Quotes of the Day:

"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could do only a little." 

– Edmund Burke

"Whatever plans we may make, we shall find quite useless when the time for action comes. Revolutions are always full of surprises, and whoever thinks he can play chess with a revolution will soon find how terrible is the grasp of God and how insignificant the human reason before the whirlwind of His breath. That man only is likely to dominate the chances of a Revolution, who makes no plans but preserves his heart pure for the will of God to declare itself. The great rule of life is to have no schemes but one unalterable purpose. If the will is fixed on the purpose it sets itself to accomplish, then circumstances will suggest the right course; but the schemer finds himself always tripped up by the unexpected."

– Sri Aurobindo

"Hardly anyone expected the American uprising (revolution) to succeed. Thousands of colonists emigrated to Canada or hid in the woods, certain that the king's armies would tear the colonial regiments to shreds. Nor did a majority of the people support the struggle for independence, even in theory. Historians estimate that one-third favored independence, one-third favored retaining British ties, and one-third were indifferent."

– James MacGregor Burns 

1. Israel’s Netanyahu Confronts Altered Political Landscape in U.S.

2. A Secret Service House Cleaning

3. Secret Service encourages Trump campaign to stop outdoor rallies

4. Israel slams Beijing deal to include Hamas in post-war Gaza government

5.  China's FM Wang Yi discusses peace plans with Ukraine counterpart Kuleba

6. Every squad will get anti-drone gear, Marine Corps says

7. Ukraine’s cheap sensors are helping troops fight off waves of Russian drones

8. Army moves to expand 'space control' planning, 'interdiction' capabilities

9. Our Iran Policy Has Failed. Time for a New Strategy.

10. Pentagon creates regional partnerships to sustain gear far from home

11. Record-breaking drone is ULTRA cheap, but too pricey for CENTCOM

12. The Uncomfortable Reality of Russia and Iran’s New Defense Relationship

13. Are we in Cold War 2.0? (interview with Anne Applebaum)

14. Why America Has Failed to Forge an Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire

15. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 23, 2024

16. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 23, 2024

1. Israel’s Netanyahu Confronts Altered Political Landscape in U.S.

And challenges with a lame duck president.

Israel’s Netanyahu Confronts Altered Political Landscape in U.S.

The prime minister’s speech to Congress risks antagonizing both Democrats and Republicans amid election

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/israels-netanyahu-confronts-altered-political-landscape-in-u-s-65a118a9?mod=latest_headlines

By Dov Lieber

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 in Tel Aviv and Sabrina Siddiqui

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 and Lara Seligman

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 in Washington

Updated July 24, 2024 12:00 am ET

With a speech before Congress this week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will seek to win support from both U.S. parties. PHOTO: AMOS BEN GERSHOM/ISRAEL GPO/ZUMA PRESS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday drops one of the world’s most polarizing politicians into the middle of an unprecedented U.S. political shake-up, a risky combination as he tries to win support from both parties for his country and its war.

In the days leading up to his visit, it appeared U.S. party politics had moved in Israel’s favor. The national discussion over Israel’s conduct in Gaza seemed to have fallen into the background, as the focus moved to President Biden’s fitness and former President Donald Trump’s invigorated campaign after a failed assassination attempt. Campus protests had died down with the summer break, and some delayed arms shipments had begun to flow.

Then the ground shifted. Just hours before Netanyahu boarded his plane for the long flight, Biden announced he was withdrawing from the race. The prime minister was airborne while Vice President Kamala Harris was solidifying her position as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

He landed confronted with a new balancing act—appealing to the new, potentially more progressive face of the Democratic Party while not antagonizing Trump.

President Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, greeting each other in 2023 in Tel Aviv, have interacted for decades. PHOTO: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

There is tension between Netanyahu and both sides of the U.S. political aisle. Some Democrats continue to chafe over his 2015 speech before Congress in which he attacked President Barack Obama’s Iran policy. Meanwhile, Trump was put off by Netanyahu’s embrace of Biden after the 2020 election.

Harris has been tougher in her criticism of Israel than Biden, hewing closer to the progressive flank of her party. Netanyahu will need to be wary of reigniting controversy over Israel just as she is formulating her own public approach to what has become a wedge issue in the election.

If Netanyahu comes off as too chummy with the Democrats, he risks raising the ire of Trump, who has already lambasted him as someone ungrateful for their prior cooperation.

Many back in Israel are bracing themselves for a speech that they fear could draw the wrong sort of attention.

“Anyone who understands the bilateral relationship has got to be very concerned about Israel becoming a partisan issue,” said Chuck Freilich, a former deputy national security adviser in Israel. “He is going to have to be very, very careful if he doesn’t want in the end to alienate both sides.”

Speaking Monday morning from the tarmac in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu sought to allay fears that his rhetoric would alienate either side of the U.S. political divide.

“I will seek to anchor the bipartisan support that is so important for Israel,” Netanyahu said. “And I will tell my friends on both sides of the aisle that regardless who the American people choose as their next president, Israel remains America’s indispensable and strong ally in the Middle East.”

Netanyahu is traveling to the U.S. for the speech at the invitation of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.). He is scheduled to meet Biden on Thursday at the White House and Trump on Friday at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla. He is set to meet Harris as well.

Boaz Bismuth, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party, said the prime minister couldn’t say no to an invitation from Congress, especially not when Israel is facing historic challenges.

Security fencing at the Capitol went up ahead of Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech this week. PHOTO: MICHAEL REYNOLDS/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Few countries have more at stake in this U.S. presidential election. Israel needs a steady supply of arms, intelligence, diplomatic support in international forums and potentially outright military support as it hopes to defeat or deter its adversaries. It is contending with a war in Gaza, another looming on the border with Lebanon and an increase in clashes with Iran-backed militias in places as distant as Yemen.

U.S. support looked less certain in the spring, with college campuses roiled by pro-Palestinian protests, the Biden administration pausing some weapons deliveries because of concerns about civilian casualties and Schumer calling for Netanyahu to step down. Concerns grew in Israel that U.S. support would fall victim to partisan politics.

Such concerns have eased, but Netanyahu risks reigniting debates over U.S. support for Israel. Progressive Democrats already have Netanyahu and Israel in their sights thanks to the visit​.

“Netanyahu should not be welcomed into the United States Congress,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vermont), a critic of the Israeli government who won’t attend the speech. “On the contrary, his policies in Gaza and the West Bank and his refusal to support a two-state solution should be roundly condemned.”

Harris also won’t be attending the speech because of what aides said was a previously scheduled event Wednesday in Indianapolis.

A letter signed by 230 anonymous House and Senate staffers last week called on members to protest or boycott the event.

“This is not an issue of politics, but an issue of morality,” the letter says. “Citizens, students, and lawmakers across the country and the world have spoken out against the actions of Mr. Netanyahu in his War on Gaza.”

In 2015, nearly 60 Democrats boycotted Netanyahu’s speech to Congress. While the exact number of Democrats who plan to skip this week’s address isn’t known, some congressional aides have privately suggested it could be between 50 and 100.

Netanyahu speaks in 2015 before Congress. PHOTO: J. SCOTT APPLEWHITE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Netanyahu is deeply unpopular at home among many voters and his own security establishment. Both blame him for failing to cut a cease-fire deal with Hamas that could free some of the 116 hostages still being held in Gaza, many of them already likely dead, and for subjecting the country to the prospect of an endless war.

Critics also fault him for fighting publicly with the Biden administration about the war in Gaza, including a recent dispute over arms deliveries, in what they see as posturing to improve his standing at home.

The prime minister has said that he is standing up for Israel and that the military pressure is improving the prospects for a deal. Many in Israel see his visit as an attempt to burnish his image and appear as a statesman to his supporters.

Netanyahu’s speech at the Capitol will be his fourth to a joint session of Congress, surpassing his idol Winston Churchill for most addresses by a foreign leader. He is making the address on his first trip abroad since the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 killed 1,200, took around 250 hostages and set off Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. More than 39,000 people have been killed in the fighting, according to Gaza health authorities, who don’t say how many were combatants.

The feeling in Israel now is that the tension with the U.S. has abated, Hamas has been severely weakened and that Israel is no longer facing an emergency situation, said Amit Segal, a leading conservative Israeli commentator.

The backdrop gives Netanyahu the room to take a less combative approach with the Biden administration while seeking to frame the conflict in Gaza as an international war with international consequences, he said.

Bismuth, the Likud lawmaker, said that while the prime minister’s 2015 speech was meant to warn the West about the threat from Iran, this week’s speech is about what to do now that the threat has been unleashed.

“In 2015 it was theoretical,” Bismuth said. “Now everything is all too real.”

Israel’s security establishment fears that long-term bipartisan support in Washington, a pillar of national security, is in danger.

“The fact that he’s landing in the biggest political storm now shows he doesn’t understand the political situation,” said Mitchell Barak, a former adviser to Netanyahu and now a political analyst and director at Jerusalem-based Keevoon Global Research. “He’s only going to create divisions and do more damage than good by doing this trip.”

Write to Dov Lieber at dov.lieber@wsj.com, Sabrina Siddiqui at sabrina.siddiqui@wsj.com and Lara Seligman at lara.seligman@wsj.com

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

Appeared in the July 24, 2024, print edition as 'Netanyahu in Delicate Balancing Act'.

2. A Secret Service House Cleaning

A Secret Service House Cleaning

A bipartisan task force in Congress can keep the Biden probe honest.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-secret-service-house-cleaning-7085bcf2?mod=latest_headlines

By The Editorial Board

July 23, 2024 5:56 pm ET

Secret Service director Kim Cheatle on Monday PHOTO: ANNABELLE GORDON/ZUMA PRESS

Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle resigned on Tuesday, recognizing the inevitable 11 days after her agency failed to protect Donald Trump from a potential assassin some 150 yards away. New leadership is needed to restore the agency’s credibility and competence, but also welcome on Tuesday was the creation of a House task force to investigate the security failure.

House Speaker Mike Johnson and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced that they are putting together a bipartisan task force on the events in Butler, Pa. “The security failures that allowed an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life are shocking,” the leaders said in a joint statement.

The task force will have subpoena power and include seven Republicans and six Democrats. The bipartisan makeup is encouraging, signaling that, even in our rancorous times, both parties recognize the need to discover what went wrong at the Secret Service and report those facts to the public.

President Biden has also launched a government investigation, but the political reality is that Americans might not trust a report from the executive branch on a failure by the executive branch. The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and Ms. Cheatle was a Biden appointee. The House investigation, if done well, will serve as a reality check on whatever the Biden probe turns up and concludes. We assume Messrs. Johnson and Jeffries will appoint serious lawmakers for the task force, which would rule out the likes of Reps. Matt Gaetz and Adam Schiff.

The questions to be answered include the chain of command in Butler, why the security perimeter didn’t include the building the shooter was able to climb atop, and why communications failed between the Secret Service and local law enforcement.

One larger question to ask is whether the Secret Service has been tasked with protecting too much. The agency was established to protect the continuity of government, yet it now provides a vast umbrella covering former Presidents and their families, visiting heads of state and high-profile events like political conventions and campaign rallies.

The Secret Service has acknowledged that it turned down requests from Donald Trump’s security team for more protection resources over the past two years. If it lacks the manpower to adequately protect a major party nominee for President, perhaps a rethinking of the Secret Service’s overall mission is needed.

Americans have little trust in government these days, and the Secret Service’s stunning failure to protect Mr. Trump adds to the reasons. The goal of the House probe should be to get to the truth, draw accurate conclusions, and report them without political favor to the American people.

WSJ Opinion: The Trump Shooting Exposed Deeper Risks

WSJ Opinion: The Trump Shooting Exposed Deeper Risks

Play video: WSJ Opinion: The Trump Shooting Exposed Deeper Risks

Wonder Land: Even after the assassination attempt, the leaders of our eroding institutions have no answer or just look the other way. Photo: EVAN VUCCI/ASSOCIATED PRESS

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

Appeared in the July 24, 2024, print edition as 'A Secret Service House Cleaning'.

3. Secret Service encourages Trump campaign to stop outdoor rallies

Of course the Secret Service would recommend no outdoor rallies for any candidate. But this is a non-starter. I think it only makes the Secret Service look like it cannot support the traditional American democratic process. It makes it seem like they are trying to shift the blame to those who decide to hold an outdoor rally: "We told you it was not a good idea to hold an outdoor rally."

Secret Service encourages Trump campaign to stop outdoor rallies

Trump campaign is scouting indoor venues, such as basketball arenas and other large spaces where thousands of people can fit, people familiar with the request said.

By Josh Dawsey

July 23, 2024 at 5:53 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by Josh Dawsey · July 23, 2024

Secret Service officials encouraged Donald Trump’s campaign to stop scheduling large outdoor rallies and other outdoor events with big crowds after the assassination attempt on the former president in Butler, Pa., according to people familiar with the matter.

In the aftermath of the shooting, agents from the Secret Service communicated their concerns about large outdoor rallies going forward to Trump campaign advisers, three people familiar with the matter said.

The people familiar with the matter spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.

For upcoming events, Trump’s team is scouting indoor venues, such as basketball arenas and other large spaces where thousands of people can fit, people familiar with the request said. The campaign is not currently planning any large outdoor events, a person close to Trump said.

A Trump campaign spokeswoman declined to comment. A spokesman for the Secret Service said the agency does not comment on its protective methods.

Trump has held hundreds of outdoor rallies since launching his first presidential bid, often bragging about — and sometimes falsely inflating — his large crowds. They have become something of a cult favorite among his most passionate fans, with tailgate parties in parking lots, vendors lining open areas near the rally and large parades of traffic, often with gargantuan pickup trucks.

They usually include large rosters of speakers before Trump takes the stage, with crowds sometimes enduring the heat or the cold for many hours. Interestingly, the crowd sometimes departs before Trump, who is regularly late, finishes speaking.

The rallies are often held at airports but are also held at fairgrounds, football stadiums or other large outdoor venues.

Sarah Matthews, a former Trump spokeswoman turned critic, said Trump would often get upset if people were not moved past the magnetometers quickly enough and the outdoor venues were not filling up quickly enough.

“We’ve seen from the early days of his presidency even, and before that during his first campaign in 2016, how important crowd size is to him. It gives him a lot of joy and energy being with large crowds. He feeds off their energy. It’s almost like a source of comfort for him,” said Matthews, who served as a deputy press secretary in the Trump White House.

Indoor rallies are more expensive, campaign advisers said. But one campaign official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private plans said the indoor events are inherently safer because it is easier to control who comes through a finite number of doors, and there are fewer line-of-sight issues.

“Obviously with an indoor venue, you have a capacity,” she said. “It doesn’t pack the same punch. There’s something about being at one of those outdoor rallies.”

The rallies have long been viewed as onerous by the Secret Service because they include complicated outdoor venues with thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people. Most other former presidents rarely appear in public, and when they do, they usually appear in settings such as conferences and restaurants with fewer people. Trump requires a much larger security footprint than other past presidents because he holds so many large events.

Agents usually arrive well in advance, putting together a security plan for the large outdoor venues.

U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle resigned Tuesday in the aftermath of the assassination attempt, telling staff that she took “full responsibility,” according to a copy of a letter sent to agency staff and obtained by The Washington Post.

In early 2024, Trump advisers told the Secret Service they were planning to do large events regularly, and would need increasing amounts of protection and assets, a person familiar with the conversation said. But the two sides often battled over resources — with requests from Trump’s detail being rejected by the Secret Service.

The Washington Post · by Josh Dawsey · July 23, 2024

4. Israel slams Beijing deal to include Hamas in post-war Gaza government

Excerpts:

The diplomatic spat came as Israel hammered Gaza, including the southern city of Khan Younis, where it had ordered a partial evacuation of civilians.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzuk, Fatah envoy Mahmud al-Aloul and emissaries from 12 other Palestinian factions.

Hamas and Fatah are long-term rivals and fought a brief but bloody war in 2007 in which the militants seized control of Gaza.

Fatah continues to dominate the Palestinian Authority which has limited administrative control over urban areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel slams Beijing deal to include Hamas in post-war Gaza government

23 Jul 2024 07:29PM

(Updated: 23 Jul 2024 07:35PM)

channelnewsasia.com

GAZA STRIP: Israel swiftly condemned an agreement brokered by China on Tuesday (Jul 23) which Beijing said would bring Hamas into a "national reconciliation government" for post-war Gaza.

Foreign Minister Israel Katz insisted that "Hamas rule will be crushed" and accused Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah faction signed the deal, of embracing the group whose Oct 7 attacks triggered the war.

Any involvement by the militant group in the post-war governance of Gaza is anathema to the United States as well as Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington to address a joint session of Congress and has vowed to continue the Gaza war until Hamas is destroyed.

The diplomatic spat came as Israel hammered Gaza, including the southern city of Khan Younis, where it had ordered a partial evacuation of civilians.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted senior Hamas official Musa Abu Marzuk, Fatah envoy Mahmud al-Aloul and emissaries from 12 other Palestinian factions.

Hamas and Fatah are long-term rivals and fought a brief but bloody war in 2007 in which the militants seized control of Gaza.

Fatah continues to dominate the Palestinian Authority which has limited administrative control over urban areas of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Palestinians, who fled the eastern part of Khan Younis, walk after they were ordered by the Israeli army to evacuate their neighbourhoods in Khan Younis, on Jul 22, 2024. (File photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Salem)

The text of the deal outlined plans for "a temporary national unity government by agreement of the Palestinian factions" which would "exercise its authority and powers over all Palestinian territories" – the Gaza Strip as well the West Bank, including Israeli-annexed east Jerusalem.

China, which last year brokered a deal restoring relations between regional rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia, hailed the agreement as a commitment to "reconciliation".

But Katz said Abbas "embraces the murderers and rapists of Hamas".

He also rejected any role for the Palestinian Authority in Gaza, saying "Abbas will be watching Gaza from afar".

"GAZA IS DEAD"

On the ground, Israel pressed on with the war in Gaza. Hours after it ordered civilians to evacuate parts of Khan Younis, including areas that had been declared part of a humanitarian safe zone, its jets pounded the city.

The Gaza health ministry said that 73 people had been killed and more than 200 wounded in the area, while thousands fled.

The Israeli military did not comment on the toll when asked by AFP. But in a statement, the military said its fighter jets and tanks "struck and eliminated terrorists in the area".

On Tuesday, it said its jets struck "over 50 terror infrastructure sites" as part of the Khan Younis operation.

Hassan Qudayh, a resident forced to evacuate, said: "Gaza is over, Gaza is dead, Gaza has gone. There is nothing left, nothing".

AFP correspondents reported air strikes in Gaza City and Jabalia in the north of the territory, as well as Khan Younis, while the Israeli military also said its troops had killed militants in "aerial strikes and close-quarters combat" in Rafah in the far south.

Smoke rises following Israeli bombardments in Khan Younis, Gaza Strip, on Monday, Jul 22, 2024. (File photo: AP/Abdel Kareem Hana)

More than nine months of war have obliterated much of the territory's healthcare capacity, with what remains under immense pressure.

Mohammed Zaqout, director of Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis told AFP: "There is no space for more patients. There's no space in the operating theatres. There is a lack of medical supplies, so we cannot save our patients."

The World Health Organization said up to 14,000 people needed medical evacuation from Gaza and that it was "extremely worried" that diseases could cause more deaths than war injuries after poliovirus was detected in the territory's sewage.

The war was sparked by Hamas's Oct 7 attack on southern Israel which resulted in the deaths of 1,197 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli figures.

The militants also seized 251 hostages, 116 of whom are still in Gaza, including 44 the Israeli military says are dead.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed at least 39,090 people, also mostly civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory's health ministry.

LANDMARK SPEECH

Beijing's dealmaking came with Netanyahu in Washington.

Netanyahu will deliver a landmark speech to Congress on Wednesday amid unprecedented strains between Israel and its ally.

The Israeli premier has resisted pressure from the administration of President Joe Biden to accept a truce, which far-right members of his coalition strongly oppose.

Biden, who will meet Netanyahu on Thursday, vowed to continue working to find a solution during his final six months in office, after announcing his withdrawal from the US presidential race.

Talks aimed at securing a truce are set to continue with an Israeli delegation due to travel to Doha on Thursday, a source with knowledge of the talks said.

Egypt, Qatar and the United States have been working to secure a ceasefire and hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

channelnewsasia.com

5. China's FM Wang Yi discusses peace plans with Ukraine counterpart Kuleba

Excerpts:

Beijing's foreign ministry said the pair held talks in the city of Guangzhou, with spokeswoman Mao Ning telling journalists they "exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis".

"Although the conditions and timing are not yet mature, we support all efforts that contribute to peace and are willing to continue to play a constructive role for a ceasefire and the resumption of peace talks," she said.

"China has always been firmly committed to promoting a political solution to the crisis," she added.

In a statement, Kuleba said Ukraine "also wants to follow the path of peace, recovery, and development".

"I am convinced that these are the strategic priorities that we share," he said, adding "Russian aggression has destroyed peace and slowed down development".

China's FM Wang Yi discusses peace plans with Ukraine counterpart Kuleba

24 Jul 2024 04:23PM

(Updated: 24 Jul 2024 04:25PM)

channelnewsasia.com

BEIJING: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi hosted his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba in southern China on Wednesday (Jul 24), with both sides calling for peace as Russia's war grinds on against its neighbour.

China presents itself as a neutral party in the war and says it is not sending lethal assistance to either side, unlike the United States and other Western nations.

But China is a close political and economic ally of Russia, and NATO members have branded Beijing a "decisive enabler" of the war.

Beijing's foreign ministry said the pair held talks in the city of Guangzhou, with spokeswoman Mao Ning telling journalists they "exchanged views on the Ukraine crisis".

"Although the conditions and timing are not yet mature, we support all efforts that contribute to peace and are willing to continue to play a constructive role for a ceasefire and the resumption of peace talks," she said.

"China has always been firmly committed to promoting a political solution to the crisis," she added.

In a statement, Kuleba said Ukraine "also wants to follow the path of peace, recovery, and development".

"I am convinced that these are the strategic priorities that we share," he said, adding "Russian aggression has destroyed peace and slowed down development".

Kuleba is the first senior Ukrainian official to visit China since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

His trip is scheduled to last until Friday.

"POLITICAL SETTLEMENT"

China has sought to paint itself as a mediator in the war, sending envoy Li Hui to Europe on multiple rounds of "shuttle diplomacy".

President Xi Jinping told Hungary's Viktor Orban this month that world powers should help Russia and Ukraine restart direct negotiations.

Orban's visit to Beijing was branded as a "peace mission". China also released a paper last year calling for a "political settlement" to the conflict.

However, it was criticised by Western countries for enabling Russia to retain much of the territory it has seized in Ukraine.

Beijing has rebuffed claims it is supporting Russia's war effort, insisting last week that its position was "open and above board" and accusing the West of fuelling the conflict through arms shipments to Kyiv.

China did not attend a peace summit in Switzerland last month in protest against Moscow not being invited.

"EXTRACT A PRICE"

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy called during that summit for Beijing to engage seriously with developing peace proposals.

Kuleba said on arrival in China Tuesday that "we must avoid competition between peace plans".

And he urged China to "look at relations with our country through the prism of its strategic relations with Europe".

Alexander Gabuev, director of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told AFP that Kyiv was likely to seek this week to "convince China that it should participate in a second peace summit".

"Beijing can try to extract a price, even for sending somebody like special envoy ambassador Li Hui," he said.

China has offered a critical lifeline to Russia's isolated economy since the conflict began.

But that economic partnership has come under close scrutiny from the West in recent months, with Washington vowing to go after financial institutions that facilitate Moscow's war effort.

The United States and Europe have also accused China of selling components and equipment necessary to keep Russia's military production afloat.

channelnewsasia.com

6.  Every squad will get anti-drone gear, Marine Corps says

Squad leading is complicated business, Shoot, move, and communicate, and protect your operations from drones too. How much more can we pack into a squad leader's rucksack and how many more tasks can squads be expected to conduct to standard?

Every squad will get anti-drone gear, Marine Corps says

With “zero decision space” to deal with incoming UAVs, troops need tools to take them down.

BY SAM SKOVE

STAFF WRITER

JULY 23, 2024 03:46 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

The Marines plan to equip every squad—from logistics units to reconnaissance teams deep in enemy territory—with a suite of tools to take down drones, a Marine officer told Defense One last week ahead of a September competition to pick gear.

Marines deployed to the field are already set to receive some form of protection from powerful anti-air vehicles, such as the Corps’ L-MADIS and MADIS systems.

However, those systems’ protective bubble only goes so far, said Capt. Taylor Barefoot, the Counter Unmanned Aerial Systems Capabilities Integration officer at the Marine Corps’ Capabilities Development Directorate. And Ukrainian troops have found that large, vehicle-based air-defense systems can draw enemy fire—and attract more drones than they have weapons to shoot down.

The Corps therefore wants to provide every unit with a “rudimentary, essential, self-defense capability,” Barefoot said.

The goal of the September competition is to find squad-portable tools that identify drones within a half-mile and weapons to take down ones that weigh up to 55 pounds, Barefoot said. The price tag should be around that of the gear the Corps used to jam improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said.

One solution may be to field firearms with smart optics designed to shoot down drones, said Barefoot. The Corps and Army already field some of these systems; troops also practice shooting down drones with normal sights.

However, Barefoot said he wants to find other solutions. As seen in many videos in Ukraine, a human’s natural reaction to a drone flying at them at 100 miles per hour is to hide, not to stand up and shoot, he said.

“I don't want shotguns and M4 [rifles] to be the future” even if they may be a “baseline” for basic anti-drone capabilities, he said.

Another option is low-end anti-air missiles like the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System, Barefoot said. At under $30,000 a shot, APKWS is far less expensive than AMRAAMs or Patriots—though still far costlier than most adversary drones. The system has been used in Ukraine and, at least in tests, boasts a 100 percent success rate.

Barefoot said that Marine squads could field a stripped-down version of APKWS by mounting a small pod to a tripod, but that would still add about an 81mm mortar’s worth of gear to a squad’s load.

Barefoot said the Corps is also interested in establishing a multi-layered sensor network designed to identify drones before they get too close. Sensors that listen for radio communications might help, but you can’t ID the frequency-hopping drones used in Ukraine against a library of signatures. Visible-light sensors might be more useful, at least in some cases—“if you have an optic that can look at the thing and identify it, it gives you just an added layer of certainty”—but acoustic sensors may work better at night or even on cloudy days, he said.

Barefoot said the September competition is expected to attract several companies with AI-enabled cameras to test.

Ideally, data from all types of sensors—acoustic, visual, and electronic—would be merged and displayed via the Tactical Android Kit, he said. The TAK is open-source software used in the military to visualize a battlefield and share information.

The Corps is also hoping to solve the problem of identifying friendly and enemy drones, said Barefoot. The problem has similarly plagued Ukrainian forces, who routinely shoot down their own drones.

Emitters can be placed on drones to help with IFF, but the devices tend to make drones large to be easily portable by a reconnaissance unit, Barefoot said.

Units could coordinate with air control stations to identify their drones, but a unit under attack by speedy loitering munitions may not have time.

“That is zero decision space,” he said.

Barefoot said artificial intelligence may have a place in counter-drone work. For example, an AI-enabled sensors could help units more quickly identify if they’ve spotted an enemy UAV or just a bird.

AI could also direct 30mm cannons at drone swarms, he added.

“I want to be able to take a block of [electronic emission] tracks off of a sensor screen, and—just like you would select multiple icons on your desktop—just drag and drop across [the drones], and then tell the computer to kill everything in this box,” he said. “The interface is there, all of the components to make that happen are there, I just need the AI to come in and drive the bus.”

Following the trials, the Corps hopes to field some systems to a Marine Air-Ground Task Force, likely in the Pacific, sometime in the next 12 months, he said.

defenseone.com · by Sam Skove

7. Ukraine’s cheap sensors are helping troops fight off waves of Russian drones

Ukraine’s cheap sensors are helping troops fight off waves of Russian drones

Sub-$500 rig helps save expensive air-defense missiles for bigger threats.

BY AUDREY DECKER

STAFF WRITER

JULY 20, 2024

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

A Ukrainian soldier uses an old hunting rifle to take aim at an enemy drone just 100 meters from the Russian trenches in Ukraine's Toretsk region on July 5, 2024. Kostiantyn Liberov/Libkos/Getty Images

Sub-$500 rig helps save expensive air-defense missiles for bigger threats.

By Audrey Decker

Staff Writer

July 20, 2024

RAF FAIRFORD, England—Ukraine has a network of almost 10,000 acoustic sensors scattered around the country that locate Russian drones and send targeting information to soldiers in the field who gun them down.

Dubbed “Sky Fortress,” the concept was developed by two Ukrainian engineers in a garage who put a microphone and a cell phone on a six-foot pole to listen for one-way UAVs, said Gen. James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa.

“They put about 9,500 of these within their nation and now they get very accurate information that is synthesized in a central computer and sent out to mobile fire teams. And on an iPad, they get a route of flight of these one-way UAVs coming in, and they have a triple-A [anti-aircraft] gun and a person with six hours of training can shoot these down,” Hecker told reporters at the Royal International Air Tattoo on Saturday.

About three months ago, Russia sent a salvo of 84 UAVs into Ukraine, and the system helped the defending troops shoot down all but four, Hecker said.

The system was so effective that the engineers behind the system were invited to demo it at Ramstein Air Base in Germany, Hecker said. Other countries are looking at acoustic sensors, he added, noting that Romania recently did a demo with the system.

Each sensor costs about $400 to $500, he said, which suggests that the entire network costs less than a pair of Patriot air-defense missiles.

Hecker said the U.S. and allied militaries should look for their own ways to dramatically lower operational costs. In April, the U.S. expended missiles worth millions of dollars to take out $30,000 drones launched at Israel from Iran and Iranian proxies.

“That's why I challenge industry, I challenge the NATO air chiefs to come up with cheaper, more creative solutions that will put us maybe, hopefully on the right side of the cost curve, but if not, an equivalent cost curve. Likewise, we need to develop equipment at NATO to put Russia on the wrong side of the cost curve, should we have an Article Five situation,” he said.

Patriot and other heavy-duty air defenses remain vital for Ukraine, whose forces and civil infrastructure have been increasingly hammered by Russian ballistic missiles.

“What we're seeing from the Russians is increased use of ballistic missiles, and that's primarily because of North Korea providing ballistic missiles to them, and that obviously concerns us, but we are making sure that we equip Ukraine so that they can deal with that threat,” Hecker said.

Hecker was asked about Ukraine’s prospects for survival.

“A couple months ago, I was a little bit nervous because the Ukrainians were starting to run short on some of the munitions that are required for defense as well as offense. But through the Ukrainian Defense Contact Group, Secretary Austin and the other defense ministers have stepped up to the plate and recently given Ukraine a lot of equipment that they really needed. So that gives me a little bit more hope as we go on,” he said.

8. Army moves to expand 'space control' planning, 'interdiction' capabilities

Army moves to expand 'space control' planning, 'interdiction' capabilities - Breaking Defense

"As we look out into 2030, we know from all the Army warfighting concepts that we have to grow space capability, and we have to grow air defense missiles," SMD Commander Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey said.

breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · July 23, 2024

Lt. Gen. Sean A. Gainey receives his third star from his children, Tatjana and Justin, during a promotion ceremony at the US Army Space and Missile Defense Command’s Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, headquarters, Jan. 9, 2024. (US Army photo by Carrie David Campbell)

WASHINGTON — Army Space and Missile Defense Command (SMDC) is moving out to implement its new(ish) space “vision,” expanding both the number of personnel for planning and operations as well as their scope of deployment, according to SMDC Commander Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey.

“As we look out into 2030, we know from all the Army warfighting concepts that we have to grow space capability, and we have to grow air defense missiles,” he told the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) today.

The Army published its “Army Space Vision Supporting Multidomain Operations [PDF]” in January, initiating a transformation in how SMDC works to integrate space with its day-to-day planning, exercises and operations in the field — as well as fight in an environment where such capabilities may may be degraded.

“Successful operations in and through the space domain will be critical to our success. Space has become more important as both enabler and dependency to our Warfighting. Commanders at all echelons have access to, rely on, and can be observed by the space-based assets of allies and competitors alike,” the vision document explains.

The document mandates two main Army space missions:

• Integrate friendly joint, coalition, and commercial space capabilities in support of all
• Army Warfighting Functions to include positioning, navigation, and timing; deep sensing;
• beyond line-of-sight communications; force tracking; environmental monitoring; space domain awareness; and geospatial information.
• Interdict adversary space capabilities by delivering necessary fires and effects at echelon to protect friendly forces from observation and targeting by counter-satellite
• communications, counter-surveillance and reconnaissance, and navigation warfare operations.

Gainey said a key focus right now for SMDC’s 1st Space Brigade, headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colo., is on planning for how space capabilities can support multi-domain operations.

“We got to grow more space control planning teams. We’re doing that. We’re growing an additional space control planning company,” he said.

The brigade established its first three space control planning teams back in 2021.

In addition, Gainey said SMDC is working to expand its pilot effort to establish a Theater Strike Effects Group (TSEG) at Indo-Pacific Command to the other regional combatant commands. The TSEG concept was originated in the vision document, which described them as units that “can synchronize and deliver Army space interdiction fires in support of theater targeting objectives.”

“[W]e believe that each COCOM should have resident one of those elements inside to be able, from the theater level all the way to the major command level, leverage [space capabilities]. So, resident in there are space control type capabilities that I know my team is working closely with industry on,” he said.

Gainey added that under a “larger program of record,” SMDC is pursuing “smaller form factor,” easily maneuverable, prototype space systems that can be rapidly fielded.

For example, the 1st Brigade in April participated in Army Special Operations Forces exercises bringing a prototype system to monitor the health of “friendly satellite communications links,” according to a service press release. And during this year’s Project Convergence Capstone 4, held Feb. 23 to March 20, the Army also tested small systems for satellite communications.

breakingdefense.com · by Theresa Hitchens · July 23, 2024

9. Our Iran Policy Has Failed. Time for a New Strategy.

Our Iran Policy Has Failed. Time for a New Strategy.

For too long we relied on empty threats or ignored the problem.

thedispatch.com · by Jonathan Ruhe · July 24, 2024

https://thedispatch.com/article/our-iran-policy-has-failed-time-for-a-new-strategy/

The Biden administration still speaks of “not allowing” Iran nuclear weapons. Yet just last Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked that Iran is “probably one or two weeks away” from “having breakout capacity to produce fissile material for a nuclear weapon.” His blunt observation, that “where we are now is not a good place,” barely begins to capture the problem.

Thanks to more than a decade of international inaction, Iran’s nuclear program is now so advanced, resilient, and opaque that it can cross the threshold more easily than we can stop it. This accrues deterrence to Iran, reducing its need for any provocative final steps to produce an actual weapon and rouse a global response.

The U.S. has for too long relied on timeworn sanctions and military threats, or simply avoided the issue altogether, eroding our credibility and distracting from an overdue, hard-nosed reevaluation of how Iran has profoundly magnified the costs, risks, and uncertainties of our prevention policy. Until we face up to these failures, Iran increasingly will throw its weight around as if it has nuclear weapons, ramping up its destabilizing aggression that has been so evident since October 7.

Enriching uranium to weapons-grade purity of 90 percent is a longstanding U.S. redline. But Iran has produced so much material just under this line, for so long, as to leave a distinction without a difference between its actions and U.S. prohibitions. Secretary Blinken’s recent comment about Iran being just a week or two from breakout capacity should not obscure the bigger concern: Iran can make a dozen bombs’ worth of 90 percent uranium in just three months and maintain steady output thereafter; the Manhattan Project worked overtime for a year-plus to make just four such quantities. Even if Iran does nothing to expand its infrastructure, these numbers will keep shifting in its favor as stockpiles accumulate. The fact Iran is known to be so close to this threshold, and that any final steps could come quickly and imperceptibly, basically forces the world to treat it like a nuclear power—even when it isn’t.

Iran’s program is also highly resilient. Having seen Iraqi and Syrian nuclear ambitions devastated by small surprise Israeli attacks, Tehran uses new centrifuges to enrich uranium faster at smaller sites that are easier to bury, hide, and disperse. The Stuxnet cyberattack in 2010 set back Iran’s main plant for months, but 10 years later a rash of covert kinetic strikes (attributed to Israel) prompted a much more dangerous response as the regime swiftly boosted uranium output, deployed better centrifuges, shifted enrichment deeper underground, and built new subterranean facilities.

All of this steady progress shrinks the window for inspectors to track ever more activities, which Iran compounds by systematically denying them access. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director Rafael Grossi has warned he lost sight of Tehran’s progress long ago and would have to build a new inspections regime from scratch, including on Iran’s weaponization status. Israel’s heist of Iran’s nuclear archives in 2018 showed that to be more advanced than was widely thought, and woven into a maze of military and purportedly civilian sites.

Tehran’s implausible deniability is advantageous. The regime is not overtly completing a bomb, but it knows how to make an advanced version of the implosion-type device used on Nagasaki, and it watched Pakistan successfully test similar designs six times in 1998. Nor would the regime need testing to assure the usability of a simpler gun-type device, like the one used on Hiroshima. Either way, it could produce the components separately and defer assembly, just as the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were finished in the Pacific only days before. Accordingly, leading analysts noted, “it is not possible to predict when or if the Iranian regime might decide to build nuclear weapons” (emphasis added).

This unpredictability helps deter U.S. or Israeli military action. It curbs the ability to gauge whether Iran is about to achieve the bomb, clouds assessments of what damage a strike could or did inflict, and denies success to any ensuing operations. Iran’s missiles and drones reinforce this deterrence by exploiting adversaries’ lack of strategic depth, and holding hostage their bases and other key assets. Iran can credibly threaten massive and precise retaliation, and it expands the range of these weapons by giving them to proxies encircling the region. The cost-benefit analysis of U.S. or Israeli military action favors Iran much more today than when Israel came closest to striking in 2010-12.

Now outmaneuvered, U.S. strategy is slipping into a tacit, but tectonic, shift from preventing to containing or outright ignoring the problem. Six straight administrations have pledged to use all elements of U.S. power to keep Iran from the bomb, but the Biden administration has mixed explicit rejection with implicit acceptance.

Already in spring 2021, American officials admitted aloud their fading hopes to reverse Iran’s advances or divulge its bomb-building efforts. The president and Secretary Blinken each acknowledged this failure privately in late 2022, after Iran ditched JCPOA reentry talks. But it fell to Gen. Mark Milley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to admit the failure publicly, if not plainly, when he told the Senate last year that the United States would not permit Iran a “fielded” nuclear weapon. By punting a well-established redline beyond the point a bomb could be fully assembled, that single added word spoke volumes about how Tehran was undoing decades of U.S. prevention policy.

In parallel, Iran worked around Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 2012 redline of one bomb’s worth of 20 percent uranium. Ten years later, after Tehran produced multiple such quantities, Israelis warned about not enriching above 60 percent—a stance since adopted by the JCPOA’s European parties (The U.K., France, and Britain, known as the E3). This impinges Israeli credibility and gives far less warning time of a much larger breakout.

Tehran’s success is evident in America’s policy catatonia. The United States and E3 have clear authority to “snap back” stringent international sanctions but have refrained from using it. In tandem, President Joe Biden conspicuously avoided his long-promised pivot to a pressure campaign, trying instead to bribe Tehran handsomely to slow, not stop or reverse, a fraction of its enrichment. The administration also quietly restrained Israeli military preparations, driven by transparent aversions to what this portended. Combined with the sheer scale of work required to ready a strike, and Israel’s resulting reticence to deal with Hamas or Hezbollah before the shock of October 7, this shows Iran’s real leverage from its nuclear advances.

Tehran and its proxies underlined this problem by firing the first shots on all seven fronts that now embroil U.S. and Israeli forces in the region’s tensest standoff in a generation. Iran’s audacious targeting of Israel in April with the largest projectile offensive in history, including missiles whose variants could one day carry nuclear warheads, would have been unthinkable if it felt it could not deter or defeat any ensuing conflict spiral. Though tactically impressive, America’s role in helping shoot down that attack, and immediately framing the result as a “win,” actually reinforces Iran’s boldness by conveying an overriding desire to forestall an Israeli response.

In the backdrop, Iranian officials underline their newfound escalation dominance by indicating a readiness to weaponize, if need be—a marked departure from prior excoriations of anyone who questioned the ostensibly civilian nature of their nuclear project. In January, Iran’s nuclear chief declared “it is about us not wanting to do this. It is not about the lack of capability. … I think we have achieved such deterrence.” The next month, his predecessor said, “We’ve crossed all the lines, overcome all obstacles. It’s like having all the parts to build a car: we have the chassis, the engine, the transmission, everything. Each component serves its purpose, and everything is in our hands.” In April, the security head for nuclear facilities warned: If Israel “wants to use the threat of attacking our country’s nuclear sites as a tool to put Iran under pressure, revision of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear doctrine and polices … is conceivable and probable.”

Anymore, the concern is less how regional tensions create diversions for Iran to cross the nuclear threshold, and more how its capacity to do so compels its enemies to comply with its terms for war and peace. In a damning indictment of this cumulative policy failure, it is best to start anew and stop devaluing America’s word with yet more immaterial promises. Policymakers will have to figure out, from whole cloth, what they are trying to prevent and what it would take to achieve this.

Any cogent answer must first resolve the ambiguity at the core of Iran’s atomic venture and its ability to advance in obscurity. The U.S. can only hope to draw viable redlines, and devise credible threats to uphold them, if it actually knows what’s inside the black box. Thus Tehran first has to provide a complete declaration of its nuclear program, something it roundly rejected when that program was smaller and more vulnerable. This endeavor goes far beyond even the heavy lifting of reconstituting the IAEA’s “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s declared activities at its handful of known sites, which are just a shrinking fraction of its larger enterprise. The world needs its first-ever full transparency on Iran’s sprawling weaponization drive, enrichment and centrifuge infrastructure, proliferation networks, and missile development. Inspectors then need to be able to verify Iran’s declaration, and anything they suspect is omitted, when and where they choose, including sensitive Iranian military bases, for as long as necessary.

Accordingly, the baseline ultimatum should be that Iran provide this visibility and swiftly comply en toto with the IAEA’s investigation. Only then will it be feasible to reposition and redefine strictures around Iran’s nuclear program itself. Anything else will be drawn in the dark, devoid of credibility. Given Tehran’s tendency to proceed obliquely and in obscurity, this will be more complex than old redlines that could be drawn literally in one stroke, like when Netanyahu famously stood before the U.N. in 2012 and dragged a big red marker across a cartoon explosive representing one bomb’s worth of 20 percent uranium. It may entail Iran rolling back its program from where it now stands, making enforcement even dicier than prior redlines premised on potential future progress.

In this context, Iran would have to, at minimum, adhere to the most stringent IAEA safeguards regime, which means shuttering all undeclared facilities, building no new ones, and comprehensively disclosing its bomb-making efforts. Since inspectors will find rampant Nonproliferation Treaty violations, redlines might need to cut to the quick, as far down as zero enrichment. Forcing Iran to open its books could obviate some of these challenges by also forcing the United States, Israel, and E3 to finally agree on a unified position.

Starting with basic transparency, these redlines will be viable only if Tehran fears significantly more military and diplomatic pressure than it ever has before. Targeting its nuclear and retaliatory capability, and even threatening to do so, is a categorically tougher proposition today than Israel’s strikes on Iraq, Syria, and nearly Iran in 2012 (before America balked). It means the largest U.S. operation since at least the Gulf Wars, and one that promises to be equally open-ended and indeterminate.

Credibly threatening to bring so much force to bear if Iran tests our new redlines, and blunting Iran’s response, necessitates greatly enhanced U.S. force posture in the region. It also entails tight coordination on offensive operations with Israel, at levels that both countries have been loath to undertake, and which increasingly intertwines with Israel’s calculus toward Iran’s most potent proxy, Hezbollah. The United States already faces competing crises in Europe and Asia, unlike 10 to 15 years ago, making it harder to sacrifice readiness elsewhere and secure global allies’ support for another major Middle East conflict.

All this capability will still be moot without U.S. readiness to use it, should Iran dare test new redlines. Four straight commanders-in-chief have failed to convey such intent, which now may include threatening the regime itself, in order to compel it to concede a complete declaration of its program, coerce it to adhere to new redlines, and dissuade it from resuming nuclear work after a potential strike. The United States and E3 also need Tehran to know they will reimpose U.N. sanctions on its illegal nuclear activities in lieu of a complete and verifiable declaration. Reasserting this lost credibility is innately difficult, and made harder still by Iran’s sense of escalation dominance and the threats it already negated.

Domestic support will be key to sustaining a much more demanding and risky policy. Leadership in both parties still say a nuclear Iran is unacceptable, and resounding public majorities see it as a top threat. But nobody grapples with these implications for prevention, nor how to communicate them to the public, now that Iran doesn’t have to cross established redlines to be a living, breathing nuclear power. And despite clear evidence in Ukraine and Gaza, American leaders are reluctant to confront and convey the highly unpredictable course, duration, and demands of contemporary wars. By comparison, President John F. Kennedy purposely appeared ashen-faced and graven before the watching world in October 1962, warning he would not shrink from the risks, though awful, of global war if the alternative was nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Jimmy Carter’s 1980 State of the Union address inveighed Americans to give “careful thought, steady nerves, and resolute action, not only for this year but for many years to come” to meet Moscow’s new threats to the Middle East.

Such momentous shifts in Iran prevention policy will be hard to execute, they offer zero comfort of continuity with standard practices, they bring no guarantee of success, and to most Americans they raise the specter of yet one more, even costlier “forever war.” But thinking and talking through the problem is long overdue, and profoundly preferable to the strategic inertia Tehran exploits so well.

Avoiding this debate and defaulting belatedly to containment is at least as problematic. Its proponents would have to explain how a posture premised on robust deterrence could ever succeed, if its point of departure is the confirmed failure of credible prevention policy. It is also highly uncertain if the successes of Cold War containment could be recreated at reasonable cost, including rebuilding deterrence and bringing partners onboard for an inherently long-term effort—and all without the impetus from an overt demonstration of Iranian nuclear weapons capability.

We dodged these discussions when Iran’s threats were less pressing and everyone threw sanctions at the problem, even though this encouraged Iran’s nuclear and conventional aggression that sanctions could not slow, let alone stop. Like the debates surrounding America’s adoption of containment over isolationism to counter the Soviet Union—a decision that was far from foretold—defining what prevention now means can force sharper thinking about the ends and means of U.S. strategy. Those debates of the 1940s-50s spurred greater appreciation and action from Congress, defense industry, allies, and the American people to address these challenges together and send clear signals to Moscow and other audiences.

Just as the United States finally quit isolationism after World War II, the Iran problem can be addressed only by consciously abandoning inept and obsolete strategic concepts, including the fallacy that Iran only advances directly and obviously toward redlines that are easily defined and upheld. Too often, this fallacy readily translates to intuitive and stark, but misleadingly reassuring, analogies that portray Iran as a tiger, snake, or octopus.

A more accurate depiction is harder to appreciate, because the danger is neither clear nor present: Iran designed its program to pass through the threshold of nuclear weapons unharmed, just as the snail glides safely and unassumingly over the edge of a straight razor. Facing expectations it would act like a deadly predator, Iran became a snail. America must now adapt and advance in turn.

thedispatch.com · by Jonathan Ruhe · July 24, 2024

10.  Pentagon creates regional partnerships to sustain gear far from home

Seeme like a smart move that will be critical to sustainment but of course also creates another defense dilemma by providing targeting opportunities for our adversaries.

Pentagon creates regional partnerships to sustain gear far from home

Defense News · by Jen Judson · July 23, 2024

Seeking to move away from its reliance on hauling equipment back stateside for repairs, the Pentagon is working with allies and partners to better sustain capability forward in operational theaters, beginning with the Indo-Pacific region.

Being able to fix gear close to the fight is considered critical to any future conflict with China, according to officials.

The Pentagon recently released a regional sustainment framework that would “satisfy demand closer to the point of need,” while enhancing both U.S. and regional partners’ capabilities, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment Christopher Lowman told reporters at a recent briefing.

“For the past two and a half years, we’ve been focused on the realities of sustaining the U.S. joint force in a contested theater and what it would take to ensure success and mitigate some of the risk of relying on long, over-ocean lines of communication to retrograde equipment back to the United States for repair and then return,” Lowman said.

Historically, sustainment has been viewed solely as a national responsibility, with the U.S. government sustaining its own forces in theater.

The Pentagon’s new, partner-focused plans are “really a recognition that sustainment can be performed through a coalition and a network of regional providers, because each of those regional allies has capability, industrial capability, maintenance, repair and overhaul capability and a desire to support the work,” Lowman said.

The idea is not to build new maintenance and repair capabilities in theater, but to take advantage of what already exists while “making the appropriate changes to accommodate specific U.S. needs and then utilizing that through a joint venture arrangement, as opposed to a U.S. funded, built, owned and operated capability,” Lowman said.

The Pentagon’s under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, Bill LaPlante, and Lowman recently signed the strategy laying out the regional sustainment framework to align maintenance, repair and overhaul capabilities globally.

Such a strategy would cover sustaining equipment that has experienced normal wear and tear or battle damage.

The framework will also provide theater commanders multiple options to redirect equipment sustainment and “creates a higher level of uncertainty within adversaries’ planning cycles, and thereby enhancing deterrence,” Lowman said.

The plan is to establish the framework in the Indo-Pacific theater first, and the Defense Department is already working with five nations there to put together maintenance, repair and overhaul capability for American and partner equipment.

Lowman said he was unable to disclose the countries the U.S. is working with in the Pacific as terms of agreements are still being negotiated.

But he said the Defense Department is working with five Indo-Pacific countries to establish appropriate projects and to identify industrial partners, both U.S. and regionally based.

The Pentagon plans to build out regional sustainment partnerships within the European and Middle East theaters in fiscal 2025, followed by South America in FY26 and Africa later on, Lowman said.

INDOPACOM is being prioritized given the U.S. national defense strategy’s focus on China as the pacing threat, but also because it presents the greatest contested logistics challenge because relying on long, over-the-ocean lines will no longer prove effective if the U.S. finds itself in a war against China.

Already in the European theater, because of support for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion, sustainment partnership capabilities are emerging within the context of NATO cooperation, but the Pentagon plans to apply lessons learned from the INDOPACOM pathfinder effort to other key theaters, according to Lowman.

Ideally, regional partners will come to the table with existing capability because those countries are similarly equipped, or are equipped with U.S. produced weapon systems, “so they have repair capabilities that we’ll capitalize on,” he said.

The Defense Department will also take a look at capabilities like shipyards that are not currently configured to accommodate America’s specific requirements, but would require money for expansions and workforce training, Lowman said.

Less desirable, but also under consideration, is to look at places where capability does not exist and build it, but “that would entail the greatest amount of capital investment,” Lowman added.

Already, the U.S. has seen what regional sustainment can look like through small examples during major exercises like Talisman Sabre in Australia. During the exercise, a vehicle was damaged during a road march and was able to be repaired in country using Australian parts.

In addition to the regional sustainment framework, Lowman said the Pentagon is also engaged in a major push to use advanced manufacturing techniques forward in theater, such as additive or subtractive manufacturing and 3D printing to make parts.

“What we’re doing is enabling a digital framework in order to transmit intellectual property to the point of manufacture and then, of course, secure that intellectual property at the point of manufacture and finally to ensure that the parts produced meet our standards of manufacture so that they’re safe and suitable to operate,” Lowman said.

About Jen Judson

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

11. Record-breaking drone is ULTRA cheap, but too pricey for CENTCOM

Record-breaking drone is ULTRA cheap, but too pricey for CENTCOM

New drones break CENTCOM record with 49 hours over ISIS-K target in Afghanistan

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/record-breaking-drone-is-ultra-cheap?r=7i07&utm

JACK MURPHY

JUL 23, 2024

∙ PAID

(U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Kregg York)

U.S. Central Command is preparing to send a pair of record-breaking drones back to the United States less than six months into their deployment because it can’t afford less than $2 million per month to keep them in the Middle East, according to a representative of their manufacturer, DZYNE Technologies Incorporated.

The decision to pull the drones out of theater removes a valuable intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system for so-called “over-the-horizon” operations against ISIS-Khorasan, the main U.S. counterterrorism target in Afghanistan.

Based on commercially available glider technology, the two Unmanned Long-Endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft recently broke a record for time on target for unmanned aerial systems in Central Command’s area of responsibility, which covers the Middle East and Central Asia.

DZYNE partnered with the Air Force Research Laboratory to develop the drone in order to give the U.S. military eyes in the sky that can linger over targets for much longer than other unmanned aerial systems like the MQ-9 Reaper.

Both drones arrived in the Central Command region in March and began flying in April, the DZYNE official told The High Side. It was only in May that the Department of Defense quietly disclosed on its DVIDS website that the ULTRA was deployed to Central Command’s area of responsibility. Now sources familiar with drone operations in the region tell The High Side that it has broken a record for time over target.

Manufactured by DZYNE at the cost of $8 million each (including the sensor package), the ULTRA was designed to be a lower cost, longer-flying and unarmed alternative to the $28 million Reaper, which has a flight endurance of 14 hours when loaded with munitions. Fully autonomous when taking off, flying, and landing, the ULTRA does not require a certified pilot to operate it, but operators on the ground can use the aircraft’s data link to re-task the drone in flight if needed.

Developed and tested at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, the ULTRA’s longest flight in U.S. airspace prior to its deployment to the Middle East was for about 70 hours, according to the DZYNE official, who declined to be named in order to discuss classified operations. The long-term operational goal, according to the official, is for the ULTRA to stay aloft for 70 hours while on a mission, working in tandem with the Reaper, which can be called in to conduct airstrikes if commanders deem it necessary. (However, both the DZYNE website and the Defense Department credit the ULTRA with already being capable of non-stop flights of 80 hours.)

Since the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, President Joe Biden has charged the Pentagon with being able to conduct “over-the-horizon” counterterrorism missions in that country. In reality, that has meant flying operations from the Persian Gulf region of the Middle East. The U.S. military’s main target in Afghanistan, according to several former government officials, is ISIS-Khorasan, which remains on the United States’ list of foreign terrorist organizations.

In a March House Armed Services Committee hearing, the head of Central Command, Army Gen. Michael Kurilla, bemoaned what he described as the Taliban regime’s failure to adequately counter ISIS-K in Afghanistan. “The Taliban targeted some key ISIS-Khorasan (ISIS-K) leaders in 2023, but it has shown neither the capability nor the intent to sustain adequate counterterrorism pressure,” he said in his prepared remarks. “In fact, this lack of sustained pressure allowed ISIS-K to regenerate and harden their networks, creating multiple redundant nodes that direct, enable, and inspire attacks.”

The drone strike that took out senior Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in 2022 did not involve the ULTRA, and indeed, did not involve the Department of Defense “over-the-horizon” capabilities. That strike was a CIA operation conducted with the agency’s own drones under Title 50 covert action authorities.

Many of the ULTRA missions over Afghanistan are flown out of Al Dhafra air base in the United Arab Emirates, about 1036 miles from Kabul, the Afghan capital, a former military official familiar with drone operations told The High Side. The long distances involved in such operations mean it takes the MQ-9 about 7 to 8 hours to arrive on station, so it can only maintain an orbit over the target for 2 to 3 hours before having to return to base, according to the DZYNE official.

By comparison, the two ULTRAs flew a mission to Afghanistan in which one drone handed off to the other to enable “no-blink” constant eyes on target for 49 hours, a record for a Central Command drone mission, the DZYNE representative said. The Pentagon estimates that it would take 18 Reapers to maintain continuous coverage for that period of time, according to the DZYNE official.

The most recent ULTRA mission to Afghanistan saw one aircraft in the air for 60 hours, including 33 hours in Afghan airspace. The mission began with the ULTRA loitering over its base for six hours to wait out an unspecified “weather event” before continuing on to Afghanistan, where it provided more than 30 hours of coverage of an ISIS-K target, according to the DZYNE official.

Despite these achievements, the ULTRA’s first operational deployment has exposed some areas for improvement, according to the DZYNE official, who said that the company plans to put a more powerful engine in the drone so that it can fly at higher altitudes. There were also some communications and video uplink issues with a few of the test flights overseas, but these issues are being resolved and a new updated comms suite is going to be installed in the ULTRA, according to a company representative. DZYNE is also working on an armed variant that is in development testing in the United States, in which the missile will be held within the fuselage of the aircraft. However, there are no plans to have the ULTRA replace the Reaper as the work horse for strike missions, the DZYNE official said.

“I don’t want to see another program with good promise ruined by people who want to strap weapons on an [Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance] platform,” a former military official familiar with military drone programs told the High Side, adding that the ULTRA occupies “the perfect middle ground” between the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an unmanned system, and the venerable U-2 Dragon Lady manned spy plane. The longest known RQ-4 combat sortie lasted 32.5 hours, while the U-2’s Cold War missions were limited to 8 hours, but this century the plane has flown missions lasting up to 12 hours, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

A second DZYNE official told The High Side that the Pentagon wants to keep the ULTRA in theater but that the budget for doing so has dried up so the Air Force is preparing to pack the drones up and ship them back to the United States. “CENTCOM is going to return these birds next month,” the first DZYNE official said. “They claim they don’t have the $1.9 million a month that would be required to operate them and keep them going.”

At $1.9 million a month, or $22.8 million annually, that would put the cost of maintaining the two ULTRA’s in the Middle East at less than .11 percent of Central Command’s 2024 budget request of $20.9 billion.

The High Side reached out to DZYNE and CENTCOM for official comment on this story, but had not received a reply by the time of publication.

12. The Uncomfortable Reality of Russia and Iran’s New Defense Relationship

Excerpts:

In tackling these challenges, Washington will have its work cut out. Given the mix of drivers of and weakened constraints on Iran-Russia cooperation, the U.S. playbook from the 1990s and 2000s — which included diplomatic pressure, the threat and use of sanctions, and the offer of incentives — will be far less effective today to confront the defense relationship. The further institutionalization of Iranian-Russian defense ties will additionally complicate efforts to undermine or unwind the relationship through traditional instruments. The best Washington and its partners can therefore do is to disrupt cooperation on the margins and prevent it from materializing in the most sensitive areas.

First, they should strengthen trade sanctions on both countries and export controls, especially those that target critical “chokepoint” technologies and their suppliers. Specifically, such measures should target both states’ procurement of electronic components, guidance and engine components, and test and production equipment, all needed for drones and missiles. In addition, financial sanctions might curtail Iran’s ability to pay for Russian assistance.

Second, they should improve intelligence collection and their use of “strategic disclosures” on Iranian-Russian cooperation, especially those that highlight negotiations of concern, transfers that are planned or underway, and the key organizations and officials involved. Over the past year, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has displayed Shahed drones for media representatives and foreign government delegations. U.S. disclosures about possible Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia were among the reasons prompting the E3 to extend ballistic missile related sanctions on Iran. Continuing and improving strategic disclosures might help warn of upcoming transfers, increase international scrutiny, and deter some cooperation. Disclosures of cooperation between Russian and Iranian military and other universities could also be used to highlight areas of concern for the transfer of intangible technology.

Third, the United States and its partners should prepare for enhanced Iranian and Russian capabilities by improving their own air and missile defenses. In the Middle East, Washington has already laid the basis for such efforts by convening a U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council working group on integrated air and missile defense that, among other measures, discusses the regional expansion of air and missile defense early warning systems and information sharing to ensure a common air picture.

Lastly, Washington should engage Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and possibly China, to exert quiet pressure on Moscow to refrain from giving certain technologies to Iran. These countries retain leverage with Russia that they can use to press the Kremlin to tone down its assistance to Tehran: China because of its overall significant economic relations with Russia; the United Arab Emirates as a conduit for Russia’s roundabout trade; and Saudi Arabia as Russia’s partner in OPEC+. Both the Gulf Arab states and Beijing rely on Middle Eastern stability to pursue their own economic agendas, which should give them a further incentive to lean on Moscow.

The Uncomfortable Reality of Russia and Iran’s New Defense Relationship - War on the Rocks

HANNA NOTTE AND JIM LAMSON

warontherocks.com · by Hanna Notte · July 24, 2024

On April 2, 2024, Ukraine’s military struck several buildings in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia’s Tatarstan region. The strike demonstrated Ukraine’s steadily improving ability to hold targets deep inside Russia at risk. But it was also a stark reminder of just how far Iranian-Russian defense cooperation has come since 2022: As of last year, Russia has indigenized the production of Iranian-designed Shahed drones at Alabuga — practicing a degree of cooperation with Tehran that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The Shaheds and other Iranian-origin drones deployed by Russia have created a severe headache for Ukraine, leading its military planners to resort to the April strike.

From the 1990s to 2022, Russia provided, off and on, important military assistance to Iran across the ground, aerospace, and naval domains, largely focused on hardware instead of technology transfers. In addition to Russian support to Iran’s nuclear program, this assistance included the provision of tanks, armored vehicles, anti-tank missiles, combat aircraft, helicopters, and surface-to-air missiles, among others. Assistance — at least in the 1990s — also entailed unofficial transfers by low-level Russian entities to Iran’s ballistic missile and suspected chemical and biological weapons programs.

Since 2022, Russia’s defense relationship with Iran has taken a big leap forward. Cooperation has moved past the previous patron-client dynamic, with Iran emerging as a key enabler of Russia’s air and ground campaign in Ukraine. Military-technical collaboration has intensified in existing areas, while also advancing to new frontiers such as the joint development of novel uncrewed aerial vehicles. Amid a general weakening of past constraints on cooperation, Iran and Russia have also taken steps to further institutionalize their defense relationship.

Western capitals should accept an uncomfortable reality: Even if Russia’s war against Ukraine were to end, there is little hope that the Iran-Russia defense relationship will revert to its pre-2022 status quo. Both countries have identified needs for future military contingencies that they can help each other meet — even if Iran will continue to be more reliant on advanced technology from Russia than vice versa. Traditional instruments such as diplomatic pressure or sanctions are unlikely to be effective in checking this cooperation so long as both Iran and Russia view Washington and its allies as their main adversaries.

As a result, the best the United States and its partners can do is to disrupt this cooperation on the margins and focus on undermining it in the most sensitive areas. Specifically, Washington should focus on complicating Iran’s and Russia’s procurement of electronics for high-end defense goods and seek to derail or deter impending deals or deliveries through strategic disclosures.

Become a Member

Brothers in Arms

Since February 2022, the Iranian-Russian defense relationship has expanded both in degree and in kind. Pre-existing areas of cooperation — such as electronic warfare, space, or cyber — have seen increased activity. In August 2022 and February 2024, Russia launched imaging satellites for Iran and has committed to aid Iran’s space program in additional ways, including through a December 2022 agreement. Russia has helped Iran with GPS denial and jamming capabilities, sharing lessons from its own electronic warfare efforts in Syria. Russia has also continued to deliver conventional weapons to Iran, providing it with Yak-130 training aircraft last September. To be sure, cooperation in these areas has been underway for years, having received a boost with the expiration of the conventional arms embargo against Iran in October 2020. At the time, Moscow reacted negatively to U.S. efforts to extend the embargo and Russian experts signaled that Russia could step up its defense cooperation with Iran.

Since February 2022, however, cooperation has taken an even more significant leap forward, with Iran and Russia collaborating in entirely new areas. Iran’s provision of drones, drone production technology, and drone training to Russia has received considerable international attention, given its impact on the Ukrainian battlefield. As of May 2024, the Russian armed forces had launched at least 4,000 Iranian-designed Shahed drones against Ukraine. Less noted, though, is Iran’s multifaceted support for Russia’s ground war, including through artillery shells, small-arms ammunition, anti-tank rockets, mortar bombs, and glide bombs. This shows how Russia can benefit from Iranian aid in terms of quantity, if not quality.

Iran has also assisted Russia’s war effort in more indirect ways, sharing expertise on how to circumvent or overcome the effects of sanctions. Tehran and Moscow signed a joint declaration to that effect in December 2023. Emerging as a critical supporter of Russia’s Ukraine campaign, Iran ended the client-patron dynamic that had characterized the relationship for the better part of three decades. During this period, Iran had relied on Russian support, but had little to offer its partner. Russia’s own assistance to Iran has extended into new domains, too. Russian technicians have been detected working on Iran’s space launch vehicle program and other aspects of its missile programs. Russia has also provided Iran with Western-origin military technology captured on the battlefield in Ukraine, which Tehran can study in order to reverse engineer it or to develop countermeasures.

Russia’s needs for its Ukraine campaign have been the key factor driving the expansion of defense cooperation. But this isn’t the only factor. Previous constraints on the relationship have now subsided in importance against the backdrop of a shared Iranian-Russian animosity toward the United States. Those past constraints included a Russian susceptibility to U.S. or Western pressure to limit cooperation with Iran, Russian concerns with adhering to nonproliferation norms and export control regimes, Iran’s inability to pay for Russian technology, Russia’s ties with the Gulf Arab states and Israel, and historical mistrust between both countries.

To be clear, present Iranian-Russian defense cooperation is not limitless. Highly coveted items on Iran’s wish list from Russia — such as Su-35 advanced fighter aircraft — have not yet been delivered and no agreement on the delivery of S-400 advanced air defense systems has been reached. Potential obstacles to cooperation will also continue going forward. These include both countries’ supply chain vulnerabilities, Russia’s desire not to antagonize its Gulf Arab partners, and Russia’s enduring technological superiority vis-a-vis Iran in key areas. All these should preclude the formation of a full-fledged and equal military-strategic partnership.

And yet, the defense relationship is on a clear upward trajectory. It is also benefitting from a joint Iranian-Russian effort to institutionalize defense ties by bolstering formal mechanisms that facilitate and coordinate military-technical cooperation. Institutionalization started in Syria, where the Russian and Iranian campaigns in support of the government developed an “integrated grouping” of irregular armed formations under Russian command. Iran’s then-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Ali Shamkhani, and Gen. Qasem Soleimani served as Iran’s main points of contact with the Russian military.

Building on that valuable experience, the period after February 2022 has been marked by a further increase in high-level engagements among military and defense officials — including their bilateral Joint Military Cooperation Commission, which is especially important for cooperation between the two countries’ General Staffs. The two countries have also been negotiating a new 20-year strategic agreement and will resume talks towards its finalization once the newly elected Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and his cabinet have settled into office. In addition they have made forays into the joint production of weapon systems, thereby creating new path dependencies.

With increasing institutionalization of the defense relationship, we should expect expanded cooperation not only at the official level — including transfers of weapon systems and production technology — but also from lower-level entities looking to procure technologies to support their weapons programs. Investment into the International North-South Transport Corridor and other infrastructure to facilitate trade will likely provide a further institutional “hook” for expanded Iranian-Russian defense cooperation over the medium term.

The recent surprise election of Pezeshkian is unlikely to impact these trend lines. He may pursue modest economic reforms and social liberalization, and may even seek to revive diplomacy on the nuclear dossier with the West. Still, Iran will not waver in its cultivation of close ties with Russia and, more importantly, the pursuit of a regional strategy that will benefit from Russian military-technical support. On these matters, Iran’s supreme leader, its Supreme National Security Council, and high-level military officials are the most important decision makers. Most bilateral cooperation occurs independent of the president’s oversight — through the General Staff, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and regular military (Artesh), and the Defense Ministry. Similarly, while the Kremlin determines the overall thrust of Russia’s ties with Iran, the Russian Ministry of Defense, the General Staff, and Russian defense conglomerate Rostec perform important functions in driving defense and military-technical cooperation, creating vested interests in its continuation beyond the top leadership.

Scenarios of Future Cooperation

The combination of weakened constraints and growing institutionalization make it unlikely that the Russian-Iranian defense relationship will lapse back into its previous patron-client dynamic even once the war in Ukraine ends. Both Iran and Russia have needs for future military contingencies, some of which the partner country may help meet. Assessing the future military needs of each country, and identifying the areas in which the partnership could be leveraged to meet those needs, allows analysts and policymakers to think through the most worrisome scenarios for future Russian-Iranian defense cooperation.

In terms of what Iran may seek from Russia, two areas of Iranian strategic interest are of highest concern: There are weapons and technologies that would enhance Iran’s asymmetric capabilities, especially those important for the most likely conflict scenarios with the United States and Israel in the aerospace and naval domains. Similarly alarming are those Russian weapons and technologies that Iran might transfer to its partners in the “axis of resistance” — especially Lebanese Hizballah, the Yemeni Houthis, and Iraqi militias — that could threaten U.S. and allied security interests.

Iran’s military-technical needs in pursuit of these strategic interests fall into three main categories. First, Iran is keen on improving its long-range strike capabilities. To do so, it may seek assistance from Russia on key technical and operational elements of its targeting cycle, relying on ballistic and cruise missiles, uncrewed aerial and naval systems, and even glide bombs. Iranian needs in this area may have been rendered even more acute by the lackluster performance of its missiles and drones during its large-scale attack against Israel this past April. Russian assistance might help Iran with over-the-horizon targeting, advanced propulsion, guidance, and seeker technologies. Second, Iran may turn to Russia for help on improving its “air defense cycle” (charkheh-ye padafand-e havai) and passive defense (padafand-e gheyr-e amel) capabilities designed to protect its nuclear, military, and other sensitive facilities from a U.S. or Israeli air attack. Such help may entail the transfer of more advanced air defense systems or of technologies to support Iran’s domestic air defense programs. Finally, Iran may request Russian support to improve the surface and subsurface attack and defense capabilities that underpin its asymmetric naval strategy. Especially important in this regard may be Russian technical help to improve Iran’s anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles and anti-ship drones.

Russia could conceivably help Iran in all three areas, given its superior long-range strike, air defense, and naval capabilities. It could do so not just by transferring complete systems, but also through technology transfers or by sharing operational expertise. Considering that Moscow and individual Russian entities have previously transferred missile and other sensitive technologies to Iran, it is not a stretch to think that this may happen again in the future.

Russia may also step up its direct assistance to Iran’s partners in the “axis of resistance.” Prior to February 2022, any Russian security assistance to such groups was sporadic, with the exception of Iran-backed groups in Syria, with which Russia collaborated more intensively from 2015. After February 2022, Moscow ramped up intelligence sharing with Iran-backed militias and supplied Hizballah with anti-ship missiles via Syria. Hizballah struck Israel’s Meron air control base with Russian-made anti-tank guided missiles in January 2024, suggesting that Moscow may have provided additional arms to the militant group. U.S. officials warned late last year that the Wagner Group may provide air defense systems to Hizballah. In the event of further escalation between Israel and Hizballah, Russia should be expected to funnel additional weapons not needed for the Ukraine campaign to Hizballah and the Yemeni Houthis.

Western states should also worry about less likely — but no less consequential — forms of Russian assistance that would enhance the hedging strategies underpinning Iran’s asymmetric deterrence and compellence. Moscow may, for instance, support Iran’s nuclear hedging capabilities without helping it cross the threshold to building a nuclear bomb. Iran is also suspected of hedging in other areas where it could benefit from Russian know-how: intermediate-range and inter-continental ballistic missile-applicable technologies, including solid-propellant space launch vehicles, technologies applicable to direct-ascent anti-satellite weapons, and dual-use technologies in the chemical and biological weapons domains to enhance its “on demand” capacity to produce such weapons. Since Moscow’s capabilities in these realms are superior to those of Iran, it could support its partner in honing these hedging strategies.

Russia would benefit from Iranian assistance in return. For as long as Russia pursues its military campaign in Ukraine, Iranian backing will come in handy to help Russia meet some of its most acute needs for ammunition, relatively inexpensive drones, and possibly ballistic missiles. Beyond the war in Ukraine, Russian needs from Iran are likely going to be far more limited than Iranian needs for advanced technology from Russia. Still, Moscow may turn to Tehran for support in niche areas. For example, considering Iran’s sophistication in long-range precision strike, Russia may hope to glean technical or operational insights from its partner. It may also rely on Iranian help to replenish its weapons and munitions inventories once the war in Ukraine is over. Finally, Russia might benefit from the supply of spare parts via Iranian Defense Ministry and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps procurement networks.

As the bilateral defense relationship continues to deepen, the two sides might also pursue joint programs. In the area of combat drones, production has already evolved into a joint venture of sorts, with Moscow and Tehran working cooperatively to develop new kinds of drones. In the future, the partners could pursue joint programs to enhance each other’s anti-ship ballistic missile capabilities, as Iran and Russia are among a small number of countries in the world that develop them. They could also deepen their counter-sanctions cooperation, given that both rely heavily on Western electronic components for missiles and drones.

The Long Shadow of Iranian-Russian Defense Cooperation

Iranian-Russian defense cooperation is not just a matter of acute concern as Washington seeks to bolster Kyiv’s defenses. In planning for the future security environment in both Europe and the Middle East, U.S. defense planners should proceed from worst-case assumptions around Iranian-Russian cooperation and think through the second- and third-order effects. Beyond the Ukrainian battlefield, there are implications for U.S. security interests in at least four areas. First, any Russian assistance that creates qualitative upticks in Iran’s asymmetric capabilities — especially its long-range conventional strike and air defense capabilities — will inevitably complicate the ability of the United States and its regional allies to deter and defeat Iran and its regional partners. Second, the sheer volume of assistance that Iran could theoretically provide to Russia in munitions and inexpensive missiles and drones would not just enhance Russia’s position in Ukraine, but could also pose a headache for NATO defense planners down the line. Third, any Russian aid to Iran’s hedging efforts in the areas of nuclear, long-range missile, anti-satellite technologies, or chemical and biological weapons would inevitably undermine international efforts to control and prevent the proliferation of these technologies, while also enhancing Iran’s regional deterrence and compellence.

Finally, growing collaboration between Iran and Russia in any of these areas may provide a “plank” to spur military-technical cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. While there is much talk of an emerging “axis” tying the four countries together, there is little evidence to date of trilateral or quadrilateral defense cooperation among them. That could change in the future, however, with Iranian-Russian ties forming a nucleus for the four countries to develop or improve anti-ship ballistic missiles and other long-range strike systems, jointly conduct illicit procurement of critical technologies, or share technical and operational insights gained from tests, exercises, and the use of missiles and drones. There is past precedent of military-technical cooperation in most of the dyads among the four countries. All of them see the United States as their most important adversary, and each country has its own mix of military needs and strengths that will create valuable synergies to take advantage of.

In tackling these challenges, Washington will have its work cut out. Given the mix of drivers of and weakened constraints on Iran-Russia cooperation, the U.S. playbook from the 1990s and 2000s — which included diplomatic pressure, the threat and use of sanctions, and the offer of incentives — will be far less effective today to confront the defense relationship. The further institutionalization of Iranian-Russian defense ties will additionally complicate efforts to undermine or unwind the relationship through traditional instruments. The best Washington and its partners can therefore do is to disrupt cooperation on the margins and prevent it from materializing in the most sensitive areas.

First, they should strengthen trade sanctions on both countries and export controls, especially those that target critical “chokepoint” technologies and their suppliers. Specifically, such measures should target both states’ procurement of electronic components, guidance and engine components, and test and production equipment, all needed for drones and missiles. In addition, financial sanctions might curtail Iran’s ability to pay for Russian assistance.

Second, they should improve intelligence collection and their use of “strategic disclosures” on Iranian-Russian cooperation, especially those that highlight negotiations of concern, transfers that are planned or underway, and the key organizations and officials involved. Over the past year, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency has displayed Shahed drones for media representatives and foreign government delegations. U.S. disclosures about possible Iranian ballistic missiles to Russia were among the reasons prompting the E3 to extend ballistic missile related sanctions on Iran. Continuing and improving strategic disclosures might help warn of upcoming transfers, increase international scrutiny, and deter some cooperation. Disclosures of cooperation between Russian and Iranian military and other universities could also be used to highlight areas of concern for the transfer of intangible technology.

Third, the United States and its partners should prepare for enhanced Iranian and Russian capabilities by improving their own air and missile defenses. In the Middle East, Washington has already laid the basis for such efforts by convening a U.S.-Gulf Cooperation Council working group on integrated air and missile defense that, among other measures, discusses the regional expansion of air and missile defense early warning systems and information sharing to ensure a common air picture.

Lastly, Washington should engage Gulf Cooperation Council countries, and possibly China, to exert quiet pressure on Moscow to refrain from giving certain technologies to Iran. These countries retain leverage with Russia that they can use to press the Kremlin to tone down its assistance to Tehran: China because of its overall significant economic relations with Russia; the United Arab Emirates as a conduit for Russia’s roundabout trade; and Saudi Arabia as Russia’s partner in OPEC+. Both the Gulf Arab states and Beijing rely on Middle Eastern stability to pursue their own economic agendas, which should give them a further incentive to lean on Moscow.

Become a Member

Hanna Notte, Ph.D., is director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and a nonresident senior associate with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Her work focuses on Russia’s foreign and security policy, the Middle East, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation.

Jim Lamson is a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. Prior to that, he worked for 23 years as an analyst with the CIA.

This article is based on a research study recently conducted with the support of the Russia Strategic Initiative at U.S. European Command.

Image: khamenei.ir via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Hanna Notte · July 24, 2024

13. Are we in Cold War 2.0? (interview with Anne Applebaum)

Excerpts:

Mak: Just to wrap up this conversation, you dedicated this book to “the optimists,” and I have to admit that I'm having a hard time identifying in that camp right now. And so I'm trying to understand, you know, how do we fix the trajectory of the world that you've identified here?

Is it fixable? How do we turn away from, you know, a sort of nothing matters worldview towards something more hopeful and more democratic?

Applebaum: I think the short answer involves a lot of people. Everyone. You, me, everyone reading to think about how they can be engaged in whatever country they live in. 

How do you engage in your democracy? How do you play some kind of role? How do you support and insist on supporting the rights that we're all guaranteed in our constitutions? How do you convince others of why that's important?

It's very important to vote. It's very important to participate in the electoral process in other ways. And that's the best advice I can give ordinary people.

I have a whole laundry list in the book of things that governments could do, and they start with the elimination of the institutions that enable kleptocracy in our own societies. That seems to be the easiest and first thing that we can do. 

But I think ordinary people can also, through their own participation, make a difference.

Are we in Cold War 2.0?

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum doesn’t think so. Now autocracies are less ideological. What they do share, she writes in a new book, is a way of stealing - like corrupt corporations.

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/are-we-in-cold-war-20?r=7i07&utm

TIM MAK AND ALESSANDRA HAY

JUL 23, 2024

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Editor’s Note: We’re trying something a little different: Anne joins us to talk about her book, out today, titled 'Autocracy Inc.' It’s about how the world’s dictatorships now cooperate more like a series of companies that work together to steal, launder and oppress. 

To read more about the personal stories of those resisting authoritarianism, sign up for The Counteroffensive for free!

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The historian and journalist Anne Applebaum participates in the session ‘Democracies in danger’ in the XXXV Economy Circle meeting on May 30, 2019 in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by David Zorrakino/Europa Press via Getty Images)

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mak:  So are you calling it ‘Autocracy Inc.’ or ‘Autocracy Incorporated’? 

Applebaum: I mean, Autocracy Inc. sounds cooler. The only problem with it is that, you know, when you hear it, it sounds like it could be I-N-K. You know, Autocracy Ink!

Mak: I like that. I think the double meaning actually makes your book like three levels cooler. 

Applebaum: The reason why the book has that title is that I spent a long time searching for a metaphor.

The relationship between modern autocracies: they are not an alliance, they are not a bloc. I don't even think they're an axis because axis implies some kind of coordinated activity.

What they are more like is a huge international conglomerate within which there are separate companies that cooperate when it suits them, but otherwise do their own thing.

And I think that's the best way to describe a group of countries who have nothing in common ideologically. You have communist China, nationalist Russia, theocratic Iran, Bolivarian Socialist Venezuela...

Russia's President Vladimir Putin delivers a speech during the Victory Day military parade at Red Square in central Moscow on May 9, 2024. (Photo by MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

You have these actually quite different styles of leadership and different ways of claiming legitimacy, but they do have a few things in common. One of them is the way in which they use the international financial system.

Unlike the most famous dictators of the twentieth century, most of the leaders of these countries are very interested in money, and in hiding money, and in enriching people around them. 

They dislike the democratic world. They dislike the language that we use. They don't want to hear any more about human rights or rights at all. You know, the right to freedom of speech or the right to a free press.

They also don't want to hear about transparency. They prefer to conduct their affairs behind a veil of secrecy. They don't want institutions that expose them, whether those are domestic or international. 

And all of them see the language of transparency and rights as their most important enemy, whether mostly because that's the language that their domestic opponents use, whether it's the Navalny movement in Russia, or whether it's the Hong Kong democrats in China, or whether it's the complex Venezuelan opposition — they all use that kind of language, because they all understand that those are the things they are deprived of. 

Autocracy Inc. is an attempt to encapsulate that group of countries.

Mak: And you write a lot about how they've created this network to steal, to launder funds, to oppress people, to surveil, to spread propaganda and disinformation. 

I read with great interest your argument that this is not Cold War 2.0. Because you argue that ideals are too disparate, they don't have a unified ideology. 

But I also found that as I was reading your book, I sensed a sort of underlying ideology that does kind of bring all these countries together: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. It’s more of a worldview. It’s less of a prescriptive ideology.

But it is this worldview of nihilism and cynicism and hopelessness – a sort of future where the truth is impossible to know, so the public shouldn't even bother trying to find out. Isn’t that what unifies this bloc of anti-Western countries? 

Applebaum: I think you're right that those feelings are what they want to induce in their populations and maybe our populations too. They want people to feel that politics is a realm of confusion and something they can't understand.

They want people to feel cynical and apathetic. They want people to stay out of politics. Authoritarian narratives and authoritarian propaganda vary between a kind of advocacy for the supposed stability and safety of autocracy, as opposed to the chaos and degeneracy of democracy.

It sort of varies between that and the Russian version, which is streams of lies so that people feel confused and disoriented and they don't know anymore what's true and what's not.

So you're right that aligns them. You could also say that another thing that aligns them is a kind of anti-enlightenment view of the world, and they don't want rational thinking or science. They want to be free of any checks and balances. 

They want to be free of any obligation to report or respond to the truth. They want to mold and shape the world, according to their somewhat different personal visions. 

That's the way they approach the world. So there are things that unify them. There are also things that make them different. My goal is to not to claim that they're all the same. But they do have some similar goals, and they share certain interests.

Mak: Using that, though, can we conceptualize what's happening now in the world as the start of a new Cold War, or do you still think that's the wrong way to look at the problem?

Applebaum: I think that's the wrong way to look at the problem. It's true that it's a war of ideas. But to say the Cold War implies a geographical separation, a Berlin Wall and it also implies unity on both sides, which we don't have on either side, actually.

And there is also a lot of the world that doesn't really belong in either camp or switches back and forth. 

There are a lot of complicated countries like India or Turkey or the Gulf states, which play different roles. Sometimes they align with one side, sometimes they align with another. 

And I also want to stress that something I just said, and I'll emphasize it again, that people who align with the autocratic worldview are found inside democracies, and they aren't a fringe. 

In the United States, they dominate the Republican Party, which is one of our two great political parties. In other countries, they play an important role in political coalitions.

Mak: The countries you mentioned as being part of Autocracy Inc.: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and you also add countries like Mali and Zimbabwe as other examples of countries that might fall under this banner. 

North Korean leader Kim Jong un holding the 10th plenary session of the 8th Central Committee of the Workers' Party in 2024. (Photo by Kim Jae-Hwan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

They don't really strike me as innovative, growth places. They don't really strike me as where the future lies. Just to play devil's advocate here, why should we be concerned about them? Why should we be worried about the effect that they might have on our future?

Applebaum: First of all, I do think China is a place that's innovative and is very interested in the future of AI and is putting a lot of money into it. So that's a big parenthesis. 

You're certainly right that Mali isn't really a model for anybody. I don't even think Russia is a model of a society that people want to live in or admire. But we do need to care about them because they care about us.

Although they're not that attractive, they are capable of doing a lot of damage. So their vision is negative. They're very focused on us. They want to undermine us.

Maybe people in London or Paris or Madrid don't wake up in the morning and feel threatened by Russia, China, and North Korea. 

[But] there are people in North Korea who wake up every morning and think about us. They're interested in affecting our politics. They're interested in challenging the weaker democratic states. 

The Iranian proxies in the Middle East are interested in challenging and overturning the order in the Middle East. They have both military and propaganda and other sources of disruption that they are willing to use against us.

We might not want to care about them or think about them, but I didn't think that we have a choice anymore and the evidence is all around us. 

And let me just say a word about Ukraine. Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Part of the reason is that Putin, he's a megalomaniac and he has an idea of himself as the leader of a restored Russian empire, and he's used that language in the past. 

But he also did it because Ukraine felt to him like a challenge, an ideological challenge. Ukraine was another large Slavic country that had been very corrupt. It was heading very much in the direction that Russia went, becoming very much like that, and was very dominated in many ways in the business sphere, in particular by Russia. 

And yet the Ukrainians organized and through civic activism, they overthrew that regime, they changed it, and they created a democracy. Sometimes it seems like a pretty rocky democracy, but it's a democracy, nevertheless. 

And they, even during the war in Ukraine, have a sense of freedom of speech and ease of conversation that you don't have in Russia and haven't had in Russia for many years. 

So the model that Ukraine presents, of a country that's aiming to be integrated into Europe that would like to be part of the democratic world, is very threatening to Putin, because the scenario that he has been most afraid of, unlikely though maybe it now seems, is exactly the 2014 Maidan scenario. He's afraid of civic activism organizing to somehow overthrow or threaten him.

Anti-government protesters shout slogans on a road block on Hrushevskoho Street on January 30, 2014 in Kyiv, Ukraine. (Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty Images)

The scenes of the people swarming Yanukovych's golden palace at the end of the Maidan revolution must have frightened him because that's what he's afraid of.

And so crushing Ukraine is also about crushing that idea and showing Russians that that's not going to work and we're not going to let that kind of country survive. 

And the other purpose of the war was to say to America and Europe and the rest of the democratic world: ‘we don't care about your stupid rules. And we're not bothered by this norm that you say existed since 1945, that we don't change borders in Europe by force. We're not interested in that.

And we're going to show you that it doesn't matter. And we're also going to show you that all your language about never again, there'll never be concentration camps, there'll never be torture and murder in Europe – we're going to show you that we don't care about that either.’

We're going to set up concentration camps in occupied Ukraine. We're going to kidnap children, take them away from their parents or the institutions they live in. We're going to make them into Russians. And we're going to continue with this project of destroying Ukraine as a nation and as a state. And that's a deliberate challenge to the way that the Western world thinks.

I keep using the word Western. It’s an old habit, but Western is the wrong word – [I should be saying,] the democratic world.

Mak: Ukraine is obviously subject to this physical violence that you've outlined. It's also constantly subject to the propagandistic efforts of Russia through things from troll farms, through narratives that they're trying to spread, and dissent within the society. 

I was really taken by one anecdote you put in the book – [which has] Bill Clinton giving a speech in 2000 and saying, as a joke, that China has been trying to crack down on the internet and everyone in the room laughs. 

Applebaum: …And it was, it was at Johns Hopkins University. You know, it was a room full of people who do political science and foreign policy…

Mak: …Smart, smart people who think a lot about the future, and Bill Clinton said that trying to crack down on the Internet was like trying to nail jello to the wall. 

President Bill Clinton delivers a speech on trade with China at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images)

And so thinking about the developments in politics around the world over the last decade, it really does seem that at the core of this book is an idea: that this original promise of the Internet, a globalized world that would be connected and freed from government surveillance and control, that that original promise is kind of dead. 

I know the jury's still out, but I want to get a sense from you: was the development of the Internet over the last decade fundamentally a net positive benefit for human freedom?

Applebaum: The Internet is a reflection of human nature in a certain way. It was an expansion of already existing trends. So it's hard for me to say, to talk about the Internet as a whole, being good or bad. 

I mean, it's just a reflection of what we are like. I think we can say pretty clearly now about social media, which is a particular piece of the Internet, has created a kind of chaos.

It fundamentally changed the way that people understand the world, particularly the political world and political information. So the way that people now get information is through short bursts of messages on their phone.

There's been a kind of dumbing down of everybody. I mean, I see it and hear it.

And it's also become just much, much easier to create instant propaganda campaigns. The Soviet Union actually used to run what we now would call active measures or fake news campaigns.

There's a famous one that grew up around the AIDS virus. They had started a conspiracy theory that the AIDS virus had been an invention of the CIA and they planted it.

The idea was to make a kind of echo chamber where people would hear it from different places and people would believe in it. And I think it had some impact. I think some people around the world believed it.

You can now do a campaign like that in an hour. 

Mak: You mentioned how the Internet was a reflection of human nature. And there is an assumption that democracy and freedom are natural human callings and that we're kind of drawn to it by the nature of what humanity is.

But you can also see if you look around the world that a lot of people are willing to give up their own freedom for a sense of security, or to give up some freedom as long as the government imposes their view of the world on other people they don't happen to like. 

And I wonder if you've grappled with or changed your view on the nature of human beings in the last decade or so.

Applebaum: So my previous book, which is called Twilight of Democracy, was much more about this. It was about the attraction of authoritarian ideas and specifically why they're attractive to people who live in democratic countries.

The more you stare at history books and the deeper you look at the origins of our modern democracies, the easier it is to see that most of humanity through most of history has lived in what we would now describe as autocracy, monarchies, dictatorships. 

Democracies are the exception. There are very few of them. Most of them fail. I think almost all of them have failed at one point or another. They require an enormous amount of effort to keep going and to maintain. Even the ancient scholars, even Plato and Aristotle, wrote about how democracies can decline. So it's not as if this is even a modern phenomenon.

Forms of democracy that were known in the ancient world were also considered to be always at risk of being destroyed by the appeal of a strong man or by disintegration. So I don't think democracy is at all normal.

I think it's probably abnormal. And the attraction that people feel for, you know, for dictators doesn't surprise me at all. 

Mak:  Let’s place Autocracy Inc. in the context of the ongoing situation in the United States right now. We're speaking right after Donald Trump has survived a shooting attempt and a convention where he seems to have unified the Republican party. 

You write near the end of the book about Trump that “if he ever succeeds at directing federal courts and law enforcement at his enemies... then the blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds will be complete." 

It doesn't seem like you're super optimistic about what might happen next.

Applebaum: What worries me honestly about Donald Trump is the affinity that he has shown for the dictators that I'm writing about.

It's not like it's a secret or you have to look at classified documents. He talks openly about it, his admiration for Xi Jinping, his admiration for Putin, his admiration even for the North Korean dictator who's destroyed his country.

n this file photo taken on June 28, 2019, China's President Xi Jinping (R) shakes hands with US President Donald Trump before a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Osaka. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / AFP) (Photo by BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images)

It's a poor, sad, repressed country in contrast to vibrant, successful South Korea. Yet, Trump admires him because he's brutal and because he stays in power for a long time, I guess. 

The second piece of it is that I worry about Trump’s transactional instincts, particularly in a second term, if he were to win.

Trump is not interested in an alliance of democracies or a community of values or America playing a role in supporting the stability and viability of democracy around the world.

He's mostly interested in himself. He's interested in his own money. He's interested in his own perceptions of him. He's interested in his own political stability and right now, he's interested in staying out of jail. 

Former US President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump walks to speak to the press after he was convicted in his criminal trial at Manhattan Criminal Court in New York City, on May 30, 2024. (Photo by MARK PETERSON/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

I would be afraid of that in a second term, when he feels much less constrained, that his interests in his own finances and his children's finances would be one of the prime drivers of his foreign policy. 

In that sense, he would already be like one of the dictators that I've written about.

He could also, you know, he might also be looking to do deals that benefit business people around him. 

And I don't know what joining Autocracy Inc would look like. It's not that there would be some pact between America and Russia or America and China, or maybe there would be, but it’s not necessary at all. 

It's simply that we would begin to behave like those dictatorships. And our leaders would begin to behave like the leaders of those dictatorships and we're not that far away from it. So it's not difficult to imagine at all.

Mak: Just to wrap up this conversation, you dedicated this book to “the optimists,” and I have to admit that I'm having a hard time identifying in that camp right now. And so I'm trying to understand, you know, how do we fix the trajectory of the world that you've identified here?

Is it fixable? How do we turn away from, you know, a sort of nothing matters worldview towards something more hopeful and more democratic?

Applebaum: I think the short answer involves a lot of people. Everyone. You, me, everyone reading to think about how they can be engaged in whatever country they live in. 

How do you engage in your democracy? How do you play some kind of role? How do you support and insist on supporting the rights that we're all guaranteed in our constitutions? How do you convince others of why that's important?

It's very important to vote. It's very important to participate in the electoral process in other ways. And that's the best advice I can give ordinary people.

I have a whole laundry list in the book of things that governments could do, and they start with the elimination of the institutions that enable kleptocracy in our own societies. That seems to be the easiest and first thing that we can do. 

But I think ordinary people can also, through their own participation, make a difference.

Protestors march with a large banner during the Mahsa Amini Day - Woman Life Freedom Rally. Iranians and non-Iranians joined the march for democracy in London. Global rallies were held in every city in the world to show solidarity with the people of Iran. (Photo by Loredana Sangiuliano/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

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NEWS OF THE DAY: 

Good morning to readers! Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.

LABOR SHORTAGES IN UKRAINE PROMPT NEW ROLE FOR WOMEN: Ukraine is suffering labor shortages brought on by mobilization. These waves of mobilization have not only taken a lot of men from the workforce and into the army, but it has also caused a lot of men fearing conscription to stay home.

These mobilization waves have led to women becoming an increasingly important part of the workforce.

The Washington Post profiles Tatiyana Ustymenko, a coal miner who has taken on a job previously only available to men.

RUSSIAN ATTACKS LEAVE UKRAINIAN ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE WORKING AT 50%: Continued Russian attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure have significantly reduced Ukraine’s capacity to produce energy, leaving it at 50% of what it was in 2023, Euronews reports.

Ukrainian energy production and capacity in 2023 was already partially diminished from infrastructure attacks in 2022. 

HUNGARY WANTS EU ACTION AGAINST UKRAINE: Hungary wants the EU to take action against Ukraine after Ukraine made the decision to partially end the transfer of Russian oil to Hungary across Ukrainian territory to comply with sanction regulations, Politico reports.

“Ukraine's decision fundamentally threatens the security of supply in Hungary,” the Hungarian Foreign Minister. Hungary gets 70 percent of its oil from Russia. 

14. Why America Has Failed to Forge an Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire

Excerpts:

To be sure, cease-fires associated with negotiations, even if short-lived, are often essential in providing valuable humanitarian aid to innocent civilians caught in war’s crossfire. Such efforts, in this case for Palestinians, should not be abandoned. Rather, the benefits of humanitarian relief borne of temporary cease-fires must be considered in tandem with the potential longer-term downsides of insincere diplomacy. Ignoring this dilemma can result in greater suffering.

Although numerous countries and international institutions could influence the present war, the United States holds the greatest sway. And Washington has several alternatives to its current strategy of pushing for talks that could more meaningfully affect the course of the conflict. First, Biden should change course by calling out and expressing willingness to punish human rights atrocities and violations of laws of war. As Oona A. Hathaway has previously argued in Foreign Affairs, Washington would benefit from dialing back its offensive against the International Criminal Court and strongly pushing Israel to investigate and punish its soldiers’ wrongdoings. Biden should do so, and he should increase threats to pause or withhold arms transfers if Israel’s conduct does not change. This would not only save civilian lives but would also slowly build confidence that the United States might be an impartial arbiter of a future cease-fire agreement. To undermine Hamas’s recruitment and mobilization efforts, the United States should encourage Israel to directly target Hamas’s agents and avoid hurting Palestinian civilians. Sanctions on groups and individuals fomenting violence will also have a part to play.

The United States—as well as Egypt, Qatar, and other prospective mediators—should also stand ready to offer its services whenever the belligerents request them. But constant efforts to instigate talks or insist on terms that do not align with belligerents’ actual positions should end. If negotiations take place, the likelihood of their success will depend in large measure upon recent battlefield activity having revealed one side’s superiority and both belligerents accepting that a settlement will be truly enforceable. The value of third parties is not that they can create peace where peace does not exist. It is, rather, that they can assist in arranging peace—and in reducing the risk of belligerents looking weak or being exploited while negotiating—when both sides are ready to consider it. Pressuring Israel to minimize civilian casualties and to punish its troops’ unacceptable behavior, or convincing all belligerents to put down their weapons, would require greater political will, patience, and restraint than a public push demanding acceptance of an improbable agreement. But these actions hold the promise, however slim, of positive change.

Why America Has Failed to Forge an Israel-Hamas Cease-Fire

Pressuring Belligerents to Talk Rarely Works—and Sometimes Backfires

By Eric Min

July 24, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Eric Min · July 24, 2024

On May 31, U.S. President Joe Biden announced a three-phase proposal to end the war in the Gaza Strip. He called, first, for a temporary cease-fire tied to partial withdrawals of Israeli forces, limited hostage exchanges, and an influx of aid. Negotiations would then begin and, if successful, lead to the second phase, involving a permanent cessation of hostilities, tied to full withdrawals and complete hostage exchanges. The final phase would see reconstruction efforts begin in Gaza, and the exchange of the remains of Israeli hostages.

Despite the fanfare with which it was announced, this proposal was just one of many to have been made since the war began. Indeed, Israel and Hamas had previously rejected similar plans advanced by Egypt and Qatar. And, like the other proposals, the Biden plan has fallen flat. Although these mediated initiatives have not succeeded in forging peace, they represent attempts to end the ongoing suffering caused by the war. It can’t hurt to try.

Or can it? The historical record reveals that such diplomatic interventions often have hugely negative consequences. Outside powers have almost never been able to impose lasting cease-fires without support from the belligerents themselves and, perhaps more troublingly, external efforts to facilitate diplomacy can make wars worse. Rather than bringing peace, there is the uncomfortable likelihood that diplomacy which takes place regardless of what is happening on the battlefield, can actually exacerbate a war. The United States and its allies should pressure Hamas and Israel to change their wartime conduct, instead of seeking to impose negotiations when neither side has expressed an interest in a settlement.

FEAR TO NEGOTIATE

Many prominent academics, including Robert Powell and Branislav Slantchev, have viewed negotiations during conflict as a process that can produce a spectrum of outcomes. On one end, the relevant parties successfully reach a mutually acceptable agreement, ending the dispute. In the middle, parties may identify more limited areas of compromise, and the dispute continues with a narrower range of differences. On the other end, parties fail to find any common ground, and the dispute continues as if nothing changed. Across all these possibilities, negotiation is seen as a costless activity that either improves the situation or, at worst, does not change the status quo.

But negotiations can have costs. One of these is that leaders often worry that betraying a willingness to negotiate will be interpreted as a sign of weakness, waning resolve, or interest in suing for peace. Such an interpretation could deflate morale at home or motivate the enemy to fight more fiercely because it believes that victory or, at least, further gains are within reach. This fear was expressed in 1965 by former U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then Ambassador to South Vietnam Maxwell Taylor. He warned Washington against diplomatic overtures to North Vietnam, because “haste to get to the conference table may spark upsurge in [Viet Cong] efforts designed to achieve the maximum negotiating advantage, since Hanoi and Peking may interpret our eagerness as a sign of weakness.” North Vietnamese officials expressed similar concerns, telling the Norwegian ambassador to Peking in 1967 that whenever Hanoi showed any interest in talks the United States unleashed fresh attacks. Consequently, peace talks did not begin until 1968, after both sides felt that they had demonstrated their strength through respective operations. Officials in both Washington and Hanoi knew that indiscriminately initiating negotiations can lead to more intense fighting and a further deterioration in relations between combatants. In the words of former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Fred Iklé and Georgetown Professor Paul Pillar, negotiations can have “side-effects,” regardless of whether they produce agreement.

The historical record reveals that such diplomatic interventions often have hugely negative consequences.

To be sure, the reality of the battlefield can open space for negotiation. Waging war reveals each side’s strength, as well as its willingness to absorb costs to resolve a dispute on terms favorable to it. New information from fighting helps all parties to revise their expectations and can lead to a shared understanding of the war’s trajectory. Sustained battlefield trends that undeniably and continuously favor one side provide the clearest path to negotiations, as was shown by the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5. Before Japan initiated hostilities, few would have expected it to decisively or repeatedly defeat Russia on the battlefield. Yet this is exactly what happened. The relentless string of Japanese battlefield victories led U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate, at the belligerents’ request, and negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth, which granted Japan most of its demands.

That said, lopsided battlefield trends do not guarantee openness to diplomacy if belligerents cannot trust the opponent to honor a diplomatic settlement, or if they cannot trust a third party to reliably enforce its terms. During the darkest moments of World War II from 1940 to 1941, when Germany’s blitzkrieg strategy conquered Europe, the United Kingdom and other countries refused to negotiate with German Führer Adolf Hitler because they saw no scenario in which he could credibly commit to a peaceful deal or be meaningfully deterred from reneging. After all, the failed prewar policy of appeasement had shown that Hitler could not be trusted to follow through on his promises. The only way to address the problem was to eliminate Hitler or to die trying.

International institutions and third parties can also pressure combatants in ways that allow them to pursue peace. Belligerents can cast their willingness to negotiate as an act of cooperation with the international community rather than as evidence of waning resolve. This allows them to appear as the moderate voice and to frame the opponent as the recalcitrant party. An example of this was seen during the Cenepa Valley War between Ecuador and Peru in 1995, when Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán Ballén proposed to his National Security Council that they request diplomatic assistance from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States in order to look like good-faith actors. Diplomatic pressure can not only make negotiating less risky but it can also make avoiding negotiations costly. In many conflicts, including those in Ukraine and Gaza, third parties backed by institutions, including the United Nations, have managed to get belligerents to negotiate while fighting. It is no coincidence that the proportion of time spent talking while fighting wars was almost twice as high from 1947 to 2003 as it was between 1823 and the establishment of the post–World War II order, in 1945.

A SLY GAME

Another mistaken assumption about negotiations is that they always take place in good faith. Even if disputants do not reach a settlement, it is presumed that they have made a sincere attempt to find a mutually acceptable agreement. If true, there may be no harm to talking. However, reality is more complicated. Belligerents can and often do negotiate in bad faith, by seeming interested in a settlement while actually aiming for talks to fail. Insincere belligerents can use the time gained from talking to rearm and regroup, to deflect political blame for the war, or to propagandize. Negotiations, then, become a way to fight wars—not just to end them.

This dynamic was seen from 1951 to 1953, during talks in Kaesong and Panmunjom to end the Korean War. William Vatcher, the chief psychologist working for the United Nations Command (UNC) delegation, noted that because North Korea and China had been “unsuccessful in attaining their objectives on the Korean field of battle, they turned to the conference table as a means of achieving their ends … to gain precious time while they rebuilt and strengthened their forces, to obtain every possible benefit from the UNC, and to serve as a sounding board for their propaganda.” The U.S. contingent leading the UNC’s delegation also dragged its feet during these talks while seeking to show its allies that it was willing to give diplomacy a chance, thereby creating more political space for continued fighting.

Bargaining is more sincere when a side is left with no other options—that is, when the battlefield has plainly revealed the war’s likely outcome. When that has happened, a belligerent will independently seek to negotiate, despite the risks of looking weak. Without these factors—and still hopeful of victory—belligerents feel greater liberty to negotiate insincerely. Forcing belligerents to talk when the battlefield has not revealed the conflict’s trajectory can backfire, yielding outcomes that are counterproductive to settlement.

That is the risk with Gaza. Israel and Hamas are not currently prepared to reach a mutually acceptable agreement. Deals can succeed only when all parties are willing to accept the same terms and when all parties believe that the terms will be followed. Neither condition currently holds. Rather, each side’s fundamental goal has not wavered since October 7: Hamas wants to survive as a political and military entity, and Israel wants to eliminate it. Regardless of any potential changes in the belligerents’ positions regarding the presence of Israeli forces in Gaza, the rights of return for Palestinians, or the viability of a two-state solution—which are themselves intractable issues—fundamentally incompatible positions on Hamas’s future afford no space for agreement.

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

Belligerents are more likely to believe that a peace deal will hold either when at least one side is too weak to fight or when both believe that any attempt to renege on an agreement would lead to terrible consequences. Neither condition is currently satisfied in Gaza. The Rafah operation that began in early May, which was staged to eradicate Hamas, has not accomplished its objective. Hamas still seems willing to fight on, and its uncompromising demand for a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, even in July, attests to this fact. Indeed, Israel’s attacks against Palestinian civilians have increased political support for Hamas, which could actually grow stronger, thereby decreasing the likelihood of the organization’s members abiding by a deal.

Both Israel and Hamas face intense and constant pressures to negotiate, which makes them—if not forces them to— feign interest in diplomacy. Hamas responded to Biden’s May 31 proposal by saying it wanted to work “positively and constructively” toward a cease-fire. In a written statement published a week later, the organization reaffirmed “its positive stance towards Biden’s statements.” This encouraging language does not demonstrate Hamas’s genuine desire for agreement. Instead, it reflects the organization’s awareness that Biden’s announcement was designed to place the blame for the war’s continuation on Hamas. Moreover, the fact that slight variants of the same three-phase plan have been proposed, accepted, and then rejected over multiple months, even as political and battlefield realities have changed, indicates that diplomatic efforts are primarily driven by third parties’ desires to stop the fighting and are not closely tied to belligerents’ real or perceived conditions.

If pushed to engage in diplomacy without fundamental points of disagreement being resolved, belligerents may exploit talks for their own political and military benefit. For example, warring parties may insincerely offer or agree to terms that, although they may sound reasonable to outside observers, are unlikely to be accepted by the other party. This process allows one side to curry political favor internationally by shifting blame for continued conflict onto its opponent, and subsequently justifying continued and escalated hostilities. Moreover, any pauses in fighting due to negotiations provide further opportunities to remobilize and prepare for resumed hostilities, as was seen during the first Arab-Israeli war. In October 1948, five months after the conflict began, the Israeli delegation at the United Nations helped draft Security Council Resolution 62, which called upon all belligerents to return the land conquered and retreat to their positions from two weeks prior, while urging further negotiations. Rewinding the battlefield by two weeks made little sense to Israel, as it had gained significant ground in that time. However, Israeli officials supported the resolution because they correctly predicted that the Arab states would spurn it, thereby diverting international criticism to the Arab states, and Israel could continue with its planned military operations.

STACKING THE DECK

Such factors do not bode well for the Biden administration’s recent diplomatic offensive. Over the course of negotiations, which are still ongoing in fits and starts, Israeli and Hamas representatives have repeatedly and publicly blamed each other for being the obstinate party, in an attempt to make themselves seem like the reasonable one. If Hamas abandons the current mediation effort entirely, Israel can argue that it tried—although, of course, it had little interest in seeing negotiations succeed—and that violence is the only way forward. On the other hand, if

Hamas accepts the proposal to begin the deal’s first phase, both sides gain six weeks of a temporary cease-fire to rearm should negotiations leading into the deal’s second phase fall apart. Given both sides’ fundamental disagreement, the odds of failure are high. Almost as soon as Biden completed his remarks, Netanyahu stated that the plan does not affect his overarching goal of destroying Hamas, and Hamas would certainly reject or renege upon any negotiated agreement that calls for its own destruction.

The situation may become a repeat of June 1948 when, during the first Arab-Israeli war, the United Nations arranged a four-week temporary cease-fire to provide space for UN mediator Folke Bernadotte to negotiate a permanent peace. As Bernadotte presented various proposals, both Israel and its Arab rivals recruited new troops, recuperated, and stockpiled international shipments of arms. Unbeknownst to the UN mediator, neither side ever had any genuine desire to compromise and both even considered launching attacks before the cease-fire’s formal end, to surprise their adversary. When the cease-fire lapsed, the hostilities that followed ultimately favored Israel, which benefitted from the breathing space allowed by negotiations. The side effects of diplomacy enabled more war.

The strong relationship between the United States and Israel further complicates the prospects for peace in the current Gaza war. Political scientists including Katja Favretto, Andrew Kydd, and Burcu Savun have found that powerful biased mediators—and the United States is certainly one for Israel—have greater success in convincing belligerents to settle than weak or unbiased mediators. This is because mediators that favor one side are capable of persuading that side to negotiate and abide by a deal. But the United States may be too biased. Washington has consistently shown its willingness to use UN Security Council vetoes to protect Israel, to criticize International Criminal Court charges against Israel, and to generally tolerate Israel’s wartime conduct. Overwhelming U.S. support for Israel has raised doubts that the United States would be able to deter Israel from reneging on a settlement.

GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

Third-party efforts to push for diplomacy, regardless of the belligerents’ beliefs, conditions, or goals, can undermine peace. Indeed, negotiated settlements borne of third-party pressure are much more liable to collapse than those sought by the belligerents themselves. Real peace relies on a far more judicious and challenging exercise of international diplomacy.

To be sure, cease-fires associated with negotiations, even if short-lived, are often essential in providing valuable humanitarian aid to innocent civilians caught in war’s crossfire. Such efforts, in this case for Palestinians, should not be abandoned. Rather, the benefits of humanitarian relief borne of temporary cease-fires must be considered in tandem with the potential longer-term downsides of insincere diplomacy. Ignoring this dilemma can result in greater suffering.

Although numerous countries and international institutions could influence the present war, the United States holds the greatest sway. And Washington has several alternatives to its current strategy of pushing for talks that could more meaningfully affect the course of the conflict. First, Biden should change course by calling out and expressing willingness to punish human rights atrocities and violations of laws of war. As Oona A. Hathaway has previously argued in Foreign Affairs, Washington would benefit from dialing back its offensive against the International Criminal Court and strongly pushing Israel to investigate and punish its soldiers’ wrongdoings. Biden should do so, and he should increase threats to pause or withhold arms transfers if Israel’s conduct does not change. This would not only save civilian lives but would also slowly build confidence that the United States might be an impartial arbiter of a future cease-fire agreement. To undermine Hamas’s recruitment and mobilization efforts, the United States should encourage Israel to directly target Hamas’s agents and avoid hurting Palestinian civilians. Sanctions on groups and individuals fomenting violence will also have a part to play.

The United States—as well as Egypt, Qatar, and other prospective mediators—should also stand ready to offer its services whenever the belligerents request them. But constant efforts to instigate talks or insist on terms that do not align with belligerents’ actual positions should end. If negotiations take place, the likelihood of their success will depend in large measure upon recent battlefield activity having revealed one side’s superiority and both belligerents accepting that a settlement will be truly enforceable. The value of third parties is not that they can create peace where peace does not exist. It is, rather, that they can assist in arranging peace—and in reducing the risk of belligerents looking weak or being exploited while negotiating—when both sides are ready to consider it. Pressuring Israel to minimize civilian casualties and to punish its troops’ unacceptable behavior, or convincing all belligerents to put down their weapons, would require greater political will, patience, and restraint than a public push demanding acceptance of an improbable agreement. But these actions hold the promise, however slim, of positive change.

• ERIC MIN is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Foreign Affairs · by Eric Min · July 24, 2024

15. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 23, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, July 23, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-july-23-2024

Key Takeaways:

• The Russian State Duma proposed an amendment that would allow commanders to punish subordinates for using personal communications and navigation devices at the frontline, prompting significant milblogger backlash and highlighting how Russian forces continue to struggle with command and control (C2) issues and overreliance on insecure technologies to conduct combat operations in Ukraine.

• Ukrainian forces reportedly conducted drone strikes against a ferry crossing in Kavkaz, Krasnodar Krai on the night of July 22 to 23.

• Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed a new Deputy Head of the Russian Ministry of Emergency Services on July 22, and there were several personnel changes within the Russian State Duma on July 23.

• Russian forces recently marginally advanced near Siversk, Avdiivka, and Donetsk City.

• Russian regional officials are continuing to increase financial incentives to entice more men to fight in Ukraine.

• Russian occupation officials continue to rely on Russian security organs for law enforcement and filtration functions in occupied Ukraine aimed at degrading pro-Ukrainian sentiment.

16. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 23, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, July 23, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-july-23-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Gaza Strip: The United States, Israel, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are separately advancing an alternative post-war governance vision for the Gaza Strip that conflicts with a separate Chinese-mediated proposal for a unity government between Hamas and Fatah. The US-Israeli-UAE plan could move towards accomplishing Israeli war aims by protecting nascent, non-Hamas alternatives in the Gaza Strip. The Beijing proposal would amount to an Israeli defeat, if implemented.

• Iraq: Four unspecified Iraqi sources cited by Reuters on July 22 claimed that an Iraqi delegation in Washington, DC, has requested the United States begin withdrawing its forces from Iraq starting in September 2024. CTP-ISW continues to assess that the United States and its partners in Iraq and Syria have successfully contained but not defeated ISIS and that a US withdrawal from Syria would very likely cause a rapid ISIS resurgence there within 12 to 24 months that would then spill into Iraq.

• Iran: Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei gave a speech to Parliament in which he implicitly called on Parliament not to obstruct potential efforts by President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian to resume nuclear negotiations with the West. Khamenei simultaneously encouraged Parliament to work to mitigate the effects of Western sanctions. The pursuit of nuclear negotiations to lift sanctions caused by the nuclear program and an effort to mitigate the effects of sanctions in general are not mutually exclusive.

• Houthi Attacks on Israel: Unspecified military sources in Sanaa told Lebanese newspaper Al Akhbar on July 23 that the Houthis will target new civilian sites in Israel, which is consistent with the Houthi leader’s statements on July 21.

• Houthi Threats Against Saudi Arabia: The Houthis appear to have successfully coerced Saudi Arabia into stopping a Yemeni government effort to cut Houthi access to the international finance system. Saudi Arabia likely pressured the Yemeni government to cancel its decisions to prevent Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia.

• Lebanon: Lebanese Hezbollah may be expanding the locations it targets in northern Israel. This expansion follows threats by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to expand the group’s targets on July 17.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com