been observed in Russia, two U.S. officials said.
If the missiles were provided, they could be sent using Iranian smuggling routes, some U.S. officials say. The Russian Embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A Houthi attack in June on a merchant ship is shown in this image taken from a video. PHOTO: HOUTHI MEDIA CENTER/REUTERS
The Houthis vowed in December to strike any ship heading to Israeli ports. But many of their attacks have been directed against civilian ships with no ties to Israel or planned port calls, according to a June report by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency.
U.S. officials say that the Houthis and their Iranian backers have been using commercial ship tracking websites to identify and then target commercial vessels. The U.S. has warned companies that provide such data services to take steps to preclude the Houthis from gaining access to the shipping information and has also cautioned foreign governments where such companies are located.
U.S. warships have had close calls with missiles and drones from Yemen. In recent weeks the Houthis have expanded their campaign, including by launching missiles into the Arabian Sea.
Though Kurilla called for an intensified “whole of government” effort, a Biden administration official said some measures have already been taken to complement the military actions.
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on individuals and entities providing funding to the Houthis, as well as on Houthi leaders, the official added. On Jan. 10, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution sponsored by the U.S. and Japan demanding that the Houthis end the attacks. On Jan. 17, the U.S. designated the Houthis as specially designated global terrorists, reversing a February 2021 decision to take them off that list.
On Thursday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller announced the sanctioning of several individuals and entities, along with five ships, “that have played critical roles in financing the Houthis’ destabilizing activities.”
Write to Michael R. Gordon at michael.gordon@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com
Appeared in the July 20, 2024, print edition as 'U.S. Tries to Stop Russia From Arming Houthis'.
4. U.S. Detainees Provide Russia With Valuable Leverage
Excerpts:
“American citizens are now being persecuted, because there is a phobia which is supported in mass media and the public sector,” said Maria Bast, the chair of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights. “Of course, it’s mainly political.”
...
Not all cases involving Americans in Russia are overtly political. In cases dating at least to 2011, U.S. and dual citizens have been charged with crimes including homicide, assault, robbery, arson, fraud, bribery, smuggling, tampering and drug and sex offenses. Yet as tensions between the two countries rise over Russia’s war against Ukraine and Washington’s continued supply of lethal aid to Kyiv, even overtly criminal cases—and their outcomes—have assumed at the very least a prejudicial cast.
...
Thomas Stwalley and Jimmy Wilgus, serving lengthy prison terms for drug and sex offenses, respectively, said in phone interviews with the Journal that Russian authorities had held closed-door trials and altered court testimony, interfering with their cases. Wilgus said he was coerced into signing a confession. Stwalley pleaded not guilty and said authorities had planted drugs on him.
“All of these cases have now become political cases that Russia believes will provide some sort of leverage in any postwar negotiations,” Pomeranz said. “Russia is playing a long game that it believes will ultimately prevail.”
U.S. Detainees Provide Russia With Valuable Leverage
As relations between Moscow and Washington continue to worsen, the cases of 20 Americans jailed in Russia assume a political shade
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/u-s-detainees-provide-russia-with-valuable-leverage-606d6a41?mod=latest_headlines
By Brett Forrest
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July 20, 2024 5:30 am ET
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Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying. The decision came after a secret trial that the U.S. has condemned as a sham. Photo: Donat Sorokin/TASS/ZUMA PRESS PHOTO: DONAT SOROKIN/TASS/ZUMA PRESS
The conviction and sentencing of Evan Gershkovich on Friday, the Wall Street Journal reporter falsely accused by Russian authorities of spying, marks the latest turn in a cycle of arrests and convictions that U.S. officials say reflects a policy of gathering American prisoners to trade for Russians held in Western countries.
A Wall Street Journal review of Russian court documents and media reports shows that at least 20 U.S. and dual U.S.-Russian citizens are being detained in Russian jails and labor camps.
Six U.S. or dual U.S.-Russian citizens have been arrested since Gershkovich’s detainment in March last year.
“They are holding these Americans as potential leverage for future negotiations,” said William Pomeranz, a former director of the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, in Washington, and a specialist in the Russian legal system.
READ EVAN GERSHKOVICH’S WORK
On the Ground in Putin's Russia: Coverage of a Country at War
Russian President Vladimir Putin “is in the driver’s seat since he will control the timetable for any deal,” Pomeranz added. “Russia does not have a lot of leverage over U.S. policy, except for upping the consequences for detained Americans.”
The Russian embassy in Washington didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
Russian authorities detained Gershkovich while he was on a reporting assignment in Yekaterinburg, roughly 900 miles east of Moscow. In June, prosecutors approved an indictment of Gershkovich, falsely alleging that he was gathering information about a Russian defense contractor on behalf of the Central Intelligence Agency. Authorities have produced no public evidence to support their allegations, which Gershkovich, the Journal and the U.S. have vehemently and repeatedly denied.
Gershkovich received a 16-year prison sentence Friday.
Gershkovich is one of two Americans the State Department is known to have designated as wrongfully detained in Russia, a step that allows the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs to engage on behalf of a U.S. citizen.
The other known designee, Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine convicted in 2020 of espionage, a charge that both he and the U.S. deny, is serving a 16-year sentence in the IK-17 penal colony in Mordovia, roughly 300 miles east of Moscow.
Paul Whelan in a Moscow courtroom in 2020. PHOTO: SOFIA SANDURSKAYA/MOSCOW NEWS AGENCY/AP
While Gershkovich and Whelan receive high-level U.S. support, the State Department continues to evaluate some number of outstanding cases for wrongful-detainment status, according to people familiar with the matter.
“The Department of State continuously reviews the circumstances surrounding the detentions of U.S. nationals overseas, including those in Russia, for indicators that they are wrongful,” a State Department spokeswoman said. “When making assessments, the department conducts a legal, fact-based review that looks at the totality of the circumstances for each case individually.”
Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russia citizen and journalist with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded media organization, traveled from her Prague home last spring to visit her ailing mother in Kazan, roughly 450 miles east of Moscow. Held in October on an allegation of failing to register as a foreign agent, Kurmasheva was charged also with disseminating false information about the Russian military. She had helped edit a book that is critical of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Kurmasheva, 47, has denied the allegations against her through her husband and legal team.
Kurmasheva’s supporters have said that the Russian authorities targeted her because she is a journalist holding a U.S. passport and are mounting a campaign for the State Department to designate her as wrongfully detained.
“Alsu is not a criminal,” her husband, Pavel Butorin, posted on X after a May hearing extended Kurmasheva’s pretrial detention to August. “She’s not an activist, not a member of the Russian opposition, and presents no threat to the Russian government.”
Alsu Kurmasheva had helped edit a book that is critical of Russia’s war in Ukraine. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Ksenia Karelina, a dual citizen living in California, was charged with treason in February while visiting her family in Yekaterinburg. Karelina had allegedly made a small financial donation to a Ukrainian humanitarian organization that Russian authorities said was used to benefit Kyiv’s military.
Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia has tightened treason statutes and stifled domestic dissent. Karelina faces a possible sentence of life in prison. She hasn’t publicly responded to the allegation.
In December, St. Petersburg authorities charged Yuri Malev, a dual citizen who was visiting Russia, with desecrating a photo of a St. George ribbon in a social media posting, according to TASS, a Russian state news agency. The black-and-orange ribbon, a Tsarist-era marker of gallantry and patriotism, has come to symbolize Russia’s military efforts in Ukraine. Malev, who worked as a security guard at a Brooklyn sports complex, pleaded guilty to a charge of “rehabilitation of Nazism” and received a sentence of three and a half years, according to TASS.
“American citizens are now being persecuted, because there is a phobia which is supported in mass media and the public sector,” said Maria Bast, the chair of the Association of Russian Lawyers for Human Rights. “Of course, it’s mainly political.”
Ksenia Karelina was detained while visiting her family in Yekaterinburg. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
Not all cases involving Americans in Russia are overtly political. In cases dating at least to 2011, U.S. and dual citizens have been charged with crimes including homicide, assault, robbery, arson, fraud, bribery, smuggling, tampering and drug and sex offenses. Yet as tensions between the two countries rise over Russia’s war against Ukraine and Washington’s continued supply of lethal aid to Kyiv, even overtly criminal cases—and their outcomes—have assumed at the very least a prejudicial cast.
In 2021, David Barnes pursued his ex-wife, Svetlana Koptyaeva, to her native Moscow. She had fled the U.S. with their son in 2019 and was the subject of a warrant in Texas since she shared custody with Barnes and hadn’t secured his approval to take the children out of the U.S., according to lawyers involved on both sides of the case.
The following year, Russian prosecutors charged Barnes with abusing the boys when they lived in the U.S. based on the ex-wife’s allegations that he had molested them. Authorities in Texas had declined to charge Barnes when his ex-wife had made the same accusations before she had left for Russia.
After being held in pretrial detention for more than two years, Barnes was convicted by a Moscow court in February and sentenced to 21 years in prison. Barnes has maintained his innocence, and his lawyers and family members have suggested a political motivation behind his case.
Marc Fogel, a teacher at the Anglo-American School of Moscow, was sentenced in 2022 to 14 years in prison after being convicted of smuggling roughly 17 grams of marijuana into Russia. He said he had intended to use the drug for medical purposes to treat chronic pain.
Supporters of Marc Fogel gathered outside the White House in 2023. PHOTO: STEPHANIE SCARBROUGH/AP
Musician Travis Leake, 52, had reassured friends and family via social-media posts about his decision to remain in Moscow after Russia expanded its war in Ukraine. Authorities raided Leake’s Moscow apartment in June and allegedly seized drug-dealing paraphernalia, according to Russian state-run news services.
“I have been formally accused about nothing,” Leake said in a video that aired on Russian TV at the time of his arrest. “I don’t know why I’m here.”
On Thursday, Leake was convicted on drug charges and sentenced to 13 years in a maximum-security penal colony, according to a post on a social-media account for the Moscow city courts.
Thomas Stwalley and Jimmy Wilgus, serving lengthy prison terms for drug and sex offenses, respectively, said in phone interviews with the Journal that Russian authorities had held closed-door trials and altered court testimony, interfering with their cases. Wilgus said he was coerced into signing a confession. Stwalley pleaded not guilty and said authorities had planted drugs on him.
“All of these cases have now become political cases that Russia believes will provide some sort of leverage in any postwar negotiations,” Pomeranz said. “Russia is playing a long game that it believes will ultimately prevail.”
Write to Brett Forrest at brett.forrest@wsj.com
5. The Software Patch That Shook the World
The Software Patch That Shook the World
A CrowdStrike security update rendered computers unusable and underscored the fragility of modern global technology
https://www.wsj.com/tech/cybersecurity/crowdstrike-outage-software-patch-78d05df2?mod=latest_headlines
By Asa FitchFollow
, Sam SchechnerFollow
and Sarah E. NeedlemanFollow
July 20, 2024 5:30 am ET
Hemant Rathod, an Indian executive, was sipping tea in a conference room Friday morning in Delhi, about to send a long email to his team, when his computer went haywire.
The HP laptop suddenly said it needed to restart. Then the screen turned blue. He tried in vain to reboot. Within 10 minutes, the screens of three other colleagues in the room turned blue too.
“I had taken so much time to draft that email,” Rathod, a senior vice president at Pidilite Industries 500331 -1.92%decrease; red down pointing triangle, a construction-materials company, said by phone half a day later, still carrying his dead laptop with him. “I really hope it’s still there so I don’t have to write it again.”
The outage, one of the most momentous in recent memory, crippled computers worldwide and drove home the brittleness of the interlaced global software systems that we rely on.
Triggered by an errant software update from the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike CRWD -11.10%decrease; red down pointing triangle, the disruption spread as most people on the U.S. East Coast were asleep and those in Asia were starting their days.
Screens at Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi displayed error messages Friday. PHOTO: KABIR JHANGIANI/ZUMA PRESS
Over the course of less than 80 minutes before CrowdStrike stopped it, the update sailed into Microsoft Windows-based computers worldwide, turning corporate laptops into unusable bricks and paralyzing operations at restaurants, media companies and other businesses. U.S. 911 call centers were disrupted, Amazon.com employees’ corporate email system went on the fritz, and tens of thousands of global flights were delayed or canceled.
“In my 30-year technical career, this is by far the biggest impact I’ve ever seen,” said B.J. Moore, chief information officer for the Renton, Wash.-based healthcare system Providence, whose hospitals struggled to access patient records, perform surgeries and conduct CT scans.
Fixing the problem involved technical steps that confounded many users who aren’t tech-savvy. Some corporate IT departments were still working to unfreeze computer systems late on Friday. CrowdStrike said the outage isn’t a cyberattack.
Adding to the chaos—and further underlining the vulnerability of the global IT system—a separate problem hit Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing system on Thursday shortly before the CrowdStrike glitch, causing an outage for customers including some U.S. airlines and users of Xbox and Microsoft 365.
The CrowdStrike problem laid bare the risks of a world in which IT systems are increasingly intertwined and dependent on myriad software companies—many not household names. That can cause huge problems when their technology malfunctions or is compromised. The software operates on our laptops and within corporate IT setups, where, unknown to most users, they are automatically updated for enhancements or new security protections.
Travelers waited as flights were canceled Friday at Václav Havel Airport in Prague. PHOTO: MICHAL KRUMPHANZL/CTK/ZUMA PRESS
In a 2020 hack, Russian perpetrators inserted malicious code into updates of SolarWinds software in a way that compromised a swath of the U.S. government and scores of private companies.
The rising frequency and impact of cyberattacks, including ones that insert damaging ransomware and spyware, have helped fuel the growth of CrowdStrike and such competitors as Palo Alto Networks and SentinelOne in recent years. CrowdStrike’s annual revenue has grown 12-fold over the past five years to over $3 billion.
But cybersecurity software such as CrowdStrike’s can be especially disruptive when things go wrong because it must have deep access into computer systems to rebuff malicious attacks.
Not all updates happen automatically, and computer attacks often occur because people or businesses are slow to adopt patches sent by software companies to fix vulnerabilities—in essence, failing to take the medicine the doctors prescribe. In this case, the medicine itself hurt the patients.
The global outage began with an update of a so-called “channel file,” a file containing data that helps CrowdStrike’s software neutralize cyber threats, CrowdStrike said. The update was timestamped 4:09 a.m. UTC—just after midnight in New York and around 9:30 a.m. in India.
A Delta employee assisting a traveler at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Friday. PHOTO: MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG NEWS
That update caused CrowdStrike’s software to crash the brains of the Windows operating system, known as the kernel. Restarting the computer simply caused it to crash again, meaning that many users had to surgically remove the offending file from each affected computer.
The nature of the patch meant that the impact was uneven, with people in the same office even experiencing the outage very differently. Apple Macs, which don’t use the affected Windows software, were OK, and servers and PCs that weren’t on and internet-connected didn’t receive the toxic update.
CrowdStrike soon realized something was amiss and the update to the file was rolled back 78 minutes later. That meant it wouldn’t affect computers that were off or in sleep mode during that period. But for many of those that were switched on, the damage was done.
In a blog post, CrowdStrike told those users to boot into the Windows “safe mode,” delete the offending file—called C-00000291*.sys—and reboot.
IT teams often can fix problems on employees’ computers using remote-access software—tools that became especially common during the work-from-home boom of the pandemic. But for laptops and other PCs that approach doesn’t work if the machines can’t restart. For those systems, CrowdStrike’s fix had to be done in person—either by a tech-support person on site, or by a regular employee trying to apply the instructions.
George Kurtz, chief executive of CrowdStrike, tried to reassure customers and shareholders during the IT outage. PHOTO: MICHAEL SHORT/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Moore, the Washington state healthcare CIO, was away on vacation and initially wasn’t worried when emails about malfunctioning computer applications started landing in his inbox Thursday night.
But by 11 p.m. Pacific time, he had learned that the outage had engulfed the nonprofit health system’s approximately 50 hospitals and 1,000 clinics across seven states. Hundreds of IT employees began deploying patches, which required manual remediation, he said.
Some of the system’s affected computers and devices were fixed by 6 a.m., and most were humming again by 10 a.m. “It will be the end of the day before we get it all done,” Moore said Friday morning.
As companies were grappling with the impact, CrowdStrike’s co-founder and chief executive officer, George Kurtz, was on TV trying to reassure customers—and shareholders—looking haggard after a long night.
“We identified this very quickly and rolled back this particular content file,” Kurtz said in a CNBC interview about nine hours after the faulty update. “Some systems may not fully recover, and we’re working individually with each and every customer to make sure that we can get them up and running and operational,” he added.
The time frame for the recovery could be hours or “a bit longer,” he said. Kurtz said on X that the outage isn’t “a security incident or cyberattack.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella took to X to offer his own reassurance that the company was working closely with CrowdStrike to bring systems back online. Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded, “This gave a seizure to the automotive supply chain,” and later said, “We just deleted CrowdStrike from all our systems.”
For Rathod, the senior vice president at Pidilite, the travails didn’t end with his potentially lost email. After switching to his iPad to keep working, he had to rush to the airport for a flight—only to find long lines and flummoxed security staff checking boarding passes manually. Flight information screens weren’t working, so he had to find airline staff to direct him to the right gate.
“It was a mess at Delhi airport,” Rathod said. “How can we depend so much on one company?”
Tom Dotan and Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Asa Fitch at asa.fitch@wsj.com, Sam Schechner at Sam.Schechner@wsj.com and Sarah E. Needleman at Sarah.Needleman@wsj.com
6. From Honor Student to the Gunman Who Tried to Kill Donald Trump
The assassin used a drone and the Secret Service did not. For an untrained person he conducted pretty good preparation.
Excerpts:
But as the summer began, it appears that his plans began to change.
On July 7, six days before the political rally, Mr. Crooks may have cased the site of the planned event. On Friday, the day before the rally, he spent much of the day at the gun range, his parents told investigators. On Saturday, he went to Home Depot at 9:30 a.m. to buy a ladder, purchased 50 rounds of ammunition later in the afternoon and drove to the rally. In the Hyundai Sonata he drove to the rally, investigators said, he left behind two rudimentary explosive devices, several magazines for the rifle he used, a bulletproof vest and the drone that may have been used earlier in the day.
The nursing home said it was shocked to learn the news. Mr. Crooks had told them he would be back at work on Sunday.
From Honor Student to the Gunman Who Tried to Kill Donald Trump
Thomas Crooks was a brainy and quiet young man who built computers and won honors at school, impressing his teachers. Then he became a would-be assassin.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us/gunman-thomas-crooks-trump-shooting.html
The Butler Farm Show grounds in Pennsylvania.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
By Emily Cochrane, Steve Eder, William K. Rashbaum, Amy Julia Harris, Jack Healy and Glenn Thrush
The reporters conducted about 60 interviews with classmates, teachers, neighbors and officials in Bethel Park, Pa., and reviewed law enforcement bulletins and extensive school records for this article.
Published July 19, 2024
Updated July 20, 2024, 9:09 a.m. ET
For Thomas Crooks, the suburban Pittsburgh nursing home where he served meals and washed dishes for $16 an hour was another solitary corner of a nearly invisible life. He was polite but distant, a former co-worker said, ate lunch alone in the break room and rarely spoke with anyone.
But as western Pennsylvania geared up last week for the boisterous spectacle of hosting a rally for former President Donald J. Trump, Mr. Crooks approached his bosses with a request, law enforcement officials said: He wanted to take Saturday off.
He told them he had something important to do.
It was one of the few hints to emerge so far that the 20-year-old engineering sciences graduate was planning to become a political assassin. A week after Mr. Crooks opened fire at the rally and was killed by the Secret Service, his ideology and motives remain a vexing question for investigators and the people who crossed paths with him.
In dozens of interviews, former classmates, teachers and neighbors said they still could not square their memories of Mr. Crooks — an awkward, intelligent teenager who liked to tinker with computers and spent his weekends playing video games — with the image of the stringy-haired gunman at the rally, armed with his father’s AR-15-style rifle as he clambered onto a rooftop and took aim at the former president. Mr. Trump suffered an injury to his ear, and three spectators were wounded, one of them fatally.
“That’s where I’m struggling — I’ve looked at horrific pictures of an individual that I stood six inches away from, shaking his hand, calling on him in class,” said Xavier Harmon, who saw Mr. Crooks almost daily in the computer technology class he taught at a technical school.
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Bethel Park, a mostly white borough of about 32,000 where Mr. Crooks spent nearly all of this life. Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
Many of the young men who have attacked schools, movie theaters, supermarkets and churches in recent years deliberately or unintentionally hinted at their rage, violent fantasies or plans well before their attacks — a phenomenon that researchers call “leakage.”
Investigators have uncovered what now could be seen as concerning signs: The gunman’s phone showed that he had possibly read news stories about the teenage school shooter who killed four students at Oxford High School in Michigan. Mr. Crooks received multiple packages, including several that were marked “hazardous material,” over the past several months. He looked up “major depressive disorder” on a cellphone later found at his house.
He had also searched a bipartisan roster of political figures, including Mr. Trump, President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland, F.B.I. officials told members of Congress. He also looked up both the dates of Mr. Trump’s July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., as well as the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
And in the latest new detail to emerge, federal law enforcement officials said on Friday that they believe Mr. Crooks flew a small drone over the rally grounds on the day of the shooting in what might have been an attempt to surveil the scene.
But investigators have not found any evidence that Mr. Crooks had strong political beliefs or an ideological motivation.
Experts who study the histories of gunmen said the emerging picture of Mr. Crooks looked more like a 21st-century school shooter than a John Wilkes Booth.
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Bethel Park, a traditionally Republican town that is gradually getting bluer, is as closely divided as any in the country.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
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Some houses fly Trump flags and “Let’s Go Brandon” banners.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
“When somebody attacks a president, our gut instinct is to say, ‘That must be politically motivated,’” said James Densley, a founder of the Violence Project, which has compiled a comprehensive database of mass shootings. “What we might be seeing here is: This was somebody intent on perpetrating mass violence, and they happened to pick a political rally.”
The rally he chose was announced in early July for the Butler Farm Show grounds, just an hour’s drive from Mr. Crooks’s hometown, Bethel Park, a mostly white, middle-class suburban town of about 32,000 where Mr. Crooks spent nearly all of his life.
He was born in 2003 and grew up in a modest red brick house on a grassy, rolling road, the younger son of a politically mixed family. He attended local schools, graduating from Bethel Park High School in 2022 and from a local community college, where he received an associate degree in engineering science, in May.
Mr. Crooks was a registered Republican, though records show he also donated $15 to a progressive cause on the day of Mr. Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. Voting records show his mother is a Democrat, and his father and older sister are Libertarians.
The Trump era has brought tensions to local politics in Bethel Park, a traditionally Republican town that is now almost evenly divided. Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden there by just 65 votes in 2020. This year, the fissures of election season are everywhere.
Some houses fly Trump flags and “Let’s Go Brandon” banners. Others have “Stronger Together” yard signs. MAGA fans in surrounding towns hold flag-waving rallies on highway bridges to provoke liberals. Last Halloween, one resident decorated his lawn with a skeleton pointing a gun at another skeleton wearing a Biden T-shirt.
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Mr. Crooks attended Bethel Park High School.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
But several neighbors said the Crooks family did not put out yard signs to display their politics. In fact, they said, they rarely saw the family at all.
Mr. Crooks’s parents, Matthew and Mary, are both licensed professional counselors, and interviews and business records suggest they have been working from home at least since the pandemic.
Updated
July 18, 2024, 5:19 p.m. ETJuly 18, 2024
July 18, 2024
Mr. Crooks’s father worked at Community Care Behavioral Health, part of the insurance services division of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, connecting patients with in-network counselors, a former colleague said.
F.B.I. investigators who searched the family’s home discovered it was cluttered and not well-cleaned, something akin to a compulsive hoarder’s house.
A neighbor said that years ago she occasionally saw Mary Crooks — who, according to federal authorities, was visually impaired — walking home from work from the local T train station, using a cane. But she had not seen her walking around in recent years.
As a child, Mr. Crooks befriended other children in the neighborhood, and would walk up the block to play in their backyard, one neighbor said. The neighbor said the young Mr. Crooks was fond of wearing polo shirts tucked into cargo shorts, and remembered him as a smart, nerdy child with a penchant for math.
But the family became more insular in recent years, neighbors said. They said Mr. Crooks’s parents would wave to neighbors from their lawn and say good morning, but never initiate conversations.
Kelly Little, 38, said she had never had a conversation with the family, despite living across the street from them. Her son, Liam Campbell, 17, said he rode the bus with Mr. Crooks, and noticed that he was always very reserved.
“He didn’t speak to anyone, and no one spoke to him,” he said. “He seemed like the kind of person who didn’t like to start conversations with people he didn’t know. He seemed nervous.”
It is unclear how and when he became interested in guns, but his father owned more than a dozen firearms, including the semiautomatic rifle used in the attack.
Anthony Pusateri, a member of the rifle team at Bethel Park High School from 2018 to 2020, recalled that Mr. Crooks had tried out for the team, most likely when he was a sophomore, but was a bad shot and did not make the team.
“He just didn’t shoot well enough,” Mr. Pusateri said.
He had almost no presence on social media, but the T-shirt he was wearing on the day he attacked the rally was one sold by Demolition Ranch, a popular gun-themed YouTube channel popular in the online world of guntubers, gun enthusiasts who post reviews and explanations of firearms, as well as videos of themselves shooting up watermelons or ballistic dummies.
In high school, some former classmates said Mr. Crooks was aloof, kept to himself and was teased about his hygiene and body odor. They said he walked through the halls with his head down and revealed little about himself in class or on social media.
But others insisted that Mr. Crooks had not been bullied and was not isolated, and remembered him as having a small cluster of friends. They said he never raised any concerns for them. Jim Knapp, his former guidance counselor, said that Mr. Crooks had sat by himself at lunch and played on his phone, but that he was content to do so.
School officials said Mr. Crooks did not have any disciplinary problems in high school, and was sent to detention once, in eighth grade, for chewing gum, according to school records released on Friday. He rarely missed a day of school, and teachers noted that he participated in class and was interested in learning.
Mr. Knapp said he had to call Matthew and Mary Crooks a few times to discuss minor issues about Mr. Crooks, or his older sister, and he said the parents seemed polite, responsive and engaged. But he said the family was insular.
“They stuck to themselves,” he said.
Most afternoons during his sophomore and junior years of high school, Mr. Crooks would catch a bus to attend the computer technology program at the Steel Center for Career and Technical Education. The school draws hundreds of students from southeastern Allegheny County who take classes in auto repair, cosmetology and other job-focused areas.
If he was often alone at his regular high school, he seemed more at ease in his classes at Steel. Mr. Crooks engaged with his classmates and “wanted to be part of the group,” his teacher, Mr. Harmon, said.
He would crack unfunny jokes, and his laughter would prompt other students to laugh, Mr. Harmon said. A shaky cellphone video from his time there shows Mr. Crooks making crude jokes about his height and sexual endowment while another student laughs and holds up two fingers behind his head.
“A lot of them didn’t feel like they were accepted among their peers, so computer technology was their place they called home,” Mr. Harmon said.
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In 2021, Mr. Crooks provided an autobiographical statement for his induction into the National Technical Honor Society. The honor was presented at a ceremony that spring.Credit...YouTube
Mr. Harmon said Mr. Crooks “set the standard” for academics. He rarely scored low on tests and performed so well during impromptu quiz games that Mr. Harmon said he changed the rules to allow other students a chance to answer.
In an autobiographical statement Mr. Crooks wrote for his induction into the National Technical Honor Society in spring 2021 as a high-school junior, Mr. Crooks said he had a lifelong interest in building things, and that he and his father had built a computer together in 2017.
His interests, Mr. Crooks wrote, “are highly varied, and include computer technology, engineering, history and economics.”
He often finished his work before other students and would sometimes play computer games during idle moments.
“He’d go in the back, grab a computer, grab a screwdriver kit and start breaking it down, clean the pieces of stuff and then put it back together,” Mr. Harmon said.
He recalled giving Mr. Crooks what he called an ironic nickname — “Muscles,” because he was so skinny. He said Mr. Crooks rolled with it.
Mr. Crooks, he said, didn’t weigh in on politics, even when some of his other classmates did, and preferred to talk about the latest technology news or even cryptocurrency. Even when he asked the class to share about their weekends, Mr. Harmon added, Mr. Crooks usually didn’t have much to say.
“Tom always had something like: ‘Well, I sat in my bedroom, and I was gaming. I was on my computer. I didn’t do much this weekend, but I still had fun,’” Mr. Harmon said. “Other than his drive for academics, Tom was simple.”
He graduated with a cumulative grade point average of 4.047, according to school records. His class of about 300 students hooted and cheered as their friends crossed the stage together, in person and unmasked after years of pandemic disruptions. When Mr. Crooks’s name was called, he received a smattering of polite applause as he accepted his diploma.
He did not go far after graduation. After community college, he planned to enroll this fall at Robert Morris University, just outside of Pittsburgh.
But as the summer began, it appears that his plans began to change.
On July 7, six days before the political rally, Mr. Crooks may have cased the site of the planned event. On Friday, the day before the rally, he spent much of the day at the gun range, his parents told investigators. On Saturday, he went to Home Depot at 9:30 a.m. to buy a ladder, purchased 50 rounds of ammunition later in the afternoon and drove to the rally. In the Hyundai Sonata he drove to the rally, investigators said, he left behind two rudimentary explosive devices, several magazines for the rifle he used, a bulletproof vest and the drone that may have been used earlier in the day.
The nursing home said it was shocked to learn the news. Mr. Crooks had told them he would be back at work on Sunday.
Jan Ransom, Katie Benner, Bianca Pallaro, Michael Rothfeld, David W. Chen, J. David Goodman, Katie Flaherty, Alan Blinder and Adam Goldman contributed reporting. Julie Tate, Susan C. Beachy and Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Emily Cochrane is a national reporter for The Times covering the American South, based in Nashville. More about Emily Cochrane
Steve Eder has been an investigative reporter for The Times for more than a decade. More about Steve Eder
William K. Rashbaum is a Times reporter covering municipal and political corruption, the courts and broader law enforcement topics in New York. More about William K. Rashbaum
Amy Julia Harris has been an investigative reporter for more than a decade and joined The Times in 2019. Her coverage focuses on New York. More about Amy Julia Harris
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent who focuses on the fast-changing politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school. More about Jack Healy
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons. More about Glenn Thrush
7. What Happened to Digital Resilience?
What Happened to Digital Resilience?
With each cascade of digital disaster, new vulnerabilities emerge. The latest chaos wasn’t caused by an adversary, but it provided a road map of American vulnerabilities at a critical moment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us/politics/crowdstrike-outage.html
A digital meltdown that affected airports, hospitals and TV stations on Friday was caused by a bug in a software update.Credit...Jim Wilson/The New York Times
By David E. Sanger
Reporting from Aspen, Colo.
Published July 19, 2024
Updated July 20, 2024, 8:35 a.m. ET
In the worst-case scenarios that the Biden administration has quietly simulated over the past year or so, Russian hackers working on behalf of Vladimir V. Putin bring down hospital systems across the United States. In others, China’s military hackers trigger chaos, shutting down water systems and electric grids to distract Americans from an invasion of Taiwan.
As it turned out, none of those grim situations caused Friday’s national digital meltdown. It was, by all appearances, purely human error — a few bad keystrokes that demonstrated the fragility of a vast set of interconnected networks in which one mistake can cause a cascade of unintended consequences. Since no one really understands what is connected to what, it is no surprise that such episodes keep happening, each incident just a few degrees different from the last.
Among Washington’s cyberwarriors, the first reaction on Friday morning was relief that this wasn’t a nation-state attack. For two years now, the White House, the Pentagon and the nation’s cyberdefenders have been trying to come to terms with Volt Typhoon, a particularly elusive form of malware that China has put into American critical infrastructure. It is hard to find, even harder to evict from vital computer networks and designed to sow far greater fear and chaos than the country saw on Friday.
Yet as the “blue screen of death” popped up from the operating rooms of Massachusetts General Hospital to the airline management systems that keep planes flying, America got another reminder of the halting progress of cyberresilience. It was a particularly bitter discovery then that a flawed update to a trusted tool in that effort — CrowdStrike’s software to find and neutralize cyberattacks — was the cause of the problem, not the savior.
Only in recent years has the United States gotten serious about the problem. Government partnerships with private industry were put together to share lessons. The F.B.I. and the National Security Agency, along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Homeland Security Department, issue bulletins outlining vulnerabilities or blowing the whistle on hackers.
President Biden even created a Cyber Safety Review Board that looks at major incidents. It is modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, which reviews airplane and train accidents, among other disasters, and publishes “lessons learned.”
Just three months ago, it released a blistering account of how Microsoft allowed intrusions into its cloud services that permitted Chinese spies to clean out State Department files about Beijing and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s emails. But by the time the report came out, American officials were focused on a more urgent problem: the spread of ransomware attacks, many from Russia.
It was the Russians, in fact, who woke up America about the vulnerability of the software supply chain problem that lets small errors ripple into large consequences.
In the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign, Moscow’s most skilled intelligence service bored into a component of that supply chain, worming its way into the update systems of software made by Solar Winds. The company’s products are intended to manage large computer networks, and the Russians knew that once they had access to the update system, they could spread a lot of malicious code fast.
It worked. Hackers soon gained access to the Treasury and Commerce Departments, parts of the Pentagon and scores of America’s biggest companies. They did no visible damage. They did not trigger panics like the kinds seen on Friday. But they got the incoming administration’s attention.
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Learn more about our process.
“In a globally interconnected economy, we need to ensure that we have the resilience” when an event like this happens, said Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies, a job that did not exist until the Biden administration invented it.
Ms. Neuberger was awakened by the White House Situation Room at 4 a.m. on Friday in Aspen, Colo., where she was preparing to speak on a panel titled “Securing Trust in the Global Digital Economy.” She spent the day assessing the risks to U.S. government systems, then calling allies and executives, including the chief executive of CrowdStrike, George Kurtz. She asked, “Is there anything we can do to help?”
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“In a globally interconnected economy, we need to ensure that we have the resilience,” said Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technologies.Credit...Pete Marovich for The New York Times
Ms. Neuberger, a former senior official at the National Security Agency, knows better than most that for now, there are no magic bullets. By the time an event like this happens, the only response is to mount a painstaking effort, step by step, to patch the error, push it out and try to wrench thousands of systems back online.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes, as the British Museum discovered recently after an enormous ransomware attack that British intelligence officials think may have ties to the Russian government, even the best of efforts to recover can fail.
“This is not something that is new, but it has been accelerated by technology and by the interconnectivity,” Sir Jeremy Fleming, the recently retired leader of GCHQ, Britain’s famed code-making and code-breaking agency that is the equivalent of the N.S.A. And these days, he worries more about criminals than nation-state attacks.
Criminals will certainly be gleaning lessons from the CrowdStrike debacle, learning how to exploit the kinds of vulnerabilities that brought television stations and airports and insurance companies to a halt. So will Mr. Putin and President Xi Jinping of China, who now have, by accident, a more detailed road map for disruption, in an election year when they may well have an interest in interfering.
It is not hopeless.
“We are optimistic that A.I. is actually allowing us to make significant — not transformative yet, but significant — progress in being able to identify vulnerabilities, patch holes, improve the quality of coding,” Kent Walker, the president for global affairs at Google, said at the Aspen forum.
But that will take awhile. And in the meantime, unintended cascades of chaos will keep rippling around the globe — some, like Friday’s, a product of error. The fear is, in an election year, that the next digital meltdown may have a deeper political purpose.
David E. Sanger covers the Biden administration and national security. He has been a Times journalist for more than four decades and has written several books on challenges to American national security. More about David E. Sanger
8. How Americans Justify Political Violence
Excerpts:
But assassination attempts fit our expectations of ideological cause and effect less neatly than the other forms of political violence — white supremacist terror campaigns, urban riots, militia plots — that have marked the country’s modern history. President John F. Kennedy’s death in Dallas was preceded by an escalating climate of right-wing extremism and conspiracism in the city, but his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Marxist. When Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011, the rhetoric of the Tea Party class of Republican politicians was quickly blamed. But her shooter seemed animated by a mix of mental illness and inchoate, basically nonpartisan hatred for the government.
In the case of Trump’s shooter, Thomas Crooks, what little evidence investigators have so far turned up regarding his politics has been contradictory and inconclusive. He was a registered Republican who made a small donation to a liberal organization at the age of 17. In the days before the shooting, he searched on his phone for images of both presidential candidates, and for the dates of both the Butler rally and the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
...
Maybe — but there’s something a little convenient about this. There have been mostly apolitical assassins and would-be assassins, such as John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in an attempt to impress the actor Jodie Foster. The reluctance to believe the killers who do see themselves in political terms, and the impulse to chalk their actions up to insanity or, in the case of Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassin, to occlude them with conspiracy theories, suggests a subconscious awareness of the essential hypocrisy that many Americans hold when it comes to political violence.
...
In February 2021, Kalmoe and Mason, the political scientists, asked a sample of Americans whether it was justified for members of their party to kill opposing political leaders to advance their political goals. Twelve percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats replied that it was. “Generalizing to the population of American partisans,” they write, “means roughly 20 million who endorse assassinating U.S. leaders.”
I think this is the crux of our political problems. And this is what our adversaries are exploiting with the active measures and disinformation campaigns against us.
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
How Americans Justify Political Violence
Partisan support for the killing of adversaries is much more widespread than anyone wants to admit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/magazine/us-political-violence.html
By Charles Homans
Charles Homans, who covers politics for The Times, has been reporting on the intersection of violence and American politics since 2021.
In August 2022, I attended a gathering of right-wing grassroots organizations at a horse-show complex in Bloomsburg, Pa., a few hours’ drive east of where Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last weekend. Everyone who went up to speak believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump, and now they were discussing what to do about it.
An evangelical pastor opened the meeting with the story of a pastor who fought alongside members of his congregation in the first days of the American Revolution. “Here’s a preacher training his people how to fight this ungodliness and wickedness, a real dictatorship,” he told the crowd. “Well, I talk to a lot of preachers today,” he went on, who were willing to “take up arms if they have to. And you know as well as I do, with what is coming, we may have to. Right? We don’t want to. But we may have to. And I believe the Second Amendment says we can.” Out in the crowd, a man had a sign depicting a rifle between a flag and a cross above the words “God, Guns, Guts! Keep AMERICA Free.”
Among the world’s historically stable democracies, America has a particularly complicated relationship with the idea of political violence. This is, after all, a country born out of violent struggle, as the T-shirts and bumper stickers and speeches at any Republican event endlessly attest. This is also a country where the major expansions of civil rights, from Emancipation to desegregation, happened under the fact or threat of state violence, and where few on the left are willing to categorically condemn violent protest in the name of social justice. It is a country where many still nod at Thomas Jefferson’s aphorism that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” or to Malcolm X vowing “by any means necessary.”
The language changed, briefly, after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Immediately after Trump survived the shooting at a July 13 rally in Butler, Pa., both he and President Biden, two men who detest each other, spoke of unity. Biden, in a statement, said, “There’s no place for this kind of violence in America. We must unite as one nation to condemn it.” Trump told The Washington Examiner that he was rewriting his convention speech to focus on national unity, not Biden. “It is a chance to bring the country together,” he said. “I was given that chance.” But the truce didn’t even last the duration of the speech.
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The assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pa., was followed by finger-pointing over the violent rhetoric that pervades American politics.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times
If condemnations of violent political speech ring hollow in the United States, it’s because they are. This is a country where the language of violence has become too deeply entangled with politics to disentangle with a few pro forma statements, and where a growing share of Americans are comfortable not just with rhetoric but with potential action. “They shot first!” a rallygoer in Butler told a BBC reporter immediately after the shooting. “This is [expletive] war!” A field director for Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democratic representative and former chair of the House Jan. 6 committee, was fired after posting on Facebook, “I don’t condone violence but please get you some shooting lessons so you don’t miss next time ooops that wasn’t me talking.” Liberal social media was awash in speculation that the whole thing had been staged.
In a June survey, the political scientists Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, who have conducted a yearslong study exploring American attitudes toward political violence, found that about 20 percent of respondents believed that political violence was at least sometimes justified. A full 60 percent — up from 40 percent four years ago — believed it was at least sometimes justified if people from the other political party committed an act of violence first, figures that varied little between Republicans and Democrats. In their discomfiting 2022 book “Radical American Partisanship,” they argue that “rather than asking whether Americans support political violence, the better question is when.”
We can argue endlessly about how much Americans mean these things when they say them in part because such words are acted on so rarely here. The end of Trump’s presidency, when thousands of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol finally made good on the language of political violence that had been deeply marrowed into his political messaging since the first days of his 2016 campaign, was an emphatic exception to the rule. But even just a year and a half later, listening to the preacher’s exhortations in that horse barn, from the back of a largely retirement-age crowd sunk deep in sagging camping chairs, the distance between talk and action seemed significant.
America is a country where college students occupy campus lawns in kaffiyehs but only until summer internships start, where suburban militia members outfit themselves with body armor and military-style AR-15s borrowed from wars they never served in. We are a comfortable and sheltered people who talk a big game that is usually just talk. Until someone throws a Molotov cocktail through a storefront, or storms the Capitol, or tries to kill a former president.
‘It Is Right to Kill Them’
Assassination attempts against major political figures happen rarely enough in the United States that they are shocking, but not so rarely that we don’t know the drill.
After Trump’s shooting, Republicans were quick to point to Biden’s statement, on a call with donors, that “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s-eye,” and to blame years of claims that Trump posed a threat to American democracy. “Don’t tell me they didn’t know exactly what they were doing with this crap,” Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, wrote on X after the shooting.
Trump’s opponents were quick to point out that all of this paled in comparison to what Trump himself had said for years. On the campaign trail, he regularly describes Biden as a “fascist” and has accused the president of perpetrating a “conspiracy to overthrow democracy.” Not long ago, he shared on social media a video of a pickup truck decorated to look like its owner had hogtied Biden in the flatbed.
But assassination attempts fit our expectations of ideological cause and effect less neatly than the other forms of political violence — white supremacist terror campaigns, urban riots, militia plots — that have marked the country’s modern history. President John F. Kennedy’s death in Dallas was preceded by an escalating climate of right-wing extremism and conspiracism in the city, but his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a Marxist. When Gabby Giffords was shot in Tucson, Ariz., in 2011, the rhetoric of the Tea Party class of Republican politicians was quickly blamed. But her shooter seemed animated by a mix of mental illness and inchoate, basically nonpartisan hatred for the government.
Updated
July 18, 2024, 5:19 p.m. ETJuly 18, 2024
July 18, 2024
In the case of Trump’s shooter, Thomas Crooks, what little evidence investigators have so far turned up regarding his politics has been contradictory and inconclusive. He was a registered Republican who made a small donation to a liberal organization at the age of 17. In the days before the shooting, he searched on his phone for images of both presidential candidates, and for the dates of both the Butler rally and the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
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President Ronald Reagan, the White House press secretary, a Secret Service agent and a police officer were shot in an attempted assassination by John Hinckley Jr. in 1981.Credit...Dirck Halstead/Getty Images
Even when presidential assassins have espoused clear ideologies, there has always been the nagging sense that the ideological explanation is insufficient. As stated motives go, it doesn’t get much clearer than those of Leon Czolgosz, the anarchist who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901. “I don’t believe in the republican form of government, and I don’t believe we should have any rulers,” he told doctors in his first interview after his arrest. “It is right to kill them. I had that idea when I shot the president, and that is why I was there.” Walter Channing, a famous psychiatrist of the era, reviewed these statements and simply refused to believe them. In an assessment for a scientific journal, he wrote that Czolgosz’s political views were not an “adequate explanation” and argued that “insanity appears to me the most reasonable and logical explanation of the crime.”
Maybe — but there’s something a little convenient about this. There have been mostly apolitical assassins and would-be assassins, such as John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 in an attempt to impress the actor Jodie Foster. The reluctance to believe the killers who do see themselves in political terms, and the impulse to chalk their actions up to insanity or, in the case of Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan, Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 assassin, to occlude them with conspiracy theories, suggests a subconscious awareness of the essential hypocrisy that many Americans hold when it comes to political violence.
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The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas shocked the nation in 1963 and has been the subject of conspiracy theories ever since.Credit...Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone, via Getty Images
In February 2021, Kalmoe and Mason, the political scientists, asked a sample of Americans whether it was justified for members of their party to kill opposing political leaders to advance their political goals. Twelve percent of Republicans and 11 percent of Democrats replied that it was. “Generalizing to the population of American partisans,” they write, “means roughly 20 million who endorse assassinating U.S. leaders.”
The Rise of ‘Moral Disengagement’
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.
You would imagine that a morally disengaged country would be less shocked by actual political violence when it occurs — and that surely explains the speed at which the country has moved on from shock over the assassination attempt at Trump’s rally to assimilating it into the prevailing narratives. On Monday night, I stood on an upper-deck balcony at the Republican National Convention when Trump made his first public appearance since the shooting. As he looked out upon the crowd from his box seat, an entire arena of Republicans, many of them with raised fists, chanted back at him the words he mouthed as he was hustled off the stage, blood streaking down his face, barely two days before: “Fight! Fight!”
Several hours after that instantly indelible image spread to every corner of the internet, I received a 20-second video sent by Zach Scherer, a young activist I met at the meeting in Pennsylvania two years ago. Scherer was still in high school during the 2020 election, and, believing it was stolen from Trump, threw himself into organizing a local activist group inspired by the “Stop the Steal” crusade. He lived in Butler, Pa., and moments after news of the shooting flashed across my phone, I called him, guessing he might be there.
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The assassination attempt on Donald Trump, which killed and injured rallygoers, galvanized the former president and his supporters at the Republican National Convention days later.Credit...Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
“Watched the whole thing unfold,” he texted several hours later. He had been sitting just to Trump’s right — close enough that in the photos he took on his phone in the next chaotic minutes, you could see the individual rivulets of blood pooling in the ear of the former president as the Secret Service agents rushed him off the stage.
In the first frames of the video, a crowd of fans in MAGA attire is scattered around bleachers draped in red, white and blue bunting. It takes a second or two to realize that something is very wrong. A man is face down in the bleachers, motionless. Another is lying on top of him. Someone walks past in a “Keep America Great” hat and a U.S.A. T-shirt stained with blood. Now a man is helping a woman in a sequined Trump cap, her arm streaked in blood as if someone had grabbed onto her in a panic. Everyone is moving with a kind of dazed urgency.
These were people like those I had met in that horse barn two years earlier — maybe some of the same people who had nodded gravely along with the preacher’s exhortations to take up arms. But now we were someplace new. This was footage of the political violence of the American imagination abruptly dissolved by the sudden, horrific arrival of the real thing.
Charles Homans is a reporter for The Times and The Times Magazine, covering national politics. More about Charles Homans
See more on: Donald Trump, Republican Party, 2024 Elections
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Our Coverage of the Trump Rally Shooting
9. The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast
The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast
New research from the Data Provenance Initiative has found a dramatic drop in content made available to the collections used to build artificial intelligence.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/technology/ai-data-restrictions.html
Credit...Raven Jiang
By Kevin Roose
Reporting from San Francisco
July 19, 2024
For years, the people building powerful artificial intelligence systems have used enormous troves of text, images and videos pulled from the internet to train their models.
Now, that data is drying up.
Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group.
The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an “emerging crisis in consent,” as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.
The researchers estimate that in the three data sets — called C4, RefinedWeb and Dolma — 5 percent of all data, and 25 percent of data from the highest-quality sources, has been restricted. Those restrictions are set up through the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a decades-old method for website owners to prevent automated bots from crawling their pages using a file called robots.txt.
The study also found that as much as 45 percent of the data in one set, C4, had been restricted by websites’ terms of service.
“We’re seeing a rapid decline in consent to use data across the web that will have ramifications not just for A.I. companies, but for researchers, academics and noncommercial entities,” said Shayne Longpre, the study’s lead author, in an interview.
Data is the main ingredient in today’s generative A.I. systems, which are fed billions of examples of text, images and videos. Much of that data is scraped from public websites by researchers and compiled in large data sets, which can be downloaded and freely used, or supplemented with data from other sources.
Learning from that data is what allows generative A.I. tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to write, code and generate images and videos. The more high-quality data is fed into these models, the better their outputs generally are.
For years, A.I. developers were able to gather data fairly easily. But the generative A.I. boom of the past few years has led to tensions with the owners of that data — many of whom have misgivings about being used as A.I. training fodder, or at least want to be paid for it.
As the backlash has grown, some publishers have set up paywalls or changed their terms of service to limit the use of their data for A.I. training. Others have blocked the automated web crawlers used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.
Sites like Reddit and StackOverflow have begun charging A.I. companies for access to data, and a few publishers have taken legal action — including The New York Times, which sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement last year, alleging that the companies used news articles to train their models without permission.
Companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta have gone to extreme lengths in recent years to gather more data to improve their systems, including transcribing YouTube videos and bending their own data policies.
More recently, some A.I. companies have struck deals with publishers including The Associated Press and News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal, giving them ongoing access to their content.
Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of technology. Subscribe and listen.
But widespread data restrictions may pose a threat to A.I. companies, which need a steady supply of high-quality data to keep their models fresh and up-to-date.
They could also spell trouble for smaller A.I. outfits and academic researchers who rely on public data sets, and can’t afford to license data directly from publishers. Common Crawl, one such data set that comprises billions of pages of web content and is maintained by a nonprofit, has been cited in more than 10,000 academic studies, Mr. Longpre said.
It’s not clear which popular A.I. products have been trained on these sources, since few developers disclose the full list of data they use. But data sets derived from Common Crawl, including C4 (which stands for Colossal, Cleaned Crawled Corpus) have been used by companies including Google and OpenAI to train previous versions of their models. Spokespeople for Google and OpenAI declined to comment.
Yacine Jernite, a machine learning researcher at Hugging Face, a company that provides tools and data to A.I. developers, characterized the consent crisis as a natural response to the A.I. industry’s aggressive data-gathering practices.
“Unsurprisingly, we’re seeing blowback from data creators after the text, images and videos they’ve shared online are used to develop commercial systems that sometimes directly threaten their livelihoods,” he said.
But he cautioned that if all A.I. training data needed to be obtained through licensing deals, it would exclude “researchers and civil society from participating in the governance of the technology.”
Stella Biderman, the executive director of EleutherAI, a nonprofit A.I. research organization, echoed those fears.
“Major tech companies already have all of the data,” she said. “Changing the license on the data doesn’t retroactively revoke that permission, and the primary impact is on later-arriving actors, who are typically either smaller start-ups or researchers.”
A.I. companies have claimed that their use of public web data is legally protected under fair use. But gathering new data has gotten trickier. Some A.I. executives I’ve spoken to worry about hitting the “data wall” — their term for the point at which all of the training data on the public internet has been exhausted, and the rest has been hidden behind paywalls, blocked by robots.txt or locked up in exclusive deals.
Some companies believe they can scale the data wall by using synthetic data — that is, data that is itself generated by A.I. systems — to train their models. But many researchers doubt that today’s A.I. systems are capable of generating enough high-quality synthetic data to replace the human-created data they’re losing.
Another challenge is that while publishers can try to stop A.I. companies from scraping their data by placing restrictions in their robots.txt files, those requests aren’t legally binding, and compliance is voluntary. (Think of it like a “no trespassing” sign for data, but one without the force of law.)
Major search engines honor these opt-out requests, and several leading A.I. companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have said publicly that they do, too. But other companies, including the A.I.-powered search engine Perplexity, have been accused of ignoring them. Perplexity’s chief executive, Aravind Srinivas, told me that the company respects publishers’ data restrictions. He added that while the company once worked with third-party web crawlers that did not always follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, it had “made adjustments with our providers to ensure that they follow robots.txt when crawling on Perplexity’s behalf.”
Mr. Longpre said that one of the big takeaways from the study is that we need new tools to give website owners more precise ways to control the use of their data. Some sites might object to A.I. giants using their data to train chatbots for a profit, but might be willing to let a nonprofit or educational institution use the same data, he said. Right now, there’s no good way for them to distinguish between those uses, or block one while allowing the other.
But there’s also a lesson here for big A.I. companies, who have treated the internet as an all-you-can-eat data buffet for years, without giving the owners of that data much of value in return. Eventually, if you take advantage of the web, the web will start shutting its doors.
Kevin Roose is a Times technology columnist and a host of the podcast "Hard Fork." More about Kevin Roose
10. China-Taiwan Weekly Update, July 19, 2024
China-Taiwan Weekly Update, July 19, 2024
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/china-taiwan-weekly-update-july-19-2024
Key Takeaways
- Taiwan Affairs Office Spokesperson Chen Binhua accused the DPP of intentionally distorting information about the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) recent legal guidelines for punishing Taiwanese separatism and generating undeserved fear among the Taiwanese public.
- Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) spokesperson Sun Li-fang warned about the PRC’s weaponization of AI and deepfakes to conduct cognitive warfare operations.
- PRC state media promoted “high-quality development,” self-reliance, and overcoming “obstacles” to economic reform ahead of the CCP Central Committee’s Third Plenum. The CCP is trying to shore up perceptions of a weak economy and lay the groundwork for upcoming economic reforms because its domestic legitimacy increasingly rests on its ability to deliver economic prosperity.
- A PRC-Philippine agreement signed after the Bilateral Consultation Mechanism on July 2 set up a direct presidential-level line of communication for bilateral crisis management. The hotline may provide a mechanism for escalation management but does not indicate a change in the PRC’s aggressive posture in the South China Sea.
- The PRC and Russia conducted joint naval exercises in the South China Sea concurrently with a joint naval patrol in the North Pacific.
11. How Israel Turned the Tide in Rafah
Excerpts:
Can Hezbollah be persuaded to pull back its forces? “I doubt it,” Mr. Katz says. “My personal view is it’ll happen either through an Israeli military response or if Iran orders Hezbollah to withdraw.”
In the end, Mr. Katz says, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah “doesn’t understand Israel. He has an image of weakness”—but he’s wrong. “We don’t want war, because we don’t want anything in Lebanon. But if it will be war, it will not be like in Gaza,” where the presence of hostages restrains Israel’s use of force. “About 80% of our air force isn’t being used right now,” he says. If Iran doesn’t pull Hezbollah from the brink, it will be.
Mr. Katz speaks for many Israelis when he says: “We don’t ask anyone to fight instead of our soldiers. It’s a principle for us.” But Israel can’t stand alone: “We need you to back us, and to let our enemies know that you back us.”
“This is not a regular war. Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis and the Shiite militias—they want to eliminate Israel. To destroy Israel. It’s not a game. We don’t have another homeland, OK?” As our meeting ends, he sighs and comes at it from a different angle: “It’s not like the Holocaust. I’m a son of Holocaust survivors, may they rest in peace. I heard the stories from my mother, and I know everything. It’s not the Holocaust—but it’s the same intent. If they would have the power to do the same thing, they would do it.”
How Israel Turned the Tide in Rafah
Hamas miscalculated when it expected the Jewish state to yield to pressure from allies to stop short, Foreign Minister Israel Katz says.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-israel-turned-the-tide-in-rafah-hamas-pressure-to-make-deal-d5baa104
By Elliot Kaufman
July 19, 2024 5:17 pm ET
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz. ILLUSTRATION: KEN FALLIN
New York
Something changed in Gaza. After months of rejecting Israeli cease-fire proposals and holding out for more concessions, Hamas has begun to offer concessions of its own. Israel is closer than ever to freeing many of its remaining hostages, and it has gained the leverage to demand terms that protect the strategic gains of the war.
If you believe the media drumbeat—that Israel’s war effort is futile, its strategy absent, and its political isolation growing—it’s impossible to account for the breakthrough. Why, after months of contemptuous stalling, did Hamas begin to bend?
“Two reasons,” says Israel Katz, Israel’s foreign minister, in an interview at the Journal’s office. “One, they understand now that there will be no cease-fire without a hostage deal. Two, the IDF is acting aggressively against the terrorists in Gaza. Especially important was entering Rafah,” Hamas’s stronghold at the southern end of the strip.
Israel cut off Hamas’s supply routes and now holds Hamas “by the throat,” as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently put it. Senior terrorists are dropping at a faster clip as Israeli intelligence closes in; half of Hamas’s military leadership has been eliminated. Even after a large Israeli bombardment to kill Hamas’s military chief, Mohammed Deif, who is considered unlikely to have survived, Hamas barely attacked in response and rushed to clarify that it isn’t leaving negotiations. “Hamas is under much more pressure now,” Mr. Katz says. “That’s what made the difference.”
Israeli intelligence confirms it. “We see now the signs that there is a lot of pressure from the military arm of Hamas. They push the leaders in the hotels outside”—Hamas’s politicians, who live in luxury in Qatar—“to achieve an agreement. It wasn’t like that before,” Mr. Katz says. Hamas’s leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, “didn’t want a deal before. Not even when we offered everything.”
It shouldn’t be a surprise that pressure on Hamas could yield gains in negotiations. Yet for months Western powers took the opposite approach, pressuring Israel to end the war and leave Hamas victorious. They called for an “immediate cease-fire,” increasingly delinked from a hostage deal. Humanitarian groups upbraided Israel and kept quiet about Hamas. The International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court menaced Israel with bogus prosecutions and tribunals.
“The main reason that this murderer, Sinwar, didn’t do the hostage deal is because he expected the world to stop Israel without it,” says Mr. Katz. “He expected the ICJ, the ICC, the Security Council, maybe a conflict between the United Nations, Israel and the EU”—surely one of them would force Israel to capitulate. Time was on Hamas’s side, no matter how many hostages it kept or killed.
Mr. Katz was on the receiving end of many lectures from Western officials. “I sat with foreign ministers, and they told me, ‘Don’t go to Rafah, don’t go to Rafah. It’ll be a mess.’ And I told them, ‘What are you saying? You believe that we can leave Hamas in Rafah, and so five minutes after we withdraw, they will take all of Gaza?’ ”
The Rafah operation was delayed by months, during which Hamas seemed to be under less pressure than ever. The White House withheld weapons from Israel. Warnings of a humanitarian disaster poured in from all quarters. On May 6, Israel invaded Rafah anyway.
“And we were right,” says Mr. Katz. “Everyone knows it now, even the U.S., because everyone warned that it would be a catastrophe. It’s a war, yes. It’s not a picnic. But they said that it would take four months to evacuate the population. It took only days.” More than a million Gazans quickly evacuated Rafah to designated safe zones.
No critics recanted, but the pressure on Israel quietly diminished. As if embarrassed, the world suddenly took note that Hamas is the obstacle to a hostage deal. The White House made the point, especially after airing on May 31 an Israeli offer that Hamas went on to reject. The U.N. Security Council ratified that offer. Even the Palestinian Authority, which glorified the Oct. 7 massacre, now blames Hamas for the continuation of the fighting. Hamas, the odd man out, had to admit there is no cease-fire on the horizon unless it releases the hostages.
Mr. Katz knows a deal still isn’t guaranteed. “It’s Hamas, after all,” he says. “There will be a deal only if Sinwar will understand that he doesn’t have any other choice.” That means no rest for the wicked. “The people that deal with the negotiations are telling us now: ‘Don’t stop, continue’ ”—push Hamas even harder.
Coming face to face with the reality of Palestinian nationalism has changed Israel. “The people from the kibbutzim in the south—many were socialist and believing in all the ideas,” Mr. Katz says. “Now, they’re telling us, ‘We are against a Palestinian state.’ ” They saw on Oct. 7 what purposes such a state would be put to.
Western foreign ministers should know better. “You will sit there, in the fjords in Norway, and decide that there will be a Palestinian state?” Mr. Katz says. “It will not happen. We want peace more than you do.” It’s suicide that Israelis object to. “No one can force Israel into it, not even the wise deputy prime minister in Spain,” he says, referring to Yolanda Diaz, who uses the protest slogan for the destruction of Israel: “From the river to sea, Palestine will be free.” Mr. Katz says: “I told them the days of the Inquisition have passed.”
Has Oct. 7 changed how the world sees the conflict? “Not enough,” Mr. Katz answers. “They forget. But one thing they can’t forget is the hostages,” he says. “We don’t allow them to forget.” He often brings families of hostages on foreign trips and to meetings with his counterparts.
Western statesmen face domestic pressure if they back Israel against the butchers. Some Europeans fear their large Muslim populations, Mr. Katz says. Others worry about social media. “So, it will be hard,” he tells them, “but you are leaders.”
Mr. Katz is grateful for American support and has no interest in criticizing the Biden administration. On Iran, he thinks the U.S. is moving in the right direction. Regarding the delayed weapons he says: “I think that now everything is OK, and it’s very good that our enemies know that it’s OK.”
On the ICC, he aims his fire at the prosecutor. Karim Ahmad Khan had assured Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Britain’s then-Foreign Minister David Cameron that before making a decision, he would give Israel a chance to provide evidence. “Why are a lot countries mad at him? Because he lied to them,” Mr. Katz says. Mr. Khan canceled the meetings with Israel on short notice and instead showed up on CNN to announce that he would seek arrest warrants for Israeli leaders.
Mr. Katz is fresh off conversations with Western statesmen at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization conference in Washington. “I went to tell them three words,” he says: “Iran, Iran, Iran.” If you want a preview of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday, start there.
The world may treat Hamas as the Jews’ problem, but the men calling the shots in Tehran aren’t so easily dismissed. “Iran sells 80% of its oil to China,” Mr. Katz says. “Now they’re selling every day about 2 million barrels. It was only 300,000 before,” when the U.S. enforced its oil sanctions. China gets the oil at a substantial discount.
“You understand very well what is the competition now in the world between the U.S. and China,” Mr. Katz says. He made this case to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and found her receptive. “Even this administration has an interest, because of the global conflict, to be aggressive against Iran,” he says. It also has an opportunity. “Now, because Iran supports Russia and the Europeans are afraid of Russia—not only against, but afraid—the Europeans are willing to join.”
These days, Europe sometimes brings America along. At the International Atomic Energy Agency in May, the U.S. didn’t want to make a stir by censuring Tehran’s nuclear program. It did so in the end, however, because France, Germany and the U.K., with some help from Israel, pushed the censure anyway.
Mr. Katz sees the Islamic Republic as vulnerable. “Iran is like an egg: hard on the outside but soft on the inside. From the inside, most of the people in Iran are against the regime,” he says. “The economy is weak, still weak. And after we saw the helicopter crash,” in which Iran’s president and foreign minister died, “maybe the Iranian army is not so modern. So, to put effective sanctions against Iran can be a game changer. Because there are no proxy terrorist organizations without Iran.”
That’s worth remembering as Israel faces down Hezbollah, Tehran’s army in Lebanon. It started firing on Israel on Oct. 8 and has slowly escalated ever since, turning the north of Israel into a no-go zone for nine months.
Mr. Katz warns that “all-out war” is very close. “We don’t want it, and maybe they don’t want it. But it can’t remain like this,” he says. “I’m telling you, press Iran. If you want to prevent war, the way to prevent war is to pressure Iran and explain to Iran what the cost will be.”
Contrary to what the West assumes, “a cease-fire in Gaza and a hostage deal will not prevent a war with Hezbollah in the northern front,” he says. “Israel won’t agree to ‘quiet for quiet’ anymore.” Quiet won’t be enough for 70,000 evacuated Israelis to return to their homes in the north of Israel. They need real security, which requires Hezbollah to leave its perch in southern Lebanon, demilitarizing the buffer zone as the U.N. mandated in 2006.
Can Hezbollah be persuaded to pull back its forces? “I doubt it,” Mr. Katz says. “My personal view is it’ll happen either through an Israeli military response or if Iran orders Hezbollah to withdraw.”
In the end, Mr. Katz says, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah “doesn’t understand Israel. He has an image of weakness”—but he’s wrong. “We don’t want war, because we don’t want anything in Lebanon. But if it will be war, it will not be like in Gaza,” where the presence of hostages restrains Israel’s use of force. “About 80% of our air force isn’t being used right now,” he says. If Iran doesn’t pull Hezbollah from the brink, it will be.
Mr. Katz speaks for many Israelis when he says: “We don’t ask anyone to fight instead of our soldiers. It’s a principle for us.” But Israel can’t stand alone: “We need you to back us, and to let our enemies know that you back us.”
“This is not a regular war. Iran and Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis and the Shiite militias—they want to eliminate Israel. To destroy Israel. It’s not a game. We don’t have another homeland, OK?” As our meeting ends, he sighs and comes at it from a different angle: “It’s not like the Holocaust. I’m a son of Holocaust survivors, may they rest in peace. I heard the stories from my mother, and I know everything. It’s not the Holocaust—but it’s the same intent. If they would have the power to do the same thing, they would do it.”
Mr. Kaufman is the Journal’s letters editor.
12. Irreconcilable Differences: A guide to plans for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. by Sir Lawrence Freedman
A long but important read.
Excerpts:
In a situation where Ukraine is already under pressure to make some concessions Putin’s inclination will be to ask for more. How far would Trump be prepared to go to push Ukraine so that Russia could keep the gains of its aggression? Would he be prepared to offer credible security guarantees as a carrot to Kyiv. If he does, would that make the deal even less attractive to Putin? Part of Russia’s reasoning in the past has been that if a hostile regime remains in Kyiv the situation will remain unstable – which is why it wanted to occupy all of Ukraine in the first place.
In practice, therefore, deal-making will be difficult. Some issues, even with good will, which will be lacking, will still be intractable. Let us assume, for example, that territory is to be ceded to Russia. Where will the new border be drawn and what will be the arrangements for movement across it? If, as in the past, Russia insists on limits on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces how will they be set and verified? What will happen if the Ukrainian parliament rejects any deal. In the past Zelensky has promised to put any agreement to a referendum. At what pace can the economic sanctions imposed on Russia be unravelled, and will this be conditional on Russia meeting its obligations?
This is why detailed ‘peace’ negotiations are rarely a good way to stop a war. The best way to stop a war is a cease-fire and possible disengagement of forces that the two sides can live with, to be followed, if possible, by substantive negotiations of long-term arrangements. But that will not happen if Ukraine believes that the ceasefire line will turn into a de facto border, with the territory lost to Ukraine forever. There might be much more ambitious schemes, for example with contested territory put under international trusteeship, proper referendums to allow residents to state their preferences (but including those that fled as well as those that stayed), peacekeeping forces from other countries to monitor ceasefire lines. Nobody is proposing any of this at the moment.
There would be enormous relief all round if this war could be brought to a conclusion. But the fact that this is yet to happen is not simply the result of a lack of will to do the commonsensical thing but because of what is at stake for both sides. The record of the 2022 negotiations is that positions shifted with developments in the war. The ‘realist’ demands for Ukraine to make concessions start with an assumption that this is a war Russia is bound to win. Ukraine’s view is that if there is to be any hope of Russia giving up on territory that is has tried to take through conquest then it has to be shown that it cannot win and will be pushed back. Sadly this is a war without a quick diplomatic fix.
Irreconcilable Differences
A guide to plans for negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
https://samf.substack.com/p/irreconcilable-differences?utm
LAWRENCE FREEDMAN
JUL 20, 2024
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Ukrainian and Russian representatives during the third round of peace negotiations in 2022.
Since the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War ‘realists’ have warned that Ukrainians are foolish to resist Russian aggression and should instead agree a compromise peace that might still leave them with the bulk of their country at the cost of conceding a chunk to Russia. How much independence the rump Ukraine could then enjoy would depend on what had also been agreed on its future security arrangements. These same realists would expect Ukraine to accept that it could never join NATO.
A recent example of such ‘realism’ can be found In a letter in the Financial Times signed by individuals who have long taken this position, including former UK and US Ambassadors to Moscow. They do not expect concessions from Russia other than a possible promise that it would not try to take even more territory. They urge that the US should start talks with Moscow ‘on a new security pact which would safeguard the legitimate security interests of both Ukraine and Russia’ without explaining how that would work.
This announcement, they argue, ‘should be immediately followed by a time-limited ceasefire in Ukraine.’ This would ‘enable Russian and Ukrainian leaders to negotiate in a realistic, constructive manner’, but they do not say what they can negotiate after such a long and bitter war or for that matter what will happen if the negotiations fail and the time on the ceasefire runs out. They claim to care for Ukraine but their underlying message is Russian – give up now or you will lose more and if you keep fighting ‘the more the pressure for escalation up to a nuclear level is likely to grow.’ (For a robust response see a letter signed by James Sherr and others).
Elsewhere on 5 July, 51 Nobel Laureates posted an appeal in the Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta, urging immediate cease-fires in both Ukraine and Gaza so that world leaders can turn to the urgent task of saving the planet from climate change. (Because it is published in Russia and so subject to censorship the word ‘war’ had to be removed from the opening sentence). Their case is that war is wasteful and the efforts expended on it would be better spent on climate change. ‘While killing each other, people are also destroying our planet.’ Their call - Cease fire! End the loss of human life! Prevent a nuclear disaster! – is somewhat short on details, as if the thought that peace is preferable to war hadn’t occurred to anyone before.
No doubt people in Ukraine and Russia would also be pleased if the war ended and so would welcome negotiations to that effect. The problem, as with all non-substantive calls for diplomatic initiatives to end the war, is that the Ukrainian people are not keen on abandoning their territory to cruel occupiers while Russians do not question Vladimir Putin’s war goals of taking more territory. So while both sides regularly insist that they would prefer to achieve their goals by peaceful rather than violent means, and do not rule out negotiations, when they set out their proposals describing desirable outcomes, they turn out to be totally incompatible.
Interest in negotiations is currently growing not because political leaders have read letters in the Financial Times but because it now seems entirely possible that Donald Trump will become President again and he has previously claimed to have a plan for bringing an end to the war. Against this backdrop, and perhaps because of the stresses and strains of the war and the lack of clear routes to a military victory, there is now much more international chatter about the possibility of new negotiations.
It will be a big enough challenge to agree a venue, format and agenda for talks, let alone to find the compromises that would make it possible to call a halt to the war. To explain the challenge here is a guide to what was talked about in the past, the current stated positions of the two sides, and what is known about a supposed ‘Trump Plan’.
The 2022 Negotiations
The most substantial negotiations took place during the first weeks of the war. They appeared to be making progress in mid-March 2022 but they soon stalled and by May had fizzled out completely. Russia regularly claims that a workable deal was very close and that Zelensky was somehow persuaded to abandon it by Boris Johnson, then UK Prime Minister, and fits in with their general view that the Ukrainians are puppets of the West and are unable to reach their own conclusions. (The claim flows from a comment by David Arakhamia, who had been involved in the talks, and reported that when Johnson visited Kyiv in April 2022 he told Zelensky not to ‘sign anything’ with Russia and ‘just fight.’)
Detailed accounts of the negotiations have now appeared, including this one in Foreign Affairs by Sam Charap and Sergey Radchenko The most substantial, based on the negotiations record and the final state of draft as reached in April 2022, was published last June in the New York Times. I have drawn extensively on this account in the following paragraphs.
The issues at the heart of those negotiations would be the same in another round, although both sides have since hardened their positions and the experience of the war has added new issues. The core topics were then Crimea, Eastern Ukraine and membership of NATO. There were also other questions raised by the Russians on ‘denazification’, including the status of the Russian language in Ukraine, which the Ukrainians said were irrelevant, but presumably would some up again.
Crimea
Russia initially wanted Ukraine to recognize Crimea as part of Russia. Ukraine refused but did propose that the two countries agree to ‘resolve issues related to Crimea’ through 10 or 15 years of diplomacy. This would come with a pledge to avoid seeking a resolution through ‘military means.’ In the end the draft treaty excluded the issue. Crimea would be left under Russian occupation but without Ukraine recognizing it.
The Enclaves
Russia demanded that Ukraine give up the entire Donbas. Its draft language stated:
‘Ukraine recognizes the independence of the Donetsk People's Republic and the Luhansk People's Republic within the administrative boundaries of the former Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine and, in this regard, shall introduce comprehensive changes to the national legislation.’
Ukraine appeared ready to accept that the enclaves established in 2014 in the Donbas might remain under Russian occupation but no specifics were agreed. It was assumed that this would be sorted out in a meeting between Presidents Zelensky and Putin, which of course never happened.
Neutrality and Membership of NATO
Russia demanded that Ukraine never join NATO or other alliances, host foreign military bases or weapons, or conduct military exercises with other countries without its consent. Ukraine offered to become a ’permanently neutral state’ and to ’terminate international treaties and agreements that are incompatible with permanent neutrality.’
The key problem was what would replace it. Ukraine wanted an arrangement binding other countries to come to Ukraine’s defence if it were ever attacked again. It proposed a security mechanism that would be triggered ‘in the event of an armed attack on Ukraine.’ Yet Kyiv had been burned before. They were given assurances about sovereignty and territorial integrity by the US, UK, and Russia contained in the Budapest Memorandum, signed when Ukraine agreed in 1994 to give up its nuclear arsenal inherited from the Soviet Union. These had already been ignored by Russia when it decided to annex Crimea in 2014 and then again in the full-scale invasion. Charap and Radchenko suggest that the Ukrainian calculation was that by signing up as a guarantor with Western powers, ‘Moscow accepted that any future aggression against Ukraine would mean a war between Russia and the United States.’
According to the Treaty language, the ‘guarantor’ countries that signed on to the treaty would hold ‘urgent and immediate consultations’ for no more than three days. Then, they would take ’individual or joint action as may be necessary’ to protect Ukraine, including
‘…closing airspace over Ukraine [a non-fly zone], providing necessary weapons, using armed forces in order to restore and subsequently maintain the security of Ukraine as a permanently neutral state.’
Russia agreed to much of Ukraine’s language on security guarantees but with exceptions. It balked at the idea of other countries establishing a no-fly zone or providing Ukraine with weapons. In April, in a move that finished off the negotiations, it sought to insert a clause that would require all guarantor countries — including Russia itself — to agree on military intervention.
‘The Guarantor States and Ukraine agree that in the event of an armed attack on Ukraine, each of the Guarantor States … on the basis of a decision agreed upon by all Guarantor States, will provide … assistance to Ukraine, as a permanently neutral state under attack…’
Russia would therefore be able to veto any international response if it invaded Ukraine again.
Who actually would provide the guarantees? The United States, the UK, France, China and Russia itself were all listed in the draft of the treaty as guarantors. Russia also wanted to include Belarus, while Ukraine wanted to add Turkey.
The European Union
In the 2022 talks, in its main concession, Russia pledged not to stand in the way of Ukraine’s possible membership in the European Union, though preventing this had been at the heart of the initial dispute between them in 2013-14.
‘The Parties to this Treaty share the understanding that Ukraine's status as a permanently neutral state is, subject to the provisions of this Treaty, compatible with Ukraine's possible membership in the European Union.’
A Ceasefire.
The Ukrainian view was that Russia could stop fighting and withdraw at any time. It regularly requested an early ceasefire but, as it noted in a March 2022 treaty draft: ‘The Russian side has ignored Ukraine’s numerous requests for a ceasefire.’
Russia added an annex to the April 2022 draft about how a ceasefire would be applied. It would begin when the treaty was ‘provisionally applied’ — defined as the day it was signed by Ukraine and most of the guarantor countries, including Russia. Both sides would not ‘carry out actions that could lead to the expansion of the territory controlled by them or cause a resumption of hostilities.’ Ukraine would be required to withdraw immediately: Russia’s withdrawal would be the subject of separate ‘consultations.’ Not hard to see the problems in that formulation.
International organizations could also be involved. Russia proposed that the United Nations monitor the cease-fire and that the Red Cross participate in the exchange of prisoners of war, interned civilians, and the remains of the dead.
Demilitarisation
Along with ‘denazification’, when announcing the invasion Putin had also spoken of ‘demilitarization’. In the negotiations it sought to limit the size of Ukraine’s military, allowing it no more than 100,000 people, with small quotas for different types of weapons (for example 147 mortars and 10 combat helicopters) and the firing range of Ukraine’s missiles restricted to 25 miles.
Ukraine was willing to accept some caps but put them much higher - an army of up to 250,000 people, 1,080 mortars and 60 combat helicopters, and missile range restricted to 174 miles. Nothing was agreed. The Ukrainian armed forces have moved on since this point.
Economic Sanctions
Russian wanted Ukraine and every other treaty signatory to cancel economic sanctions:
‘Ukraine shall cancel and henceforth not impose, and also shall publicly call on all states and international organizations to cancel and henceforth not impose, any and all sanctions and restrictive measures imposed since 2014 against the Russian Federation.’
Next Steps: Ukraine
Although the impetus was taken out of the talks by the revelations in April about Russian atrocities against civilians in Bucha, which made it hard to imagine how a deal could ever be struck, this did not actually bring them to a conclusion. As noted it was the Russian attempt to disable the security guarantees that Ukraine was seeking as an alternative to NATO membership that persuaded the Ukrainians that the talks were not going anywhere. No agreement had been reached at all on the territorial issues. The idea that this was a ’lost peace’, still encouraged by Russian propagandists and Western fellow travellers, doesn’t add up.
In future negotiations the neutrality/security guarantees issue will return, with the same issues present. But in three respects the discussions will have changed. First, the territorial issues will be to the fore although both sides positions have hardened. Ukraine now wants the return of all its territory while Russia is now wants to take more than before. Second, Ukraine wants reparations for all the devastation caused to its country by the Russian invasion and the cost of clearing it up. Third, all the issues surrounding future security arrangements have moved on and become more simplex.
Ukraine now insists that any peace deal must invalidate the September 2022 annexations of its territory (when Putin claimed for the Russian Federation the oblasts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia) , and that the Crimean Peninsula, which Putin annexed in 2014, must once again be considered part of Ukraine.
Zelensky’s ten point ‘peace formula’, announced in November 2022, had these headings:
1) Radiation and nuclear safety;
2) Food security.
3) Energy security.
4) The release of all prisoners and deportees.
5) Implementation of the UN Charter and restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the world order.
6) Withdrawal of Russian troops and cessation of hostilities.
7) Justice.
8) Ecocide, the need for immediate protection of environment.
9) The prevention of escalation.
10) Confirmation of the end of the war.
These formed the basis of a process set in motion in June when 92 countries met at a summit in Switzerland. Most (80) but not all of the participants called for the ‘territorial integrity’ of Ukraine to be the basis for any peace agreement. Some queried the lack of Russian participation. The next step is for the working groups to look in more detail at points in the plan in different capitals. Zelensky has now promised a full plan to be ready in November (with a possible Trump victory in mind?) that would be addressed at a second international summit. He suggests that Russia would be invited: Russia says it won’t attend. His basic aim is to create a narrative around what a just peace would look like.
Next Steps: Russia
As Zelensky’s peace conference was about to start, Putin restated his demands. Ukraine must surrender the entirety of four annexed regions (including territory that its forces currently hold) and abandon its bid to join NATO. He still insists that Ukraine must demilitarize and that all sanctions on Russia must be lifted.
‘As soon as they declare in Kyiv that they are ready for such a decision and begin the real withdrawal of troops from these regions – and also officially notify about the abandonment of plans to join NATO – our side will immediately, at the same minute, make the order to cease fire and begin negotiations.’
This came with a promise to ‘guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal of Ukrainian units and formations.’ These terms would be cemented in international agreements.
These are essentially surrender terms. Instead of the normal presumption that a ceasefire would be followed by substantive negotiations, the big issues would have to be agreed in Russia’s favour before a cease-fire would be implemented. This would be an unlikely sequence. Even if there was a proper negotiation and the headings of an agreement could be reached there would be far too many questions of interpretation to allow it to be the basis of a lasting ceasefire. Attempting to sort out the details of the final deal as a first step is a recipe for prolonged and unsuccessful talks.
It is also worth noting a coda to Putin’s statement from Dmitry Medvedev, if only because he is a former president and prime minister. In a post on his Telegram channel, he said that even if Zelensky agrees to Putin's most recent conditions for peace, this would not constitute the ‘end of the Russian military operation’ in Ukraine.
‘Even after signing the papers and accepting defeat, the remaining radicals, after regrouping their forces, will sooner or later return to power, inspired by Russia's Western enemies. And then the time will come to finally crush the reptile. To drive a long steel nail into the coffin lid of Bandera's quasi-state.’
Russia will eventually return ‘remaining [Ukrainian] lands to the bosom of the Russian land.’
As we have learned to discount Medvedev’s comments on other matters, including his routine threats to do terrible things to all Russia’s enemies, we can probably discount this as well, but it hardly provides a reason for Ukraine to take any Russian promises seriously.
Victor Orban
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has embarked on his own peace mission. He has done this while holding the EU’s rotating presidency, although the EU’s leadership have disavowed and disparaged his efforts. Orban has met with both Zelensky (who was unimpressed) and Putin (more impressed) before discussing his ideas with Donald Trump.
After a three-hour meeting with Putin, Orban acknowledged that Ukraine and Russia’s stances were ‘very far from one another’. Putin appeared to confirm in private what he had said in public about his ambitious demands. Orban promised that he would continue to work to end the war for the rest of this year. ‘There are almost no countries left that are in contact with both sides. Hungary is one of them.’
In a letter to EU leaders Orban claimed that Trump had ‘well-founded plans’ for Russia-Ukraine peace talks. This led him to propose that the EU should reopen direct diplomatic communication with Russia and start ‘high-level’ negotiations with China to find a peaceful solution to the war in Ukraine. This got a frosty response, not least because all this suggested an imposed peace on Ukraine.
According to Orban,
’We can expect no peace initiative coming from [Trump] until the elections. I can however surely state that shortly after his election victory, he will not wait until his inauguration, but will be ready to act as a peace broker immediately. He has detailed and well-founded plans for this.’
Trump
Trump himself has previously claimed that he would sort out the war in short order, and, as he is now as likely as not to become President, there is interest in how he thinks this can be done. The Kremlin said any peace plan proposed by a possible future Trump administration would have to reflect the reality on the ground but that Russian President Vladimir Putin remained open to talks.
A rudimentary plan has been drawn up Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served in Trump's National Security Council staff, during his 2017-2021 presidency, for a ceasefire based on prevailing battle lines allowing for peace talks to then take place.
The core elements of the plan were outlined in a paper published by their American First institute. In an interview Kellogg said it would be crucial to get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table quickly if Trump wins the election. He advocated telling the Ukrainians, 'You've got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, support from the United States will dry up.’ Putin would be told: 'He's got to come to the table and if you don't come to the table, then we'll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.’ Keeping NATO membership for Ukraine off the table was part of the incentive for Russia to come along; putting it back on would be punishment for holding back.
These coercive measures might possibly get the parties to the table but it does not point to any actual agreed deal. The fact that there is even substantive engagement involving the two leaders will raise expectations that a deal will just be a few conversations away. (Remember the excitement surrounding Trump and North Korea’s King Jong-un, which in the end produced broad principles which could not be turned into a lasting deal).
The Kellogg/Fleitz plan seems to suggest that Ukraine need not formally cede territory to Russia under their plan even if it would have to accept that it would not regain control of it all in the near term, or indeed ever. That would not be enough for Russia. Putin would want the transfer of all the claimed territory confirmed and he would be reluctant to hand back any of the extra oblasts he has added to the Russia Federation.
In a situation where Ukraine is already under pressure to make some concessions Putin’s inclination will be to ask for more. How far would Trump be prepared to go to push Ukraine so that Russia could keep the gains of its aggression? Would he be prepared to offer credible security guarantees as a carrot to Kyiv. If he does, would that make the deal even less attractive to Putin? Part of Russia’s reasoning in the past has been that if a hostile regime remains in Kyiv the situation will remain unstable – which is why it wanted to occupy all of Ukraine in the first place.
In practice, therefore, deal-making will be difficult. Some issues, even with good will, which will be lacking, will still be intractable. Let us assume, for example, that territory is to be ceded to Russia. Where will the new border be drawn and what will be the arrangements for movement across it? If, as in the past, Russia insists on limits on the size of the Ukrainian armed forces how will they be set and verified? What will happen if the Ukrainian parliament rejects any deal. In the past Zelensky has promised to put any agreement to a referendum. At what pace can the economic sanctions imposed on Russia be unravelled, and will this be conditional on Russia meeting its obligations?
This is why detailed ‘peace’ negotiations are rarely a good way to stop a war. The best way to stop a war is a cease-fire and possible disengagement of forces that the two sides can live with, to be followed, if possible, by substantive negotiations of long-term arrangements. But that will not happen if Ukraine believes that the ceasefire line will turn into a de facto border, with the territory lost to Ukraine forever. There might be much more ambitious schemes, for example with contested territory put under international trusteeship, proper referendums to allow residents to state their preferences (but including those that fled as well as those that stayed), peacekeeping forces from other countries to monitor ceasefire lines. Nobody is proposing any of this at the moment.
There would be enormous relief all round if this war could be brought to a conclusion. But the fact that this is yet to happen is not simply the result of a lack of will to do the commonsensical thing but because of what is at stake for both sides. The record of the 2022 negotiations is that positions shifted with developments in the war. The ‘realist’ demands for Ukraine to make concessions start with an assumption that this is a war Russia is bound to win. Ukraine’s view is that if there is to be any hope of Russia giving up on territory that is has tried to take through conquest then it has to be shown that it cannot win and will be pushed back. Sadly this is a war without a quick diplomatic fix.
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13. The Crumbling Edifice of Conventional Deterrence
Excerpts:
The most stressful potential shock test for U.S. conventional deterrence in the near term is the challenge of two simultaneous or nearly simultaneous large-scale conflicts in Europe and Asia. The mature Cold War standard for U.S. force planning for two major regional conflicts or major regional contingencies lapsed after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. The United States and its allies in Europe and Asia must now expect more assertive political and military behavior from Russia and China than hitherto, and the two powers have already increased their cooperation through joint military exercises.
This cooperation does not mean that their partnership will extend to combined military operations in the near future, and cooperation is far short of the military interoperability needed for shared responsibility in battle. In addition, the United States has allied support in Europe and Asia that is more than symbolic and capable of providing technology, training, and forces to support deterrence and defense in theater. Nevertheless, deterrence and defense requirements for this most demanding case will require policymakers with strategic vision, commanders with imagination and daring, and durable linkages among allied partners across the conflict domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Unfortunately, conventional deterrence and defense failure in this scenario can open the door to nuclear escalation with unforeseeable consequences.
The Crumbling Edifice of Conventional Deterrence | The National Interest
Successful deterrence will require policymakers with strategic vision, commanders with imagination and daring, and durable linkages among allied partners across the conflict domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.
by Lawrence J. Korb Follow @LarryKorb on TwitterL Stephen Cimbala
nationalinterest.org
July 19, 2024 Topic: Security Region: Eurasia
Successful deterrence will require policymakers with strategic vision, commanders with imagination and daring, and durable linkages among allied partners across the conflict domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace.
Current and aspiring nuclear great powers (the United States, Russia, and China), together with other comparatively small nuclear weapons states (either declared or widely acknowledged as such), are investing in expensive and expansive modernization of their nuclear arsenals. This pattern of growing commitment to larger and costlier nuclear weapons deployments is predicated on the assumption that nuclear weapons are a necessary and sufficient deterrent to a major war, including nuclear war. But that assumption is now under widespread challenge.
What we are seeing is a growing willingness of state and non-state actors to engage in large-scale conventional and unconventional warfare, even against the interests of nuclear powers. It turns out that, without the capability to deter or win conventional wars or unconventional attacks against vital interests, a state’s nuclear arsenal is, effectively, a one-dimensional success story sitting atop a glue factory of military insufficiency.
Dissenters of the preceding view might argue that nuclear weapons serve to deter a nuclear attack against the state and its vital interests and nuclear blackmail by one state against another or its allies. This concept is of little consolation to practical heads of state and military planners. A deliberate nuclear strike “out of the blue” by one nuclear power against another, not preceded by a conventional war, is one of the least likely paths to nuclear war. More likely is the expansion of a conventional war into a decision by one side to engage in nuclear first use.
The side that is winning the conventional war is less likely to engage in nuclear first use or first strike than the losing side. Resorting to nuclear first use would probably be a decision to rescue a losing position in a conventional war. Still, against a nuclear-armed opponent, nuclear second use in retaliation could not be ruled out—indeed, it would almost certainly be expected. Thus, a power that decided on a first-use nuclear policy has wittingly opened the door to a process of escalation over which further control requires a two-sided tacit agreement not to climb the ladder any higher.
Russia’s war against Ukraine beginning in February 2022 is an example of conventional deterrence failure that, as the fighting grows in terms of economic costs and societal destruction, invites an eventual expansion to nuclear war. NATO’s considerable support for Ukraine has kept the latter in the fight, together with the tenacity of Ukrainian resistance, the ingenuity of its intelligence services and tactical commanders in force employment, and the inability of Russia to close the deal with its own conventional forces and military assets greatly outnumbering those of Ukraine.
This stalemate has led to Russian frustration that expresses itself in periodic threats of nuclear first use by Russian President Vladimir Putin, other members of the Russian government, and noted Russian academics. Just as NATO failed in conventional deterrence before the outbreak of war in February 2022, Russia has failed to compel extensive Ukrainian resistance, including strikes into Russian territory with drones and long-range missiles supplied by the United States and NATO allies. Sooner or later, the military stalemate in Ukraine will have to give way to negotiations and a peace agreement—however distasteful such a deal might be to hardliners on all sides.
Further evidence of the apparent futility or declining relevance of nuclear deterrence, when it is unsupported by conventional deterrence based on war-winning capability, is provided by ongoing wars in the Middle East. Israel is a nuclear weapons state, yet it was attacked on October 7, 2023, by Hamas with the support of Iran because Israeli conventional deterrence failed (together with strategic intelligence). In addition, Iran aspires to join the club of nuclear weapons states, and neither the United States nor Israel has been able to deter Tehran’s quest for nukes by posing a credible conventional threat.
A nuclear Iran opens the door to a Middle Eastern proliferation nightmare that could include Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey as aspiring nuclear weapons states. However, unlike the U.S. attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, no coup de main against the regime in Tehran appears feasible. Economic sanctions and cyberwar are about all that remains in the U.S. tool kit for dealing with the ayatollahs and their supporting clique in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Speaking of embarrassing futilities in conventional deterrence—how is it that a group of terrorists holed up in Yemen, who were once limited to small arms and jeeps, have assembled an armory of missiles and drones to all but shut down traffic in the Red Sea, holding hostage much of the supply chain that affects countries in all regions? Great powers used to call people like this “pirates” and dispatched sufficient forces to treat them accordingly—as outlaws, not governments. Yet the Houthis, supported by Iran, continue to plague mariners of many nationalities without fear of retaliation from all but a few countries. The United States and the United Kingdom have attempted to push back and strike against identifiable terrorist weapons caches and command strongholds. Still, frankly, the situation is a global embarrassment for the international community, including the nuclear powers.
Some analysts may object that it is a stretch to discuss nuclear deterrence with respect to the situation in Yemen. However, apart from deterrence, one assumed characteristic of nuclear weapons is that they allow their possessors a certain amount of swaggering and additional reputation that they are not to be messed with. But this reputational overhang from nuclear possession looms less important in dealing with prospective conventional warriors and unconventional attackers than does the ability to disarm your opponent or to displace his regime and, in the case of terrorists, strike them with precision and lethality. America’s nuclear deterrent is not in doubt per se, but the United States and other leading military powers are having a harder time making conventional deterrence stick. In turn, unreliable conventional deterrence invites leaders to substitute military-strategic bluster or, if available, reach for nuclear coercive bandaids.
An example of the latter is North Korea. Pyongyang would almost certainly lose a major conventional war against South Korea, which the United States and other allies support. As a result, North Korea has ramped up its nuclear-strategic capabilities and even tested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) capable of reaching U.S. national territory, not to mention numerous missiles for attacks against American allies in the Indo-Pacific. This dangerous nuclear posturing by North Korea could stimulate responsive nuclear weaponization by Japan, South Korea, and other regional actors who feel directly or indirectly threatened.
Obviously, there are sensible counterarguments to the preceding example. One might contend, for example, that North Korea has survived as an outlaw regime, but Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi in Libya did not because the Hussein and Qaddafi regimes lacked a nuclear deterrent to conventional aggression and regime change. From this perspective, even a small nuclear force can deter a more powerful conventional attacker by threatening to impose unacceptable costs on the latter.
But this argument misses a critical point. In order to act as a credible deterrent, a nuclear force must be able to survive a first strike from putative attackers. If a small nuclear force can be destroyed preemptively with either conventional or nuclear weapons, it simply invites an attack on itself. Nonsurvivable nuclear forces are instigators of deterrence failure instead of reliable insurance policies against aggression.
The most stressful potential shock test for U.S. conventional deterrence in the near term is the challenge of two simultaneous or nearly simultaneous large-scale conflicts in Europe and Asia. The mature Cold War standard for U.S. force planning for two major regional conflicts or major regional contingencies lapsed after the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union. The United States and its allies in Europe and Asia must now expect more assertive political and military behavior from Russia and China than hitherto, and the two powers have already increased their cooperation through joint military exercises.
This cooperation does not mean that their partnership will extend to combined military operations in the near future, and cooperation is far short of the military interoperability needed for shared responsibility in battle. In addition, the United States has allied support in Europe and Asia that is more than symbolic and capable of providing technology, training, and forces to support deterrence and defense in theater. Nevertheless, deterrence and defense requirements for this most demanding case will require policymakers with strategic vision, commanders with imagination and daring, and durable linkages among allied partners across the conflict domains of land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace. Unfortunately, conventional deterrence and defense failure in this scenario can open the door to nuclear escalation with unforeseeable consequences.
Stephen J. Cimbala is a distinguished professor of political science at Penn State Brandywine and the author of numerous books and articles on international security studies, defense policy, nuclear weapons and arms control, intelligence, and other fields. View a listing of Dr. Cimbala’s authored books, book chapters, and journal articles here.
Lawrence J. Korb is a senior fellow at American Progress and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He was previously a senior fellow and director of national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. Follow him on X: @LarryKorb.
14. Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern
Graphic, photos, and video at the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/20/trump-shooter-motive-fbi-investigation/]
I think the reason for the public's frustration with lack of motive is because each side of the partisan divide wants to be able to blame the other (which is used to justify their hatred of the other political party members).
I really think this excerpt from the NY Times on political violence explains a lot:
If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/magazine/us-political-violence.html
Lack of motive in Trump attack frustrates public, but fits a pattern
Terrorism analysts say Trump’s would-be assassin is among a string of high-profile assailants with unknown or murky reasons for turning violent.
The Washington Post · by Hannah Allam · July 20, 2024
In the week since the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, details have emerged about sniper positions and Secret Service agents, witnesses and warnings.
But the answer to the biggest question remains elusive: Why?
So far, investigators say, they have found little evidence of an ideology driving the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old nursing home aide who was killed at the scene. The information gleaned from his phone, family and friends doesn’t offer a motive, national security analysts say, and the absence of a quick explanation has left room for the rapid-fire spread of partisan and conspiratorial theories shaping how millions of Americans view the attack.
Barring a breakthrough in the investigation, Crooks appears poised to join a string of high-profile attackers with no discernible ideological driver, or with influences from a mixed bag of beliefs. That outcome is frustrating for a nation struggling to make sense of the event, analysts say, but it fits into a pattern of bloody episodes that defy categorization along a traditional left-right spectrum.
“It’s hard, because when you go after a political target, you do assume political motive,” said Daniel Byman, a terrorism researcher the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a national security think tank.
Trump rally shooting
The Washington Post built a 3D model of the site of the attempted assassination at a Donald Trump rally in Pennsylvania based on more than 40 videos and photos. The Post’s analysis found that two Secret Service countersniper teams may not have been able to see the shooter at first.
End of carousel
Investigators haven’t produced evidence showing an ideological motive that meets official definitions of terrorism, Byman and other analysts say. Authorities typically explore other theories, too, including mental illness or a quest for notoriety. The lack of conclusive findings has been difficult to accept for many Trump supporters, who have embraced the idea that he was targeted by an enemy of the MAGA movement — a claim repeated this week by speakers at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
Since the shooting, conspiracy theories have proliferated — on the right and left — as every aspect of the incident is examined by self-appointed sleuths. The scraps of information released so far have been spun into elaborate hypotheses involving Biden administration coverups, foreign plots and demonic spirits.
“It’s very unsatisfying, psychologically, to say, ‘Stuff happens and we don’t know why,” Byman said, adding that without a motive, “people fill the void with their own conspiracy theories that increase polarization and decrease trust in institutions.”
Attacks without clear motivation aren’t unusual and have increased, researchers say, in part as a reflection of the ideologies that swirl together on social media and gaming platforms, creating a toxic soup of grievances with no cohesive political agenda. Authorities have cited unclear or overlapping beliefs in recent plots or violence where, for example, white nationalism melded with misogynistic “incel” subcultures, or when a member of a satanic neo-Nazi group invoked Islamist militancy in what the Justice Department called a “a diabolical cocktail of ideologies.”
In 2022, an attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was carried out by a hammer-wielding man who had been involved in nudist activism and Green Party support before more recent racist rhetoric and expressions of hatred toward Democrats, according to analysts who have studied his writings. As with Trump’s would-be assassin, extremists and partisans quickly stepped in to exploit the vacuum where a clear-cut motive would be.
The deadliest recent example was the 2017 mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and injured hundreds. To this day, it’s unclear precisely why 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers. The FBI has released a trove of documents that showed he had a serious gambling habit but never declared a motivation for the rampage. Paddock killed himself before authorities reached him.
Aaron Rouse, who led the FBI’s Las Vegas office when it investigated the attack, said the public should be patient while investigators pursue every possible lead, which will probably take months.
“As a society, we’re kind of preprogrammed for a TV culture that there’s an event, then a resolution, and it has to make sense,” Rouse said. “People have to have patience and realize there’s not a grand cabal behind every event.”
During the Las Vegas probe, Rouse said, he was surprised to learn from FBI officials who study mass shootings that roughly 20% of the time, a gunman doesn’t want anyone to know their motive or reasons.
“Some of them don’t provide a manifesto or a recording,” Rouse said. “They don’t tell people, and that’s what we had in Las Vegas, and it was incredibly maddening.” Rouse’s team eventually concluded that the gunman was a person with a troubled past who didn’t handle disappointment well.
Authorities say Crooks fired an AR-style rifle at Trump from a rooftop outside the rally security perimeter, killing one person in the crowd and critically injuring two others. He was then fatally shot by the Secret Service. Trump was injured, emerging from the attack with a bloodied ear.
FBI agents combing through the details of Crooks’s life have found little in the way of ideology or politics to explain his attempt to kill Trump just days before the former president again became his party’s White House nominee. Crooks had conducted online searches for information related to Trump and Biden, and had photos of both men saved on his phone, according to lawmakers and others briefed on the investigation.
Investigators have also determined that the gunman visited the site of Trump’s rally nearly a week in advance, those people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss details that have not been made public by the FBI.
According to state records, Crooks was registered as a Republican, though campaign finance records show that someone with his name and street address gave $15 to the Progressive Turnout Project, a Democratic voter-turnout organization, in January 2021.
In addition to Trump and Biden, the shooter had photos of Attorney General Merrick Garland and a member of the British royal family saved on his phone, two people familiar with the probe said. He had searched for information about major depressive disorder, the rally in Butler, Pa., and the Democratic National Convention scheduled for August. The gunman also searched online for information about teenage mass shooter Ethan Crumbley and his parents, according to a person familiar with a briefing law enforcement officials gave to lawmakers earlier this week.
“He had a range finder and a backpack,” Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said after a briefing Wednesday, in a statement that called for Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle to step down.
With no signs of a political motive or a foreign element, investigators are focusing on the psychology of the gunman. But there, too, there is not much to go on, other than that he had searched the internet for information about depression.
While many have assumed the motives behind Saturday’s shooting were rooted in the heated rhetoric of a presidential campaign, a 1997 Secret Service study of American assassins and would-be assassins of public figures found that “attackers and near-lethal approachers of public officials rarely had ‘political’ motives.”
Karl Schmae, a retired FBI supervisory agent, said the most relevant comparison to Crooks may be John Hinckley Jr., who tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan in 1981.
Before that shooting outside a Washington hotel, Hinckley had stalked President Jimmy Carter. Investigators concluded he wanted to shoot a president to try to impress an actress.
“John Hinckley was a troubled guy and he just wanted notoriety,” Schmae said. “There was nothing in particular about Reagan other than killing him would make Hinckley famous.”
Given the level of security around a former president and the mode of attack, Crooks surely knew he was embarking on a suicide mission, said Gina Ligon, who leads a federally funded terrorism research center at the University of Nebraska at Omaha and has written extensively about political violence.
“It certainly looks like someone who didn’t necessarily want to survive the attack,” Ligon said, but who sought “to do it in a way that’s remembered.”
Ligon said there were still too many unanswered questions to conclude that Crooks fit the profile of a “lone wolf,” a term that some researchers criticize as overlooking the role of online networks in radicalizing people to violence.
“Nobody acts alone — except the Unabomber,” she said.
Ligon and other analysts pointed to Crooks’s use of an AR-style rifle, his T-shirt from a brand popular in gun circles and the homemade explosive devices authorities discovered in his car and home as indicators of influences from a wider “ecosystem.”
Ana Velitchkova, a sociologist at the University of Mississippi who studies political violence, said what little is publicly known about Crooks meshes with research suggesting that attacks are more likely under certain conditions, such as when individuals “hone their violent skills.” The gunman was a member of the Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, a shooting club in Clairton, Pa., which through an attorney has condemned the attack as a “senseless act of violence.”
With so few clues, “we might never know what exactly triggered Crooks to shoot at Donald Trump,” Velitchkova said in an emailed response to questions.
“Nothing in Crooks’s reported profile seems out of the ordinary: no extremist ideology, no mental health issues, no struggles at school, no family issues,” she said. “Instead, Crooks appears to have been a ‘normal’ young man in today’s America.”
Perry Stein contributed to this report.
The Washington Post · by Hannah Allam · July 20, 2024
15. Confusion reigns as people turn to misinformation to understand Trump shooting
The "others" hating the "others."
Excerpts:
“For Trump supporters, saying Biden did it gives people ‘comforting fears,’” Putnam said. A shooting causes trepidation, of course, but it’s less scary if we think Biden ordered it because we already know him, and that he’s an adversary of Trump’s.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), a potential Trump running mate, released a statement on X saying, without evidence: “Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
Also on X, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the media as well, saying without foundation, “they demonized us” and “got what they wanted, an assassination attempt on President Trump and one of his supporters murdered.”
Conversely, Putnam said, people who distrust Trump are disposed to believing bad things about him, such as the “false flag” conspiracy theory. “So,” Putnam said, “the shooting is scary, but it’s comforting to say Trump is really behind it because he’s already distrusted.”
Even people who work to understand and deny disinformation find themselves taking a step back to marvel at just how quickly bad ideas and inaccurate accounts can zip across the world in nanoseconds.
Confusion reigns as people turn to misinformation to understand Trump shooting
A whirlwind of conflicting conspiracy theories blew across social media since the shooting Saturday by gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park.
Philadelphia Inquirer · by Alfred Lubrano
Misinformation has spread widely in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump.
A whirlwind of conflicting conspiracy theories has blown across social media since the shooting Saturday by gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, of Bethel Park, Pa.
Right-wing social media users claimed baselessly that President Joe Biden and the deep state were behind it, or, as the Kremlin said, they created the atmosphere that provoked the attack. Others on the left asserted it was staged by Trump supporters carrying out a “false flag operation,” perhaps using fake blood, to elicit sympathy and votes. Yet another theory was that the media is to blame for a near-deadly overdose of negative Trump narratives that triggered the violence. It may have been the Chinese, or Antifa, other conspiracy theorists claimed.
A few politicians on the right were among those engaging in the conspiracy mongering.
Not long after the shooting Saturday, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins (R., Ga.) posted on X falsely asserting that “Joe Biden sent the orders,” referencing the shooting. Late Sunday afternoon — garnering more than 7 million views — the post was somewhat altered, reading “The Republican District Attorney in Butler County, PA, should immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.”
As for the Democrats, no left-leaning politicians appeared to go on record blaming Trump people for staging the shooting. But the idea did have popularity on social media.
Democratic strategist Dmitri Mehlhorn, adviser to Democratic political donor Reid Hoffman purportedly wrote, “If any Trump officials encouraged or knew of this attack, that is morally horrific, and Republicans of decency must demand that Trump step down as unfit,” according to the news website Semafor. On Sunday, Mehlhorn apologized, saying he regretted the email, Semafor reported.
Meanwhile, actress and activist Andrea Seales posted on X, saying without evidence that the shooting “was more staged than a Tyler Perry production of Medea Runs for President.”
On Sunday afternoon, Biden warned against rushing to baseless conclusions about the gunman’s motivations before the FBI completes its investigation.
“I urge everyone, everyone, please don’t make assumptions about his motives or his affiliations,” Biden said. “Let the FBI do their job, and their partner agencies do their job. I’ve instructed that this investigation be thorough and swift, and the investigators will have every resource they need to get this done.”
A major news event such as the attempted assassination of a presidential candidate is expected to generate an enormous amount of misinformation (mistaken facts being disseminated), as well as disinformation (incorrect or faked information and videos purposely posted).
Because so many questions about what happened and why are still swirling, we will likely see two things, said Matthew Stamm, director of the Multimedia Information and Security Lab at Drexel University: “People innocently speculating online items that will then be inaccurately interpreted as fact. And bad actors, foreign and domestic, attempting to influence the American public.”
Asked what misinformation about the Trump shooting we can expect in the coming hours and days, Stamm of Drexel said, “More. I don’t know particularly, but, yes, a lot more.”
That individuals on social media are espousing endless numbers of conspiracy theories is nothing new. They flare up when people are scared and confused, according to University of Pittsburgh historian Lara Putnam, faculty affiliate with the school’s Institute for Cyber Law Policy and Security.
Psychologically, such theories can be both “scary and comforting,” she said.
Many conspiracy theories have known villains, Putnam said. Being able to think of a familiar figure perpetrating a frightening event — such as an assassination attempt — is far less worrisome than contemplating an evil, unknown person pulling the trigger. Thus, Putnam said, we’re seeing a proliferation of conspiracy theories that baselessly say Biden is behind the Trump shooting.
“For Trump supporters, saying Biden did it gives people ‘comforting fears,’” Putnam said. A shooting causes trepidation, of course, but it’s less scary if we think Biden ordered it because we already know him, and that he’s an adversary of Trump’s.
U.S. Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.), a potential Trump running mate, released a statement on X saying, without evidence: “Let’s be clear: This was an assassination attempt aided and abetted by the radical Left and corporate media incessantly calling Trump a threat to democracy, fascists, or worse.”
Also on X, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia blamed the media as well, saying without foundation, “they demonized us” and “got what they wanted, an assassination attempt on President Trump and one of his supporters murdered.”
Conversely, Putnam said, people who distrust Trump are disposed to believing bad things about him, such as the “false flag” conspiracy theory. “So,” Putnam said, “the shooting is scary, but it’s comforting to say Trump is really behind it because he’s already distrusted.”
Even people who work to understand and deny disinformation find themselves taking a step back to marvel at just how quickly bad ideas and inaccurate accounts can zip across the world in nanoseconds.
“‘A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on?’” said Penn State University misinformation expert Matt Jordan, quoting Winston Churchill. “Lies are coming from all over the place.”
Conspiracy theories about presidential shootings are common, but they spread faster now than they did 60 years ago.
There were private conversations among average citizens when JFK was assassinated, David Kahl Jr., professor of communication and misinformation expert at Penn State Behrend in Erie, said on Sunday.
Today, we’re able to propagate information — and misinformation — very differently. “Any person with a keyboard and a screen can reach thousands, millions,” Kahl said. “We’re seeing today alone, it’s real easy to spread misinformation.”
Philadelphia Inquirer · by Alfred Lubrano
16. Making sense of rumors about the Trump assassination attempt
A relatively deep dive into the rumors. Graphics, charts and data at the link: https://www.cip.uw.edu/2024/07/15/trump-assassination-rumors-collective-sensemaking/
Making sense of rumors about the Trump assassination attempt
cip.uw.edu · July 15, 2024
2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG
By Danielle Lee Tomson, Kate Starbird, Nina Lutz, Stephen Prochaska, Ashlyn B. Aske, Melinda McClure Haughey, Joseph S. Schafer, Zarine Kharazian, Adiza Awwal, and Michael Grass
Center for an Informed Public
University of Washington
This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
Key Takeaways
-
After the assassination attempt on presidential candidate Donald Trump, people converged online to make sense of available information in a process known as collective sensemaking.
- Collective sensemaking has two core components: assembling potential evidence and framing. The available evidence helps us select the frames we use, and the frames shape which evidence we focus on and how we interpret it.
- Early sensemaking focused on determining who the shooter was and why he had done it. We expect continued speculation online about the shooter’s motives, along with selective evidence sharing and continued framing contests.
- We also observed three politically-coded frames emerge: On one anti-Trump side, conspiratorial framing that the assassination attempt was “staged” for political gain; on the pro-Trump side, equally conspiratorial framing of the assassination attempt as an “inside job;” and in between, framing that criticized the Secret Service for failing to adequately protect the former President.
- Savvy creators are also utilizing AI to make content, memes, and product listings in response to the attempted assassination, including AI-generated imagery and commemorative merchandise listings.
On Saturday afternoon (July 13, 2024), a campaign rally stage in rural Butler, Pennsylvania became the site of a horrific and tragic event: an assassination attempt on former president Donald J. Trump. The presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee had been speaking during the rally when audience members reported hearing shots fired. Within seconds, members of Trump’s security detail surrounded him as he took cover behind the podium. Moments later, he would emerge from the scrum with his face bloodied and his fist raised, captured in immediately iconic photographs that lit up the internet.
The aftermath of the event was chaotic as officials, rally attendees, and online audiences tried to make sense of a dynamic and, at times, conflicting information space. Initial media reports containing hedgy language about “popping noises” were soon updated to assert that shots had indeed been fired. News spread that three audience members had been hit by gunfire, which resulted in one fatality. Photos circulated of a suspected shooter who lay dead on a rooftop a few hundred feet away. As the facts crystallized, information participants worked to determine the frames through which those facts would be interpreted. Diverging along ideological lines, pro-Trump rhetoric attempted to assign blame for the shooting, anchoring on an assumption that the perpetrator was a Democrat motivated by political rhetoric acutely critical of Trump. Meanwhile, among anti-Trump commentators, a sense of skepticism spread, with many theorizing that the event may have been “staged” by the Trump campaign for political gain.
For researchers familiar with how information flows during crisis events (and specifically in the aftermath of mass shootings) these dynamics — unpredictable and uncertain information spaces, political framing contests, conspiracy theorizing — are not surprising. Instead, they are reflective of core characteristics of many crisis events, the sociotechnical structure of our modern information spaces, and our political moment.
In this article, we share some of what we have seen on social media and other online spaces in the aftermath of the Trump assassination attempt, and put that into context based on what we know about how people use social media during crises and breaking news events. Specifically, we map some of the emerging narratives that we are tracking to a “collective sensemaking” approach for understanding rumoring and conspiracy theorizing during and after crisis events. Throughout the piece and drawing on our longstanding expertise of collective sense-making dynamics, we share some thoughts about what we might anticipate in the coming days as this situation evolves. Our hope is that this article will be helpful to everyday people participating in this sensemaking process, as well as journalists attempting to cover these conversations.
Background: What Is Collective Sensemaking?
During crisis events like Saturday’s shooting, we often see groups of people come together to make sense of what is happening amid intense anxiety and informational ambiguity. This dynamic process, called “collective sensemaking,” is increasingly happening online. Rumoring — with rumors defined as stories or pieces of information unverified at the time of propagation — is a natural part of this process, as groups develop theories to explain information and evidence that emerges. According to sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani’s 1966 book, rumors help us assign meaning in otherwise uncertain, rapidly unfolding events. Seen from this perspective, rumors can be either true or false, given they are defined not by their facticity but rather their unverified nature and spread through informal channels. In contemporary life, rumoring has found a home on the internet and has become an integral part of digital life where instantaneity is increasingly valued.
Drawing on the work of Gary Klein, et al, our approach to understanding how groups engage in collective sensemaking online focuses on the interactions between shifting evidence and frames, or ways to interpret this evidence. Groups adjust frames to suit multiple purposes or interests as new evidence emerges, such as first-hand social media photos and videos, reporting, witness testimony, past experiences, photojournalism, and expert opinion. Drawing on the same evidence, oppositional groups may contest framing of what is going on during and after the crisis. We have observed in prior research that emerging evidence may be boosted and/or reframed by larger, more influential accounts we call “news brokers,” who play an outsized role in the framing process. As we’ve written before, disinformation can be seen as manipulation of the sensemaking process (both through the introduction of faulty evidence and the intentional shaping of frames), and conspiracy theorizing occurs when these sensemaking processes go awry (often due to early anchoring on a conspiratorial frame).
The subsequent examples illustrate this dynamic relationship between evidence and frames in the process of collective sensemaking that we have seen in this assassination attempt crisis, informed by learnings from previous crises — particularly those that involve a shooter. We anticipate that some frames will persist as more evidence is produced, such as criticism of the Secret Service or blame of mainstream media for inciting violence against a candidate. Others fade more quickly as new evidence emerges, for example about the identity of the shooter. Given the aesthetic affordances of social media platforms, cultural symbols emerging in this moment, ranging from Trump asking for his shoes to putting his fist up in the air, become crystalized in different subcultures and can be used for commercial and political gain by crisis entrepreneurs and political campaigns. We observe generative AI taking an increasingly prominent role in speeding up the creation and proliferation of such cultural symbols.
Example 1: Speculation of Shooter’s Identity and Motives
The first questions to emerge in collective sensemaking during shooting crises are likely to be “Who did this and why?”[] Our analysis reveals that, in the wake of the assassination attempt of Donald Trump, rumors about the shooter’s identity began to spread within 5 minutes of the shooting on X (formerly Twitter), and soon echoed across other platforms. On Telegram, the shooter identity rumors took shape across two distinct stages (Figure 1).
Regarding the Who? In the first stage, prior to the shooter’s identity being officially released, public Telegram channels prematurely pointed the finger at an alleged “Antifa” member. Following this initial false identification, an individual on X posted a video falsely claiming to be the shooter, leading to more confusion. In subsequent fact checks, the self-identified shooter was identified as an internet troll (with an antisemitic handle) who later claimed he posted the video as a joke.
Regarding the Why? Once the actual shooter’s identity was officially confirmed and these initial false claims and speculations proved incorrect, rumoring entered a second stage focused entirely on theorizing about the shooter’s motives []. Telegram channels featured accusations and insinuations about the shooter’s potential connections to the Democratic party, presenting reports that he previously donated to a progressive fundraising group through the ActBlue donation platform. Elsewhere, media outlets noted that public records suggested he was a registered Republican, but this piece of evidence was not salient on Telegram, where U.S. audiences are highly skewed towards conservative politics.
Across both Stage 1 and Stage 2, we noted how the production of evidence on Telegram reflected the use — and promotion — of a strategic political frame that sought to paint the perpetrator as motivated by a left-wing agenda and/or anti-Trump rhetoric. That frame stayed consistent even as the available facts hinting at the shooter’s identity shifted.
Figure 1: An anonymized cumulative graph showing the number of posts, over time (UTC), about the shooter’s identity. Circles represent public Telegram channels, sized by the number of channel subscribers. Original posts are marked in pink, while forwarded posts are navy. This graph was generated using a continuously updated sample of public Telegram channels posting about U.S. elections. The sample was constructed using a snowballing method by following Telegram “forwards.” The initial seed list from which we snowballed consisted of 1) the largest U.S.-focused channels listed in the online Telegram catalog TGStat and 2) additional channels identified through manual monitoring and investigation as focused on U.S. elections.
As right-leaning audiences on Telegram focused on framing the shooter as a left-wing activist, left-leaning audiences elsewhere (e.g., Bluesky and X) approached the task of understanding the shooter’s motives from the opposite point of view. Conflicting rumors circulated (and continue to circulate) around the shooters’ past political activities and actions, including that he was a registered Republican, had donated to a progressive political cause, and that he appeared in a Blackrock commercial[].
Framing competitions that attempt to lay “blame” on one political party or another for motivating a shooter are not uncommon. They were also seen after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, as rumors circulated about the assailant’s party membership, as well as his anti-semitismic and xenophobic posts on the social media platform, Gab. It is important to note that even in assassinations of prominent political figures, the primary motive is not always directly political, such as in the assassination of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe in 2022. Investigating the factors contributing to episodes of political violence, including the assailant’s motives, takes time. This ambiguity leaves space for different groups to spread identity-based frames for interpreting evidence about the shooter and his motivations. We have seen examples of false identity-based frames in other recent U.S. shootings, such as false claims that both the 2022 Uvalde, Texas and the 2015 Colorado Springs, Colorado shootings were perpetrated by transgender people. In the coming days, we expect more online rumoring and speculation about these motives.
Example 2: A Spectrum of Political Frames
In the many cases of online collective sensemaking that we’ve studied, the application of politically-coded frames is a salient part of the process. Across the political spectrum, commentators often use the same videos, images, eyewitness accounts, and “expert” analyses to support disparate rumors and theories aligned with their political preferences.
In the first days after the assassination attempt, we observed three core politically coded frames emerge. On the anti-Trump extreme, there was an early frame that the event was staged for Trump’s political gain, though this has since slowed as more evidence emerged (visible in Figure 2). Another general frame emerged criticizing and questioning the Secret Service, with some partisan influencers applying an ongoing critique of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives to explain the Secret Service’s failure — a frame we’ve seen in other recent crisis events. On the pro-Trump extreme, a frame emerged that the assassination attempt had been an “inside job.” Both extremes reflect more conspiratorial framing devices and instincts.
“Staged” Assassination Attempt
In the early aftermath, a frame took hold on TikTok, X, and Bluesky that the assassination attempt was staged for Trump’s political benefit. Commentators insinuated that the event was set up to portray him as a hero with photographers strategically positioned to capture the instantly iconic photo of him with blood on his ear and his fist in the air. Others claimed that the crowds not panicking enough was “proof” that they were crisis actors. Some pointed to Trump’s history with World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and reality TV — suggesting he had “bladed” or cut himself like pro-wrestlers do for dramatic effect — as indication that this was a professionally staged event. Mimicking “expert” testimony, some professionals in the entertainment industry compared the blood on Trump’s ear to the kind found in packages on studio lots. Spanish-language videos drew on experiences of “fake crimes” in other Latin American countries to bolster the “staged” claim.
Figure 2: A temporal plot showing the number of posts on X that discussed the attempted assassination using the word “staged”. The x axis is Time (EDT) and the y axis reflects the number of estimated tweets related to a set of keywords about the assassination attempted, narrowed to posts containing “staged”. The data in this graph was visualized by using Brandwatch Consumer Research.
Theories derived from this frame peaked in the first two hours after the shooting, but died down shortly thereafter, as reputable news outlets had reported this as a legitimate assassination attempt and the shooter had been identified. Interestingly, though the “staging” frame was prominent this time within communities on the political left, it resonates with conspiratorial frames that are repeatedly used by the right-wing audiences to process crisis events, such as “false flag” and “crisis actors” accusations, where an event is produced in order to facilitate a political or economic victory.
Secret Service Failures
On social and mainstream media, many across the political spectrum, including President Biden, questioned why the Secret Service had failed in protecting a presidential candidate. Social media commentary was particularly focused on the failure to secure the rooftop where the shooter had carried out his deed. News brokers shared videos of the crowd urging law enforcement to address the armed man on the roof during the rally. Reflecting a more politically-coded frame, some compared videos of the Secret Service’s swift reaction to the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan, suggesting the Secret Service reaction to shots at Trump was much slower.
Many pro-Trump influencers suggested Trump had been denied additional protection — sometimes directly or indirectly blaming it on political motivations. Some spread the rumor that the Secret Service had denied Trump’s additional security requests, which the GOP had been investigating — a claim the Secret Service has denied. This narrative was further fueled by recent proposed legislation calling for the removal of Trump’s Secret Service protection if he were convicted.
Some pro-Trump influencers also blamed the Secret Service failure on DEI initiatives supposedly positioning unqualified minority hires in leadership roles — a frame we’ve seen employed before, spuriously blaming DEI for crises such as the Baltimore bridge collision and Boeing’s subpar manufacturing. Some juxtaposed images of female Secret Service agents at the Trump rally with older images of male agents. We expect this frame to continue gaining traction online.
“Inside Job” Claims
Some critiques of the Secret Service took on more conspiratorial framing. In retweeting a popular pro-Trump influencer, Elon Musk speculated that the mistake was either “incompetence” or “deliberate” (a framing that emerged on Telegram as well, see below). Highlighting many of the same critiques and questions of how the shooter could get to an unsecured rooftop, other influencers suggested the shooting must have been an “inside job.” One popular post tried to make sense of how a 20-year-old could outsmart the Secret Service, warnings from the crowd, or the speed of law enforcement’s reaction, only to conclude by comparing the event to the Kennedy assassination and insinuating the failure was potentially intentional. Others spread the rumor that a counter-sniper was told to wait. These speculations align with claims of “false flag” operations in previous crisis events.
While the “staged” assassination attempt, Secret Service failures, and “inside job” rumors were prominent on other platforms, notably X, they remained relatively low level within the sample of data we examined on Telegram — which has often hosted that kind of conspiratorial framing in the past. Much of the conversation in our Telegram data continued to focus on the identity of the shooter and his political affiliation. An important limitation to note here, however, is that our Telegram data is constructed from a snowball sample of U.S.-focused public Telegram channels, and is thus not necessarily representative of the conversation across the entire Telegram ecosystem.
Figure 3: A temporal plot showing the number of posts by public Telegram channels in our sample per hour for four prominent rumors. The ‘“staged” assassination attempt, Secret Service failures, and “Inside job” claims were present among public Telegram channels, but the volume of these rumors remained relatively low-level in our sample of data.
Example 3: Right-Wing Critiques of Mainstream Media
One of the most salient frames for breaking news and crisis events deployed by the right-wing is criticism of mainstream media. Historian AJ Bauer has described opposition to mainstream media as a defining and uniting characteristic of post-War conservatism. We saw this frame deployed in a variety of critiques including claims that mainstream media outlets had incorrectly reported the event; that the media had been too slow to call the shooting an assassination attempt; or that the media was partly responsible for goading the public into a frenzy against Trump by claiming he is a threat to democracy. The frame of mainstream media opposition is so strong among many Trump supporters that some rally goers were recorded shouting “This is your fault!” at the press box after the shooting.
As crises unfold, media institutions are subject to some of the same collective sensemaking dynamics as the rest of the public. It can take time for journalists to generate reliable leads and release accurate reporting — and in rapidly evolving contexts like this one, sometimes incorrect or frustratingly vague information is initially reported. This dynamic served as another vector for conservative criticism of mainstream media. In the first reports that something was wrong at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, headlines stated that Trump had fallen or been escorted away in response to loud noises — drawing ire from online commentators who claimed the media was trying to downplay the severity of the event. Though these vague initial headlines were later updated after credible sources confirmed Trump had been targeted in an assassination attempt, screenshots highlighting the hedgy language in the initial headlines persisted on social media.
Subsequent rumors, including one tweet featuring a video clip of French far-right politician Marine Le Pen, criticized what was perceived as media hesitancy to call the event an assassination attempt. As these critiques gained prominence, they furthered the longstanding delegitimization of the media. Social media users, including Elon Musk himself, championed X as a quicker, more reliable, and less partisan source of information for breaking news than an outlet like CNN.
Beyond the criticism of initial reporting, social media users blamed the mainstream media for motivating the attack, suggesting previous negative coverage about Trump had stoked virulent anti-Trump sentiments amongst the American public. They particularly lambasted legacy media personalities as victim blamers, who pointed out Trump and his supporters had warned of political violence as a consequence of Trump’s legal prosecutions. Some social media users shared compilations of historic headlines in which Trump was criticized, meanwhile prominent figures like U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene blamed the media for “demonizing” Trump.
As the circumstances around the shooting continue to unfold, screenshots of previous reporting will continue to appear incorrect or outdated. Though continuously refining a developing story is a normal part of the journalistic process, it may continue to serve as a vector for delegitimization of mainstream media.
These rumors and criticisms reveal some of the challenges faced by professional journalists grappling with both legitimate criticism and politically-driven villainization of their work: they are criticized for both moving too slow and expressing uncertainty when they report quickly, also vilified for making mistakes and having to correct themselves, and criticized (often by actors on both sides of the political spectrum) for being biased.
Example 4: Cultural and Commercial Production During Crises
Oftentimes, the trendiest content does not offer a particular verbal or textual explanation for a crisis, but instead evokes an affective response to a resonant aesthetic produced through trending sounds, images, and pop cultural references, and may spread in a variety of intersecting subcultures (e.g., partisan groups, fandoms, or racial/ethnic identities). The ability to create these aesthetic connections is easier than ever due to the emergence of computational tools like generative AI. The power of imagery, symbols, and sounds to assign ambiguous but powerful emotional resonance in pursuit of political or social mobilization — or commercial gain via commemorative merchandise — must not be overlooked in moments of crisis.
Humor and Pop Culture to Process Crisis
On contemporary social media, pop cultural references may be used to memorialize, explain or make light of crisis events. We saw memes comparing Trump’s grazing of the bullets to the Matrix films bullet dodges, alluding to Simpsons predictions, or even using Spongebob characters to depict a jealous Abraham Lincoln. Satirical content can also act as frames, such as “interviewing the assailant’s gun” which served the rumor that the event was staged and had crisis actors. Some content elevates the moment to iconic status, like celebrating what sounds like Trump saying “let me get my shoes” as the Secret Service ushers him away. Reactionary meme production is a hallmark of any cultural event in the internet era as creators try to vie for attention during a trending moment or cope with what has happened.
Fandoms and Subcultures Cement Group Identity Via Cultural Interpretations
Different ethnic, fandom, and cultural groups often react to the event with inside references. For instance, the Fortnite community created reenactments in the game and posted videos of it. Perhaps most visible even outside of its own community is Black Twitter[] and Black TikTok’s reactions ranging from relief at the shooter being white to reenacting the scene to asking Shonda Rhimes to come back and write a Scandal television episode.
In particular, “Many Men (Wish Death)” by 50 Cent — a song about a man who cannot die despite hits on him — trended as folks celebrated Trump’s survival. Many videos on TikTok utilized the track to create videos about Trump, which quickly resulted in a remix of Many Men on several platforms and the acknowledgement of the meme by 50 Cent at a performance. The song was a way to signal one’s support for Trump and find others who do — especially because users can search for more content that has that viral sound or song. Rumors have been reported that 50 Cent may perform at the Republican National Convention — underscoring how online content can impact offline political organizing.
AI Fueling the Generation of Content and Commerce
Generative AI may be fueling the faster generation of cultural and commercial content for creators. The mass amount of sharing and creating may contribute to internet trends and a shared “vibe,” or affective sentiment, within an app. Some of the content may appear to be or is considered “AI Spam,” which has gained popularity online and identified in a recognizable style (like the image below of Trump emerging from clouds) as mass-produced content is made to generate engagement and downstream profits. The rapid production of a shared aesthetic language and collective zeitgeist may result in drawing connections to other related frames more quickly — an area where more research could be done because of the newness of generative AI.
A Facebook user publicly posted this Trump photo in the AI-generated style of hidden faces in nature, and it has spread to some Facebook pages and groups that discuss AI-generated memes/imagery.
Additionally, many users increasingly leverage AI to quickly output listings for products they will sell with the attention they receive by jumping on the trending event. Capitalizing on crisis events is not new, but what is novel is the near instantaneous ability to commemorate it by quickly selling merchandise (that may not exist yet, or ever) with product images or listings generated by AI. We can anticipate this phenomenon much more during this and future crises.
Commercial incentives — including merchandise and monetization from mass followings — can also contribute to the propagation of a shared sentiment in the wake of a crisis. This is an essential component to the influencer attention economy. The ubiquity of commemorative T-shirts or tattoos is so common that users were quickly joking about how long it would take for these shirts to be made and posting when the shirts were out.
Commemorative merchandise contributes to mobilizing and demonstrating support for Trump in this moment. Product listings relating to this event vary from shirts to phone cases, with several products related to this event appearing on in-app shops like TikTok Shop and Facebook Marketplace, as well as the platform Etsy. Along with in-app marketplaces, there are digital ads being run on several platforms like X to advertise a wide range of products including collectible commemorative trading cards, digital currencies with $MAGA surging after these events. Some of these products may be inauthentic listings and the public should be mindful of the incentives of crisis entrepreneurs.
Note: We anonymize account names to protect the identity of accounts that may have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However, we do not anonymize public figures, professional journalists, verified accounts, and accounts that have massive online followings (>250k followers)
The Humanity of Rumors
Rumors are a natural part of human life, especially during moments of crisis when emotions are high and the facts are uncertain and changing. Researchers understand collective sensemaking — which produces rumors — as a natural social process, and one in which we all partake. Under these conditions, we all make mistakes. Getting caught up in conspiracy theorizing during the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a major political figure is a common human response. Collective sensemaking processes are also subject to manipulation. Bad actors and hoaxers can introduce faulty evidence. Political operatives may attempt to bend the frames that people use to select and interpret evidence. Scammers and crisis entrepreneurs can try to exploit heightened emotional states to spread falsehoods, sell products, and gather donations. Our hope in writing this article is not to scold people for sharing rumors, but to help people understand our very human vulnerabilities, especially to intentional manipulation, during times of crisis and social disruption.
Additionally, we aim to shed light on how the sociotechnical structures and dynamics of online information spaces may make us even more vulnerable, under these conditions, to spreading false rumors and to being manipulated by scammers and political point-scorers. Recognizing how our political identities are intentionally exploited — and even just incidentally make us susceptible — to spread false rumors may help us become more resilient to these forces. Slowing down and paying attention to which frames we are using and how they shape which evidence we focus on and how we interpret that evidence may help us in navigating complex digital spaces.
- Danielle Lee Tomson is the research manager at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.
- Kate Starbird is a CIP co-founder and Professor in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.
- Nina Lutz is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
- Stephen Prochaska is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW Information School doctoral student.
- Ashlyn B. Aske is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW School of Law Master of Jurisprudence student.
- Melinda McClure Haughey is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
- Joseph S. Schafer is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
- Zarine Kharazian is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
- Adiza Awwal is a CIP graduate research assistant and UW HCDE doctoral student.
- Michael Grass is the CIP’s assistant director for communications.
Footnotes
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[1] For example, in the aftermath of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, social media users mobilized to search for clues to the identities of the suspects, resulting in multiple false identifications.
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[2] At the time of writing this blog post, no official motive has been reported in the shooting at the rally.
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[3] The financial services company has been subject to right-wing attacks for its support of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) initiatives.
- [4] A Note on Terminology: Following a common practice in academic scholarship, we refer to the different elements of X (tweets, retweets, likes, follows) by the terms used in the community itself. Likewise, we use terms like “news twitter” and “crisis twitter,” both lower case, as the common names used on X to refer to these communities or discourse subgroups. When referring to the platform itself or associated policies, we use the term “X,” the legal name of the platform.
cip.uw.edu · July 15, 2024
17. A Russian Bot Farm Used AI to Lie to Americans. What Now?
But don't worry. The Russians have never tried to influence US elections. (note sarcasm).
A Russian Bot Farm Used AI to Lie to Americans. What Now?
csis.org · by Commentary by Emily Harding Published July 16, 2024
Remote Visualization
“Farming is a beloved pastime for millions of Russians.”
—RT press office, in response to allegations that RT created an AI-enabled bot farm to spread disinformation
Russia has officially made one dystopian prediction about artificial intelligence (AI) come true: it used AI to lie better, faster, and more believably. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with counterparts in Canada and the Netherlands, disrupted a Russian bot farm that was spreading pro-Russian propaganda. The FBI director and deputy attorney general in a press release highlighted the use of AI to create the bot farm as a disturbing new development. What they did not say, however, is that the West is unprepared to defend itself against this new threat.
This capability enables quick reactions on a huge scale to highly divisive world events. For example, the Russian operation could choose to spread divisive messages about the assassination attempt on former president Trump. In the past, this would have been a labor-intensive task of crafting a variety of credible messages designed to outrage both ends of the political spectrum, then iterating until a divisive note hit a nerve. Now, AI can craft the message, alter it for different audiences, and distribute it rapidly. Russia could enter the chat almost immediately.
Russia has always been at the leading edge of innovation in propaganda. From spreading allegations that CIA created AIDS in the 1980s and amplifying divisions over race and religion in U.S. society in 2016 to blasting anti-Ukraine messages globally today, Russia constantly finds new ways to push narratives to weaken the West.
AI has now provided the capability to vastly scale up those propaganda efforts. Throughout this disinformation campaign, Russia employed AI to create over 1,000 fake American profiles on social media, then used those profiles to spread anti-Ukraine, pro-Russian narratives in the United States. In short, Russia has coopted AI to lie.
This effort began in earnest around the invasion of Ukraine. A deputy editor in chief at RT, a Kremlin-linked news outlet that has earned a reputation for spreading the Kremlin’s distorted view of the world, organized the development of the bot farm. RT worked in conjunction with agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB)—perhaps Russia’s most aggressive and nuanced propagators of propaganda. In April 2022, the FSB bought the infrastructure for the farm, including U.S.-based domain names. Those domains hosted the AI-powered bots and even included code that tricked X (formerly Twitter) into believing the bots were real humans. Then, in early 2023, a Russian FSB officer created a private intelligence organization to manage the bot farm, using employees at RT.
The farm used Meliorator—“a covert artificial intelligence (AI) enhanced software package,” according to a joint statement issued by FBI and U.S. allies—to create a multitude of online personas. An open-source tool called Faker generated photos and limited biographical information for those personas. One form of bot was carefully architected to appear quite real. Developers used a web crawler to create seemingly authentic personas, which were used to amplify disinformation shared by other accounts. The personas represented a number of nationalities; many were posing as Americans.
The bots largely posted on X, but the code was clearly written to cross platforms and national boundaries. The government advisory said that “analysis of Meliorator indicated the developers intended to expand its functionality to other social media platforms.” The project disseminated disinformation to and about a number of countries, including Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States. Allied governments report that the tool is capable of creating convincing personas in large numbers, using those personas to post credible-sounding information, amplifying messages from other bot personas, and formulating their own messages tailored to the apparent interests of the fake human.
This development was predictable, but the United States still was unprepared to confront it. It was predictable in that it sits at the confluence of two events: First, Russia is fighting a war against Ukraine that has featured both kinetic and information combat. Second, it is a U.S. election year, when Russia has in the recent past significantly stepped up its propaganda efforts. Thus, there was every reason to expect Russia would use 2024 to press the cutting edge of propaganda technology.
Despite this advanced warning, U.S. efforts to defend against disinformation campaigns remain anemic at best. The Global Engagement Center at the State Department and the Foreign Malign Influence Center at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence are small and understaffed. The rules about what U.S. government (USG) agencies are and are not allowed to do in the information space are unclear and sometimes contradictory. In truth, the USG is largely dependent on industry to keep the bot farms away, and even the USG’s ability to talk to social media companies about these issues was recently the subject of intense legal debate. The sum total of these efforts is that the United States is crawling, and its adversaries just strapped on a jet pack.
Creating highly tailored propaganda is now fast and easy. Russia proved that AI can create realistic-seeming personas, drive content at scale, and trick platforms into believing personas are not bots at all. A group of allies caught this effort and seized the relevant domains, but not until the work had been underway for two years. In another two years, the state of the art in AI will be such that a bot can identify the messages that resonate best with a micropopulation and then feed that population what they want to hear. The payload of information will feel as local and genuine as a conversation over the fence with a neighbor.
Where Russia has led, others will follow. Western allies are sure to see many other attempts by intelligence services, information brokers, and even private citizens to use AI to spread disinformation, often to weaken the resolve of those who would stand up to autocrats and bullies.
Defensive efforts should move faster: Social media companies should capitalize on AI to automatically identify anomalous behavior, and they need teams of humans to investigate what the AI systems flag. The United States and allied governments should support research into how to use AI to defend against AI. Meanwhile, Congress should provide more freedom and more tools to the parts of the government that are fighting propaganda, in particular supporting efforts to inoculate and educate the public about how to avoid getting duped. Only a highly skeptical population, reading anything they see on social media critically, can starve the bot farmers who seek to divide them.
Emily Harding is the director of the Intelligence, National Security, and Technology Program and deputy director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.
Commentary is produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a private, tax-exempt institution focusing on international public policy issues. Its research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary. CSIS does not take specific policy positions. Accordingly, all views, positions, and conclusions expressed in this publication should be understood to be solely those of the author(s).
© 2024 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. All rights reserved.
csis.org · by Commentary by Emily Harding Published July 16, 2024
18. Force Design: Where is the Evidence of Revolutionary Change?
Excerpts:
“The root of the problem,” he begins, “is that their [Boomer and Conway’s] experiences are from a different era. The character of warfare has shifted.” He repeats the assertion later, in slightly different language, by stating that “the paradigm of warfare has shifted while they haven’t.” Perhaps. Generals are often famously accused of preparing to fight the last war. At the same time, Generals Boomer and Conway, and numerous other Marines who oppose FD2030, possess the wisdom of experience to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same—to use another well-worn phrase—and we should not be too quick to declare our current situation fundamentally new and unique.
...
At the foundational level, war does not change. At its most essential, war is a violent clash between independent, hostile and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other by force, constrained only by the countervailing efforts of the other and the limits of its own capabilities and resolve. But at another level, warfare is constantly changing. At the surface level, what we can call the face of warfare, warfare is continuously changing through a process of mutual co-adaptation by which each side adjusts its methods to the other in search of advantage. New tactics, techniques, technologies, organizations, and procedures constantly emerge and combine in new ways, while remaining within the parameters of the existing paradigm, in pursuit of a temporary battlefield edge that lasts until the enemy develops an effective counter. Thus, we can say that war is both timeless and ever changing. But this is not especially helpful, as it allows the two sides of the debate to argue past each other. Traditionalists can point to foundational factors and argue that war is as it always was. Change advocates can point to surface factors and argue that war has changed dramatically. Both are manifestly right.
...
In summary, we believe that Col. Desens has failed to make a compelling argument that recent technological developments have changed the character of war—as other have failed to do before him. The evidence suggests, to us at least, that the long-promised revolution in warfare has not arrived just yet. Advanced weapons are making their presence felt, to be sure, but at the surface level rather than the systemic level. Moreover, the so-called legacy systems that some have described as obsolete will have their say also. And we believe all of this will fit together within the existing combined-arms paradigm. While the face of war continues to evolve, the character of war as we have known it for decades continues to prove itself, at least for now, stubbornly resistant to change.
Force Design: Where is the Evidence of Revolutionary Change?
By John F. Schmitt & Jeffrey S. Dinsmore
July 20, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/20/force_design_where_is_the_evidence_of_revolutionary_change_1045934.html
U.S. Marines fire an M777 Howitzer during Artillery Relocation Training Program 24.1 at Combined Arms Training Center, Camp Fuji, Japan, May 15, 2024. ARTP is an exercise held to strengthen the defense of Japan and the U.S.-Japan Alliance as the cornerstone of peace and security in the Indo-Pacific region. The skills developed at ARTP increase the lethality and proficiency of the only permanently forward-deployed artillery unit in the Marine Corps, enabling them to provide precision indirect fires. (U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Michael Taggart)
In his recent RCD article “Operational Misconceptions: A Response to Operational Incompetence 2030,” Colonel Mark Desens offers a strongly worded rejoinder to General Walter Boomer and General James Conway’s critique of Force Design 2030 (“Force Design 2030: Operational Incompetence,” RCD, 15 June 2024). Col. Desens makes the same two-fold rebuttal that many FD2030 proponents have made: that the retired generals are old and out of touch and that warfare has undergone revolutionary change. He articulates his argument with more clarity than most.
“The root of the problem,” he begins, “is that their [Boomer and Conway’s] experiences are from a different era. The character of warfare has shifted.” He repeats the assertion later, in slightly different language, by stating that “the paradigm of warfare has shifted while they haven’t.” Perhaps. Generals are often famously accused of preparing to fight the last war. At the same time, Generals Boomer and Conway, and numerous other Marines who oppose FD2030, possess the wisdom of experience to know that the more things change, the more they stay the same—to use another well-worn phrase—and we should not be too quick to declare our current situation fundamentally new and unique.
For at least the last half-century, technology enthusiasts have been heralding an imminent revolution in warfare wrought by long-range precision weapons and sensors. We are still waiting. Revolutions in warfare are rare. Much more common over that time frame have been predicted revolutions that did not live up to the hype. They bring change, to be sure, but that change tends to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, so we can forgive the skeptics their skepticism. One common factor in unrealized transformations seems to be the repeated tendency to underestimate the ability of the other side to develop countermeasures that mitigate the predicted transformative effect—a dynamic that Generals Boomer and Conway with their experience are well-positioned to appreciate.
The revolutionists essentially assert that anything that moves on the battlefield (or even on the way to the battlefield) will be seen, and anything that can be seen will be destroyed, tipping the balance between offense and defense decisively in favor of the latter. At the limit, warfare under those conditions reduces to a static exchange at long range between interlocking kill webs of sensors and shooters. Let’s be clear: this is a highly technology-centric conception of warfare that is at stark odds with the Marine Corps’ traditional human-centered view. (Let’s also be clear: that does not necessarily make it wrong, but we suggest its adoption would have profound implications for the Corps.)
If the proposition is true, it would mean a return to the dilemma—albeit on a much larger scale—that prevailed on the Western Front of the First World War, when a number of technological factors combined within a dense and compressed battlespace to favor the stationary force decisively over the moving force. But we note that the condition that applied on the Western Front did not apply in all theaters of the war: operations in the Eastern and African theaters of the war remained much more fluid throughout the conflict. We also note that while the trend toward greater range, precision, and lethality has been consistent for centuries, only occasionally has it favored the defender. As Will McGee has pointed out, ever since the Germans figured out how to restore maneuver to the battlefield in 1918, the offense has been ascendant, and the technological trend has tended to support that ascendancy. Clearly, additional factors were at play in Western Europe in 1914, just as new ones will be at play elsewhere in the future. We suggest a little humility is in order: do not be so quick to conclude that emerging capabilities will decisively and intractably favor the defense.
Proponents seem to take this proposed new model of revolutionary change as axiomatic. Col. Desens offers no evidence to support this assertion, perhaps because he believes the issue is settled. The issue is far from settled. Col. Desens has performed the valuable service of opening the door to a serious conversation the institution ought to be having but isn’t. This is a model of future war that we believe deserves a more serious vetting than it has received. We believe, in fact, that this is the issue around which the entire debate revolves.
Col. Desens’ choice of nouns—character and paradigm—is important. If we are to have a productive conversation, it is important to agree on the terms of reference. What does it mean to say that the character of war has shifted? What constitutes a new paradigm of warfare?
At the foundational level, war does not change. At its most essential, war is a violent clash between independent, hostile and irreconcilable wills each trying to impose itself upon the other by force, constrained only by the countervailing efforts of the other and the limits of its own capabilities and resolve. But at another level, warfare is constantly changing. At the surface level, what we can call the face of warfare, warfare is continuously changing through a process of mutual co-adaptation by which each side adjusts its methods to the other in search of advantage. New tactics, techniques, technologies, organizations, and procedures constantly emerge and combine in new ways, while remaining within the parameters of the existing paradigm, in pursuit of a temporary battlefield edge that lasts until the enemy develops an effective counter. Thus, we can say that war is both timeless and ever changing. But this is not especially helpful, as it allows the two sides of the debate to argue past each other. Traditionalists can point to foundational factors and argue that war is as it always was. Change advocates can point to surface factors and argue that war has changed dramatically. Both are manifestly right.
But there is a level in between—commonly called the character of warfare—and that is where the crux of this debate lies. This intermediate level defines the broad dynamics of warfare—the operating system, the “rules of the game.” The character of war is enduring but not immutable. It follows a pattern of punctuated equilibrium, remaining stable for long periods, changing only occasionally and then only in response to powerful forces. But when it does, it tends to change quickly and usually unexpectedly.
Transformations in the character of war are rare watershed events. (It could be theorized that as the pace of technological advancement accelerates, so will the frequency of transformations, although we have not observed that pattern in the historical record). More common, at least in the last hundred years, have been predicted transformations that did not live up to the hype. Technological advances have brought change, no doubt, but that change has tended to be closer to the surface than the systemic level.
For our leaders, understanding this intermediate, systemic level is key. It stands to reason that a military that correctly anticipates a transformation and prepares for it gains a significant advantage over one that does not. Conversely, a military that goes all in on a transformation that does not arrive could find itself bested by a less advanced enemy that does the basic things really well. Herein lies the rub.
We agree with Col. Desens that changes in the character of warfare represent paradigm shifts. Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of changing paradigms in his classic 1962 history of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He argued that most of the time scientists conduct “normal science” within an existing paradigm, strengthening, modifying, and expanding that paradigm to accommodate anomalies. When a paradigm cannot adjust to those anomalies it collapses, eventually to be replaced by a new paradigm that does accommodate them. His concept has been extended to a multitude of other fields including the military in terms of operations and tactics.
If the character of warfare has changed it would indeed constitute a change of paradigm in the Kuhnian sense. Ukraine’s war with Russia of course is the test case that all the world’s militaries are watching. The proposed harbingers of transformation—notably missiles and drones—so far seem to have fit comfortably within the incumbent operational paradigm rather than producing anything that could be called transformative. They reflect “normal operations,” to adapt a Kuhnian construct. While drones have caused a stir, countermeasures have lessened their impact.
Meanwhile, legacy systems deemed obsolescent—tanks and cannon artillery being the primary examples—remain operationally significant and at the top of the Ukrainian wish list. During the initial invasion, Russian tanks indeed appeared especially vulnerable to antitank guided missiles and aerial attack drones, leading to pronouncements of the death of armor. It now appears likely that the period of vulnerability at the beginning of the war reflected two specific causes, both now somewhat mitigated. The vulnerability to antitank missiles reflected the Russian failure to employ combined arms—that is, employing tanks without infantry and artillery support. Meanwhile, the vulnerability to drones probably reflected the inevitable interval between the introduction of an innovation and the emergence of an effective countermeasure. The variety of emerging anti-drone systems and the speed with which they now are being developed merely prove the iron rule that any innovation in warfare begets its own countermeasure. Once again, the transformation narrative appears to have underestimated that rule. A 2023 report by the Royal United Services Institute estimated Ukrainian drone losses at 10,000 a month to Russian countermeasures, primarily electronic jamming of navigation systems.
Germany, France and the U.S. Army have established programs to develop the next generation of tanks. Meanwhile, predictions of the obsolescence of cannon artillery also seem premature. In Ukraine, artillery remains the king of battle, with the Ukrainians firing upwards of 4,000 shells a day and the Russians routinely firing many more. Poland announced it could no longer keep up with the Ukrainian demand for artillery rounds.
Of particular note, Col. Desens argues that Generals Boomer and Conway’s “generation appears unable to comprehend the nature of today’s fight,” in which “the deadliest and most important fight may be getting to the fight.” Here, ironically, Generals Boomer and Conway’s very longevity would seem to be a benefit. The anti-access challenge clearly is timely, but it is “new” only to officers whose entire experience has been counterinsurgency. Getting to a fight in Europe or the Pacific was one of the most significant worries of the U.S. military throughout the Cold War, and considerable effort was made to solve that problem. Solutions ranged from early rapid deployment of units to establishing prepositioned equipment both ashore and afloat in Europe and the Pacific. Among the many techniques practiced during that era was “breaking out” of U.S. ports with amphibious ships because we feared the Soviets would block them. Getting to the fight is not an issue new to General Boomer and Conway’s generation. Moreover, the U.S. Navy’s success in downing missiles in the Red Sea provides ample evidence that the anti-access/area denial problem is not intractable.
Col. Desens also contends that previous generations don’t comprehend “that modern technology has greatly diminished the value of legacy formations and equipment.” This is another trendy idea, but it is an assertion worth debating. Two specific reactions: first, even if the dueling kill webs model applies to the next war, it will not be the entire war. It may constitute the opening gambit, but after the precision munitions have been spent and the dust clears, it will take so-called legacy forces to project power, secure strategic geography, and impose and maintain the conditions of the political end game. Second, even if the dueling kill webs model applies in some future conflicts, it will not apply in all—just as trench warfare did not apply to all theaters in the First World War.
The world remains a dangerous and unpredictable place. The United States still will require rapidly deployable combined arms forces to respond to a wide variety of security challenges. That role traditionally has fallen to Marine air-ground task forces, but we are concerned about the Marine Corps’ continued ability to perform that wide range of missions since it has committed to the dueling kill webs model. For U.S. forces writ large, it is not an issue of either/or but a question of proportion. From our analysis, other services are better suited to the long-range precision fight as a primary mission while the Marine Corps should continue to focus on its role as a global response force.
Contrary to Col. Desens, we suggest that the value of legacy formations is as high as it ever was. It is their survivability under certain conditions that is at issue. Another conversation worth having. Here again, the example of the Western Front is instructive. There were two very different responses to the stalemate. The allied response essentially was to accept the inability to maneuver as intractable and to develop a positional-firepower approach. The German army, in contrast, committed itself to figuring out how to restore the ability to maneuver in the face of overwhelming firepower, which it successfully accomplished, not through some grand technological solution but rather through the development of relatively low-order tactical technique. The Spring Offensive of 1918 was a case of too little too late, but the infiltration tactics it debuted, when married to the internal combustion engine and the radio, became the blitzkrieg in the next war.
As one of us has written previously, we believe the Marine Corps, like the allies in 1914, is focusing on the wrong problem. Rather than a Marine Corps that contributes marginally to the positional-firepower fight, which we believe others can do better, the nation would be better served by a Marine Corps that can restore and maintain the ability to project power in an age of long-range precision weapons. This capability would be indispensable not only in a high-intensity conflict in the Pacific but in any mission around the globe.
Finally, Col. Desens defends the Stand-in Forces concept. We acknowledge the merit of wanting to attack the enemy’s anti-access kill web from the inside out, rather than attacking into the teeth of it from outside in. There is a certain maneuverist impulse to that. Col. Desens asserts that these forces would have the “ability to rapidly emplace, operate and displace to new locations.” Again, we are skeptical: the Corps has yet to secure the surface means to emplace and displace these units, and wargames and exercises to date have only highlighted the significant and yet-unsolved survivability and logistics problems facing the concept. Moreover, the Corps’ antiship missiles, when they arrive in sufficient numbers after 2030, already will be outdated by longer-range and more modern hypersonic missiles of the other services.
In summary, we believe that Col. Desens has failed to make a compelling argument that recent technological developments have changed the character of war—as other have failed to do before him. The evidence suggests, to us at least, that the long-promised revolution in warfare has not arrived just yet. Advanced weapons are making their presence felt, to be sure, but at the surface level rather than the systemic level. Moreover, the so-called legacy systems that some have described as obsolete will have their say also. And we believe all of this will fit together within the existing combined-arms paradigm. While the face of war continues to evolve, the character of war as we have known it for decades continues to prove itself, at least for now, stubbornly resistant to change.
John F. Schmitt is a former Marine infantry officer. Under the guidance of two commandants of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray and General Charles Krulak, he authored the Marine Corps keystone doctrinal manual, Warfighting. In the years since, he has continued to author documents for senior leaders in the Department of Defense.
Colonel Jeffrey S. Dinsmore is an active-duty Marine of 38 years. He enlisted in 1986, has served on nine operational deployments, including four deployments on Contingency and Special Purpose MAGTFs and Marine Expeditionary Units from 1987 to 2001, and five times on combat deployments during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom. He currently serves as a director of planning and training for task forces deploying to the Indo-Pacific.
19. Rotting From the Corps? (Critique of the Army officer corps)
Rotting From the Corps?
By S.L. Nelson
July 20, 2024
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/20/rotting_from_the_corps_1045946.html
The United States Army frequently channels the thinking of one of its most famous World War Two generals, George S Patton. A few of his famous phrases resound through the halls of the institutions that turn out future Army leaders. In his famous "Blood and Guts" speech from 1941, Patton said: "You musicians of Mars must not wait for the band leader to signal you…You must each of your own volition see to it that you come into this concert at the proper place and at the proper time."
However, in today's U.S. Army, aspiring leaders wait for the band leaders to signal before playing, and march to their desired tune instead of contributing their creative perspective and playing their own notes.
Where Patton envisioned Army leaders orchestrating a symphony of destruction, today's leaders orchestrate a symphony of deceit. By the end of the 'best year of my life,' as leaders often describe their time at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (CGSC), I recognized again in my military journey that rigor and accuracy were subservient to winning buy-in from the intended audience of a staff product or brief.
CGSC teaches an excellent curriculum, and the rigor of the curriculum exposes officers who do not possess the requisite knowledge but are still excellent communicators. For example, in one class we examined different factors and regional dynamics at stake in the Gulf War. The instructor asked what Israel's role was and why Patriot missiles were placed in Israel. A well-regarded officer, whose Army branch had already marked him as a future senior leader, immediately responded that Israel performed much heavy-lifting as an ally of the United States, inserting buzzwords (i.e., inoculate, case in point, seamless, adjudicate, prosecute, blah blah) to dazzle the audience. The officer did not know the answer but forged ahead with a learned verbal dance. For a moment, truth and reality succumbed to a beautiful, believable, verbose façade, until a few other students corrected the narrative, having watched Gulf War coverage on TV during the conflict
But why?
The military culls officers as they move up the ranks to select the best for command. Unfortunately, those officers who learn to compose the most melodious tunes for their senior leaders (i.e., raters) emerge as the top prospects for future command. These politically-adept officers fashion their tune according to what their bosses want to hear. Often, a leader's off-hand remarks and random thoughts spoken aloud become a cornucopia of insight to guide motivated officers in what they say and do. Instead of anchoring rigorous staff work on problem-framing within a realistic environment, senior leaders often get a brief focused on how the staff thinks the senior leader views the problem and what solutions best serve his predisopositions.
Because senior positions are two-year assignments, one can imagine the turmoil this causes for future planning and procurement. While the average officer does not go to work each day intending to deceive, he analyzes problems primarily through the lens of the leader's personality, whomever happens to wear the leadership mantle at the time. This divorces military thinking from reality.
Officers who grow up in this environment manifest two traits that translate to national security threats: first, fearing that initiative could put them at odds with their superior’s idea of the situation, officers wait for guidance before planning or constructing courses of action; second, once planning begins, officers focus on the partiality or biases of the senior leader, in terms of tailoring ideas, concepts and solutions to his preference.
Intellectual drift is inevitable in this system. Instead of continuous focus and refocusing on the problem, staff officers focus on adjusting momentum for whatever solution matches what each subsequent decision-maker envisions. The problem is now the last leader's vision, and the solution rests on the new leader's intent. This pattern creates a tremendous waste of resources.
Everyone knows this is happening: staff officers, general officers and contractors, too. Therefore, it is especially egregious when today's military organizations paint conceptual castles in the sky that fade into cost overruns and awkward capabiltiy implementation for tomorrow's leaders, staff and force.
Though I was only nine years-old during the Gulf War, I remember the United States helped defend Israel against Scud attacks to keep Israel out of the Gulf War. I got that much from watching television. Today, after watching a mid-career officer at CGSC eloquently describe the inverse of what happened in 1990-1991, I recognize the symptoms of a more significant rot nurtured in today's officer corps.
S.L. Nelson has served from the tactical to strategic level as a military officer. His views are his own and do not represent the position of the U.S. DoD.
20. Secret Service's Lack Of Red Dot Pistol Optics Puzzles SWAT Officers
But would such sights have prevented the assassination attempt? I think not.
Secret Service's Lack Of Red Dot Pistol Optics Puzzles SWAT Officers
Red dot pistol sights have become widespread across police agencies big and small, but they aren't standard on Secret Service agents' Glock 19s.
HOWARD ALTMAN, TYLER ROGOWAY
POSTED ON JUL 19, 2024 2:09 PM EDT
7 MINUTE READ
twz.com · by Howard Altman, Tyler Rogoway
In the moments after a bullet nearly killed former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, he was surrounded by U.S. Secret Service (USSS) agents who then whisked him away to a nearby armored suburban. In the chaotic aftermath of the assassination attempt, images of the agents wielding Glock 19 GEN 5 MOS (Modular Optic System) 9mm pistols began to emerge. On closer inspection, these Glocks did not feature red dot-type optical ‘reflex’ sights, an upgrade that is now common even among small local police departments and across the civilian firearms marketplace.
BUTLER, PENNSYLVANIA – July 13: Members of Secret Service assist former president Donald Trump into a vehicle after being clipped by a sniper’s bullet. Note both Glock 19s without red dot optics. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post
The lack of this modern firearms feature seemed like a very odd choice for agents who could be tasked at any moment with engaging multiple assailants in the most chaotic, time sensitive, and densely populated of situations. We reached out to SWAT team members, one current and one former, who told The War Zone they were also puzzled as to why the agents weren’t using red dot sights, especially since their Glocks are equipped to accommodate them. Although, from what we have learned, that may be in the process of slowly changing.
Glock 19 Gen 5 MOS with Holosun red dot sight open emitter optic. (Cabelas.com)
Mounted on top of the pistol’s slide, these micro-optics help shooters acquire a target faster and fire on it more quickly and more accurately, while also increasingly their overall situational awareness, compared to traditional iron sights. Pistol-mounted optics have quickly gained massive popularity for both law enforcement and military applications, and across the civilian market. While some training is required to transition to red dots as a primary sighting system, few have argued that doing so isn’t worth it. In addition, with most current red dot pistol configurations, iron sights can still be co-witnessed through the optical window for use if the optic fails.
“You can be proficient with iron sights too,” said Jeff Bruggeman, who served as a SWAT team member with the Fairfax City, Virginia, SWAT team for 18 years. “You don’t have to have a red dot system (RDS) on a pistol, but given some of the advantages of having it, I’m not quite sure why. The Secret Service is touted as a premier law enforcement agency. Why they wouldn’t use it is interesting.”
A current SWAT member for a different agency had a similar reaction.
“They are standard in the agency I’m with,” said the officer with 15 years of experience on his team who requested anonymity to speak freely. “I am surprised the [agents] don’t use them given the agency’s prestigious reputation.”
Both said that the optical sights are a major improvement over iron sights.
Agents create a human shield over Donald Trump after shots rang out at his campaign rally. Note the agent’s holstered sidearm has a TLR-7 weapons light but no optic. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post
Pistol mounted red dot sights enable the user “to acquire a target faster, with both eyes open so they don’t lose their peripheral vision and if they transition from a shoulder weapon with a red dot to a pistol with a red dot, their brain doesn’t have to switch gears like it would going to standard three-dimensional pistol sights,” Bruggeman said.
The current SWAT officer concurred.
“You don’t have to take your eyes off of what you intend to assess and then possibly engage,” he said. “You don’t move your eyes to that. It comes into view. It creates the ability for more observation, essentially over that platform, so you have a little more of your battle space in front of you.”
Both men said the optical sights are fairly recent additions to their kit, coming in the past few years. The current officer said his department evaluated studies on how they work and then had several rounds of testing “with different control groups.” Those groups examined the optic sights at long and short distances and under varying circumstances. The tests showed that the optical sighs offered increased accuracy across a range of distances and situations.
They also tested how well the optic sights handled in situations requiring a quick draw.
Some have suggested that the optical sights, which protrude above the weapon, might be bulky and impede the ability to quickly react to a dynamic situation. That wasn’t the case, said the active SWAT officer.
“There’s been no deficit in the sense of bulky,” he said.
Optical sights, however, are not infallible. Unlike iron sights, they require a power source to work. And, like any electronic device, they are susceptible to malfunction and damage, although many types are extremely rugged and well proven with widespread use for years now in U.S. lay enforcement, military, and civilian applications.
“They are great tools to have on your weapon system but the two main weaknesses are a dead battery and water getting on your lens,” said Bruggeman. “Water distorts the red dot image on glass.”
Enclosed pistol optics, which are quickly becoming more popular, where the red dot projects within two sealed panes of glass, makes it so rain, snow, dirt, and debris cannot get between the emitter and the glass it is projected on.
Bruggeman added that while working with the Secret Service on presidential and candidate details, he did not see them using the optical sights. That was not, however, something that he thought unusual because they were not widely used at the time.
Some USSS personnel at the rally had pistol optics.
A member of the USSS Counter Assault Team, known as the ‘CAT,’ was seen with one on his Glock 47. An elite unit of USSS operators, CAT team members are selected from a fraction of those who apply. They are uniformed and more heavily armed than plainclothesed agents, sporting AR15-pattern assault rifles, night vision goggles, expendables like flash-bangs grenades, and heavier body armor. The officer seen below who took position between the line of fire and Trump sports a Glock 47 with a Aimpoint Acro2 enclosed red dot sight.
A member of the CAT team standing on stage seconds after Trump was nicked by the would-be assassin’s bullet.. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images) The Washington Post
Glock 47 with Aimpoint Acro P2 enclosed red dot optic. (Glock)
This would make sense as CAT units are specially equipped for dealing with heavily armed and resilient threats while the other agents can extract the protectee from the scene. Then again it would be outright bizarre if these teams were not equipped with pistol optics at all.
The Secret Service declined to talk about why its plainclothes agents do not carry red dot optics on their pistols.
“Out of concern for operational security, the U.S. Secret Service does not discuss the means and methods used for our protective operations,” a USSS spokesperson said. However, the head of a union representing federal law enforcement officers told us that the USSS is starting to field optical sights.
“I am being told by a USSS Agent that optics are currently being phased in and all USSS agents will eventually have them,” Matthew Silverman, National President of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA) told The War Zone. “There is no set standard that all agents need to have optics now, however, they are being issued to agents who recently graduated the academy.”
This would make some sense as training can occur from early on with new agents, but red dot optic transition training is extremely well established and effective for law enforcement officers of all experience levels.
Jeff James, a retired USSS Special Agent in Charge, suggested a reason why the Secret Service has been slow to adopt the use of optical sights on their Glocks.
“We never had them when we used Sig-Sauers,” said James, who retired in 2018 and is now Police Chief of Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh. “Optics can fail. If people aren’t able to shoot well with iron sites, and their optics get damaged during a gunfight, fall, fist fight, or the batteries die, you need to lean on the iron sites.”
“I don’t know specifically the rationale that the Secret Service has for not incorporating optics, but I do know that optic failure is a concern,” James added.
The Secret Service used to use Sig Sauer’s P229 DAK. Sig-Sauer
Considering recent events, it will be interesting to see if the USSS accelerates a transition to red dot pistol optics for all its agents, especially considering the weapons they already carry were specifically built to accommodate them. In the meantime, tried and true iron sights will soldier on. Still, it’s hard to consider it anything but odd that one of the holdout law enforcement entities for widely adopting this technology is the same one specifically tasked with protecting the most threatened individuals in the most high-risk of circumstances.
Contact the author: howard@thewarzone.com
Senior Staff Writer
Howard is a Senior Staff Writer for The War Zone, and a former Senior Managing Editor for Military Times. Prior to this, he covered military affairs for the Tampa Bay Times as a Senior Writer. Howard’s work has appeared in various publications including Yahoo News, RealClearDefense, and Air Force Times.
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twz.com · by Howard Altman, Tyler Rogoway
De Oppresso Liber,
David Maxwell
Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy
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Editor, Small Wars Journal
Twitter: @davidmaxwell161
Phone: 202-573-8647
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