Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"So long as we remain amateurs in the critical field of political warfare, the billions of dollars we annually spend on defense and foreign aid will provide us with a diminishing measure of protection."

-- Sen Thomas J Dodd, 1961

“I much prefer the sharpest criticism of a single, intelligent man to the thoughtless approval of the masses.”

– Johannes Kepler.

“They came with a Bible and their religion, stole our land, crushed our spirit, and now they tell us we should be thankful to the lord for being saved.”

– Pontiac (1718-1769)

1. Special Operations Forces for the Decisive Decade By Christopher P. Maier & Bryan P. Fenton

2. Gaza war a recruiting boon for terrorists, U.S. intelligence shows

3. Inside the Dangerous Work of Defending Ukraine’s Skies

4. Grand Strategy for World War III: Weaponizing Oil and Gas

5. Genesis and Exodus: Lessons From the US Army’s Recruiting Failure

6. The original prophet of Taiwanese independence

7. Deepfake video targeting Zelensky’s wife linked to Russian disinformation campaign, CNN analysis shows

8. NATO Has to Change. Here’s How.

9. How Taiwan Conquered U.S. Politics — and Showed Europe How It’s Done

10. The AUKUS goal: balancing power in the region

1. Special Operations Forces for the Decisive Decade By Christopher P. Maier & Bryan P. Fenton

Special Operations Forces for the Decisive Decade

By Christopher P. Maier & Bryan P. Fenton

July 06, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/06/special_operations_forces_for_the_decisive_decade_1042633.html?utm

In his recent remarks hailing the congressional bipartisan agreement on the national security supplemental appropriations, President Biden noted, "our nation stands at an inflection point — an inflection point in history — where the decisions we make now are going to determine the course of our future for decades to come. This is one of those moments.” Our principal adversaries and competitors, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, continue to contest the rules-based international order through direct and indirect confrontation, disruption, and malign influence. The employment of emergent and disruptive technologies, such as artificial intelligence and uncrewed systems, has fundamentally altered the modern battlefield and provides highly cost-effective means of challenging traditional military power. At the same time, terrorist groups continue to threaten U.S. citizens at home and abroad.

Within this new and rapidly evolving security environment, our Nation’s special operations forces (SOF) provide extraordinary value in strengthening international partnerships, responding to crises, deterring conflict, and setting conditions for the United States to prevail in a potential conflict. Last month, U.S. Special Operations Command and the Global SOF Foundation hosted our annual SOF Week for 2024 that brought together military, interagency, industry and international partners and highlighted the critical role of U.S. and international SOF in addressing these complex security challenges. The event brought together over 21,000 participants from across 80 countries to discuss key operational and technological challenges for SOF in this changing strategic environment, as we are increasingly called upon to operate in remote, austere, and contested environments.

One of U.S. SOF’s core strengths is our ability to build and cultivate a global network of generational relationships through low-cost, small-footprint deployments. Since the Second World War, our specially selected and trained forces have worked shoulder-to-shoulder alongside allies and partners to understand strategic challenges, develop stronger partnerships, maintain stability, counter disinformation and other malign influence, and deter aggression. On a given day, U.S. SOF are deployed to more than 85 countries, conducting operations, training, and joint exercises, and when combined with our partners, U.S. SOF’s reach extends to nearly every corner of the globe.

U.S. SOF’s ability to operate globally and in small teams provides a cost-effective means to build partner capacity, enhance interoperability, and gain valuable insights in advance of crisis or conflict. For example, since 1994, U.S. SOF have supported multinational training efforts with Ukraine that have proved critical to Ukraine’s remarkable resilience in resisting Russia’s illegal and unprovoked invasion. SOF training of Ukrainian Forces in air defense, robotics, unmanned systems integration, information operations, and the integration of artificial intelligence into operations, have been critical in Ukraine’s current operations. U.S. SOF continue to engage with regional European SOF partners in support of integrated deterrence. We continue to learn and adapt from Ukraine’s experience on the battlefield, while deepening relationships with partners who face threats from hostile powers.

U.S. SOF have long been the DoD pathfinder in developing and fielding technological advancements with immediate operational impacts through rapid prototyping, testing, and experimentation in real-world environments. Many of these advancements have been adopted by the Joint Force. In recent years, we have reviewed modernization priorities to operate in increasingly contested and denied environments in support of the U.S. Joint Force. Focused on providing U.S. SOF’s unique perspectives and capabilities in all domains, we are modernizing our surface and subsurface maritime capabilities; counter-unmanned systems; next-generation intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; command and control; and collaborative and autonomous systems.

U.S. SOF also continue to lead through care for our most valuable resource — our people. Humans truly are more important than hardware and will continue to be even in an age where artificial intelligence, as well as all technology is rapidly advancing. Anchoring in this First SOF Truth, we continue to invest in the assessment, selection, and training that generates the most advanced fighting force in the world. U.S. SOF’s unique Preservation of the Force and Family program has set the standard in providing a holistic approach to optimizing readiness and resiliency across the force and families. In partnership with industry and academia, we continue to develop innovative approaches across the range of physical, behavioral, cognitive, familial/social, and spiritual domains necessary to ensure our forces and their families are optimally prepared to take on the challenges of an increasingly complex global environment. We are particularly focused on our pathfinding efforts to strengthening brain health, including preventing and treating traumatic brain injury as well as the effects of blast over pressure and exposure.

Representing only slightly more than 1.5 percent of the DoD budget, U.S. SOF provide the Nation an extraordinary value in addressing complex, global challenges. SOF’s unique capabilities create dilemmas for our competitors, empower our allies and partners to resist coercion, disrupt terrorist networks, respond at the first sign of global crises, and enable the Joint Force to prevail in conflict. As on display throughout SOF Week 2024, the teamwork among our military, interagency, international, academic, and industry partners — all working together — remains essential to securing shared interests and collective objectives in an increasingly complex world.

Christopher P. Maier is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. Among his responsibilities are all special operations, irregular warfare, counterterrorism, and information operations policy issues and the oversight of special operations peculiar administrative matters, on behalf of the Secretary.

General Bryan P. Fenton is a career Special Forces (Green Beret) Officer. He currently serves as the 13th Comma The views expressed in this article are the authors' own and not the Department of Defense.

2. Gaza war a recruiting boon for terrorists, U.S. intelligence shows

When INR talks people should listen.

Please tell me the rest of the IC is not neglecting this type of analysis.

(Question: who is taking over INR from Mr Holmgren?)

Excerpt:

During Holmgren’s tenure, the agency proved clairvoyant yet again after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Dissenting from the majority of gloomy U.S. intelligence predictions that Ukraine would quickly fall because of inferior firepower and force strength, INR was more optimistic about Kyiv’s prospects as it weighed less-tangible factors like the country’s will to fight.

“If you were looking purely at the intelligence and order-of-battle assessments, it was clear the Russians had a military advantage,” said Holmgren. “But assessing will to fight and the likelihood of success on the battlefield also requires taking into account a nation’s history, culture, local attitudes and public opinion — things you can’t glean from intelligence alone. This is where INR’s unique expertise on Ukraine’s history, culture and its people led our folks to stake out a more bullish position on Ukraine’s prospects.”

Gaza war a recruiting boon for terrorists, U.S. intelligence shows

Widespread anger at the United States for its role in Israel’s campaign against Hamas has galvanized organizations globally, a top State Department official warns.

By John Hudson

July 5, 2024 at 2:41 p.m. EDT

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · July 5, 2024

The State Department’s top intelligence official is warning that the war in Gaza is bolstering recruitment among terrorist organizations and providing “inspiration for lone actors” furious over the United States’ staunch support for Israel.

The Hamas-led assault into Israel on Oct. 7 “was, is and will be a generational event that terrorist organizations in the Middle East and around the world use as a recruiting opportunity,” Brett Holmgren, the assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, told The Washington Post in an interview.

“We’ve already seen that play out to some degree in Europe,” Holmgren said, referring to the arrests of individuals in Germany and the Netherlands accused of plotting attacks on Jewish sites.

Holmgren offered his warning as he prepares to become acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) following the departure of Christine Abizaid, the agency’s chief since 2021, later this month.

Holmgren oversaw the State Department’s intelligence bureau as it was consumed by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as a multiplying array of threats from big powers such as China and Russia, and from terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and affiliates of the Islamic State.

The bureau — one of the 18 organizations that make up the U.S. intelligence community — is one of the least-known yet most deeply respected agencies in the U.S. government, given its long track record of prescience related to the wars in Vietnam and Iraq and other geopolitical crises.

Known as INR, the bureau deftly warned in 1961 that South Vietnam’s war against the Viet Cong was faltering and would ultimately fail because of the communist movement’s popularity in villages in the south.

In 2002, it disagreed with the CIA, which had concluded that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was attempting to secretly construct a nuclear weapons program — the George W. Bush administration’s stated cause for war, and now widely considered one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history.

During Holmgren’s tenure, the agency proved clairvoyant yet again after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022. Dissenting from the majority of gloomy U.S. intelligence predictions that Ukraine would quickly fall because of inferior firepower and force strength, INR was more optimistic about Kyiv’s prospects as it weighed less-tangible factors like the country’s will to fight.

“If you were looking purely at the intelligence and order-of-battle assessments, it was clear the Russians had a military advantage,” said Holmgren. “But assessing will to fight and the likelihood of success on the battlefield also requires taking into account a nation’s history, culture, local attitudes and public opinion — things you can’t glean from intelligence alone. This is where INR’s unique expertise on Ukraine’s history, culture and its people led our folks to stake out a more bullish position on Ukraine’s prospects.”

INR relies on experts from academia with years and sometimes decades of experience on specific geographic regions and issue areas. The agency also embeds personnel in U.S. Embassies around the world, giving its analysts unique insights that can be missed by other intelligence officials who sit in cubicles in Virginia or Maryland. INR has a relatively flat organizational structure, too, making it easier to reach internal consensus on contentious subjects even when the agency is at odds with the rest of the intelligence community, said Holmgren.

As the Kremlin prepared to invade its neighbor, Holmgren huddled with Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, on the State Department’s seventh floor, an experience he called the most “memorable” of his tenure there.

“I briefed him on late-breaking, tactical intelligence indicating Russia was on the verge of launching strikes throughout Ukraine,” Holmgren said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to entrust that responsibility to Holmgren reflected the confidence he had in him during such a perilous moment, said Victoria Nuland, former undersecretary of state for political affairs.

“Remember that Ukrainians were very divided about whether this was just an intimidation tactic by the Russians or whether they would actually go in,” she said in an interview. “We were very intent on trying to ensure that they were maximally prepared for the worst.”

When Holmgren shifts to the counterterrorism role, he will oversee a staff of more than 1,000 people charged with maintaining an authoritative database of known and suspected terrorists, and sharing actionable intelligence that draws from foreign and domestic sources.

When asked about the mounting anger toward the United States over its military support for Israel amid Gaza’s mushrooming civilian toll, Holmgren said that “the sentiments that you’re hearing on the ground are real.”

“They are reflected in the analysis that we’ve conducted,” he said, acknowledging “the global ramifications that 7 October has had, and is likely to have, on the perception of the United States in the region and among most Muslim countries.”

Israel’s fierce retaliation for the Hamas-led attack, which killed 1,200 people and took more than 240 hostage, has resulted in the death of more than 37,000 Palestinians, according to local health authorities.

Holmgren declined to offer a view on the justification of U.S. weapons transfers to Israel in the conflict, a key source of anger in the Muslim world. But he underscored that foreign governments continue to want to engage with the United States on intelligence cooperation and solutions to the conflict “whether in the Middle East, Latin America, Europe or Asia.”

“A lot of these governments still very much want U.S. engagement and believe that it’s important to the future of the region and also the future of the international order,” he said.

Nuland said Holmgren could be expected to offer President Biden and his top aides unvarnished views on the conflict’s ramifications.

“He’s not afraid to call it like he sees it,” she said, “and he’s not afraid to tell policymakers that they’ve got to address these things and to play a role in the policy conversation about how they can be addressed.”

Holmgren’s last day at the State Department is Friday, when career Foreign Service officer Lisa Kenna will assume leadership of the bureau. A near-term priority will be the security of November’s presidential election, said a senior State Department official.

Holmgren assumes his powers as acting director of the NCTC on July 18.

The Washington Post · by John Hudson · July 5, 2024

3.Inside the Dangerous Work of Defending Ukraine’s Skies

Respect for air defenders.

Inside the Dangerous Work of Defending Ukraine’s Skies

Operators of missile-defense systems make split-second decisions that can save lives and are increasingly at risk themselves

https://www.wsj.com/world/inside-the-dangerous-work-of-defending-ukraines-skies-6f1dc545?mod=hp_lead_pos10&utm

By Alistair MacDonaldFollow and Ievgeniia Sivorka

Updated July 6, 2024 12:01 am ET

ODESA, Ukraine—Like a World War II fighter ace, commander Viktor Petryshyn has stenciled onto the side of his air-defense system the 58 drones, missiles and planes he has shot down.

The war in Ukraine has shown how a comprehensive air defense can keep even a formidable air force like Russia’s at bay. It has also revealed limitations as Ukraine defends against waves of drone attacks and harder-to-hit modern missiles, with a limited supply of ammunition.

Behind these sophisticated air-defense systems, which fire missiles to intercept aerial threats, are men and women who often make split-second decisions that can save scores of lives.

Their own lives are also increasingly at risk as Russia targets Ukrainian defensive positions. Winning the upper hand in the air has significant ramifications for a war that has become a grinding stalemate on the ground.

Commander Viktor Petryshyn has stenciled onto the side of his S-300 air-defense system the drones, missiles and planes he has shot down.

JOSEPH SYWENKYJ FOR WSJ; VIKTOR PETRYSHYN

“This war in the skies is one of the most important things now,” said Petryshyn, who is a commander of an S-300 system in the 160th Antiaircraft Missile Odesa Brigade. “If we are unable to protect our airspace, their aviation will flood into Ukraine.”

Ukraine says it needs to bolster its air defenses to counter the threat of the Russian air force and strikes on its power grid. To help, Western governments are working to find new systems and manufacture more missiles. The U.S. recently agreed to send another Patriot system to Ukraine and is in talks with the Israeli government to redeploy as many as eight more to support Kyiv.

Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East have propelled air defense to the forefront of modern warfare. Air-defense systems have grown in prominence as drones widen the airborne threat, and more countries—and militant groups—build up their arsenals of missiles and rockets.

With a varied arsenal of Soviet-era and Western-donated systems, Ukraine has become a testing ground, creating a hierarchy of what works best.

The U.S.-made Patriot system is widely regarded as the most effective. It has a range of more than 60 miles and can destroy harder-to-hit hypersonic and ballistic missiles that are often too fast or big for other systems to defend against.

German and Ukrainian soldiers stand in front of Patriot systems at a military training area in Mecklenburg, Germany. PHOTO: POOL/GETTY IMAGES

Toward the bottom of the hierarchy is the decades-old Soviet S-300 system that Petryshyn oversees.

While sophisticated software and mechanics take much of the skill out of modern systems, the human hand plays an important role when operating an S-300.

In service since the late 1970s, the S-300 has a crew of six that sit side by side in a command vehicle that travels with a separate missile silo and radar system.

One crew member spots the target on a radar, another physically lines it up helped by calculations from two others. The commander gives the OK to fire, and the final crew member presses the button.

Crew members work in close confines for grueling shifts that last up to 18 hours. Teams have to get along. Including drivers, security and cooks, a traveling battery can include up to 45 people.

S-300/SA-10

Prewar starting inventory: 250

Weight: 50 tons

In service: 1978

Firing range: 15.5 to 93.2 miles (depending on missile)

Origin: Soviet Union

Four surface-to-air-missiles

16.4 ft.

13.1 ft.

39.4 ft.

Note: Dimensions shown for S300V

Sources: Center for Strategic & International Studies; Military Today (dimensions)

Petryshyn, a 43-year-old father of one, has been in this role since 2014 and still feels the adrenaline when his crew hits a target. “You still get emotional, you still shout,” he said.

Dmytro Plys, a senior lieutenant, is deployed with another S-300 system in eastern Ukraine, where his role is to fix, or capture, targets.

Around six months ago, the radar operator of Plys’s unit spotted something on the radar the crew couldn’t work out as it moved at different speeds and heights, sometimes disappearing off the screen. It must be an assault helicopter, they concluded.

The commander decided to hit it, remembered Plys, who then targeted the green dot on his screen. The missile left its silo, 20 seconds passed and then the green dot disappeared from their screens, causing cheers from the crew.

Some Ukrainian cities have gone dark due to Russia’s attacks on the country’s infrastructure. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR WSJ

A worker checks the damage to a power plant after a Russian missile strike. PHOTO: SERHII KOROVAYNY FOR WSJ

They would later find out that they had downed a Ka-52, one of Russia’s most maneuverable and prized helicopters. Since the start of the war, Plys’s battery has shot down eight fighter aircraft and two helicopters.

Plys, 28, has been fighting since 2017 and said he can no longer imagine living as a civilian.

When the war first began, Plys and his S-300 crew would often talk about the people at the end of their missiles. After almost two and half years he no longer does.

Air-defense crews are also at risk. Several Ukrainian systems, including at least one Patriot battery, have been damaged or destroyed by Russian attacks, Western officials have said.

Plys’s S-300 is currently being fixed after it was damaged in a near hit. “There is no person who is not afraid,” he said.

Petryshyn has had a couple of close calls. In January his battery was spotted by a Russian reconnaissance drone.

Dmytro Plys’s role is to fix, or capture, targets. PHOTO: JOSEPH SYWENKYJ FOR WSJ

In the Black Sea area where he operates, Russia can fire from nearby Crimea or a naval vessel, giving crews as little as 3½ minutes to escape.

Petryshyn had been outside the vehicle and ran for cover. The S-300 had moved about half a mile when the missile hit the exact spot it had previously been.

“We have Guardian angels,” he said.

His unit can change their position three times in one day to avoid detection.

The mobile nature of many air-defense systems and the willingness of Ukraine to move its assets close to the front line has led to what some have dubbed the SAMbush, or surface-to-air missile ambush.

Such operations have taken some noticeable scalps, including Russia’s A-50 radar detection aircraft, which plays an important role in commanding air and missile strikes.

Russia has also changed its tactics.

Petryshyn said that Russian missiles would typically fly along the same routes, often low and over rivers to evade radar. Now these missiles maneuver more to avoid air defenses.

The insignia on the uniform of Viktor Petryshyn reads ‘Protectors of the Heavens.’ PHOTO: JOSEPH SYWENKYJ FOR WSJ

Russia uses low-cost drones to test where Ukraine has positioned its air-defense systems and then plots its missiles around them, military analysts say.

Ukraine’s array of systems makes it difficult to coherently marshal defenses as a whole, according to Col. Ro Clemente, a U.S. Army officer specializing in missile defense.

Patriot units have acted autonomously rather than as part of a unified defensive shield, Clemente said at a recent conference, adding that Ukraine tends to “over engage.”

Overall Ukraine’s armed forces say they have shot down thousands of drones and missiles, along with some 359 aircraft and 326 helicopters, inflicting significant damage on Russia’s air force.

But Petryshyn and Plys say that Ukraine is running out of S-300 missiles, which were made by Russia.

Sometimes when they shoot, they miss their target. “You feel bad,” said Plys. “We barely have any missiles and then you waste one.”

Write to Alistair MacDonald at Alistair.Macdonald@wsj.com

4. Grand Strategy for World War III: Weaponizing Oil and Gas

Excerpts;

In short, this strategy is: US production up, Russian and Iranian exports out, and the Chinese economy down.

During the Cold War, the Reagan Administration worked tirelessly to hobble Russian efforts to export oil. At that time, a combination of investment in offshore drilling with a Saudi alliance was needed in order to stabilize oil prices for the West. The Saudi regime might be willing once again to lower oil prices in exchange for a security guarantee from the United States for protection from Iran, but this would not serve the United States’ broader interests. Today, with forty years of technological improvements since the Reagan Administration, the United States should not only support its proxies and allies but also invest in innovative new sources of energy, including in particular small modular nuclear reactors, space-based solar and fusion power.

Grand Strategy for World War III: Weaponizing Oil and Gas

By Michael Hochberg & Leonard Hochberg

July 06, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/07/06/grand_strategy_for_world_war_iii_weaponizing_oil_and_gas_1042635.html?utm

How should the United States confront China, Russia, and Iran as the world looks as if it might descend into World War III? What economic tools can be deployed to gain strategic effect and generate advantages, asymmetric or otherwise, for the United States and the West? Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken is now advocating for Ukrainian use of U.S. supplied weapons to attack military targets in Russia. Meanwhile, Ukraine has begun destroying Russian refineries to good effect with domestically produced drones, but this effort is far short of a comprehensive hydrocarbon strategy for the West.

One of the keys to victory in the Cold War was cheap oil, as Peter Schweitzer pointed out in his book, Victory. The United States must again use hydrocarbons as its economic “nuclear” weapon. Most critically, formulating and implementing a grand strategy for the United States that encompasses ways, means and ends with regard to the price of oil and gas is both necessary and urgent.

The Cold War alliance between the House of Saud and the United States was founded on an exchange of security in the form of U.S. military assistance in return for suppressing oil prices and stabilizing the market. The Saudis used their spare production capacity to suppress and stabilize oil prices.

The price manipulation had a double benefit: First, low oil prices for the West enhanced economic growth and kept inflation down. Second, these reduced prices devastated the Soviet Union's main export industry, thereby dramatically reducing its access to foreign currency exchange. Without that foreign currency, the Soviet Union’s ability to back the currencies and debt of the Warsaw Pact countries was dramatically curtailed, and its capacity for purchasing and stealing critical technologies from the West (often through “neutral” countries) was significantly reduced.

But reducing prices was not enough: The Reagan administration went further, working tirelessly to curtail Soviet access to Western capital, technology, and especially the ability to sell into Western markets. By preventing the construction of pipelines and export terminals, the U.S. was able to cripple the Soviets’ ability to generate desperately needed hard currency.

In today's world, a hydrocarbon strategy is less obvious: Some of the United States’ allies are energy exporters, while others are importers. The same holds true for U.S. adversaries. Are higher or lower oil and gas prices desirable for the United States? Higher oil prices help Russia and Iran but harm China. Lower prices harm Russia and Iran but help China. What about volatility and supply interruptions? High volatility harms and destabilizes U.S. allies who are net importers of hydrocarbons (such as European nations and Japan). Is stability desirable, or are price fluctuations strategically beneficial? This paper seeks to outline how a hydrocarbon weapon should be deployed in the current geopolitical circumstances.

As an oil and gas producing nation, the U.S. interest is in maintaining relatively high but stable oil and gas prices in the West, with a secure energy supply nationally and for its allies. The opposite is true for China, which wants low and stable oil and gas prices. Western advantage lies in encouraging high prices, price volatility and supply uncertainty for China, while preventing Russia and Iran from successfully selling their hydrocarbons.

Here we propose a new strategy, called kinetic decoupling: Given the ongoing wars in Ukraine, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf, there is a perfect opportunity to disable Russian and Iranian oil-production assets. Export terminals, oil pipelines and tankers in port in Iran and Russia could be targeted by U.S. proxies.

The Israelis and Ukrainians should be encouraged and armed to hit these facilities repeatedly and to comprehensively disable them. The tankers using these facilities can be targeted and sunk. Disrupting the Belt and Road oil pipeline projects through ethnic proxies in Central Asia will make China more dependent on trans-oceanic shipping even as the export terminals and ports come under attack.

With the United States acting as a partner to buffer supply shocks, allies of the United States get high but stable prices and a supply assurance, along with a closer relationship with the U.S. China gets high and uncertain prices, with supply shocks. Russia and Iran lose the physical ability to sell oil and gas into the global market and are forced to renege on their agreements with China. The Saudis benefit from increased prices, which allows them to enhance their defense against Iranian aggression.

In short, this strategy is: US production up, Russian and Iranian exports out, and the Chinese economy down.

Michael Hochberg earned his PhD in Applied Physics from Caltech. He is currently a visiting scholar at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge University and the President of Periplous LLC, which provides advisory services on strategy, technology, and organization design. He co-founded four companies, representing an exit value over a billion dollars in aggregate, spent some time as a tenured professor, and started the world’s first silicon photonics foundry service. His publications include a co-authored, widely used textbook on silicon photonics and his articles have appeared in Science, Nature, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Fast Company, Naval War College Review, Gatestone, etc. Michael’s writings can be found at longwalls.substack.com, and his twitter is @TheHochberg.

Leonard Hochberg is a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and serves as the Coordinator of the Mackinder Forum-U.S. (www.mackinderforum.org). He taught at Stanford University (among other institutions), was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and co-founded Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (i.e., STRATFOR). He has published work in Social Science History, Historical Methods, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Orbis, National Review, The Hill, American Spectator, RealClearDefense, Cartographica, Naval War College Review, Gatestone, etc. Len earned his PhD in political theory and European history from Cornell University.

5. Genesis and Exodus: Lessons From the US Army’s Recruiting Failure

A British analysis of recruiting.

Genesis and Exodus: Lessons From the US Army’s Recruiting Failure

by Captain PlumeJuly 5, 2024

https://wavellroo m.com/2024/07/05/genesis-and-exodus-learning-from-the-us-army-recruiting-failure/?utm

Wavell Room Audio Reads

Genesis and Exodus: Lessons From the US Army's Recruiting Failure

1 min

The US Army’s recruiting operation is everything you might wish for: professionalised, incentivised, well resourced, and without the contractorization that the British Army has adopted. It is fully embedded in US high schools and colleges, the centre of gravity1 for ‘first job’ recruitment, where students take the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) so graduate already knowing which roles they qualify for. It offers generous enlistment bursaries and benefits up to $50K(!)2 and enjoys widespread popular awareness, understanding and support, both as an institution and an employer. In many ways it is the recruiting operation the British Army wishes it had.

Despite this, the US Army abruptly failed to meet its recruiting targets in 2022. Not by a small margin either but by a quarter, a shortfall of 15,000 recruits,3 more than the entire British Army annual recruiting demand and its worst performance since the draft.4 Last year was little better, missing higher targets by 10,000. What happened? And why so suddenly in 2022? And with every western military struggling to recruit, what can the British Army learn from it?

It’s the Policy, Stupid.

The US Department of Defense has offered familiar explanations: a strong job market, reduced access to schools during Covid, and reduced inclination to serve among Generations Z and Alpha.5 These reasons will all resonate with British Army recruiters too, but do the numbers add up?

Yes and no. Applications to all US military branches dropped 20% during Covid,6 which might correlate with a 25% drop in enlistments two years later. However, it would be more likely to have impacted in 2021, when the Army was still doing OK. No more recent data are publicly available, but the DoD doesn’t seem to be citing applications as the main problem.

Instead, it complains that eligibility has also dropped by 20% in the last ten years, so a fifth fewer young Americans who wanted to join in 2022 were able to. In fact, it believes only 23% of young people are eligible to join the US military at all.

So far so good, but eligibility is a policy decision. It’s the Army’s own choice who gets to be eligible or not, and they could revise their own rules. Americans didn’t suddenly change overnight, and recruiting was doing alright before 2022.7 In 2019 a recruiting officer even declared that eligibility was no worse it had ever been.8 Clearly societal factors like obesity, falling academic scores, disbarring behaviours, or worse mental health, all have an impact over time, but not suddenly by 20% in a year. So, what new eligibility policies did the US Army introduce in 2022?

Well, arguably they didn’t. What they did do, though, is start fully enforcing the ones they already had, specifically the medical policies, just like we did in 20049 when our inflow also plummeted by about 20%.10 Enter Project GENESIS.11

Medical Policy

The GENESIS health system was introduced in February 2022, giving US recruiting staff unprecedented access to candidates’ medical histories. For the first time, they could not conceal undeclared medical issues and in a country with no national healthcare system like the USA candidates used to be able to hide a lot.

Recruiters also used to ignore anything medical that they thought was minor, and challenging recruiting targets meant they had strong incentive to do so. Now they can’t. ‘Military Times’ quotes one as saying: “now that GENESIS exists, we can no longer hide things”. Another claimed: “When GENESIS hit the scene, it was a night-and-day difference. There are still people who are eager to join, it’s just really, really, hard to actually get them in.”12

The head of Recruiting Command has conceded that GENESIS means delays are now caused by “something that happened 7 years ago, and they have to locate those records”.13 Even if that doesn’t create more medical failures, which is hard to believe, GENESIS certainly causes much more delay and complexity in the recruiting process.14 This creates an exodus of frustrated candidates into the booming civilian job market.15

This will sound depressingly familiar to British Army recruiters, too. Civilian employment options are also at a historic high and medical issues are also the biggest reasons for delay and frustration. According to a 2017 report for the Defence Select Committee, medical issues account for 93% of all British Army candidate rejections.16

Just let that sink in for a moment. 93% of all British Army rejections are for medical reasons. The next biggest factor quoted, tattoos, is less than 4%. Other publicly available data suggest UK medical failures might be closer to 60%,17 or perhaps 80%,18 but that still makes medical the single most important element of the British Army recruiting process by a massive margin.

US Army figures won’t be identical, but in 2010 half of young Americans couldn’t meet medical standards.19 Americans haven’t got any slimmer or healthier since then, so GENESIS will have pushed that proportion up, probably into the same 60% to 90% rejection space as the UK.

Other Policies

Medical policy is hard to change, partly because there could be risk to life if you get it wrong, and partly because only doctors understand it, and no-one else can understand them. Hence, the US Army is trying to relax as many other standards as it can get away with, notably tattoos,20 marijuana use,21 or allowing calculators during the 1 ½ hour ASVAB.22 For about a week they also dropped the need for a high school diploma (equivalent to about 5 GCSEs)23 but that was quickly reversed.24 It looked too much like desperation, with shades of Forrest Gump and Bubba Blue.

Forrest and Bubba weren’t real but the Vietnam War’s ‘Project 100,000, New Standards’ programme they represent was.25 The ‘new’ standards were lower, inevitably, but still above the WW2 and Korean War levels their senior ranks had to meet. Overnight, this policy change increased the eligible recruiting pool by 30%, bringing in 45,000 extra soldiers each year.26 New Standards men had similar training success rates to other recruits and met the same output standards, albeit some needed more time. Over 90% proved to be “fully satisfactory servicemen”.27

Despite this apparent success the US Army remains embarrassed by New Standards, which is still a trope for the worst aspects of the Vietnam War. Despite having much more demanding education and cognition policies than most other armies (yes, really), lowering them in the modern all-volunteer force remains a red line. For now.

Instead, the US Army has thrown its weight and some $214 million28 behind the Future Soldier Preparatory Course (FSPC).29 Introduced mid-2022, this offers an up-to 90-day training programme for candidates below entry standards like body mass or cognition score, but who meet all other requirements. With a capacity of 12,000, more than 10,000 recruits who previously would have been rejected joined basic training via the FSPC in 2023.

Lessons from America

Since the FSPC stood up, the US Army has increased its recruiting inflow by about 10,000,30 the same number who passed the course. Go figure, as our cousins would say. They also seem to have achieved this without improving applications much – public data is sketchy. Still, the relaunch of their much-loved (by senior officers) “Be All You Can Be” 1980s marketing campaign fell flat when its Hollywood star actor got arrested.31

Lesson 1 seems to be that recruiting the available people who actually want to join you works, but you might need to compromise. Either help them to reach your entry standards or reduce those standards and meet them halfway. Both the FSPC and ‘New Standards’ approaches are essentially the same formula: policy is relaxed to let in people who “aren’t good enough”, more training and development is given to them as needed, and the final trained output remains unchanged. The FSPC’s modern spin is that it is “before basic”32 so the US Army can honestly state that its entry standards haven’t changed, unlike the Vietnam War. That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.

Lesson 2 is that medical policy is a real problem for modern professional armies. It’s not just the 60% to 90% rejection rate, which would have Vilfredo Pareto tugging at your sleeve in any case; it’s the huge amount of time, delay, complexity, and cost the process generates for everyone involved, especially candidates, who give up in frustration. Increasingly better healthcare and electronic record-keeping combined with ever-decreasing corporate risk appetites make it harder and harder for responsible Armies to ignore medical issues that would have been invisible in the past.

The same also applies to all other recruitment policies too, if you allow it to: demanding exquisite systems is just as much of a problem in recruiting as in every other area of Defence procurement. For example, when more than 75% of the US population lives in a state with legal marijuana use, having a policy that bans anyone who’s given it a try seems a bit excessive.

Lesson 3 is that there are no easy answers. If you really want to fix recruiting, you have to do something, and that will require resources, effort, and compromise. The US Army still has a long way to go, but after 18 months and $214 million, it has increased its annual inflow by 10,000 recruits, more than the 20% fall in national eligibility, and more than we usually recruit in a year.

That’s impressive and makes you wonder why we couldn’t do the same. FSPC is only one side of the coin and improving applications is also essential, but that takes time and FSPC is plugging the dyke for now. The US Army still needs do better, though, so watch this space for further compromise. The US Navy has just announced that it’s dropping its high school diploma requirement33 and the US Air Force’s marijuana-waiver trial has proven three times more successful than expected.34

So, What Can We Learn from the US Army?

Well, the obvious answer for the British Army is to sack Capita,35 get more AFCOs,36 recruit more women,37 stop trying so hard to be visibly diverse,38 tell Gen Z to buck their ideas up,39 and reintroduce conscription,40 especially for anyone who is unemployed or a criminal.41

That’s the sum of public discourse regarding British Army recruiting, with each proponent touting their single-issue solution as an obvious panacea. In the real world, though, even conscription doesn’t help much if barely anyone can meet your entry policies, however many AFCOs you’ve got. That’s why sensible armies make those policies much more flexible when needed – the famous “Bantam Battalions” of the Great War would not have passed the medical when war was declared.

Modern candidates are more likely to have documented episodes of common but minor mental conditions, be neurodivergent, or just be overweight or physically unfit, compared to any previous generation. That means they can’t join even when they want to, although in some cases time and effort might reverse the problem. That’s where initiatives like the FSPC come in.

The British Army’s Soldier Development Course (SDC) was the basis for the US Army’s FSPC, but our version has nothing like that scale or ambition. With capacity for only 5% of the regular recruits we need42 it anecdotally usually runs half-empty. At only a month long it is also too short to support weight-management programmes successfully.

Expanding and extending the SDC might be a good place to start. Perhaps changing the model to get third parties like Military Training Colleges43 to increase capacity cheaply, or use Army Reserve Training Units, or even Capita’s Fire Service College facility (formerly RAF Moreton-in-Marsh).44 The US Navy has launched its own FSPC45 and the US Army is increasing its own capacity to 23,500.46

Concurrently, the British Army also needs to examine its medical policies and how and when they are delivered. Medical selection is by far the most important part of recruit selection, but it is only finalised at the end of the process, almost as an afterthought. That’s frustrating for recruiters and candidates alike, who can spend months getting to that point only to find they were never eligible in the first place.

Taking more risk in our medical policy is also essential, however irresponsible that sounds. Not everything medical is risk-to-life or duty of care. For example, being 12 months clear of ADHD symptoms has more to do with ensuring someone will be trainable at Basic, and the timescale is a bit arbitrary. Shortening the delay or accepting less comprehensive proof there is no “dysfunctional behaviour”47 would be a training or employment risk that the recruit might not finish Basic in the time we’ve given them, not a medical risk to their health. Or, we could test how trainable they really are by putting them straight onto an expanded SDC, not spend a year watching them drift away.

The most important lesson we can learn from the US Army, though, is that if you really want to fix recruiting you need to actually do something. Americans see recruiting as a national security problem that they need to fix, quickly, before the big war that’s already started goes fully noisy. They’ve taken steps to do that, and these seem to be working.

By contrast, we’ve become addicted to not solving the problem, hoping that a magic wand will make it go away: ‘better’ applicants, a new contractor, the next marketing campaign, a recession, a new war, or another drawdown. It’s not a convincing way to recruit a professional Army, and a cynic might suggest that we don’t really want to. Being understrength must be a big saving in personnel costs.

The current generations are the only ones we’ve got, and nearly 100,000 of them already try to join us every year.48 Recruiting more of these people who actively want to be soldiers must be part of any credible solution, and to do that we need to look honestly and creatively at how we can help them.

Whether that’s by changing policy, like ‘New Standards’, or enhancing training, like FSPC, or making the recruiting process easier by taking more calculated risks, or all the above, doesn’t matter. As long as the output standards stay the same and, crucially, the quantity of trained soldiers goes up.

The evidence from the US Army is that workable solutions exist, but we are choosing not to apply them.

About the author

Captain Plume

Captain Plume has formerly served as both a regular and a reservist, and has recruited for both the Army Reserve and Territorial Army for more than 20 years.

Footnotes

ADP Land Operations (2017). A centre of gravity is defined as “the characteristics, capabilities or localities from which a… grouping derives its freedom of action, physical strength or will” – Army Doctrine Publication: operations (updated 31 March 2017) (publishing.service.gov.uk)
US ARIC (2022). Army offers up to $50k in enlistment incentives > U.S. ARMY RECRUITING COMMAND > U.S. Army Recruiting News
Army Times (2022). Army misses recruiting goal by 15,000 soldiers (armytimes.com)
Forces Net (2023). Worst recruitment since 1973 is not due to ‘wokeness’, US Army survey suggests (forces.net)
Camarillo, G., (2023). 20230322 – USA – SASC Recruiting and Retention (Cleared).pdf (senate.gov)
USA Facts(2024). Is US military enlistment down? (usafacts.org)
USAREC (2022). Facts and Figures (army.mil)
War on the Rocks (2019). The Sky is Not Falling: How Conventional Wisdom About the Recruiting Environment is Awry – War on the Rocks
MOD (2006). The Governmentâ€™s Response to the Deepcut Review Presented to Parliament by The Secretary of State for Defence By Command of Her Majesty CM 6851 (publishing.service.gov.uk)
National Statistics (2007). UK Defence Statistics Compendium 2007
USMEPCOM (2022). Military Entrance Processing Stations roll out MHS GENESIS > USMEPCOM > Article View (army.mil)
Military Times (2023). The ‘Genesis’ of today’s recruiting crisis (militarytimes.com)
Military.com (2023). Army Sees Signs it Might Hit Recruiting Target This Year | Military.com
Task & Purpose (2022). How the military’s MHS Genesis is screwing over Army recruiters (taskandpurpose.com)
US Department of Labor (2023). Job openings reach record highs in 2022 as the labor market recovery continues : Monthly Labor Review: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (bls.gov)
Francois, M. (2017). [Page 6]. Filling the Ranks – Report on the State of Recruiting into the United Kingdom Armed Forces – by the Rt Hon Mark Francois MP 26.07.17.pdf
MOD FOI Response (2017). Number of successful and unsuccessful applicants into the army from financial years 2015 to June 2017 (publishing.service.gov.uk)
UK Defence Journal (2024) Over 125,000 applicants rejected from British Army (ukdefencejournal.org.uk)
Mission: Readiness (2009). MR-Ready-Willing-Unable.pdf (missionreadiness.org)
Military.com (2022). Army Relaxes Tattoo Rules as It Scrambles for New Recruits | Military.com
Politico (2023). Matt Gaetz proposes end to cannabis testing for military – POLITICO
Military.com (2023). Pentagon Set to Allow Calculator Use on Military Entrance Exam as Recruiting Slumps | Military.com
The Good Schools Guide (2024). From American schools to British (National Curriculum for England, IGCSEs, A Levels) | The Good Schools Guide
Defense One (2022). After Criticism, Army Reinstates High School Diploma Requirement as Recruitment Plummets – Defense One
U.S. Department of Defense (1972). ‘Project 100,000: New Standards Program’. The project name refers to an annual enlistment target across all five Services, not just the US Army.
Ibid.
Ibid.
USA Today (2023) Army recruiting crisis: These $200M fit camps get soldiers into shape (usatoday.com)
US Army (2022). Army announces creation of Future Soldier Preparatory Course | Article | The United States Army
Military.com (2023). One Recruiting Environment, Two Different Outcomes for Army and Marine Corps | Military.com
CNC News (2023). U.S. army pulls ads with Jonathan Majors following actor’s arrest | CBC News
Breaking Defense (2023). Before Basic: Amid recruiting crunch, Army expands Future Soldier Prep Course – Breaking Defense
Navy Times (2024). Navy to allow those without high school diploma or GED to enlist (navytimes.com)
Military.com (2023). Air Force’s Marijuana Waiver Program Proves More Popular Among Applicants Than Expected | Military.com
GB News (2024). Army recruitment has been ‘an unmitigated disaster’ admits former armed forces minister (gbnews.com)
Lord Dannett quoted in the Telegraph (2024). Allowing beards ‘won’t fix Army staffing problem’, says Ben Wallace (telegraph.co.uk)
The Dail Mail (2024). Female army recruits are the key to solving the Armed Forces’ recruitment crisis, says Grant Shapps | Daily Mail Online
The Telegraph (2024). I’m a white male – the Army no longer actively tries to recruit men like me (msn.com)
The Independent (2024). Armed forces recruitment crisis due to Gen Z not joining up, Ben Wallace warns | The Independent
Sky News (2024). Time to ‘think the unthinkable’ and consider UK conscription, says Britain’s former top NATO commander | UK News | Sky News
Evening Standard (2024). Unemployed people who consistently turn down work should be conscripted, says Tory MP Richard Drax (msn.com)
The Guardian (2020). Overweight, unfit or shy? The British army still wants you | Military | The Guardian
MPCT (2024). Military Preparation College for Training – MPCT
Capita (2024). Home (fireservicecollege.ac.uk)
Military.com (2023). Navy Follows Army in Offering Prep Courses to Recruits Who Don’t Meet Fitness, Academic Standards | Military.com
Military.com (2024). Army Expanding Pre-Basic Training Prep Courses to Bring in More Soldiers and Curb Recruiting Crisis | Military.com
MOD (2018). Joint_Service_Manual_of_Medical_Fitness.pdf (parliament.uk)
MOD (2024). Quarterly Service Personnel Statistics: 2024 – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk )

6. The original prophet of Taiwanese independence

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak

The original prophet of Taiwanese independence

https://www.counteroffensive.news/p/the-original-prophet-of-taiwanese?r=7i07&utm

As China threatens death penalty for Taiwan independence advocates, here's the untold story of a man persecuted for these beliefs; the sacrifices he made, including exile & estrangement from his wife.

ELAINE LIN

JUL 06, 2024

Editor’s Note: This is our monthly supplemental issue on Taiwan! We believe that empathy and authoritarianism can’t mix – that when we tell deeply-reported human stories of people threatened by dictators, it compels people to act against injustice.

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Prophets often stand alone, misunderstood – sometimes even condemned by their own people.

As a godfather of Taiwanese independence, Professor Peng Ming-min knows this better than anyone.

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We often idolize political leaders and activists for their public stances. Much less well known are the personal tribulations that people go through in private as a result of their work. While no leader is perfect, their sacrifices often go unnoticed – and it is not until now, after his death, that Peng’s full story can come to life.

Dr. Peng Ming-Min, speaking to the Denver Post on May 8, 1972 about the situation in Taiwan and criticizing the government of the time. (Denver Post via Getty Images)

Peng’s story is especially relevant now, as China becomes increasingly authoritarian. This past month, Beijing called activists for Taiwanese independence “diehard” separatists, and threatened to kill them by imposing the death penalty. Recently-inaugurated Taiwanese President William Lai was included in this group.

Peng certainly would have qualified as a so-called “diehard” activist – he would probably have even been proud to wear the title.

In 1949, the party that had once ruled all of China, the Kuomintang, lost the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communist Party and fled to Taiwan, where they ruled as a one-party state under martial law. They believed they represented China, and would fully reunite with the rest of the country one day – and so dismissed or threatened those who pursued a separate and independent Taiwan.

In 1964, as a young professor of political science at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Peng Ming-min drafted the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation along with two of his students.

The declaration outlined the sovereignty of Taiwan as a separate country: “One China, one Taiwan has long been a solid truth," they wrote, which conflicted with Kuomintang’s desire to reunite with China.

It also listed key suggestions for making Taiwan a democratic country, such as adopting a new constitution to protect basic human rights; establishing an effective government that is responsible to the parliament'; and holding a direct election to choose the country’s leader.

The Kuomintang responded by charging Peng with sedition.

He served two years of jail time before being set free, but persistent surveillance by the ruling authorities triggered Peng to flee the country in 1970. He did not step foot again in Taiwan for 23 years.

The martial law put in place by the then Taiwanese leader Chiang Kai-shek was extremely stifling. The autocratic rules at the time put Peng’s family at risk of being charged if they didn’t report him to the police, so he chose not to tell them before he departed.

“He has never regretted what he did. It is the right thing to do, even if he had to leave his family,” said Wu Huei-Lan, Peng’s assistant for more than three decades, who is almost like family to Peng. The Counteroffensive visited her at her apartment in Yilan County in Taiwan.

Wu and Peng celebrated Peng’s 97-year-old birthday in 2021.

After Peng escaped to Sweden and finally felt safe, he made his first call back to his wife. But he didn’t expect the yelling from the other side of the phone.

“Look what you have done to us!” she said, before hanging up the phone.

Peng’s wife would never forgive this abandonment.

Wu went through the details of Peng seeing his daughter one last time. “He told me he could never forget the look in her eyes. He locked it into the memory box and threw the key away, ” It was the pain of Peng’s life.

Peng’s loved ones in Taiwan were treated as the family of a criminal. The Kuomintang called Peng a “Communist bandit,” and slammed his reputation.

Peng was a big fan of pottery. The pot next to Peng weighs more than 100kg and is one of his favorite collections.

Many activists organizing against the Kuomintang mysteriously died between 1970 and 1990, including a few living abroad. Peng knew he was on the Kuomintang’s wanted list. They weren’t giving up on looking for him.

“He became sensitive to his surroundings. Every time he had dinner with a group of people, he would choose the seat that was the furthest from the entrance,” said Wu. Peng guarded himself. “He put a pistol under his pillow to make sure he could react as fast as he could if bad things happened.”

When Chiang Kai-shek’s family rule ended in 1990, Peng’s college friend Lee Teng-hui became the President of Taiwan. Peng knew his chance had come. That was when Wu met Peng and they started working together.

“I didn’t know who he was!” said Wu with laughter. Peng’s memoir ‘A Taste of Freedom,’ had been forbidden in Taiwan, and his work had faded into obscurity.

In 1991, the Taiwanese Supreme Court removed Peng from its wanted list, leaving him free to return to his homeland. Peng arrived in Taiwan thirty years ago, in 1992. He was welcomed by nearly a hundred people at the airport, but none of them were his wife and kids.

“There was so much misunderstanding between him and his family,” said Wu, who knew how long the issue had ached in Peng’s heart. “Everyone tried to make his family get back together. But they were all stubborn.”

When his health deteriorated in 2015 at age 92, he knew his time was coming, and he needed closure. His assistant suggested he write a letter to his wife.

“His handwriting was so twisted that no one could understand but me. He used all his strength to hold the pen,” Wu said.

In the letter, Peng let out how much he was envious of all those activists who had their family’s support. With his pride and his convictions, he wrote that he had not been able to back down.

“The letter broke my heart,” said Wu with a long sigh. Due to privacy reasons, the letter wasn’t photographed, although The Counteroffensive reviewed it – the first publication to ever do so.

Peng confessed to his wife, in the letter, that he considered getting a divorce before he escaped. But he was worried the Kuomintang would use the divorce for propaganda.

“I can’t apologize for what I did,” wrote Peng with Wu’s help, “But I appreciate everything you did.”

Unfortunately, Peng’s wife had amnesia in her late years and passed away before she could have a chance to read it.

President William Lai, who was the vice president in 2021, had dinner with Peng and other Taiwan Independence activists.

After Peng came back to Taiwan, he was determined to build the democratic system in Taiwan. He joined the DPP and ran for president of Taiwan in 1996, in the first direct presidential election. He came second to the Kuomintang candidate, but his ideas about democracy were influential.

Peng was appointed as the President’s Senior Advisor between 2000 and 2008 by former president Chen Shui-bian, the first non-Kuomintang president after free elections began in Taiwan.

Active into his nineties, Peng re-wrote the Declaration of Formosan Self-Salvation in 2020 and rephrased seven key points, including a new name for the country, a new constitution, and rejoining the U.N.

He endorsed William Lai to run for a primary election against Tsai Ing-wen in 2019 but didn’t have a chance to see Lai become the president.

Peng passed away in 2022, but his spirit endures.

Earlier this month, Taiwanese President Lai once again called on the Chinese Communist Party to recognize them.

Lai claimed, in words that might make Peng proud: “We are already a sovereign and independent country.”

The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

NEWS OF THE DAY:

CHINA THREATENS DEATH PENALTY FOR TAIWAN INDEPENDENCE: Beijing has announced new guidelines for punishing Taiwan independence “diehards” with death penalty on June 21, aiming at Taiwan President William Lai called separatist. The U.S. condemned what it called escalatory and destabilizing language/actions from PRC officials.

… LEADING WESTERN FIRMS TO CONSIDER WITHDRAWING FROM CHINA: Western companies, alarmed at the death penalty threat, are considering leaving China due to legal risks, Reuters reports. There are some 177K Taiwanese nationals working in China, and many work for multinationals – there has not been clear guidance on what would constitute "diehard" separatism, and whether relatively benign social media posting or voting in Taiwanese elections might fall under the characterization.

China, for its part, has said that the death penalty would only apply to an "extreme minority" of independence supporters.

CHINA COAST GUARD SEIZES TAIWANESE FISHING VESSEL: The Penghu-registered Da Jin Man No.88 was boarded and seized by China Coast Guard outside Taiwan-controlled waters outlying Kinmen County on July 2. Taiwan officials sent three ships in an attempt to rescue Da Jin Man No. 88 but were forced to abort the mission to avoid "escalating tensions”.

–CONTEXT: The island of Kinmen, and the waters around it, have been flashpoints for confrontation between Taiwan and China.

TAIWAN DEPARTMENT ANNOUNCES MILITARY EXERCISE, JULY 22: The chief of the general staff Mei Chia-shu presented his plan for five days of war games. Troops stationed on offshore islands will conduct live-round drills during the exercises, scheduled to take place across Taiwan from July 22 to 26 as tension ramp up between China and Taiwan.

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK:

Hi, it’s Elaine here.

I’m so happy I made it to my fourth story for the Counteroffensive. And I’m grateful to have so much support from my amazing team members.

In all of my stories, I talked mostly about historical events in Taiwan. But today, I want to show you something cultural that I find really cool, and something that makes me proud to be Taiwanese.

The video is a rap song performance in Taiwanese and Hakkanese (a form of Chinese mostly spoken in southern China and Taiwan) at the inauguration of President William Lai on May 20th this year. Both dialects represent two major ethnicities in Taiwan. It was performed by KE, a Taiwanese rapper.

As a Taiwanese person myself, he caught my eye.

Taiwanese is spoken in the Chinese immigrant communities in South Asian countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. I grew up speaking Taiwanese as a second language, but I started losing it as I fell out of practice. It was difficult for me to speak in Taiwanese with KE in the interview.

KE is a professional Taiwanese rapper from Kaoshong, Taiwan. (Left photo from ke.1996/ Instagram)

“We didn’t learn Taiwanese in schools, and we didn’t learn it systemically, making composing harder,” KE explained. “If I wanna rhyme in Chinese, I have many Chinese characters or vocabulary in my head. But it’s not the same in Taiwanese.”

Taiwanese is not a written language, and is primarily used through speaking and listening. People often use Chinese words that are pronounced or meant similarly.

In a lot of old Taiwanese songs, you can see a strong colonizing influence. The melody reflects Japanese and Chinese culture at the time in a lot of sad love Taiwanese songs. It didn’t seem that Taiwanese and rap fit together.

“Only very few people who have tried to do [Taiwanese] rap so I had limited reference,” KE explained his struggle composing, “and I don’t even have a dictionary to look for the right words.”

KE shared his experience about what inspired him to compose rap songs with Taiwanese youth who have dreams of becoming artists. (From ke.1996/ Instagram/ photographed by Youth Bureau Kaoshong City Government in May.)

KE grew up in a Presbyterian Church. He learned psalms in Taiwanese when he was little, and he spoke Taiwanese with his grandparents because they didn’t understand Chinese. He became obsessed with improving his speaking in Taiwanese, but he was one of the very few young people.

Under Chiang Kai-shek's 20th century rule, all dialects were forbidden, destroying Taiwanese cultural roots.

“Taiwanese was discriminated against when I was little. My friends looked down on me because I spoke Taiwanese to them. They thought I was a gangster or a bad kid,” said KE.

I didn’t have a chance to see KE perform at the inauguration with my own eyes, but he attended a contest for a summer music festival hosted by the New Taipei City government on June 21. He rapped two songs in Taiwanese that I’ve never heard. Once again, his performance impressed me.

He not only uses his songs to promote Taiwanese culture to the world but also teaches valuable lessons to the young generation about having faith in themselves.

Summer can be really brutal in Taiwan. The highest temperature was above 35 celsius on 21 June. But the heat didn’t stop KE, I felt his passion and dedication in his performance.

Every singer, dancer, or performer has to face a unique but difficult choice. Do they want to go to China and pursue bigger, more profitable careers?

KE doesn’t worry about it.

His chance to make big bucks in China is gone after performing at the Taiwanese inauguration of what China has called a diehard separatist.

But he’s chosen to be a Taiwanese artist instead.

Today’s dog of peace is this little pup in a cardboard box, part of Professor Peng’s family. Unfortunately Peng had to give him away before coming back to Taiwan.

Stay safe out there.

Best,

Elaine

7. Deepfake video targeting Zelensky’s wife linked to Russian disinformation campaign, CNN analysis shows

Deepfake video targeting Zelensky’s wife linked to Russian disinformation campaign, CNN analysis shows | CNN

CNN · by Gianluca Mezzofiore · July 2, 2024

Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in Kyiv on June 18, 2024.

Ukrinform/Cover Images/AP/File

London CNN —

A deepfake video that wrongly suggested the wife of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky purchased a luxury car during the couple’s visit to Paris last month is likely part of a Russian-linked disinformation network, according to CNN’s analysis and disinformation experts.

The AI-generated video features a non-existent employee of the Bugatti dealership in Paris claiming Olena Zelenska purchased its new model, the Bugatti Tourbillon, for 4.5 million euros (around $4.8 million) on June 7.

The clip has several markings of a deep fake, from cuts in the video, to the strange accent and lip-and-mouth movements, according to Clément Briens, a researcher at cybersecurity company Recorded Future. Yet, it gathered some 18 million views in 24 hours on X, where it was reposted by pro-Russian influencers.

Bugatti said in a statement on Tuesday that its dealership in Paris, operated by Autofficina Parigi, a Car Lovers Group company, was victim of several criminal offenses and “firmly denounced this disinformation campaign.”

“A supposed salesman claiming to belong to the Car Lovers Group and its sports label Schumacher Group, published a video on social networks in which he indicated that the Bugatti Paris dealership sold a vehicle to the Ukrainian presidential couple,” it said, adding that the group “strongly denies both the existence of the transaction and, consequently, the existence of the invoice.”

“The mandatory legal details don’t appear on the invoice, the price of the vehicle is also wrong, the price of the options and their descriptions are inaccurate and inconsistent, the graphics are outdated, and the Car Lovers Group would never have allowed such a document to be issued,” the statement added.

Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, in Kyiv, is pictured on August 23, 2023.

Andrii Nesterenk/Global Images Ukraine/Getty Images/File

The group also said it has taken legal action “by filing a criminal complaint for forgery, use of forgeries, usurpation of identity and defamation” – but did not specify against whom the complaint was filed.

Clarity, an AI cybersecurity startup that is fighting against deepfakes, told CNN that their review of the video indicated “a high certainty for AI manipulations, mostly around the middle of the face area.”

The video originates from a French-language website, Verite Cachee France (sic), whose content appears to be AI-generated by scraping French media.

A CNN analysis shows Verite Cachee was set up recently, on June 22, 2024, and some of its pages still have prompts with AI to create fake articles at the top of the piece. CNN is not able to find a contact for the website.

The website’s title also doesn’t use accents – the proper spelling would be Vérité Cachée – casting further doubts on its authenticity.

Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub, told CNN the deep fake and Verite Cachee’s websites bear the hallmarks of a Russian narrative laundering campaign that has been going on since last August, with the aim of undermining Ukraine.

“They typically place some video with a story to tell on YouTube. They then tell that story by layering it on the fake news pages they’ve created, and often also one or more allied web pages. They then integrate the story through social media, starting with real pro-Russian influencers who are part of their network,” he told CNN. “Only minor change with this campaign is that the video doesn’t seem to be on YouTube.”

CNN

video

In a report from last December, Linvill and Patrick Warren, also a professor at Clemson, showed how the disinformation campaign was led by DC Weekly, a website that published a series of AI-generated Russian propaganda and fake stories, such as the debunked claim that Olena Zelenska bought $1.1 million jewellery at Cartier in New York last September.

A report by Recorded Future, a leading cybersecurity company, also identified Veritee Cachee as being part of the same disinformation network.

Given the size and resources of the network, it is likely some Russian support or financing is happening, Clément Briens, a senior threat intelligence analyst at the company, told CNN.

“They scrape articles automatically from a number of sources, using LLMs to introduce specifically political bias to attack Zelensky, Biden and NATO. Then they upload the articles to launder a pro-Russian narrative,” Briens said.

The sheer volume of articles makes it harder to detect when deep fakes are introduced because when someone clicks on the website, they see a backlog of articles that usually pass the initial check, he said.

“Then after someone uploads the video from YouTube or directly into the site, the amplification system gets activated on social media.”

The target is political readers in Europe, with the purpose to erode domestic political support for Ukraine and undermine European leaders that support Ukraine, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, according to the analyst.

CNN · by Gianluca Mezzofiore · July 2, 2024

8. NATO Has to Change. Here’s How.

OPINION

FARAH STOCKMAN

NATO Has to Change. Here’s How.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/07/opinion/nato-europe-us-ukraine-defense.html

July 7, 2024

Credit...Illustration by The New York Times; Images by pawel.gaul, and CSA-Plastock, via Getty Images

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By Farah Stockman

Ms. Stockman is a member of the editorial board and author of “American Made: What Happens to People When Work Disappears.”

What would Ike say now?

Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s first supreme allied commander Europe, felt strongly that his mission was to get Europeans “back on their military feet” — not for American troops to become the permanent bodyguard for Brussels and Berlin.

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States,” he wrote of NATO in 1951, “then this whole project will have failed.”

But as leaders of NATO allies gather in Washington on Tuesday for the alliance’s 75th anniversary, some 90,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Germany, Italy, Britain and elsewhere, making up a significant portion of the 500,000 NATO troops on high readiness.

America’s outsize presence comes not just in the form of troops. Of the $206 billion in military and nonmilitary aid allocated to Ukraine by countries around the world, $79 billion has come from the United States, according to the Ukraine Support Tracker database. Since about 1960, the United States’ share of allied G.D.P. has averaged roughly 36 percent, while its share of allied military spending has been more than 61 percent, according to a Cato Institute report. The supreme allied commander Europe has never been a European.

It is now becoming increasingly clear that Europeans need to shoulder more responsibility for their own defense. That’s not just because Donald Trump and an isolationist wing of the Republican Party complain bitterly about having to defend wealthy countries that, by the way, can afford social safety nets that America can only dream of because they don’t spend as much on their militaries. It’s also because U.S. officials are becoming more focused on the challenges posed by China, which will require an increasing amount of attention and resources in the years ahead, especially given the growing cooperation among China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

The United States simply can’t do everything everywhere all at once, by itself. The future requires well-armed, capable allies. The indispensable nation has to be a bit less indispensable.

Regardless of who wins the U.S. election, European leaders understand that they need to contribute more, Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide of Norway told me. During his recent trip to Washington, he said Republicans relayed that Europeans have to take much more responsibility for the war in Ukraine because the United States has “bigger fish to fry.”

It’s starting to happen, but not nearly as quickly as it should. The NATO summit will no doubt celebrate the fact that 23 NATO members are expected to spend at least 2 percent of their G.D.P. on defense, up from just three members that met that threshold a decade ago. But it’s stunning that nearly a third of NATO’s 32 members still fell short of that spending goal, which was agreed upon in 2014. If Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Mr. Trump’s not-so-subtle threats to abandon freeloaders haven’t convinced them to pony up more for their own defense, it’s hard to imagine what will.

After all, European reliance on U.S. troops runs counter to what many Europeans and Americans say they want. Majorities in the United States, Britain, France and Germany believe Europe should be “primarily responsible for its own defense while aiming to preserve the NATO alliance,” according to a recent survey by the Institute for Global Affairs. Only 7 percent of German and 13 percent of French respondents felt that the United States should be primarily responsible for Europe’s defense.

Europe’s dependence on the United States is engendering growing unease on the continent. Finland’s former president Sauli Niinisto has called for a “more European NATO,” and President Emmanuel Macron of France has warned that “however strong our alliance with America is, we are not a priority for it.”

So why does this dependence persist?

Part of the reason is human nature. Why would allies invest in defense if Uncle Sam always picks up the tab? But another reason is structural. When NATO was created, European allies were just emerging from devastating wars that left them suspicious of — and even hostile to — one another. Somebody had to herd the cats.

That’s how the U.S. role in NATO changed from that of temporary helper to permanent protector. At first, NATO was like a policeman watching over a construction site; the alliance went hand in hand with the Marshall Plan. If Americans were going to help rebuild Europe, they had to make sure that Moscow didn’t steal their investment.

But by the 1960s, it had become obvious that U.S. troops wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. The Soviet Union had swallowed up much of Eastern Europe, including the eastern part of Germany. That made West Germany key to stopping the Soviets, but few in Europe could stomach the idea of a strong German military after what had happened under the Nazis. So the Americans stayed put and protected Germany with their own troops and nuclear umbrella.

“The present system did not take shape because America had set out to become a kind of empire,” Marc Trachtenberg, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has written extensively about the Cold War, told me. “The system came into being because U.S. leaders realized by 1961 that there could be no purely European solution to the European security problem.” The Americans, he said, were stuck in Europe.

Once Washington realized it couldn’t leave, it started calling the shots. “We are bound to pay the price of leadership,” McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, said in 1962. “We may as well have some of its advantages.”

That meant juicy defense contracts for American firms, which became a powerful financial incentive to keep a big footprint in Europe. It’s one reason Poland buys American tanks that are too heavy to cross Polish bridges and Romania buys fighter jets that are extremely expensive to operate and maintain. The U.S. military industrial complex profits from dependency. About 63 percent of the military equipment that European Union countries purchased in 2022-23 came from the United States.

At the end of the Cold War, Europeans tried to wean themselves off U.S. military might. In 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Jacques Chirac of France attempted to create a European security system capable of acting on its own. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright nipped that in the bud in a speech that warned against diminishing NATO’s role, duplicating NATO’s efforts and discriminating against NATO members that weren’t in the European Union.

In 2017, 23 European countries started the Permanent Structured Cooperation on Security and Defense to work together on practical projects such as cyberdefense. That, too, got a negative reaction from the Trump administration, which warned against excluding American firms.

It’s no wonder that today Europe lacks the capacity to deploy the soldiers and equipment that NATO needs to defend its members, especially when it comes to specialized units such as air defense, intelligence and surveillance. John R. Deni, the author of a new report on NATO readiness, told me that NATO planners routinely come up short when they seek contributions of sophisticated systems, partly because so much has already been sent to Ukraine. “There is just not enough to go around,” he said. “There are still troubling gaps.”

Luckily, some European leaders are treating this with the urgency it deserves. At the summit, NATO allies are expected to endorse a new defense industrial pledge to scale up the production of weapons and ammunition. But NATO’s procurement plan relies heavily on American arms makers. That clashes with the new European Defense Industrial Strategy, rolled out by the European Commission in March, which envisions spending half of its military procurement budget on items produced in Europe by 2030. Once again, cats need to be herded. There’s a dire need for both institutions to get on the same page.

If they do, it will be a great step forward for Europe’s ability to assist in its own defense. In the past, Americans might have sensed a threat to their authority and sabotaged this effort to build up a European defense industry. But today, Americans, who are also struggling to ramp up their own industrial defense production, need all the help they can get.

“A stronger Europe means a stronger NATO and ultimately a more equal partnership between the U.S. and Europe,” said Rachel Rizzo, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “You want a peer relationship. You don’t want a client.”

Europeans are finally stepping up, as General Eisenhower dreamed they would. Let’s not stand in their way.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Farah Stockman joined the Times editorial board in 2020. For four years, she was a reporter for The Times, covering politics, social movements and race. She previously worked at The Boston Globe, where she won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2016. @fstockman

9. How Taiwan Conquered U.S. Politics — and Showed Europe How It’s Done

How Taiwan Conquered U.S. Politics — and Showed Europe How It’s Done

The island democracy off the coast of China has wooed friends in every U.S. faction and region — and that’s its greatest source of strength and protection.

Then-Representative of Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States Hsiao Bi-khim speaks during the opening ceremony of the first ever Taiwan Expo on Oct. 12, 2022, in Washington. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Politico · by Tomorrow

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/05/taiwan-diplomacy-u-s-politics-nato-00166608

The island democracy off the coast of China has wooed friends in every U.S. faction and region — and that’s its greatest source of strength and protection.

07/06/2024 07:00 AM EDT

Alexander Burns is head of news at POLITICO. He has covered elections and political power across the U.S. for over a decade and co-wrote a best-selling book about Donald Trump and Joe Biden. His reported column explores the future of politics and policy debates that cross international borders.

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan remembers a few things about the reception he attended at Twin Oaks, the Washington estate owned by the government of Taiwan, in the winter of 2022.

The ice cubes were stamped with the design of the Maryland flag. The officials there knew all about Hogan’s record, including his forceful condemnation of anti-Asian hate crimes. And Taiwan’s top diplomatic representative at the time, Hsiao Bi-khim, wanted to know if Hogan intended to run for president.

Hogan said he deflected her inquiry — “Well, a lot of people are encouraging me, I have to make a decision” — but Hsiao kept trying to draw him out.

Hogan paraphrased her prodding him: “It seems like you’d be a great candidate in a general election, you could appeal to a wider audience like you did in Maryland, but it seems like it would be tough to get through the primary.”

Partly because of the same calculus, Hogan chose not to seek the White House. Instead, he is the Republican nominee for Senate in Maryland and one of his party’s most prized recruits of 2024.

Hsiao is now vice president of Taiwan.

The conversation at Twin Oaks was more than an incidental encounter between two ambitious leaders who are still on the rise. It was a moment that captured the sophistication of Taiwan’s political outreach in the United States — a determined, yearslong campaign to win over American officials at every level and cement the island’s political standing. Though it is not even recognized as a country, Taiwan holds the status of an all-but-official ally in much of Washington.

Europe has much to learn from Taiwan.

As the leaders of NATO nations prepare to gather in Washington for a summit marking the 75th anniversary of the alliance, the specter of a new Trump presidency hangs over their deliberations. Fearful that the United States will back down from confronting Russia, they are reassessing their own defense policies, pleading with Republicans not to embrace isolationism and, in many cases, girding for a more dangerous world.

Taiwan’s example shows that sometimes the best defense against an expansionist, nuclear-armed neighbor is a vigorous program of Washington cocktail receptions, upbeat economic development events and relentless consular hopscotching through America’s unglamorous state capitals.

Years of painstaking retail politics across the U.S. political spectrum has built an expansive network of pro-Taiwan elected officials in both parties and throughout the American government. If China attacked Taiwan, there would be an outcry echoing from precincts far beyond the Beltway.

In Congress, there is no meaningful partisan divide over support for Taiwan — a monumental achievement in America’s fractured political culture. There are pro-Taiwan caucuses in more than a dozen state legislatures, in left-leaning territory like Connecticut and in MAGA bastions like West Virginia and Kentucky. Pro-Taiwan resolutions have passed in states as conservative as Utah and as progressive as Hawaii.

How many state legislatures have a Lithuania friendship caucus?

Taiwan has strategic advantages that some of Europe’s frontline states do not. A wealthy country with a powerhouse tech sector, Taiwan has money to burn and economic benefits to dangle that the countries in Russia’s shadow do not possess. Pro-Taiwan legislative resolutions often specify, in hefty dollar figures, how much commerce a state does with the island. There is no Baltic version of TSMC, the Taiwanese semiconductor goliath, to promise thousands of jobs to swing state governors.

But the gap is not merely a matter of cash and microchips. Taiwan has a different strategy, anchored in a keen read on what makes American politicians tick and an apparently boundless appetite for personal diplomacy.

Hsiao, 52, who was sworn in as vice president in May, is a central character in this story. Deployed to Washington by Taiwan’s previous president, Tsai Ing-wen, Hsiao was in some ways uniquely equipped for the mission: With an American mother, an Oberlin degree and a youth spent partly in New Jersey, Hsiao was surely better prepared than most diplomats to engage Larry Hogan and his peers.

She did not design Taiwan’s U.S. political strategy from zero, but she was a formidable field marshal in this charm offensive — wooing lawmakers in Washington, attending strategically useful conferences and chatting up officials from even the smallest of states. At a “Delaware Day” event at Twin Oaks, Hsiao made common cause with a state accustomed to living in the shadow of its own overbearing neighbor — not China, but Pennsylvania. “Like Delaware, in Taiwan we consider ourselves small but mighty,” Hsiao said, according to Delaware State Rep. Paul Baumbach, a Democrat.

The friendships Hsaio built in Washington have already been on display in Taiwan since she became vice president: During a congressional delegation visit this spring, Senator Tammy Duckworth came bearing a Washington Nationals jersey with Hsiao’s name on it.

Few U.S. political relationships are as valuable to Taiwan as its bond with the American Legislative Exchange Council, the right-leaning political network that brings together state lawmakers around conservative policy priorities. Tsai addressed ALEC as president in 2020, and Hsiao visited an ALEC conference in Salt Lake City in 2021. The group has embraced Taiwan’s cause, drafting sample text for pro-Taiwan legislation that members have advanced all over the country.

Karla Jones, ALEC’s senior director of international relations and federalism, said Taiwan was highly engaged with her group: “Definitely in the top 10 of countries that are very responsive,” she said.

“Taiwan has done an excellent job of having the diplomatic infrastructure you need to communicate not just in the Beltway, but outside of Washington,” said Jones, describing a remarkable state-level consensus around supporting Taiwan: “When I go to state legislatures, I can talk to any state lawmaker about Taiwan and 9 times out of 10 they’re going to agree with me, I’m going to agree with them.”

China has been all but impotent to counter Taiwan in this respect. The mainland government is so politically toxic in the United States and anti-China policies are now so mainstream here that Chinese diplomats can only register their disapproval for the record. Jones told me that Chinese representatives had contacted ALEC to voice displeasure when the group invited Tsai to address one of its conventions; after ALEC shrugged off that scolding, China didn’t try again when the group hosted Hsiao.

When I contacted the Chinese embassy about this column, a spokesperson sent me a general statement reiterating that China “firmly opposes the US having any form of official interaction with Taiwan and interfering in Taiwan affairs in any way or under any pretext.”

Taiwan’s government talks about its outreach in America in earnest, even flattering terms. A spokesperson for Taiwan’s office in Washington said in a statement that the U.S.-Taiwan relationship was anchored in shared values and economic interests, “forming the bedrock of unwavering partnership,” including at the state level and with groups like ALEC.

That partnership is also grounded in an unsentimental assessment of the American political character.

Many American officials — perhaps most of them — have limited interest in the rest of the world and only fuzzy familiarity with the places where a new World War is likeliest to ignite. The average state legislator today is unlikely to know any more about Taiwan than his forebears knew 110 years ago about the corner of the Austro-Hungarian empire where World War I detonated. This is equally true of the voters these lawmakers represent.

Where Europeans often seem to see this as troublesome American narrowness, Taiwan has treated it as an opportunity: After all, if lawmakers know little to nothing, that represents a chance to educate them.

Some share of those students will turn out to be helpful allies later on — either because they wind up in the House or Senate, or just by reinforcing the strength in numbers of America’s loose pro-Taiwan coalition.

Rex Rice, a state legislator in South Carolina, is emblematic of this brand of American politician. A conservative Republican who is an active member of ALEC, Rice was an author of the ALEC resolution encouraging states to back the endangered democracy.

When I asked Rice why he decided to get involved in supporting Taiwan, he offered the broadest of reasons, praising Taiwan as a “good business partner” and citing Taiwan’s “David versus Goliath” struggle with China.

“They’re in a world by themselves down there — pretty much by themselves,” Rice said. “They’ve got a struggle, and I’d like to support them.”

Rice added that he had found Taiwanese products reliable over time, including a set of impact wrenches that were a “good product.” The Taiwanese government had reached out to him, Rice said, but those conversations hadn’t gone too far.

“They’ve invited me to come visit Taiwan,” said Rice, sounding ambivalent about the idea. “I hate to say this, but I don’t know how long my seat — I’m talking about the one I’m sitting on — can tolerate an airline flight.”

Europe could use more friends like him.

Politico · by Tomorrow

10. The AUKUS goal: balancing power in the region

The AUKUS goal: balancing power in the region | The Strategist

aspistrategist.org.au · by Justin Bassi · July 5, 2024

Hugh White’s February essay in Australian Foreign Affairs dismissing the AUKUS pact as a mistake takes the reader on a journey through everything that can go wrong and all the reasons we should never have been so ambitious. Unfortunately, it’s a journey to nowhere, carefully bypassing the actual strategic vision of AUKUS, while concealing White’s own central assumption that China will inevitably dominate the region, whatever Australia or any other country does.

White argues that Australia should do all we can to shape the region’s future without ever describing what we should shape it into. This is a pattern for White, whose strategic argument tends to drop away at the critical moment.

Thoughtful AUKUS advocates, by contrast, are quite clear about the strategy Australia is pursuing and how AUKUS fits into it. The goal is to shape a region in which power is balanced, rules and norms are observed or enforced, and China cannot wield untrammelled power to get what it wants, expanding its present malign behaviour, such as its aggression against other South China Sea claim-ants, its cyberattacks and its economic coercion.

White portrays this goal as an effort simply to preserve US dominance, even at the cost of a catastrophic war with China in which Australia would become entangled. Australia, he argues, is backing the wrong horse and should place its bets elsewhere.

But he is misrepresenting the end state that AUKUS supporters seek: not war for the United States but deterrence for an evolving and diverse region. White refuses to recognise that, as a regional power, Australia has agency and must contribute to a balance of the region that necessarily includes the United States—whose continued engagement should be encouraged through clear signals that others are prepared to step up.

The region is not defined by a simple contest between the United States and China. It is comprised of strong democracies such as Japan, India and South Korea, as well as Southeast Asian nations like the Philippines that reject Beijing’s bullying and are putting their security interests ahead of economic convenience.

Certainly, AUKUS faces challenges, which White dissects in detail. The submarine delivery and production schedules will be tough and the capability costs of slippage—always hard to avoid on such complex projects—could be high. Crewing will be difficult and some US lawmakers are airing concerns about their own submarine production capacity.

I can’t address each of White’s criticisms here, but largely his argument is that strengthening through partnerships is too hard and we should therefore submit. His fatalism doesn’t allow for the fact that security cooperation between countries on something as significant as winning the global technology race needs a huge effort.

He is far too dismissive of AUKUS’s Pillar Two, under which the three partners are working together on advanced military capabilities in areas such as artificial intelligence, quantum, cyber and hypersonics. Technological superiority confers military and strategic advantage; cooperation among like-minded democracies could make our capability development through advanced technologies greater than the sum of our parts. The gains can be increased by expanding Pillar Two to other nations, including Japan.

His cynical view that the United Kingdom is simply reviving its faded glory and chasing money from submarine construction ignores the demonstrably deeper cooperation that our two countries are pursuing, including through the British Royal Navy’s increased regional presence and the treaty-level Defence and Security Cooperation Agreement announced by Australia and the United Kingdom in March 2024.

White acknowledges that nuclear-powered submarines are much faster and therefore better for operations beyond simply protecting Australia’s northern approaches like crocodiles in a moat. A nuclear submarine can protect Australia but can also hunt enemy vessels in a sea battle north of the equator. That’s a better warfighting capability, and therefore a better deterrent.

Despite White’s dismissive attitude towards deterrence, sharper Australian teeth will help support the stability we need as our region evolves and we find ways to manage competition without conflict—or, if necessary, to be prepared for conflict. His alternative—buying more cheaper conventional boats for the sole purpose of placing them to our north to defend our landmass—only makes sense if you agree with his strategy of letting the crisis come to us. That would mean accepting China as the dominant regional power—although he cloaks this by referring to ‘Asian great powers’—and then looking to merely survive, largely alone, what would no doubt be a grim period for our region. No United States, no AUKUS, no Quad, no Five Eyes, no hope.

Without our present partnerships—particularly the US alliance and the access it provides to intelligence and capabilities—the cost of defending Australia would become prohibitive. We would be weaker and have negligible regional influence. Those who value AUKUS recognise that Australia can thrive with our sovereignty, strategic choices and economic freedom intact, but only if we remain ambitious.

AUKUS is a challenge—I have no argument there. But as an assertion of military power, it’s a tangible contribution, along with other partnerships, to upholding a favourable power balance and stability in our region. That will help create a safer neighbourhood, and will head off future crises, rather than waiting for them to come to our door while refusing the security of the best capability and best of friends.

aspistrategist.org.au · by Justin Bassi · July 5, 2024

11.

12.

13.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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