Happy National Airborne Day – August 16th

Quotes of the Day:

"The trooper who jumps into the night and goes into battle by parachute… is not only an elite soldier, but he is a special breed of man who must fight beyond the ordinary physical and mental pressures of combat."

– General Matthew B. Ridgway

"Show me a man who will jump out of an airplane, and I’ll show you a man who’ll fight."

– General James M. Gavin

"The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was something that was bigger than themselves. They were the sons of democracy, and they were the men of Airborne."

– General Dwight D. Eisenhower

1. Putin Is Vulnerable: Western Policy Masks Russian Weakness

2. Excessive U.S. pressure on Taiwan defense spending plays into CCP's hands

3. The Ukrainian August 2024 offensive: Some initial thoughts

4. SOCOM commander calls for ‘convergence’ of Pacific-based special operations forces

5. Mongolia finds ways to align with the West without alarming China, Russia

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 15, 2024

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 15, 2024

8. In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 5)

9. Why China is becoming a top choice mediator for global conflicts

10. As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

11. Biden ‘open’ to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine

12. Tim Walz’s Military Retirement Was More Complicated Than JD Vance Wants You to Think

13. Lawmakers push Pentagon for clarity on domestic military deployments

14. Pentagon needs to speed up its integrated-deterrence efforts, Joint Chiefs chair says

15. Rewind and Reconnoiter: Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism? with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

16. Russia’s Post-War Military Recruiting Strategy Emerges

17. The Joint Reconnaissance Strike Complex: Marine and Army Experimentation in the First Island Chain

18. Iran is weaker than we think. It’s time to take advantage.

19. What military history tells us about Ukraine’s Kursk invasion By Gian Gentile and Adam Givens

20. Why the U.S. Military Needs to Imitate Ukraine’s Drone Force

21. Ukraine on the Offensive

22. We Need a Real Marine Corps To Fight a Two Front War By Gary Anderson

1. Putin Is Vulnerable: Western Policy Masks Russian Weakness

Conclusion:

The West must abandon its reactive mentality that seeks to contain Russia through countermeasures. Countermeasures are inherently reactive. The effort to limit the Kremlin’s access to Western technologies is an example of a cat-and-mouse game, in which the West grants Russia turns to adapt its sanction-evasion techniques. The West can instead anticipate Russia’s likely pivots to pre-emptively block its moves.[41] This non-trivial effort would require the United States to proactively coordinate across theaters with partners.[42] Any war that the United States will fight or help to fight, however, will have the same requirement.

Putin Is Vulnerable: Western Policy Masks Russian Weakness

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/putin-vulnerable-western-policy-masks-russian-weakness

By Nataliya Bugayova

August 14, 2024 

Russia has vulnerabilities that the West has simply not been exploiting. On the contrary, US incrementalism has helped the Kremlin offset and mask its weaknesses. The Kremlin’s weaknesses include its inability to rapidly pivot, dependence on others for Russia’s capability to sustain the war, and years of risk accumulation that Russian President Vladimir Putin is yet to reckon with. The Kremlin is vulnerable to an adversary who can generate momentum against Russia and deny the Kremlin opportunities to regroup and adapt. A serious US strategy on Ukraine would prioritize achieving such momentum. It would include removing Western-granted safe havens for Russia’s war machine. It would also include not only imposing multiple dilemmas on the Kremlin but the most painful ones, such as helping Ukraine make Russia fail on the battlefield faster and dismantling Russian narratives in the West. While it is premature to draw conclusions about Ukraine’s offensive in Kursk Oblast, the operation clearly has the potential to generate momentum. If it does, the United States should help Ukraine build on rather than dampen this momentum to regain control over the tempo of the war.

Russia’s Vulnerability to Sustained Pressure

Russia adapts if given time. Russia does not pivot rapidly, however, in part because of Putin’s risk aversion. It took Putin months to adapt after his failed three-day invasion in 2022. He continued to pursue his maximalist objectives in Ukraine with insufficient force and ordered a mobilization only after a rout of the Russian forces from the Kharkiv region in September 2022.[1] It took Putin a year to start moving the Russian economy to a full war footing.[2] Likewise, the Kremlin has been slow to react to Ukraine’s Kursk offensive. The Kremlin waited days after the start of Ukraine’s incursion to announce a counterterrorism operation in Russia’s border regions.[3] Putin has yet to implement martial law despite repeated calls from the Russian nationalist community to do so.[4]

Putin has proven to be decisive but not extemporaneous. His boldest moves followed deliberate preparation, which the West often ignored or missed. A decade of Russian information operations in Ukraine preceded the Kremlin’s hybrid operation in eastern Ukraine in 2014.[5] Russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine only after Putin re-solidified his grip on power with constitutional amendments in 2020 and normalized Russia’s military presence in Belarus in 2021, which the Kremlin had been trying to secure for years.[6] Putin has demonstrated a calculated and often risk-averse approach in his key military decisions. Putin declared a smaller, less politically costly partial mobilization in September 2022 instead of embracing the need for general mobilization. This decision ultimately led to Putin undercutting Russia’s mobilization potential.[7]

Putin faced real risks in moments when he was challenged by sustained pressure. The Ukrainian battlefield successes in the fall of 2022 led to hysteria in the Russian information space, as the military humiliation contrasted with Putin’s attempt to project an image of a ‘great Russia.’[8] The consecutive shocks of Russian withdrawal from the Kharkiv region and Kherson City drove fissures within Putin’s nationalist base and laid the foundation for the spat between the late PMC Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Russian military establishment, which eventually resulted in Prigozhin’s rebellion in 2023.[9] The shock of these defeats also led Putin to undertake notable rhetorical changes, framing Russia’s war in Ukraine as a protracted war against NATO and the West, rather than Ukraine.[10]

Had the West rushed military aid to Ukraine and planned for successive operations after the Russian defeat in the Battle of Kyiv in spring 2022 or even after Russia’s offensive culminated in Severodonetsk in summer 2022, Ukraine would be closer to a durable peace than it is today.[11]

On the contrary, Western incrementalism in the provision of military aid disrupted Ukraine’s battlefield momentum and provided Russia with a three-fold advantage: a chance for Russian forces to build their defense in depth, which monumentally complicated Ukrainian 2023 counteroffensive; a chance for the Kremlin to seize the narrative internationally; and a reduction in domestic pressures on Putin.

The United States’ incrementalism and choice to telegraph its decisions diminished the effectiveness of US policies. Delays in US decision-making afforded Russia time to develop countermeasures to US capabilities. Russia is using EW and GPS jamming to degrade the effectiveness of US ground-based long-range fires.[12] The United States’ telegraphing its internal debates about its restrictions on Ukraine’s use of US weapons gives the Kremlin time to insulate Russia from damage. Russia redeployed air assets in the range of ATACMS to airbases further away from Ukraine to protect them against a potential US policy change for Ukraine. The shock of Ukraine using new capabilities will likely have greater effects if the West stops announcing or leaking its decisions to deliver advanced capabilities to Ukraine, as the Russian military remains slow to change its posture to new threats.

Limits of Russia’s Inherent Capability

Russia depends on the will of others more than many people realize. A lot of Russia’s capability to sustain the war in Ukraine is not inherent and is, therefore, vulnerable. The Kremlin acquired some of its capabilities by force, manipulation, or by exploiting Western resources and sanctuaries. Russia depends on basing in Belarus to attack Ukraine from the north. Russia depends on foreign trade routes and intermediaries to smuggle sanctioned goods.[13] Russia depends on foreign machinery and components to produce advanced weapons.[14] Russia depends on North Korea and Iran to offset shortages in materiel.[15] Russia depends on ‘shadow fleets’ to transport its energy.[16] Russia depends on Western media to cycle its false narratives. Russia depends on continued US will to grant Russia a safe space, from which Russia can strike Ukraine with impunity — without being struck back by Ukraine with long-range US-provided systems.[17] The Kremlin depends on continued Western choice not to expel the Kremlin’s agents of influence and revenue, like Russia’s state nuclear operator Rosatom.[18]

Above all, the Kremlin depends on the West’s accepting Russia’s fabricated assertions about reality, which often cause the West to reason to conclusions that advance Russia’s interests and not ours.[19] Key examples include the false assertion that Russia has the right to a self-defined sphere of influence, and, therefore, a right to do whatever it wants to those within this sphere — including invading — with no repercussions. Another example is a false assertion that any provision of advanced military capability to Ukraine is a red line that will result in a nuclear escalation, and therefore, the US should de facto grant a veto to any nuclear power over US national security policy. Kremlin’s strategy in Ukraine disproportionately depends on the West accepting these premises, making Russia vulnerable to changes in Western perceptions. Russian dependencies give the West opportunities to exploit or dismantle Russia’s capability to sustain the war against Ukraine.

Russia cannot siphon capability from others overnight. It takes time to secure capabilities by manipulation or force and to convert partnerships into capabilities. It took Putin at least six years to force Belarus into becoming a de facto Russian military base.[20] It took months for Russia to establish joint UAV production with Iran in Tatarstan.[21] Russia is vulnerable to an adversary capable of anticipating and disrupting the Kremlin’s pivots before the Kremlin can turn them into war capability.

Russia’s partnerships require tradeoffs and are vulnerable when both partners are pressured. While the Russo–Iranian partnership is durable, its military interdependence enhances mutual capability only as long as Russia and Iran are not challenged at the same time. Russia’s loss of advanced air defense systems and air assets in Ukraine will likely limit the Kremlin’s ability to spare those systems for Iran — at a time when Iran may increasingly require them especially if the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were to face a full-fledged Israeli-partner response to its aggression. The Kremlin’s reported message that Iran should exercise restraint when acting against Israel is therefore unsurprising.[22] The Russo–Iranian partnership is therefore vulnerable to a cohesive US strategy to counter both threats if the United States were to adopt one. Moreover, Russia’s growing intent to arm Iranian proxies, aimed at deterring Western support to Ukraine, can backfire by inviting US retaliation, were Iranian proxies to threaten US assets directly with Russian capabilities, and by further undermining the Kremlin’s ability to balance between regional stakeholders.[23]

Many of Russia’s relationships do not have a durable foundation and may crumble if ‘partners’ perceive Russia’s loss. Demonstrating that Russian victory is not inevitable will have compounding effects on Russian ability to sustain the war. China is Russia’s enabler in this war, but it has not openly provided military assistance to Russia.[24] China is behaving in a metered way likely not to heavily support a proposition that may be losing. The Kremlin is alienating even its close partners. Kremlin propagandists and officials have been threatening Armenia and Kazakhstan if either were to pivot away from Russia.[25] Armenia is distancing itself from the Russia-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), as Russia has proven to be an unreliable partner when it failed to protect Armenia against the 2023 Azerbaijani attack.[26] Russian partnerships that are purely transactional are also at risk. Russia’s ability to provide value, such as reliable military exports, will further diminish if the West exhausts Russian capability faster.[27] Helping Russia lose faster in Ukraine will likely accelerate the process of other states distancing themselves from the Kremlin.

Russia’s Risk Accumulation

The Kremlin can absorb enormous costs but not without risk or limits. US incrementalism strengthens Putin’s ability to absorb risk, as it grants the Kremlin time to normalize an increasingly worse reality within Russia. The next 2–3 years are critical for the Kremlin in this war, however. If US support to Ukraine persists and gains momentum, the Kremlin will have to reckon with its accumulating problems.

The Kremlin is eroding Russia’s future capabilities. Materiel is a decisive capability for Russia in this war. Russia is burning through a lot of its equipment in pursuit of limited tactical gains.[28] Russia's defense industrial base (DIB) and ‘partner’ support can likely support the Russian strategy of gradual battlefield gains in the short term. Russian DIB’s ability to consistently support Russia’s current tempo or to fully resource Russia's reserve manpower is far from a given, however.[29] The Kremlin’s policies are eroding the foundation of Russia’s defense production, including macroeconomic stability and workforce.[30] The West, on the other hand, can surge its great latent capability in support of Ukraine.[31] The prospect of persistent US support to Ukraine that includes increasing US defense production and helping Ukraine regain battlefield initiative is a direct threat to Putin’s strategy of gradual gains. Improved defense production will also be essential to support US requirements in other theaters.

Putin’s control over Russia is strong, but it is built on fragilities and conflicting structures. For years, Putin has been cohering Russian society and his regime around those who are willing to get in line with his agenda. Putin is increasingly dependent on those who support his regime and the war (Russian nationalists), those willing to fight against Ukraine for ideological, monetary or other reason (Russia’s mobilizable force), and those willing to protect the regime (the Kremlin’s suppression apparatus). Prigozhin’s failed mutiny in 2023 and Ukraine’s Kursk offensive in 2024 exposed weaknesses of Russian domestic security.[32] Russia’s invasion of Ukraine also introduced new divides and worsened old fissures. Empowerment of xenophobic ultra-nationalists coupled with the Kremlin’s targeting of non-ethnic Russians for mobilization is exacerbating ethnic tensions in Russia.[33] Rising ultranationalism — which Putin needs to sustain the war — is ironically a direct threat to Putin’s fundamentally imperial ways of ruling Russia through his long-standing effort to portray Russia (even if falsely) as an inclusive multi-ethnic and multi-confessional federation.[34] The brutality of returning Russian soldiers, many of whom are convicted criminals, is creating tensions within Russian society with repeated incidents of violence of soldiers against civilians and even civilian violence against returning soldiers.[35]

Putin’s strategy — so far, a successful one — has been that of controlled risk accumulation. He has counted on Russia to absorb enormous costs, while Putin meticulously mitigated a few select risks related to the regime stability. For example, the Kremlin has been systemically tightening control over the information space in Russia over the years.[36] Putin is offering steep financial compensations for Russian mobilized, contract, and volunteer servicemen to ensure that Russian society remains docile to the Kremlin‘s increasing demands for sacrifices.[37] Putin’s strategy of controlled risk accumulation worked for twenty-five years in part because of Russian society’s ability to accept an increasingly worse reality. Russia normalized 500,000 Russian causalities in a war against a country that Russians used to portray as a brotherly nation. Putin has also rarely been challenged with enough pressure that would stretch his ability to manage the risks.

Putin’s risk mitigation approach may continue to work but it does require Putin to constantly manage a substantial amount of risk. This approach is vulnerable to an adversary who can create conditions that stretch Putin’s risk management capacity and deny the Kremlin time to normalize a worse reality within Russia.

Exploiting Russian Vulnerabilities: A Strategy of Persistence and Momentum

The Kremlin is cognizant of its vulnerabilities and Western opportunities to exploit them. Putin’s main effort in his war against Ukraine has been to ensure that Western policies on Ukraine never achieve persistence or momentum.[38] US policy of controlled escalation has given Putin just that: an environment where Russia is never challenged with enough velocity across time and space for the costs and risks to exceed the Kremlin’s capacity to manage them.

US persistence and momentum are key to denying Russia the ability to sustain its war against Ukraine. An effective campaign would seek to degrade, disrupt, and destroy the Kremlin’s capability and sources of capability to sustain the war in Ukraine across theaters, in multiple domains, in a way that denies the Kremlin time to adapt and reconstitute this capability. The United States should seek to help Ukraine. The United States and its partners regain control over the tempo of the war, and force the Kremlin to contend with compounding pressures without easy ways to offset them. Russian capability can be brought down to its true size by stripping the Kremlin of its sanctuaries and safety nets.

Western strategy should focus not only on imposing multiple dilemmas on the Kremlin but also on imposing the most painful ones. First, Russia’s military failures are a lynchpin that makes other actions to degrade Russia’s military capability more effective. Helping Ukraine restore maneuver to the battlefield, building on momentum afforded by Ukraine’s operation in Kursk, and reinforcing the already successful efforts to demilitarize Crimea are therefore strategic, not only operational, priorities.[39] The United States can help Ukraine do so by opening all legitimate military targets within Russia for strikes with US weapons; increasing the speed and scale of capability deliveries to Ukraine; and surging US and partner defense production to sustain the momentum of capability deliveries to Ukraine. Second, Putin's center of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself.[40] The US must adopt a strategy to persistently dismantle the Kremlin-generated alternative reality that helps Russia advance in the real world.

The West must abandon its reactive mentality that seeks to contain Russia through countermeasures. Countermeasures are inherently reactive. The effort to limit the Kremlin’s access to Western technologies is an example of a cat-and-mouse game, in which the West grants Russia turns to adapt its sanction-evasion techniques. The West can instead anticipate Russia’s likely pivots to pre-emptively block its moves.[41] This non-trivial effort would require the United States to proactively coordinate across theaters with partners.[42] Any war that the United States will fight or help to fight, however, will have the same requirement.

2. Excessive U.S. pressure on Taiwan defense spending plays into CCP's hands

Here is Elbridge Colby's X/twtter response to this article:

Elbridge Colby

@ElbridgeColby

·

2h

Here's the problem with this argument:

- Taiwan is very underprepared to defeat China's best strategy: an invasion.

- Taiwan has very limited time to arm up and get ready to deter/defeat a PRC attack.

- Americans are watching closely to see how serious Taiwanese are. 1/Quote

ogasawara_yoshiyuki

@ogasawara_yoshi

·

9h

Excessive U.S. pressure on Taiwan defense spending plays into CCP's hands: Taipei needs encouragement, not punishment.

I hope Mr. Elbridge Colby @ElbridgeColby has time to look at my piece in Nikkei Asia.

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Excessive-U.S.-pressure-on-Taiwan-defense-spending-plays-into-CCP-s-hands

Excessive U.S. pressure on Taiwan defense spending plays into CCP's hands

American policy influencers should explain that Taipei needs encouragement, not punishment

Yoshiyuki Ogasawara

August 15, 2024 17:05 JST

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Excessive-U.S.-pressure-on-Taiwan-defense-spending-plays-into-CCP-s-hands#

Yoshiyuki Ogasawara is a professor emeritus at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan). He has been observing the development of Taiwanese politics for the past 30 years.

"Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we're no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn't give us anything," Donald Trump told Bloomberg recently.

These comments came as no surprise, as the Republican presidential candidate and former president repeatedly says that allies of the U.S. should ramp up military spending.

In recent years, quite a few American politicians and foreign policy experts have vocally demanded that Taiwan increase its defense spending. Elbridge Colby, an official in the Trump administration, wrote a piece for the Taipei Times in May in which he argued that Taipei should increase its budget from the current 2.5% of annual gross domestic product to at least 5%. He basically said that Taiwan should not expect U.S. support if it fails to do so.

Such remarks have prompted debate in Taiwan. Former President Ma Ying-jeou (who in April traveled to Beijing to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping) has said that "money-pit bills" for arms purchases would ruin public finances and only benefit the U.S. defense industry.

I agree with Colby that Taiwan needs to make more efforts to strengthen its defense capability. But I feel uneasy about the way some U.S. politicians discuss the security of Taiwan without considering the nature of public opinion in Taiwan. Defense capabilities do not arise just from military expenditures, but also from the stability of the government and the determination of the people.

Taiwan's defense budget reached 3% of gross domestic product in 2008 but then decreased over the eight years of Ma's Kuomintang (KMT) administrations to 2.1% in 2016. Under the following Democratic Progressive Party administrations of President Tsai Ing-wen (2016-2024), it rose to 2.5%. But measured in terms of New Taiwan dollars, the budget increased by 66% over the past eight years from NT$365.8 billion ($11.2 billion) to NT$606.8 billion. So it is not as if Taiwan isn't making an effort.

Taiwan's new Advanced Jet Trainer aircraft fly at an air force base in Taitung, Taiwan, on July 6, 2022. Taipei's defense budget is currently as much as 2.5% of annual gross domestic product. © Reuters

But considering the structure of party politics in Taiwan, it is difficult to increase the defense budget dramatically over a short period. Even though the current administration of President Lai Ching-te intends to boost military spending, opposition parties are likely to block such a move in the Legislative Yuan. A gradual increase seems to be the realistic option.

Taiwanese society has, in general, been resilient in the face of Chinese pressure because a majority of people believe the U.S. would help Taiwan in any emergency. In reality, it is not possible for Taiwan alone to defend itself against an invasion by China. But, still, Taiwan's military would be able to inflict great damage to the People's Liberation Army, and this could make the Chinese leadership think twice about making any such move.

The best way for the Chinese Communist Party to achieve unification is to take Taiwan without waging war. For that purpose, China has been trying to intimidate Taiwan, penetrate its society and intervene in domestic politics. The authoritarian state seeks to undermine the democratic system by poisoning public opinion.

The CCP has been trying to spread skepticism about the U.S. in Taiwan -- the aim of which is to create the perception that Washington is unreliable.

They have various narratives: Taiwan would be abandoned by the U.S. in the end; the reason why the U.S. is so willing to sell weapons to Taiwan is to let the Taiwanese shed blood, while no American soldier would be deployed; the real purpose of the U.S. is to use Taiwan as a pawn to check China's development; and so on.

For people influenced by this spreading of skepticism, spending more on the military has no meaning. They too do not want to be ruled by the CCP, but may be willing to first negotiate to prolong the survival of Taiwan as a self-governed entity for as long as possible. Polls show that around 30% of voters have such views, and thus cannot be ignored.

If the next U.S. administration actually tries to force Taiwan to increase the military budget to 5% of GDP, it could trigger a domestic political uproar, possibly leading to a more Beijing-friendly president after the next election in 2028. A KMT administration would be more susceptible to pressure from China -- disadvantageous to Washington's Indo-Pacific strategy.

People in Taiwan have a strong attachment to America, especially as they think the U.S. is the only country that Taiwan could truly rely on in the event of a military crisis. At the same time, people fear that the U.S. could pull the rug out from under Taiwan.

They have cause to fear this. In 1979, the U.S. abandoned its recognition of the Republic of China (the formal name for Taiwan) as the legitimate representative of all China, in order to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China (the formal name for China.) This dismayed many Taiwanese people, even though they became grateful to the U.S. later for giving great support by enacting the Taiwan Relations Act, which allows Washington to have unofficial government-to-government contacts with Taiwan.

It is true that the sense of crisis in Taiwanese society is not strong. However, this also has advantages, as Xi's attempts to threaten Taiwan have had little effect on the public. This can be called the "great insensitivity of the Taiwanese people." If the majority of Taiwanese voters were very sensitive to such matters, Taiwan would have been psychologically subjugated by China by now.

On the surface, Taiwan appears to be a small, powerless entity being rocked to and fro by the U.S. and China. But the fact is, Taiwan also influences the strategies of the two superpowers and so should not be treated like a pawn in a great game.

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, stateside discussions on Taiwan will inevitably be conducted with American voters in mind. It is important that some people in influential U.S. positions grasp the nuances and complexity of the Taiwan issue.

If Washington starts pressuring Taipei too much on defense, that could end up pushing it into the CCP's trap. Taiwan needs encouragement, not punishment.

3. The Ukrainian August 2024 offensive: Some initial thoughts

Thu, 08/15/2024 - 7:40pm

The Ukrainian August 2024 offensive:

Some initial thoughts

By Martin N Stanton, COL, USA (ret)

 https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/ukrainian-august-2024-offensive-some-initial-thoughts

Introduction:

In recent weeks the Ukrainians have sustained a division (-) sized offensive deep into Russian territory southeast of Kursk traveling over the same ground that saw some of the largest tank battles in WW2. This offensive surprised the Russians and they have not been very effective in countering it. It is the most significant development in the Ukraine war in over a year. Below are some of my initial thoughts on this. 

Some observations of the Ukrainian August offensive:

• The Ukrainians practiced good OPSEC – The offensive came as surprise to many observers in the West (including myself) and that’s good. The fact that they were able to mask the preparations for an attack of this size is impressive. It speaks well of their ability to hide important movements not only from the Russians but from friendly Western elements… that frequently leak like sieves (I would be fascinated to learn how much US representatives in Ukraine were told about it before the attack kicked off – I suspect not much). The ability to mass forces without drawing enemy attention in this drone / ISR intensive war is impressive. We need to go to school on how they did it and what kind of Russian reconnaissance threat they were facing.  

• The Ukrainians had good Intelligence – The Ukrainians knew where the Russians were weak and penetrated there. They also appear to have had sufficient knowledge of Russian reserves and reinforcement capability to not get bogged down fighting on the first defensive belt and instead penetrate deeper – again, an unusual event in a war that has been relatively static in the manner of WW1 trench warfare for over a year. It will be interesting in the future to find out how much intelligence was provided by outside friends and how much was developed with indigenous ISR capabilities. How ever they obtained their knowledge of the Russians dispositions and capabilities in the critical sector, they made good use of it.

• They were able to sustain a drive – Not only did the Ukrainians pick the right spot to attack into Russia; they also kept going. They expanded their penetration and conducted combat operations while they were doing it using a fair amount of logistics and conducting forward resupply and re-fit operations in stride. This means sustainment of operations – which were a major Ukrainian shortcoming for much of the war, have (at least in this offensive) been addressed as an issue. If not perfectly, at least “good enough”. This is huge. Sustaining drives has been a major shortcoming of both armies in the Ukraine war. The implications of this (to date) successful offensive are significant.

• The Ukrainians appear to be able to hold what they have taken, at least for now – The Ukrainians appear to be consolidating their gains inside Russia. Every day they hold a place is time for them to create the kind of defenses that make maneuver hard and that the Russians have difficulty penetrating. Even if they don’t intend to hold the full extent of their penetration, they can create a defensive belt miles inside Russian territory and then withdraw in good order to occupy it. 

Positive Impacts of the August Offensive

• They have inflicted losses on the Russians – The Ukrainians appear to have decimated the Russian units that were spread out in an economy-of-force role holding this front. Not huge losses mind you but not insignificant ones either. More importantly, the casualties do appear to have been in a lopsided nature (IE significantly fewer Ukrainian than Russian). In this “You Tube” war where truth is hard to discern due to the exaggerated claims of everyone on both sides posting, the current Ukrainian offensive does appear to have done well in this regard. None of the Ukrainian units involved appear to have been reduced to combat ineffectiveness as far as I can tell, while several Russian units likely have been. 

• The Ukrainian offensive has forced Russia to shift forces – The Russians are moving forces to contain the penetration (I originally wrote the Russians were “racing” to move forces, but this would have given the wrong impression, even in an emergency their movements have been relatively sclerotic). These are either reserves that cannot no be committed to other fronts or forces repositioned from those other fronts directly. This means the Russians ability to conduct offensive operations anywhere else has taken a big hit. Nor does it appear that the Russians will be able to mass sufficient forces to drive the Ukrainians out anytime soon. 

• The Ukrainians now hold Russian territory as a bargaining chip for negotiations. This is a huge development. Prior to this offensive the Russian strategy was clearly to wear the Ukrainians down to force a peace on them that codified the new national borders on the existing front lines – which were all inside Ukraine. No longer. The Ukrainians now hold territory inside Russia that they can use as a negotiating lever to force Russian withdrawal. Ending the war on the boundaries that existed before Feb 2022 would be a disaster for Putin.

• Provides morale boost for Ukrainian forces, nation and international supporters – The success of this offensive has been a huge shot in the arm for Ukraine. The unending grimness of trench warfare and its seemingly limitless casualty lists was sapping the morale of Ukraine and its international supporters alike. For the first time in a long time something other than a forced peace at severe disadvantage seems possible. 

Things are looking up, but Ukraine isn’t out of the woods by any means:

                 The August offensive has been a good news story all round, no doubt about it. There are still ways it could turn bad though. It’s important we examine them.

• The Ukrainians could penetrate too far and overextend themselves: Seizing Russian territory as a bargaining chip is all for the good, but the Ukrainians must avoid taking more terrain than they can reasonably hold and still maintain a mobile reserve. The last thing they need is for the Russians to (finally) get organized and cut off their penetration from the flanks like they cut off the Germans at Stalingrad. The Ukrainians should hold only what they can defend and sustain.

• Unrealistic expectations in negotiations: The Ukrainians may be able to get back all the territory that the Russians have taken since Feb of 2022 or most of it at least. Trying to get the Crimea back would probably be something the Russians would balk at. Right now, the Russians are reeling. This could make them in more of a mood to negotiate.  Asking for too much could harden their stance. Victory is getting back to Feb 2022.

• Russian Tactical Nuclear use: Putting on my “Red Team” hat, I’m frankly surprised the Russians haven’t used tac nukes in the Ukraine war. They’d be the war winning “Easy” button; a quick way to force Ukraine to terms. This makes me think less of Putin – who plays the role of a hard man but who lacked the courage to spare his nation the massive losses they’ve suffered by using a few 10KT airburst weapons. Harry Truman had more guts. That said, continued embarrassment around Kursk could lead to tactical nuclear weapons use in a desperation move. Once he realizes that the West would squawk but not really do anything of substance, Putin might lose his inhibitions about using them more frequently. I assess this as low probability, but it’s not out of the question. 

Summary

       The August offensive has been a huge black eye for Putin and has changed the dynamics of the Ukraine war in a way not seen in over a year. It’s been an all-around good news story for Ukraine when they badly needed one. It could (as opposed to “will”) shape the outcome of the war to something more favorable to Ukraine. Let’s hope they can keep the momentum.

About the Author(s)

Martin Stanton

Martin Stanton is a retired Army officer currently residing in Florida. The opinions expressed are his own and do not reflect any official DOD or USG position.

4. SOCOM commander calls for ‘convergence’ of Pacific-based special operations forces

A new term for me:

Fenton said that “international SOF convergence” to counter such gray zone activities means “creating new partnerships, uniting existing partners into a more resilient, powerful and capable network, woven together in this region by a shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

SOCOM commander calls for ‘convergence’ of Pacific-based special operations forces

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 15, 2024

U.S. Army Gen. Bryan Fenton, head of U.S. Special Operations Command, speaks Aug. 14, 2024, to an international audience attending the three-day Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium in Honolulu. (Wyatt Olson/Stars and Stripes)

WAIKIKI BEACH, Hawaii — The decade ahead will require an international coterie of special operations forces to counteract malign advances by the likes of Russia and China, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command said Wednesday.

“This is an era of converging waves, global challenges, so to speak, that require an international SOF convergence,” Gen. Bryan Fenton said during a keynote address at the three-day Indo-Pacific Irregular Warfare Symposium at Waikiki Beach.

The symposium is hosted by the Global Special Operations Forces Foundation, a nonprofit professional organization based in Tampa, Fla., dedicated to advancing the capabilities and efficacy of special forces.

Irregular warfare defies easy definition, but generally describes conflict carried out in domains such as economics, cyber and information rather than conventional, kinetic warfare.

“Irregular warfare is a critical tool for the Department of Defense to campaign across the spectrum of conflict, enhance interoperability and access, and disrupt competitor warfighting advantages while reinforcing our own,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in an August 2023 memo announcing updated guidance for irregular warfare.

Interoperability is the military term for one country’s ability to use the training methods and equipment of another country.

U.S. and South Korean special operations troops team up for realistic training in Jinhae, South Korea, Aug. 23, 2023. (Steven Patzer/U.S. Navy)

U.S. Special Operations Command directs the special operator component commands of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force.

“This week’s gathering here of special operations teammates and academia and industry and businesses from all over the globe is an international SOF convergence, and that makes this a conference of consequence,” Fenton told the audience, which included representatives from special operations units from more than two dozen nations.

Fenton oversees 70,000 special operations personnel and an annual budget of $14 billion.

He is a former deputy commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and deputy commanding general of the 25th Infantry Division in Hawaii.

Christopher Maier, assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, highlighted the tasks ahead for special operations during a speech Wednesday.

“The threats and challenges in the Indo-Pacific are transnational and coming at us through all domains — and it feels like with unprecedented velocity,” said Maier, who formerly headed the DOD’s Defeat-ISIS Task Force.

“From the perspective of the national defense strategy, which continues to be our North Star in the Department of Defense, it’s Russia’s malign activities that pose an acute threat to regional and global stability, while North Korea continues to attempt to destabilize this region and the People’s Republic of China remains our long-term pacing challenge of those competitors,” he said.

But only China possesses the intent — and increasingly the economic, diplomatic, technological and military capability — to reshape the current rules-based international system, Maier said.

China’s “semi-permissive legal environment” allows it to piggyback on criminal activities to extend its influence throughout the region, he said.

“Here we see Chinese money-laundering organizations use many complex techniques, including trade-based schemes, informal value transfer systems such as cryptocurrency exchanges and underground banking systems to extend their reach,” Maier said.

“China sees the rising global reach and influence of criminal groups as another tool with which it can advance its Belt and Road Initiative and its new Global Security Initiative, which aims directly at countering global security norms.”

Fenton said that “international SOF convergence” to counter such gray zone activities means “creating new partnerships, uniting existing partners into a more resilient, powerful and capable network, woven together in this region by a shared vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Stars and Stripes · by Wyatt Olson · August 15, 2024

5. Mongolia finds ways to align with the West without alarming China, Russia

Although wrongly mentioned in the earlier version there was a Mongolia Forum last month (as well as the UB Dialogue). I was happy to participate in that forum. I have been impressed with Mongolia during my engagements there over the past couple of years. It is really of the fact that it has made the transition from communism to democracy and it wants to serve as not only an example for others but also as a convening authority to work on geopolitical issues. I like the "third neighbor" concept as well.

Mongolia finds ways to align with the West without alarming China, Russia

August 15, 2024 6:03 AM

• By John Xie
• https://www.voanews.com/a/mongolia-finds-ways-to-align-with-the-west-without-alarming-china-russia/7743595.html

Washington — 

Landlocked between Russia and China, analysts say Mongolia is finding ways to balance its outreach to Western democratic nations without alarming it neighbors to the north or south.

Although Mongolia regards China and Russia as its top foreign and economic priorities, with most of its trade transiting the two, it has also committed to deepening and developing relations with the United States, Japan, the European Union and other democracies, calling these countries its "third neighbors."

Sean King, senior vice president of Park Strategies, a New York-based political consultancy, tells VOA, "They're smart to involve us as much as possible as a counterweight to Moscow and Beijing."

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken concluded his latest trip to Asia earlier this month in Mongolia, where he emphasized the country is the United States’ "core partner" in the Indo-Pacific and that such partners are "reaching new levels every day."

Blinken’s visit came after the two sides held their first comprehensive strategic dialogue in Washington.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida was scheduled to visit Mongolia this week, but the trip was canceled as Japan braces for a rare major earthquake predicted for the coming week. Instead, the two sides spoke by phone on August 13.

Leaders of democracies who visited Mongolia the past few months include German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and Philippine Foreign Secretary Enrique Manalo. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Mongolia for the first time last year.

The State Department said that including Mongolia as one of two countries in Campbell's diplomatic debut "underscores the United States' strong commitment to freedom and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific and beyond."

Swiss President Viola Amherd and Mongolian President Ukhnaa Khurelsukh attend a welcome ceremony on Sukhbaatar Square in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, Aug. 2, 2024.

Charles Krusekopf, founder and associate director of the American Center of Mongolian Studies, told VOA, "Being able to have some regional presence by having a close relationship with Mongolia, having a friend in the region, I think, is important to the United States."

The June 2019 edition of the U.S. Defense Department’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” includes Mongolia, along with New Zealand, Taiwan and Singapore, in the camp of Indo-Pacific democracies, positioning them as "reliable, competent and natural partners."

Despite its geographical location, which limits its diplomatic space to maneuver, Mongolia has managed to maintain close relations with all parties, from the U.S., China, and Russia to North and South Korea, making it an exception in complex geopolitics.

At last month's Ulaanbaatar Dialogue, government officials and strategic experts from eight countries, including Britain, China, Japan, Russia, South Korea and the United States, gathered in Ulaanbaatar to discuss the most pressing strategic issues in Asia today, including tensions on the Korean Peninsula.

"It's one of the rare places in which people from all countries of the region can come together to meet, and it's considered kind of a neutral ground," Krusekopf tells VOA.

Mongolia abstained from U.N. resolutions in 2022 and 2023 that condemned Moscow’s annexation of Ukrainian territory and demanded that Russian troops leave the country.

Mongolian President Ukhnaagiin Khurelsukh and Prime Minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai also met with Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang, respectively, last year.

Oyun-Erdene visited China just a month before his state visit to the U.S., where the two countries issued the U.S.-Mongolia Joint Statement on the Strategic Third Neighbor Partnership.

Shortly before Blinken's visit this month, Mongolia held its annual military exercise called Khan Exploration, which, although it was a peacekeeping exercise, was attended not only by troops from the U.S. and Japan but also China.

Krusekopf says with most of Mongolia’s foreign trade being mining exports through China, Beijing doesn’t feel a threat from Western security interests there.

"Mongolia is friends with everyone in the region. It's never been a threat to other countries, and they're seen as a middle country. And it's a broker in that region," he said.

Editor's note: An earlier version of this story erroneously referred to the Ulaanbaatar Dialogue as the Mongolia Forum. VOA regrets the error.

6. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 15, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, August 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-august-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Ukrainian officials are taking steps to consolidate and coordinate the management of ongoing Ukrainian operations in Kursk Oblast while continuing to highlight Ukrainian advances.

• Russian milbloggers claimed that Ukrainian forces continued advancing in some areas in Kursk Oblast amid a generally slower tempo of Ukrainian operations in the area.

• Russian forces are maintaining their relatively high offensive tempo in Donetsk Oblast, demonstrating that the Russian military command continues to prioritize advances in eastern Ukraine even as Ukraine is pressuring Russian forces within Kursk Oblast.

• The Kremlin and the Russian military command are creating a complicated, overlapping, and so far, ineffective command and control (C2) structure for the Russian response to the Ukrainian incursion in Kursk Oblast.

• The delayed establishment of a complicated Russian C2 structure in Kursk Oblast continues to highlight the fact that the Kremlin failed to plan for the possibility of a significant Ukrainian incursion into Russia.

• The Kremlin appears to have a more coordinated approach to securing its control over the Russian information space than to addressing its military and C2 problems in Kursk Oblast.

• The Kremlin is likely trying to hastily create a new information space that predominantly features coopted Russian milbloggers and established Russian state propagandists.

• Ukrainian forces are reportedly using Western-provided equipment in Kursk Oblast but remain limited in their ability to strike Russian military targets within Russia with Western-provided weapons.

• Ukraine is organizing the creation of a humanitarian corridor through which to evacuate Russian civilians who are impacted by the ongoing Kursk operation, filling an apparent vacuum left by the Kursk Oblast administration and fulfilling international legal requirements for the evacuation of civilian populations.

• The Ukrainian General Staff reported that Ukrainian forces successfully conducted drone strikes against Russian air bases in Russia on the night of August 13 to 14.

• Russian forces recently made confirmed advances in the Pokrovsk and Toretsk directions.

• The Russian government submitted a bill on August 15 to lower the admission age for the Russian Volunteer Society for Assistance to the Army, Aviation, and Navy of Russia (DOSAAF) from 18 years of age to 14.

7. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 15, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, August 15, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-august-15-2024

Key Takeaways:

• Iran: Iran is likely trying to build operational surprise ahead of its expected attack on Israel. CTP-ISW continues to assess that the most likely course of action is that Iran and its Axis of Resistance will conduct a coordinated drone and missile attack on Israel.

• Hostage-ceasefire negotiations: The US, Egyptian, Israeli, and Qatari officials met in Doha for the latest round of ceasefire-hostage negotiations. Hamas refused to attend but sent officials to engage in indirect talks.

• Gaza Strip: Hamas met with three other Palestinian militias in the Gaza Strip to discuss ceasefire-hostage negotiation and post-war governance. It is notable that the Hamas meeting in the Gaza Strip did not include several prominent Palestinian militias.

• Syria: The IRGC announced the death of an IRGC Aerospace Force colonel from injuries sustained in an airstrike in Syria. The death reflects the increasingly prominent role that the IRGC Aerospace Force has adopted in Iranian extraterritorial operations in recent years. 

8. In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 5)

I really hope that Sean Naylor and Jack Murphy turn this series into a full length biography on Willie Merkerson.

In The Kill Zone: The Life and Times of Willie Merkerson (Part 5)

https://thehighside.substack.com/p/in-the-kill-zone-the-life-and-times-e68?utm

Part 5: Desert Deliverance

Sean D. Naylor and Jack Murphy

Aug 16, 2024

∙ Paid

The Ethiopian Jewish village of Balankab in the 19th century. The Jewish population of Ethiopia had been there for centuries but suffered greatly during the famines of the 1970s and 1980s.

It was long past midnight when Hume Horan, the U.S. ambassador to Sudan, drove out to Khartoum International Airport, hours after it had officially shut down for the evening. 

The capital was silent. CIA paramilitary case officer Willie Merkerson described it as the time of night when, in a Muslim city, “you can hear a rat licking ice.” 

Almost every night that month at the airport, something extraordinary had been occurring. Now Horan wanted to see it for himself. 

The ambassador’s car pulled into a position from which the noted Arabist could observe the flight line, where a single Boeing 707 from an obscure, Belgium-based charter airline was parked. As Horan watched through his car window, four buses emerged from the darkness…

A lost tribe

There had been a Jewish community in Ethiopia for many centuries, living in remote villages cut off from the main streams of Judaism – and indeed, from modernity itself. But increasing persecution in the mostly Christian nation, coupled with the ravages of drought, had prompted thousands to flee to refugee camps in Sudan.

Starting in the late 1970s, their plight had become a cause celebre among some North American and Israeli Jews. Israel’s then prime minister, Menachem Begin, ordered the country’s intelligence service, the Mossad, to do what it could to rescue them.

But because of the increasingly Islamist nature of President Jaafar al-Nimeiri’s regime, which was dominated by Arabs from Sudan’s north, any mission to spirit the Ethiopian Jews from Sudan to Israel would be extraordinarily sensitive. It would also be dangerous. Unlike the United States, Israel did not have diplomatic relations with Sudan, meaning it had no embassy in Khartoum, and thus no ability to put intelligence officers under official (i.e., diplomatic) cover.

The Israeli operation, which began in the late 1970s, involved substantial bribes to senior figures in both the Ethiopian and Sudanese regimes. But soon it also involved the United States because, according to Milt Bearden, chief of the CIA’s Khartoum station from 1983 to 1985, Israel lacked the capacity to move thousands of individuals from an Islamist country.

“Getting the Ethiopian Jews out of Sudan was a very major part of my work, maybe THE major part of my work in Sudan,” Hume Horan, the U.S. ambassador in Khartoum from 1983 to 1986, told a State Department historian.

The initial U.S. support to the effort was run through the office of Jerry Weaver, who handled refugee issues at the embassy. A larger-than-life character who spent his free time in Sudan big-game hunting and partying with local women, Weaver had made a mid-career transition into the Foreign Service after becoming dissatisfied with academia, according to a detailed description of his role in “The Arabists,” by Robert D. Kaplan. Weaver’s method was simple. He smuggled the Ethiopian Jews out of Khartoum’s airport “up to a hundred at a time” in plain sight as passengers on commercial airline flights, said David Shinn, who at the time was the U.S. Embassy’s deputy chief of mission.

In mid-1983 Weaver, who died in 2016, was moving about a hundred Ethiopian Jews a month out of Sudan using this method and told Horan that he expected that by early 1984 they would be, in Kaplan’s words, “all gone.” A series of factors rendered that prediction wildly optimistic.

First, moving all the refugees in the pipeline out using Weaver’s method would have strained the capacity of the airlines. “There are only so many of these folks you can put on a commercial aircraft at any given time,” Shinn told The High Side.

Second, the airlines were already starting to complain. “You were getting these totally uneducated folks who had probably never even seen a modern toilet filling up their airlines or taking over a significant chunk of it,” Shinn said. “My guess is the other passengers on the airplane were saying, ‘What the hell is going on here? We’re paying good money for a nice commercial flight on Swissair or whatever out of Khartoum, and we’re traveling with these folks who haven’t had a bath in six months?’”

Third, a worsening drought in Ethiopia meant the flow of impoverished Jewish refugees into Sudan was increasing faster than Weaver could move them out using the airlines.

By now hunger was killing an average of eight Ethiopian Jews a day at the main camp where the refugees were gathered in Sudan, according to Kaplan. Time was running out.

Its close relations with Israel, as well as pressure from Jewish groups in the United States, forced the Reagan administration to pay attention to the issue. For diplomatic, political and humanitarian reasons, therefore, a new way out of Sudan for the Ethiopian Jews had to be found.

“It became a huge humanitarian problem and the only people that could step up to it was the United States,” Bearden told The Team House podcast (hosted by the co-author of this series, Jack Murphy). “The way things worked in Sudan was the CIA probably had as good amount of leverage with the government as almost anybody.”

After meetings in Geneva, Switzerland, between Weaver, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Princeton Lyman, several Israeli officials and the Sudanese commissioner for refugees, the beginnings of an agreement were reached. That deal was sealed in talks in Khartoum between Horan, Milt Bearden and Nimeiri’s security chief, First Vice President Maj. Gen. Omar Mohammed el-Tayeb.

Maj. Gen. Omar Mohammed El-Tayeb, who ran Sudan’s State Security Organization. A close ally of the CIA, Tayeb was paid a lot of money to help arrange the evacuation of Ethiopian Jews through Sudan.

To say that Bearden, the CIA station chief, enjoyed a close relationship with Tayeb, who ran the State Security Organization – responsible for domestic and foreign intelligence – would be an understatement. “I had to almost go every day very early in the morning to meet him to make him have a good day, and then maybe later in the day [to] reassure him that he was having a good day,” Bearden told The High Side.

Tayeb’s trust in Bearden largely accounted for the one condition upon which the Sudanese official insisted when it came to the refugee deal: that the CIA handle everything, which he presumably thought would reduce the risk of any information about the operation reaching the public. In addition, according to Bearden, Tayeb wanted to minimize Weaver’s involvement. “Tayeb couldn’t stand the guy, because he thought he was uncontrollable,” Bearden said. (In “The Arabists,” Kaplan quotes Weaver telling a completely different story: “‘Omar and I got on,’ says Weaver. Of course, this was exactly what Weaver excelled at: shooting the breeze about guns and animal hunting with Arab military types.”)

Washington politics, plus Weaver’s experience in working all sides of the refugee issue, meant that the CIA “deputized” Weaver to run the next phase of the operation, according to Kaplan. Bearden described it differently. “I had him work with the Sudanese security service,” he said. “I didn’t ‘deputize’ Jerry. That [refugee operation] would have been his thing anyway.”

“At that point it started … to get a little messy,” said a former senior U.S. Embassy official. “Things started to unravel in terms of administering the program.” Part of the problem was the deteriorating relationship between Jerry Weaver and Milt Bearden, according to the former senior U.S. Embassy official.

“Jerry had been running this operation, and very successfully, I might add … and kept it quiet and got these people out at minimal cost,” the former senior embassy official said. “But once he seemed to have lost control of it [to the CIA], which he essentially did, I think he was hurt … I think he knew where the action had moved to, which was the agency, and he was very unhappy about it.” Bearden agreed. Weaver “was badly by hurt by all of this,” he said.

Meanwhile, Bearden and the local Mossad representatives continued to hold occasional clandestine meetings to plan the finer details of the rescue mission.

“A good idea at the time”

The operation that the CIA and Mossad put together involved Trans European Airways, a Belgian charter airline whose owner, an Orthodox Jew named Georges Gutelman, was close to the Mossad. Ironically, TEA had built a business flying Sudanese Muslims to Mecca for the Hajj pilgrimage from a special Khartoum airport terminal reserved for that purpose. The plan for what became known as Operation Moses simply substituted Ethiopian Jewish refugees for Sudanese Muslim pilgrims.

With Tayeb’s help, Bearden persuaded Nimeiri “to allow flights in quite literally every other night to fill up a Boeing 707 with these people, and they were very quietly brought into Khartoum airport, put on the airplane and off it went,” he told The Team House. However, when it came to running the operation itself, Bearden insisted that his role was minimal. “I was nowhere near in charge of that Belgian airline thing, although Tayeb must have thought I was,” he told The High Side. “Operation Moses,” Bearden’s deputy, Alan Platt, told the Operation Crest podcast earlier this year, “was run by the Israelis.”

The operation was “facilitated by foreign extraction experts carrying a variety of passports,” Horan told the State Department historian. “These men struck me as reliable, reassuring, and serious. They spoke English but they just had a kind of gray internationalism to them. I had no doubt that their real nationality was Israeli.”

Together with Weaver, the Mossad officers designed a smooth-running operation, according to the U.S. ambassador. “We knew that speed and discretion were essential to the success of the extractions,” Horan said. “A convoy of buses would gather the Ethiopians from their camps, drive them in the earliest morning hours to Khartoum airport, board them...and the planes would be gone.”

The operation, which began on Nov. 21, 1984, was supposed to be hidden from the Sudanese public but was nonetheless conducted “with the assistance of the Sudanese intelligence service, because I asked them, and I got … el-Tayeb to agree to this,” Bearden told The High Side.

However, it took more than just Bearden’s powers of persuasion to get Tayeb and other Sudanese leaders to allow Israeli spies to shuttle Jewish refugees to Israel (via Brussels, according to Kaplan) using a terminal that was supposed to be reserved for Islamic pilgrims. “The Sudanese government was paid a horrendous amount of money to facilitate that by Mossad,” Merkerson said.

Bearden declined to say whether any of that money came out of CIA coffers, but he acknowledged that Tayeb, who died in 2023, profited from the situation.

“Tayeb always knew that he was a banana peel away from a disaster at any given time,” he said. “He had some very special deals and I think he benefited from it greatly.”

Bearden credited the Sudanese with smoothing the process – handled by Weaver, the Mossad and the CIA – of getting “a couple of hundred [refugees] a night” onto the aircraft. “I went a couple of times to watch the operation … and those people were on a plane very, very quickly from the buses,” he said. “They handled this very well, the Sudanese.”

It was around this time, according to Kaplan in “The Arabists,” that Horan drove out to the airport to see the operation for himself, sitting in his car as four buses still carrying traces of desert sand appeared out of the night and drove onto the tarmac. Stopping beside the plane, the buses disgorged hundreds of passengers who could not have differed more from the cosmopolitan types who typically flew in and out of the airport on Lufthansa and Swissair. Ragged, emaciated and free of any luggage, the diminutive Jewish refugees seemed “straight out of a biblical time warp,” Kaplan writes. Each carried a piece of ribbon, the specific color of which denoted that this was his or her day to fly.

The visit left Horan visibly moved. “I felt at that moment we were really behaving like Americans should,” he told Kaplan. “No matter what was going to happen to these people, you knew they were going to be better off where they were going than where they were.”

For six weeks, the operation ran smoothly. By the turn of the year, only a couple of thousand refugees at most were left in the pipeline. The end was in sight. But a series of reports in the Israeli press brought the airlift to a premature end.

Tudor Parfitt, in his 1985 book “Operation Moses: The Untold Story of the Secret Exodus of the Falasha Jews from Ethiopia,” writes that it was a pair of January 3, 1985, articles in Israeli tabloids – and a resultant Associated Press story – that forced the Israeli government to acknowledge the operation in a press conference. The embarrassed Nimeiri regime immediately ordered a halt to the evacuation. Hundreds of Jewish refugees remained stranded in the desert, but Operation Moses was over.

To Merkerson, the secret was bound to come out once the decision had been made to use the Hajj terminal, a facility that usually only handled planes during the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca, which in 1984 occurred in early September and in 1985 in late August. “That’s when they made their first mistake,” Merkerson said. “They got greedy,” he said, adding that he was referring to both the Mossad, which wanted to move refugees out at a faster pace, and the Sudanese leaders, who were only too happy to take the Mossad’s bribes.

The Mossad’s eagerness was understandable, due to Nimeiri’s declining popularity, according to Merkerson. “Mossad knew that the time was going to run out sooner rather than later because of the tenuous nature of the government,” he said.

However, the Israelis had not taken into account the difficulty of moving hundreds of people silently in the middle of the night in Khartoum, according to Merkerson. “Most Muslim places, when it gets still, it gets real quiet,” he said. “Anything moving near the Hajj terminal is going to draw attention.” Once it was discovered that not only was the terminal being used for non-Hajj purposes, but that the people being transported were Jews going to Israel, Nimeiri’s domestic reputation, already plummeting due to Sudan’s economic woes, took another major hit.

To Bearden, the only surprise was that the operation was not compromised earlier. “Too many people [had] to be involved in that every night,” he said. “How is it possible that it didn’t get exposed earlier? … But we got – still – a shitload of them out.”

As to whose decision it was to use the Hajj terminal, while Merkerson blamed the Mossad, Bearden said it was “probably” a Sudanese decision and certainly wasn’t the CIA’s. “I wouldn’t have picked what terminal they used,” he said.

However, the blowback when the use of the Hajj terminal became public brought the decision into question, Bearden acknowledged. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The veep as case officer

A later Sudanese government investigation said that between Nov. 21, 1984, and Jan. 4, 1985, 28 TEA flights carrying Ethiopian Jews had departed Khartoum, according to The Washington Post. Kaplan, who interviewed both Horan and Weaver while they were still alive, puts the number of flights at 35, each carrying 240 refugees.

If the latter numbers are correct, that would put the number of Ethiopian Jews flown to Israel during Operation Moses at 8,400. However, the abrupt end to the mission had left several hundred Jews stranded in the Sudanese desert. “Somebody had to do something about it,” Bearden told The Team House.

That somebody was then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.

A former CIA director, Bush had become the Reagan administration’s point man on the issue of the Ethiopian Jews. In early March 1985, he stopped in Khartoum during a visit to Africa. (Ahead of Bush’s arrival, Merkerson worked with the Secret Service advance team, introducing them to the Sudanese special operations and presidential guard units he had already trained in the art of VIP protection.)

The main purpose of Bush’s visit was to find a solution to the problem posed by several hundred Jews – some estimates said almost a thousand – who had been on the list to leave via Operation Moses before it was shut down but were now living in awful conditions in a desert camp. The vice president had a meeting scheduled with Nimeiri for March 6, but first he visited Bearden at the CIA station. “He said, ‘There’s a little pressure in Washington: What are we going to do about these people out there in the desert?’” Bearden told The Team House.

Bearden knew the vice president from the latter’s tenure as CIA director and from Bush’s previous visits to stations to which Bearden had been assigned. He regarded him as “absolutely reliable, smart as a whip, and decisive,” he told The Team House.

That inside knowledge of Bush’s capabilities informed Bearden’s advice to the vice president about how to deal with Nimeiri. “I wrote out on 3-by-5 cards exactly how he should handle [it], what he should say to Nimeiri, and he sort of carried it in his pocket, but memorized it,” Bearden said.

The station chief declined to share the specifics of his advice to the vice president, other than to say that the approach succeeded and Nimeiri agreed to allow the United States to rescue the rest of the Ethiopian Jews. “Bush came back and said, ‘It worked exactly like you said.’ He said, ‘Do this, get it over with.’”

Bush “operated in Sudan like a case officer,” Bearden told The Team House. “He got the president of Sudan to say, ‘Okay, do this, but do it right.’”

CIA Khartoum station chief Milt Bearden (left) with Vice President George H.W. Bush during the latter’s visit to Khartoum in early March 1985. Bearden said Bush “operated in Sudan like a case officer.” (Photo courtesy Milt Bearden)

Bearden, an actual case officer, had already worked to get Tayeb on board: “I just told him that the remaining people, who were beginning to desiccate out in the desert, the last several hundred, were going to be a problem for him. I said, ‘These people start dying off, Omar … and it’s your ass.’ And he said, ‘Do it. Do whatever.’”

According to Kaplan, the morning after Bush’s meeting with Nimeiri, Weaver came into the embassy and wrote the plan for the evacuation of the remaining Jewish refugees. Bearden, however, described what Weaver produced as “input” (that the station chief said he “absolutely welcomed”) into a final product that he produced.

When Tayeb’s deputy at the State Security Organization, General Osman al-Saeed, who “pretty much ran the place,” visited Bearden’s house, the CIA man gave him a copy of a proposal for evacuating the remaining Jewish refugees. Al-Saeed “read it, and said, ‘Okay, I’m going to use this, I’m going to translate it into Arabic and it can be my proposal and I’ll take care of it at the top,’” Bearden said.

Next, CIA Director Bill Casey lent Bearden his personal C-141 Starlifter to bring Tayeb to Washington to arrange the details with the various parts of the U.S. government who had a stake in the exodus from the desert. The plane was the standard long-haul Air Force transport aircraft of its day, but Casey’s came with “a very nice little module that they roll in and strap down in there, which is a very first classy type of accommodation,” Bearden said.

The Sudanese security chief brought along a copy of Bearden’s proposal, which he was now claiming as his own. “It was the plan that [al-Saeed] gave Tayeb to bring to Washington and say, ‘This is our plan for getting them out,’ and so it was all Tayeb’s plan, except it was mine,” Bearden said.

In Washington, Bearden and Tayeb met with officials from the CIA, State Department and the Pentagon to plan the operation. The pair also had breakfast with Bush at the vice president’s official residence at the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, Bush’s kitchen staff had prepared a meal featuring bacon and pork sausages, Bearden told The Team House, adding that rather than eat it, Tayeb, a Muslim, “kind of moved it around on his plate.”

Bearden and Tayeb returned to Khartoum on the same C-141 that had brought them. Flying with them on this leg of the trip was a small team of Delta Force operators who were to help with the evacuation.

“Almost biblical”

The plan called for U.S. Air Force C-130s to airlift the remaining Ethiopian Jews from a desert airstrip several miles north of Gedaref, the site of a big refugee camp about 215 miles southeast of Khartoum. But before the Air Force agreed to the mission, a combined team of CIA officers and at least one U.S. Air Force officer from the defense attache’s office had to first “certify and verify that the landing strips were suitable for [that] kind of aircraft,” Merkerson told The High Side.

A recent map of Sudan showing Khartoum and Gedaref. South Sudan did not gain independence until 2011. Before that, Sudan was the largest country in Africa.

In the days leading up to the operation, Bearden flew back and forth to Gedaref on the station’s plane – a Beechcraft King Air twin turboprop executive aircraft – checking on the final arrangements. He was accompanied by his deputy, Platt, who was a former Naval aviator, and Garrett Jones, who had been a Miami vice cop before joining the CIA. Bearden also dropped off the Delta Force team that had flown over from the United States with him.

Platt was the CIA man in charge on the ground in Gedaref. The “biggest challenge” he faced, he told the Operation Crest podcast, was extricating several hundred Ethiopian Jews from the sprawling camp there without provoking “a stampede” by the camp’s tens of thousands of non-Jewish refugees, who were no less desperate to exchange their squalid existence for a better life.

The solution was to have an Ethiopian agent who could speak the Jewish refugees’ dialect infiltrate the camp and give them the word to be ready at a certain time on a specific night. “We made sure that … everybody else was asleep and … we basically snuck them out one of the fences,” Platt said.

Although the intent was to ferry the refugees to the airstrip in buses, the CIA officers didn’t feel comfortable bringing the buses closer than five miles from the edge of the camp, because their headlights would have put the mission in jeopardy. “In the desert you can see light forever … so we hiked them across the desert to the buses,” Platt told the podcast.

Bearden was also keen to credit Merkerson for his work on the operation. “He was always at my side on this stuff,” he told The High Side. In this case, that meant Merkerson remained in Khartoum “to be able to deal with the military” if required, rather than fly out to Gedaref with Platt and Jones, Bearden said.

With Platt in charge at Gedaref, Bearden made sure that as the station chief he was seen in Khartoum to preserve operational security. The evening before the operation he hosted “a huge garden party” at his residence “just to be very visible in my white linen suit,” he said. But when the guests had all departed, “I stayed on the roof with my satellite phone.”

At about 6 a.m. on March 22, 1985, as dawn washed over the desert, the first C-130 landed at Gedaref, “blowing red desert dust all over the place,” Bearden told The Team House. The plane slowed to a halt and lowered its ramp, down which came more special operators riding “knobby-wheeled motorbikes,” he said. “And off they go to set up some more navigational gear for the remaining C-130s that are still on their way.”

The planes continued landing one after another, their turboprops kicking up more clouds of red dust. With the aircraft engines still running, the Delta operators, who Bearden said numbered no more than nine, used yellow clothesline to tie the refugees together in groups of about 25. Then the operators led the emaciated figures (described by Bearden as “little sticks”) through the dust along a trail of chem lights to the airstrip and up the ramp. The scene, Bearden told The Team House, was “almost biblical.”

But despite the careful planning and the presence of highly trained military and intelligence personnel, the operation nearly took a disastrous turn. “We almost lost one of the C-130s,” Bearden told The Team House. Asked about this comment, Bearden told The High Side that Platt, a former U.S. Navy aviator, had told him that the Hercules had “almost cartwheeled” after hitting the dirt strip hard, “but the pilot brought it back down and it bounced a couple of times.”

Each plane had an Ethiopian Jew already on board to help persuade the refugees, who almost certainly had never been on a plane before (“they’d hardly ever been on a bus,” Bearden said), to get in. Despite, or perhaps because of, the extraordinarily alien circumstances in which they found themselves, the refugees were patient, obliging and silent as they did what they were told, according to Bearden. Once each planeload had boarded, the crew “closed the ramp [with] this dust blowing and the C-130s took off, one after another, until they were all gone,” he said.

Bearden, who flew out to Gedaref after the operation had concluded to pick up his men and the Delta operators, estimated that about six C-130s landed to pick up about 600 refugees. “But we had more in the air and I think they turned back after we loaded the last ones,” he said.

Parfitt puts the number of evacuees at 481. The Israel Defense Forces, which did not participate in the operation, states on its website that a total of six C-130s were involved, of which three “came back empty,” while the other three carried “around 500” Jews refugees to a new life. Platt put the number of refugees evacuated at “about 900.”

But whichever numbers are closer to the truth, “it went off like clockwork,” in part because the CIA was the ideal organization to conduct the operation, Bearden told The Team House. “If you want 10 C-130s tomorrow morning on a desert strip, we can do that.”

The evacuation was variously known as Operation Sheba and Operation Joshua, according to the IDF. (As with the earlier airlift out of the Khartoum airport’s Hajj terminal that was named Operation Moses, Bearden said that he never heard these names used until long after the missions had concluded.)

In return for his cooperation with the Gedaref airlift, Tayeb had made “sort of a demand” that the planes carrying the refugees not fly directly from Sudan to Israel, Bearden said, adding that he had suggested that the aircraft might at least have refueled in Germany to meet that requirement, but was overruled. “We didn’t end up doing that,” he said. “The Air Force and people beyond me [decided] those C-130s flew directly to Israel.”

The planes came from Ramstein Air Base in Germany and flew straight to Uvda air base in southern Israel’s Negev desert, according to the book “Mossad Exodus” by Gad Shimron, a former Mossad operative who worked in Sudan,.

Although much of the publicity surrounding the evacuation of the Ethiopian Jews centered on the Mossad’s establishment of a diving resort the Red Sea as a platform from which to move the refugees out to Israeli navy vessels, according to Bearden the number of Jews evacuated via this route amounted to “a trickle” compared with those flown out. “It was a nice try but it didn’t move too many of the people, and that’s why we got ourselves involved,” he told The Team House.

Indeed, Bearden clearly feels that the CIA’s role in the rescue of the Ethiopian Jews has never been fully recognized (although he said that recognition is not what the agency usually seeks). “Red Sea divers and all of these movies that you see,” he said. “There’s so much crap out there on this … But when it became serious to get all these people out, and not in dribs and drabs, then we got involved … because the Sudanese wanted us to.”

A damaging leak

One of Nimeiri’s conditions for allowing the Americans to conduct the desert airlift was that it be kept completely secret. “That was a very sensitive issue for Nimeiri, particularly once he had instituted Sharia,” Shinn told the State Department historian.

But that quickly proved to be beyond the ability of U.S. officials to control.

“I think someone on the American side gave it all to an LA Times reporter,” Bearden told The Team House. Indeed, The Los Angeles Times ran a series of stories by Charles T. Powers that appeared to be based on information from at least one source with remarkably detailed knowledge of the operation and the CIA role in it.

Bearden and another former senior U.S. Embassy Khartoum official each said Weaver was the source for the articles, which did further damage to Nimeiri’s domestic standing and made things very awkward for all those involved in the airlift.

“It was pretty catastrophic in terms of embassy relations with Sudan,” said the former senior embassy official, who said that the information put Weaver, the suspected source, in particular danger. “We had to get Jerry out of the country within 48 hours, as I recall.”

Powers also found himself in trouble, according to Bearden, who recalls spotting “this white guy” sitting in jail while on a visit with Sudanese security officials. “They said, ‘That’s the guy that wrote the article.’ And I said, ‘I don’t tell you many things that you have to do but let me tell you this: If you don’t let that fucking guy go now, there will be a shitstorm that you will not ever have imagined.’” The Sudanese took the station chief at his word and released Powers (who died in 1996). “Then he got the hell out of country,” Bearden said.

But, from the perspective of the governments involved, the damage had been done. By exposing the Nimeiri regime’s hypocrisy, the leak not only endangered the senior figures in that regime. It also placed at grave risk the Mossad officers whose lives depended upon those leaders’ discretion.

Keeping those officers alive would be the next major challenge for Willie Merkerson and the rest of his colleagues in the CIA’s Khartoum station.

To be continued in Part 6: In The Wind

Editor’s Note: This series contains Amazon hyperlinks for books. If you buy the books after clicking on the links, as part of the Amazon Affiliates program, The High Side will earn a small commission.

9. Why China is becoming a top choice mediator for global conflicts

How did the Six Party Talks work out when China hosted them?

Wang Huiyao

Why China is becoming a top choice mediator for global conflicts

• China’s economic influence, diplomatic connections and commitment to multilateral solutions makes it a potentially transformative force for peace

Listen to this article

Wang Huiyao

+ FOLLOWPublished: 9:30am, 16 Aug 2024

https://www.scmp.com/opinion/china-opinion/article/3274330/why-china-becoming-top-choice-mediator-global-conflicts

South China Morning Post · August 16, 2024

At the same time, China’s position as Russia’s top trading partner, with bilateral trade rising to US$240.1 billion last year, further solidifies its unique role as a potential neutral mediator. This economic interdependence with both nations gives China leverage that few other countries can match.

China’s economic diplomacy scored a notable success a year ago when it brokered the restoration of ties between long-standing rivals Iran and Saudi Arabia. As a major trading partner and the largest oil customer of both nations, China wielded significant influence. This economic leverage was bolstered by major bilateral agreements: a 25-year cooperation deal with Iran reached in 2021 and a strengthening of its comprehensive strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia in 2022.

China’s deep economic ties with these Middle Eastern powers provided both the means and the motivation to push for their reconciliation. As Israel’s third-largest trading partner, and with bilateral trade volume reaching US$14.5 billion last year, China can also – I have reason to believe – play a significant role in promoting a peaceful resolution to the Gaza crisis, potentially offering a path to dialogue where traditional diplomacy has faltered.

Furthermore, China’s seat on the UN Security Council has become a cornerstone of its growing diplomatic influence, particularly in its push for multilateral solutions to global conflicts. After the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza broke out, Wang proposed high-level international conferences to address the crises.

This approach bore fruit earlier this year when rival Palestinian factions came together for the Beijing Declaration, a rare moment of unity brokered through Chinese diplomacy. Days later, on July 25, China’s Permanent Representative to the UN Fu Cong reiterated Beijing’s stance on the Ukraine war during a Security Council review, emphasising the need for peace talks and a political resolution.

Over three decades, China has grown to become a major contributor of troops in UN peacekeeping operations, providing more peacekeepers than all the other UN Security Council permanent members combined, and is the second-largest financial backer of these operations. These commitments have helped to reshape China’s international image, portraying it as a nation dedicated to global peace and respect for sovereignty, unlike its once isolationist stance.

05:08

Palestinian factions agree to end division in pact brokered by China

Palestinian factions agree to end division in pact brokered by China

More importantly, China’s approach to international diplomacy is deeply rooted in its historical narrative and foreign policy principles. China doesn’t have a colonial past and has not engaged in invasive military campaigns in recent history, which serves as a foundation for its credibility on the global stage. This stance, encapsulated in its “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence”, emphasises dialogue and consultation over force and aggression in resolving international disputes.

China’s policy of non-interference in other countries’ internal affairs, offering an alternative to interventionist approaches, has gained significant support, particularly among developing nations. As China’s global interests expand alongside its economic and military capabilities, it continues to advocate for peaceful coexistence and non-intervention. Free from Cold War-era alliance constraints, China positions itself as a neutral mediator in global affairs – a role it increasingly embraces in today’s complex geopolitical landscape.

In addition, China’s diplomatic efforts extend to developing nations, as evidenced by the recent China-Brazil consensus on the Ukraine crisis. Their six-point proposal outlines key de-escalation principles, including no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting, and no provocation by any party. Significantly, it proposes an international peace conference, to be held at a time agreeable to both Russia and Ukraine, ensuring equal participation and fair discussion of all peace plans.

This trend was also underscored last year when an African peace delegation visited Ukraine and Russia. As a member of the Brics bloc (original members include Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa), China encourages developing countries to join in the fostering of peaceful development frameworks.

Through sharing information, financial aid, project collaboration and participation in international negotiations, Beijing is strengthening its ties with the Global South, amplifying the collective voice in global peace initiatives.

In conclusion, China’s emerging role in global conflict resolution leverages its economic influence and diplomatic reach to unite diverse stakeholders. By creating dialogue platforms that bridge long-standing divides, Beijing offers a fresh approach to peace negotiations.

China’s commitment to multilateral solutions and engagement with all parties positions it as a potentially transformative force in international peacekeeping. This approach not only advances China’s diplomatic interests but also reflects its vision of a shared future for humanity, potentially reshaping the landscape of global conflict resolution in the years to come.

Wang Huiyao is the founder of the Centre for China and Globalisation, a Beijing-based non-governmental think tank

South China Morning Post · August 16, 2024

10. As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

Excerpts:

In deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of ʿArīsh – which was then occupied by Israel – pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.

...

Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a “decent” war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide “behind its back”. It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.

...

To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.” But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation.

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree

By Omer Bartov

The Guardian · by / · August 13, 2024

On 19 June 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Be’er Sheva, Israel. My lecture was part of an event about the worldwide campus protests against Israel, and I planned to address the war in Gaza and more broadly the question of whether the protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by antisemitism, as some had claimed. But things did not work out as planned.

When I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students congregating. It soon transpired that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had been summoned, it appeared, by a WhatsApp message that went out the day before, which flagged the lecture and called for action: “We will not allow it! How long will we commit treason against ourselves?!?!?!??!!”

The message went on to allege that I had signed a petition that described Israel as a “regime of apartheid” (in fact, the petition referred to a regime of apartheid in the West Bank). I was also “accused” of having written an article for the New York Times, in November 2023, in which I stated that although the statements of Israeli leaders suggested genocidal intent, there was still time to stop Israel from perpetrating genocide. On this, I was guilty as charged. The organiser of the event, the distinguished geographer Oren Yiftachel, was similarly criticised. His offences included having served as the director of the “anti-Zionist” B’Tselem, a globally respected human rights NGO.

As the panel participants and a handful of mostly elderly faculty members filed into the hall, security guards prevented the protesting students from entering. But they did not stop them from keeping the lecture hall door open, calling out slogans on a bullhorn and banging with all their might on the walls.

After over an hour of disruption, we agreed that perhaps the best step forward would be to ask the student protesters to join us for a conversation, on the condition that they stop the disruption. A fair number of those activists eventually walked in and for the next two hours we sat down and talked. As it turned out, most of these young men and women had recently returned from reserve service, during which they had been deployed in the Gaza Strip.

This was not a friendly or “positive” exchange of views, but it was revealing. These students were not necessarily representative of the student body in Israel as a whole. They were activists in extreme rightwing organisations. But in many ways, what they were saying reflected a much more widespread sentiment in the country.

I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known. Although I have worked abroad for many years, Israel is where I was born and raised. It is the place where my parents lived and are buried; it is where my son has established his own family and most of my oldest and best friends live. Knowing the country from the inside and having followed events even more closely than usual since 7 October, I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered on my return, but it was still profoundly disturbing.

In deliberating these issues, I cannot but draw on my personal and professional background. I served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for four years, a term that included the 1973 Yom Kippur War and postings in the West Bank, northern Sinai and Gaza, ending my service as an infantry company commander. During my time in Gaza, I saw first-hand the poverty and hopelessness of Palestinian refugees eking out a living in congested, decrepit neighbourhoods. Most vividly, I remember patrolling the shadeless, silent streets of the Egyptian town of ʿArīsh – which was then occupied by Israel – pierced by the gazes of the fearful, resentful population observing us from their shuttered windows. For the first time, I understood what it meant to occupy another people.

Military service is mandatory for Jewish Israelis when they turn 18 – though there are a few exceptions – but afterwards, you can still be called upon to serve again in the IDF, for training or operational duties, or in case of emergencies such as a war. When I was called up in 1976, I was an undergraduate studying at Tel Aviv University. During that first deployment as a reserve officer, I was severely wounded in a training accident, along with a score of my soldiers. The IDF covered up the circumstances of this event, which was caused by the negligence of the training base commander. I spent most of that first semester in the hospital of Be’er Sheva, but returned to my studies, graduating in 1979 with a speciality in history.

These personal experiences made me all the more interested in a question that had long preoccupied me: what motivates soldiers to fight? In the decades after the second world war, many American sociologists argued that soldiers fight first and foremost for each other, rather than for some bigger ideological goal. But that didn’t quite fit with what I’d experienced as a soldier: we believed that we were in it for a larger cause that surpassed our own group of buddies. By the time I had completed my undergraduate degree, I had also begun to ask whether, in the name of that cause, soldiers could be made to act in ways they would otherwise find reprehensible.

Taking the extreme case, I wrote my Oxford PhD thesis, later published as a book, on the Nazi indoctrination of the German army and the crimes it perpetrated on the eastern front in the second world war. What I found ran counter to how Germans in the 1980s understood their past. They preferred to think that the army had fought a “decent” war, even as the Gestapo and the SS perpetrated genocide “behind its back”. It took Germans many more years to realise just how complicit their own fathers and grandfathers had been in the Holocaust and the mass murder of many other groups in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

When the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, broke out in late 1987 I was teaching at Tel Aviv University. I was appalled by the instruction of Yitzhak Rabin, then minister of defence, to the IDF to “break the arms and legs” of Palestinian youths who were throwing rocks at heavily armed troops. I wrote a letter to him warning that, based on my research into the indoctrination of the armed forces of Nazi Germany, I feared that under his leadership the IDF was heading down a similarly slippery path.

‘I was not entirely surprised by what I encountered, but it was still profoundly disturbing’ … Omer Bartov. Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian

As my research had shown, even before their conscription, young German men had internalised core elements of Nazi ideology, especially the view that the subhuman Slav masses, led by insidious Bolshevik Jews, were threatening Germany and the rest of the civilised world with destruction, and that therefore Germany had the right and duty to create for itself a “living space” in the east and to decimate or enslave that region’s population. This worldview was then further inculcated into the troops, so that by the time they marched into the Soviet Union they perceived their enemies through that prism. The fierce resistance put up by the Red Army only confirmed the need to utterly destroy Soviet soldiers and civilians alike, and most especially the Jews, who were seen as the main instigators of Bolshevism. The more destruction they wrought, the more fearful German troops became of the revenge they could expect if their enemies prevailed. The result was the killing of up to 30 million Soviet soldiers and citizens.

To my astonishment, a few days after writing to him, I received a one-line response from Rabin, chiding me for daring to compare the IDF to the German military. This gave me the opportunity to write him a more detailed letter, explaining my research and my anxiety about using the IDF as a tool of oppression against unarmed occupied civilians. Rabin responded again, with the same statement: “How dare you compare the IDF to the Wehrmacht.” But in retrospect, I believe this exchange revealed something about his subsequent intellectual journey. For as we know from his later engagement in the Oslo peace process, however flawed, he did eventually recognise that in the long run Israel could not sustain the military, political and moral price of the occupation.

Since 1989, I have been teaching in the United States. I have written profusely on war, genocide, nazism, antisemitism and the Holocaust, seeking to understand the links between the industrial killing of soldiers in the first world war and the extermination of civilian populations by Hitler’s regime. Among other projects, I spent many years researching the transformation of my mother’s home town – Buchach in Poland (now Ukraine) – from a community of inter-ethnic coexistence into one in which, under the Nazi occupation, the gentile population turned against their Jewish neighbours. While the Germans came to the town with the express goal of murdering its Jews, the speed and efficiency of the killing was greatly facilitated by local collaboration. These locals were motivated by pre-existing resentments and hatreds that can be traced back to the rise of ethnonationalism in the preceding decades, and the prevalent view that the Jews did not belong to the new nation states created after the first world war.

In the months since 7 October, what I have learned over the course of my life and my career has become more painfully relevant than ever before. Like many others, I have found these last months emotionally and intellectually challenging. Like many others, members of my own and of my friends’ families have also been directly affected by the violence. There is no dearth of grief wherever you turn.

The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people – many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable – and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity – with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border – is profound.

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented:

Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don’t feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages … There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution.

I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] … and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won’t accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot … It is not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause … With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.

This was a pervasive sentiment among many left-leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October. Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a “love for humanity”. But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another – that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians – it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment.

This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper.

On 30 April 1956, Moshe Dayan, then IDF chief of staff, gave a short speech that would become one of the most famous in Israel’s history. He was addressing mourners at the funeral of Ro’i Rothberg, a young security officer of the newly founded Nahal Oz kibbutz, which was established by the IDF in 1951 and became a civilian community two years later. The kibbutz was located just a few hundred metres from the border with the Gaza Strip, facing the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya.

Rothberg had been killed the day before, and his body was dragged across the border and mutilated, before being returned to Israeli hands with the help of the United Nations. Dayan’s speech has become an iconic statement, used both by the political right and left to this day:

Yesterday morning Ro’i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those waiting in ambush for him at the edge of the furrow. Let us not cast accusations at the murderers today. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred for us? For eight years they have been dwelling in Gaza’s refugee camps, as before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages in which they and their forefathers had dwelled into our own property.

We should not seek Roi’s blood from the Arabs in Gaza but from ourselves. How have we shut our eyes and not faced up forthrightly to our fate, not faced up to our generation’s mission in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of lads, who dwell in Nahal Oz, is carrying on its shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on whose other side crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands praying for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart – have we forgotten that?…

We are the generation of settlement; without a steel helmet and the muzzle of the cannon we will not be able to plant a tree and build a home. Our children will not have a life if we do not dig shelters, and without barbed wire and machine guns we will not be able to pave roads and dig water wells. Millions of Jews who were exterminated because they had no land are looking at us from the ashes of Israeli history and ordering us to settle and resurrect a land for our people. But beyond the border’s furrow an ocean of hatred and an urge for vengeance rises, waiting for the moment that calm will blunt our readiness, for the day that we heed the ambassadors of conspiring hypocrisy, who call upon us to put down our arms …

Let us not flinch from seeing the loathing that accompanies and fills the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who dwell around us and await the moment they can reach for our blood. Let us not avert our eyes lest our hands grow weak. This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.

The following day, Dayan recorded his speech for Israeli radio. But something was missing. Gone was the reference to the refugees watching the Jews cultivate the lands from which they had been evicted, who should not be blamed for hating their dispossessors. Although he had uttered these lines at the funeral and written them subsequently, Dayan chose to omit them from the recorded version. He, too, had known this land before 1948. He recalled the Palestinian villages and towns that were destroyed to make room for Jewish settlers. He clearly understood the rage of the refugees across the fence. But he also firmly believed in both the right and the urgent need for Jewish settlement and statehood. In the struggle between addressing injustice and taking over the land, he chose his side, knowing that it doomed his people to forever rely on the gun. Dayan also knew well what the Israeli public could accept. It was because of his ambivalence about where guilt and responsibility for injustice and violence lay, and his deterministic, tragic view of history, that the two versions of his speech ended up appealing to vastly different political orientations.

Moshe Dayan, then Israel’s minister of defence, with Henry Kissinger, US national security advisor, in 1974. Photograph: PhotoQuest/Getty Images

Decades later, after many more wars and rivers of blood, Dayan titled his last book Shall the Sword Devour Forever? Published in 1981, the book detailed his role in reaching a peace agreement with Egypt two years earlier. He had finally learned the truth of the second part of the biblical verse from which he took the book’s title: “Knowest thou not that it will be bitterness in the latter end?”

But in his 1956 speech, with his references to carrying the heavy gates of Gaza and the Palestinians waiting for a moment of weakness, Dayan was alluding to the biblical story of Samson. As his listeners would have recalled, Samson the Israelite, whose superhuman strength derived from his long hair, was in the habit of visiting prostitutes in Gaza. The Philistines, who viewed him as their mortal enemy, hoped to ambush him against the locked gates of the city. But Samson simply lifted the gates on his shoulders and walked free. It was only when his mistress Delilah tricked him and cut off his hair that the Philistines could capture and imprison him, rendering him all the more powerless by poking out his eyes (as the Gazans who mutilated Ro’i are alleged to have also done). But in a last feat of bravery, as he is mocked by his captors, Samson calls for God’s help, seizes the pillars of the temple to which he had been led, and collapses it on the merry crowd surrounding him, calling out: “Let me die with the Philistines!”

Those gates of Gaza are lodged deeply in the Zionist Israeli imagination, a symbol of the divide between us and the “barbarians”. In the case of Ro’i, Dayan asserted, “the longing for peace blocked his ears, and he did not hear the voice of murder waiting in ambush. The gates of Gaza weighed too heavily on his shoulders and brought him down.”

On 8 October 2023, President Isaac Herzog addressed the Israeli public, citing the last line of Dayan’s speech: “This is the destiny of our generation. This is the choice of our lives – to be ready and armed and strong and tough. For if the sword falls from our fist, our lives will be cut down.” The previous day, 67 years after Ro’i’s death, Hamas militants had murdered 15 residents of the Nahal Oz kibbutz and taken eight hostages. Since Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, the Palestinian neighbourhood of Shuja’iyya facing the kibbutz, where 100,000 people had been living, has been emptied of its population and turned into one vast pile of rubble.

One of the rare literary attempts to expose the grim logic of Israel’s wars is Anadad Eldan’s extraordinary 1971 poem Samson Tearing His Clothes, in which this ancient Hebrew hero crashes his way into and out of Gaza, leaving only desolation in his tracks. I first learned about this poem from Arie Dubnov’s outstanding Hebrew-language essay, “The Gates of Gaza,” published in January 2024. Samson the hero, the prophet, the subduer of the nation’s eternal enemy, is transformed into its angel of death, a death which, as we recall, he ends up bringing also on himself in a grand suicidal action that has echoed through the generations to this very day.

When I went

to Gaza I met

Samson coming out ripping his clothes

on his scratched face rivers flowed

and the houses bent to let him

pass

his pains uprooted trees and got caught up in the

tangled

roots. In the roots were strands of his

hair.

His head shone like a skull made of rock

and his faltering steps tore up my tears

Samson walked dragging a weary sun

shattered windowpanes and chains in Gaza’s sea

were drowned. I heard how

the earth groaned under his steps,

how he slit her gut. Samson’s

shoes screeched when he walked.

Born in Poland in 1924 as Avraham Bleiberg, Eldan came to Palestine as a child, fought in the 1948 war, and in 1960 moved to Kibbutz Be’eri, about 4km from the Gaza Strip. On 7 October 2023, the 99-year-old Eldan and his wife survived the massacre of about a hundred inhabitants of the kibbutz, when the militants who walked into their home inexplicably spared them.

After 7 October, in the wake of this obscure poet’s miraculous survival, a different work of his was widely shared on Israeli media. For it seemed as if Eldan, a longtime chronicler of the sorrow and pain brought on by oppression and injustice, had predicted the catastrophe that befell his home. In 2016, he had published a collection of poems under the title Six the Hour of Dawn. That was the hour when the Hamas attack began. The book contains the harrowing poem On the Walls of Be’eri, mourning his daughter’s death from illness (in Hebrew the name of the kibbutz also means “my well”).

In the wake of 7 October, the poem eerily seems both to forecast destruction and to convey a certain view of Zionism, as originating in diasporic catastrophe and despair, bringing the nation to a cursed land where children are buried by their parents, yet holding out the hope for a new and hopeful dawn:

On the walls of Be’eri I wrote her story

from origins and depths frayed by the cold

when they read what was happening in pain and her lights

tumbled into the mist and darkness of night and a howl engendered

prayer, for her children have fallen and a door is locked

for the grace of heaven they breathe desolation and grief

who will console inconsolable parents, for a curse

is whispering let there be neither dew nor rain, you may weep if you can

there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance

Like Dayan’s eulogy for Ro’i, On the Walls of Be’eri means different things to different people. Should it be read as a lament for the destruction of a beautiful and innocent kibbutz in the desert, or is it a cry of pain over the endless bloody vendetta between the two peoples of this land? The poet has not told us his meaning, as is the way of poets. After all, he wrote this years ago in mourning for his beloved daughter. But given his many years of quiet, precise and searing work, it does not seem fanciful to believe that the poem was a call for reconciliation and coexistence, rather than for more cycles of bloodshed and revenge.

As it happens, I have a personal connection to the Be’eri kibbutz. It is where my daughter-in-law grew up, and my trip to Israel in June was primarily to visit the twins – my grandchildren – she had brought into the world in January 2024. The kibbutz, though, had been abandoned. My son, daughter-in-law and their children had moved into a nearby vacant apartment with a family of survivors – close relatives, whose father is still being held hostage – making for an unimaginable combination of new life and inconsolable sorrow in one home.

As well as seeing family, I had also come to Israel to meet friends. I hoped to make sense of what had happened in the country since the war began. The aborted lecture in BGU was not on the top of my agenda. But once I arrived at the lecture hall on that mid-June day, I quickly understood that this explosive situation could also provide some clues to understanding the mentality of a younger generation of students and soldiers.

After we sat down and began to talk, it became clear to me that the students wanted to be heard, and that no one, perhaps even their own professors and university administrators, was interested in listening. My presence, and their vague knowledge of my criticism of the war, triggered in them a need to explain to me, but perhaps also to themselves, what they had been engaged in as soldiers and as citizens.

One young woman, recently returned from long military service in Gaza, leapt on the stage and spoke forcefully about the friends she had lost, the evil nature of Hamas, and the fact that she and her comrades were sacrificing themselves to ensure the country’s future safety. Deeply distraught, she began crying halfway through her speech and stepped down. A young man, collected and articulate, rejected my suggestion that criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily motivated by antisemitism. He then launched on a brief survey of the history of Zionism as a response to antisemitism and as a political path that no gentiles had a right to deny. While they were upset by my views and agitated by their own recent experiences in Gaza, the opinions expressed by the students were in no way exceptional. They reflected much greater swaths of public opinion in Israel.

Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields.

They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic.

Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.

Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.

In mid-July 1941, just weeks after Germany launched what Hitler had proclaimed to be a “war of annihilation” against the Soviet Union, a German noncommissioned officer wrote home from the eastern front:

The German people owe a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before … What we have seen … borders on the unbelievable … And when one reads Der Stürmer [a Nazi newspaper] and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews.

An army propaganda leaflet issued in June 1941 paints a similarly nightmarish picture of Red Army political officers, which many soldiers soon perceived as a reflection of reality:

Anyone who has ever looked at the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are like. Here there is no need for theoretical expressions. We would insult the animals if we described these mostly Jewish men as beasts. They are the embodiment of the satanic and insane hatred against the whole of noble humanity … [They] would have brought an end to all meaningful life, had this eruption not been dammed at the last moment.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visits Rafah in the Gaza Strip on 18 July 2024. Photograph: Avi Ohayon/Israel Gpo/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock

Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly,” later adding that Israel would “break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza”. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: “We are fighting Nazis.” Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you”, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s “men and women, children and infants”. In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel’s goal should be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. On Israeli TV he stated, “There are no uninvolved people … we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us.” Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, “The work must be completed … Total destruction. ‘Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’” Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about “rolling out the Gaza Nakba”. One Israeli 95-year-old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children”, was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for “providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers”. No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to “kill the Arabs”, “burn their mothers” and “flatten” Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.

This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.

The young men and women I spoke with that day were filled with rage, not so much against me – they calmed down a bit when I mentioned my own military service – but because, I think, they felt betrayed by everyone around them. Betrayed by the media, which they perceived as too critical, by senior commanders who they thought were too lenient toward Palestinians, by politicians who had failed to prevent the 7 October fiasco, by the IDF’s inability to achieve “total victory”, by intellectuals and leftists unfairly criticising them, by the US government for not delivering sufficient munitions fast enough, and by all those hypocritical European politicians and antisemitic students protesting against their actions in Gaza. They seemed fearful and insecure and confused, and some were likely also suffering from PTSD.

I told them the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany’s internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them.

The students were frightening and frightened at the same time, and their fear made them all the more aggressive. This level of menace, as well as a degree of overlap in opinion, seemed to have generated fear and obsequiousness in their superiors, professors and administrators, who demonstrated great reluctance to discipline them in any way. At the same time, a host of media pundits and politicians have been cheering on these angels of destruction, calling them heroes just a moment before putting them in the ground and turning their backs on their grief-stricken families. The fallen soldiers died for a good cause, the families are told. But no one takes the time to articulate what that cause actually is beyond sheer survival through ever more violence.

And so, I also felt sorry for these students, who were so unaware of how they had been manipulated. But I left that meeting filled with trepidation and foreboding.

As I headed back to the United States at the end of June, I contemplated my experiences over those two messy and troubling weeks. I was conscious of my deep connection to the country I had left. This is not just about my relationship with my Israeli family and friends, but also with the particular tenor of Israeli culture and society, which is characterised by its lack of distance or deference. This can be heartwarming and revealing; one can, almost instantaneously, find oneself in intense, even intimate conversations with others on the street, in a cafe, at a bar.

Yet this same aspect of Israeli life can also be endlessly frustrating, since there is so little respect for social niceties. There is almost a cult of sincerity, an obligation to speak your mind, no matter who you’re talking to or how much offence it may cause. This shared expectation creates both a sense of solidarity, and of lines that cannot be crossed. When you are with us, we are all family. If you turn against us or are on the other side of the national divide, you are shut out and can expect us to come after you.

This may also have been the reason why this time, for the first time, I had been apprehensive about going to Israel, and why part of me was glad to leave. The country had changed in ways visible and subtle, ways that might have raised a barrier between me, as an observer from the outside, and those who have remained an organic part of it.

But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”

I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.

These were issues that I could only discuss with a very small handful of activists, scholars, experts in international law and, not surprisingly, Palestinian citizens of Israel. Beyond this limited circle, such statements on the illegality of Israeli actions in Gaza are anathema in Israel. Even the vast majority of protesters against the government, those calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages, will not countenance them.

Since I returned from my visit, I have been trying to place my experiences there into a larger context. The reality on the ground is so devastating, and the future appears so bleak, that I have allowed myself to indulge in some counter-factual history and to entertain some hopeful speculations about a different future. I ask myself, what would have happened had the newly created state of Israel fulfilled its commitment to enact a constitution based on its Declaration of Independence? That same declaration which stated that Israel “will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture; it will safeguard the Holy Places of all religions; and it will be faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations”.

‘Scars on every street’: the refugee camp where generations of Palestinians have lost their futures

Read more

What effect would such a constitution have had on the nature of the state? How would it have tempered the transformation of Zionism from an ideology that sought to liberate the Jews from the degradation of exile and discrimination and to put them on equal standing with the other nations of the world, to a state ideology of ethnonationalism, oppression of others, expansionism and apartheid? During the few hopeful years of the Oslo peace process, people in Israel began speaking of making it into a “state of all its citizens”, Jews and Palestinians alike. The assassination of prime minister Rabin in 1995 put an end to that dream. Will it ever be possible for Israel to discard the violent, exclusionary, militant and increasingly racist aspects of its vision as it is embraced there now by so many of its Jewish citizens? Will it ever be able to reimagine itself as its founders had so eloquently envisioned it – as a nation based on freedom, justice and peace?

It is difficult to indulge in such fantasies at the moment. But perhaps precisely because of the nadir in which Israelis, and much more so Palestinians, now find themselves, and the trajectory of regional destruction their leaders have set them on, I pray that alternative voices will finally be raised. For, in the words of the poet Eldan, “there is a time when darkness roars but there is dawn and radiance”.

Follow the Long Read on X at @gdnlongread, listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

The Guardian · by / · August 13, 2024

11. Biden ‘open’ to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine

Biden ‘open’ to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine

By Erin Banco, Paul McLeary and Joe Gould

08/15/2024 11:01 AM EDT

Politico

The Pentagon is already working through fixes to allow Ukraine to launch the weapons from its fighter planes.

The air-launched missiles would give the Ukrainian air force a capability only a handful of other nations have. | U.S. Air Force Photo by Airman 1st Class Aaron Hill

08/15/2024 11:01 AM EDT

The Biden administration is “open” to sending long-range cruise missiles to Ukraine, a move that would give Kyiv’s F-16s greater combat punch as it seeks to gain further momentum in its fight against Russia.

The White House’s willingness to give Ukraine the Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile comes as Kyiv’s surprisingly successful ground assault deep inside Russia heads into its second week, embarrassing Vladimir Putin and forcing him to redirect troops from the battlefield in Ukraine.

No final decision has been made on sending the missile, but the administration is working through the complicated details now, according to one Biden administration official. Those issues include reviews of the transfer of sensitive technologies, and ensuring Ukraine’s jets can launch the 2,400-pound missile that carries a 1,000-pound warhead.

The official, along with two other people familiar with internal deliberations, was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive issues.

The Pentagon declined to comment on whether it had approved the transfer of the missile.

“We consider a range of options to meet Ukraine’s security assistance requirements, however we have no information to provide,” said Pentagon spokesperson Jeff Jurgensen.

The debate surrounding the JASSM and the Biden administration’s willingness to explore its transfer makes the missile the latest in a long line of sophisticated weaponry once considered off-limits for transfer to Ukraine.

Some members of Congress and political opponents have accused the Biden administration of moving too slowly to give Kyiv the equipment it needs to win the war. Yet for a conflict that is just 30 months old, the approvals of F-16s, Abrams tanks, cruise missiles, Patriot air defenses and modern infantry carriers have transformed what was a Soviet-era military into one of Europe’s battlefield powerhouses.

The potential move comes in the waning months of President Joe Biden’s tenure, after which the level of U.S. support for Ukraine becomes less clear if former President Donald Trump retakes the White House.

The air-launched missiles would give the Ukrainian air force a capability only a handful of other nations have: launching a cruise missile over 200 miles from a U.S.-made fourth-generation fighter plane.

While talks continue inside the White House and Pentagon, the administration official warned that there is plenty of work to do before any missiles actually make their way to Ukraine, including making sure that Kyiv’s existing Soviet-era planes and its freshly delivered F-16s can launch the missile at targets over 230 miles away.

The Pentagon is already working with Ukraine on those technical issues, two of the people said.

The JASSM, developed by Lockheed Martin and first fielded in the early 2000s, has been used by the U.S. sparingly in combat and has been shared with only a handful of close allies.

Ukraine already possesses both air and ground-launched missiles provided by the U.S., U.K. and France that can reach almost 200 miles from their launch point, but restrictions on the missiles’ use inside Russia are for now staying in place.

The limitations, which stipulate that Ukraine can’t use U.S.-supplied weapons inside Russia unless it’s just over the border and for self-defense only, have frustrated Kyiv, which has repeatedly asked for a freer hand to strike Russian forces inside their country. It may be too late anyway for Ukraine to use its existing missiles to strike Russian aircraft at their bases, as the Russian military moved their fighters beyond the range of those missiles in May, according to the administration official.

As Ukraine pleads for the U.S. to relax its rules, Moscow has used its fighter planes flying safely inside Russia to launch glide bombs at Ukrainian cities, killing civilians.

Ukrainian parliamentarians and advisers to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have over the last several months pressed Biden officials and lawmakers on Capitol Hill to send the JASSM. That pressure grew when a cohort of Ukrainian parliamentarians visited Washington in July. Their request made its way to national security adviser Jake Sullivan, one of the people said.

Poland, Australia and Finland have the weapon, while Japan and the Netherlands signed agreements to buy the missiles in July with delivery expected in the coming years. Germany, Greece, Romania and Denmark are also in discussions to buy the missile.

Missile maker Lockheed Martin has delivered over 4,100 JASSMs in various configurations to the U.S. Air Force and allies over the years, with a new production line in Alabama churning out around 45 missiles a month to reach a stockpile goal of 7,200 missiles, according to Pentagon data.

The JASSMs would give Ukraine a significant boost in range, as the F-16s donated this summer by European countries are not expected to fly close to Russian lines for fear of being shot down.

The U.S. and allies have already committed to sending Ukraine a variety of air-to-air and air-to-ground munitions for its F-16s, but the JASSM deliveries would give Kyiv the most powerful and longest-range weapon in its air force’s arsenal.

A cadre of pro-Ukraine U.S. lawmakers has been pressing the administration to loosen restrictions on Kyiv’s ability to fire U.S.-supplied weapons into Russian territory. They argue that the U.S. should keep the momentum going after Ukrainian forces crossed the border into Russia on Aug. 6.

“Certainly we are pushing for additional weapon systems to be supplied to the Ukrainians because the Russian aerial reign of terror has reached a different order of magnitude — maybe several orders of magnitude greater than it was, with different kinds of missiles, glide bombs and drones,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), who returned Tuesday night from Kyiv. Blumenthal declined to comment on any specific weapons under discussion.

The Pentagon has been receptive to the suggestion from Congress to supply the missiles because Russia has been successful at jamming some other American-made, precision-guided weapons.

Joint Chiefs Chair Gen. C.Q. Brown didn’t rule out sending the missiles when Ukraine Caucus Co-Chair Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) asked at a hearing in April whether the Defense Department was considering the action. How the F-16s would be armed would be part of DOD’s talks with Ukraine Defense Contact Group allies, Brown said.

“As we bring on the F-16s, it’s not only the airplanes, but the training of the pilots, the training of the maintainers — but also making sure we have the weapons to go with it,” Brown said. “That is the dialogue we’re having not only to get the airplanes but to get them to full capability.”

Politico

12. Tim Walz’s Military Retirement Was More Complicated Than JD Vance Wants You to Think

Posting this article is not meant as a defense or criticism of the Governor. This is a personal story of the author to explain the Governor's challenges and dilemmas. I think this is an enlightening article about National Guard service that neither civilians nor active duty military personnel can fully appreciate.

Tim Walz’s Military Retirement Was More Complicated Than JD Vance Wants You to Think

Politico

A National Guard officer wrestles with Tim Walz’s decision.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz prepares to depart from his residence in St. Paul, Minnesota, after Vice President Kamala Harris selected him as her running mate. | Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

By Davis Winkie

08/15/2024 11:19 AM EDT

Davis Winkie is an investigative reporter who focuses primarily on the military and veterans. He is a part-time National Guard officer. Davis, a Military Times and CNN alum, was a finalist for the 2023 Livingston Award for Local Reporting and shared the Society of Professional Journalists' 2023 Sunshine Award with colleagues from The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and The Marshall Project.

Soon after I started my National Guard career, a mentor told me I needed to learn to juggle.

Every part-time service member answers to three masters: their family, their civilian career and their military career. Saying “yes” too often is a surefire road to ruin in one or more of those three domains. One — or two, if you’re lucky — must always take precedence.

Tim Walz knows the act well.

Recently, GOP vice-presidential candidate and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) attacked the Democratic VP candidate over the timing of his retirement from the Minnesota National Guard in May 2005. Vance resurfaced the claim that the future Minnesota governor, then the top enlisted man in the 1st Battalion, 125th Field Artillery Regiment, abandoned his soldiers by retiring 10 months before the unit deployed to Iraq. He also criticized Walz for saying he’d retired as a command sergeant major. Walz was a command sergeant major, but he retired at the lower rank of master sergeant because he didn’t complete a lengthy correspondence course required to keep his provisional promotion. The Harris campaign recently updated his online biography, which previously stated he retired at a higher rank. His initial discharge form indicated command sergeant major rank, but officials issued a corrected version in fall of 2005.

Vance’s own military service gave the attack legs. He served for four years in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent. He entered active duty shortly after his 19th birthday in 2003, enlisting as a young man with few prospects and even fewer attachments. He deployed to Iraq for six months but did not see combat.

Few can grasp the choice that Walz faced — including Vance, whose life revolved around the Corps during his enlistment.

But I do. I have missed birthdays, anniversaries and career opportunities. I have also gained things that words can’t capture by serving my country during its times of greatest need. Yet for every ball I keep in the air, another hits the ground. I was laid off from my reporting job in July while on military leave.

I see the different variables in Walz’s calculus: family and medical issues, the desire to keep serving, the overlapping moral obligations to self and soldiers. I see someone who made a difficult decision that ultimately benefited not just him, but his unit, too.

And in some ways, I see myself.

In March 2005, high school teacher and then-Command Sgt. Maj. Tim Walz was one month into his bid for Congress. He was a 24-year veteran of the Guard, completing four years beyond the 20 required for retirement. Walz and his unit were less than a year past a deployment to Italy, where they helped with base security.

But that month, news came from state headquarters at Camp Ripley: The 1st Battalion of the 125th Field Artillery Regiment could deploy within the next two years. Walz had become the unit’s top enlisted soldier — a role carrying a near-spiritual obligation to ensure troop welfare — in late 2004 and started arduous correspondence courses in order to seal his permanent promotion to sergeant major. He faced the prospect of leading them into war.

I cannot definitively say when Walz requested retirement (a routine process that sometimes requires a maddening amount of lead time — I’ve seen packets take several months to clear state HQ). Nor can I definitively say when he first knew for certain that his men were bound for Iraq; an archived March 2005 release from Walz’s campaign indicated the matter was uncertain. Former colleagues claimed in recent TV interviews that Walz “knew,” if not officially, in late 2004. A National Guard press release said the 1st Brigade of the 34th Infantry Division (1-125 FA’s parent unit) received official deployment alert orders in July 2005.

But in May 2005, Tim Walz retired from the Guard.

Like almost all other members of the National Guard who accrue 20+ years in uniform, he was able to voluntarily leave. During that era, troops would have had a short window between the time deployment rumors started circulating and when they would have been prevented from leaving because of what’s known as a “stop loss” policy, which would involuntarily extend a service member’s contract through the end of a projected deployment.

The public record indicates that Walz wrestled with that spring’s decision.

In a March 20, 2005 campaign press release, Walz projected optimism about his ability to do it all in the months and years ahead. He stated that he was prepared to deploy (if the final order arrived) and simultaneously run for Congress under a possible policy exception from Pentagon officials that would permit him to conduct partisan political activity while on active duty orders.

“As Command Sergeant Major I have a responsibility not only to ready my battalion for Iraq, but also to serve if called on. I am dedicated to serving my country to the best of my ability, whether that is in Washington DC or in Iraq,” Walz said.

But fellow soldiers report that Walz felt torn over where he could make the greatest impact for his men: Could he do more as a combat leader or as a lawmaker?

“His feeling was, where can I do best for my soldiers?” one former colleague told The Daily Beast. “He thought he could do more in Congress than he could do if he stayed with the unit.”

But Walz’s choice was more complicated than combat vs. Congress.

In fact, if the National Guard had its way in 2002, Walz would have been forced into early retirement.

That year, the future governor was hauled before a medical retention board due to his hearing loss. Such panels determine whether a soldier is medically fit to continue service; Walz was retirement-eligible and could have bowed out with a pension. But instead he successfully argued he was medically fit to stay in the National Guard.

The impacts of his bilateral hearing loss and tinnitus only mounted, though. Walz underwent a surgery in 2005 that replaced his damaged ear bones with synthetic ones, though it’s unclear whether the surgery occurred before or after his retirement. Nonetheless, he was having health issues when deployment rumors arose.

Beyond the military’s duties and his civilian career ambitions, Walz faced significant family demands when he hung up his boots. He and his wife Gwen struggled to conceive children naturally, so they spent seven grueling years pursuing in vitro fertilization, or IVF.

Their efforts paid off in 2001, when their daughter Hope was born. In 2005, Gwen continued the emotionally difficult treatment — and faced the prospect of doing so with her husband at war. (The couple’s son, Gus, was born in 2006.)

But perhaps most salient to Walz, his troops and his fellow leaders was concern over whether he could continue leading soldiers while running for Congress on a platform that openly questioned the war in which they were to fight. The military requires that members abstain from partisan political activity while on active duty, though exceptions to policy sometimes occur.

In a 2009 oral history interview for the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project, Walz said he’d worried about violating laws and regulations preventing soldiers (and other federal government employees) from participating in certain types of partisan political activity. He said he tried to hide his political views while in uniform because the military workplace “wasn’t the place to be [political].”

Regardless of how long or how well Walz hid his politics, the schoolteacher turned Democratic-Labor-Farmer congressional candidate let the cat out of the bag when he entered the race in February 2005. I can’t speak to how Walz felt when he walked into his unit headquarters at the New Ulm armory, but I vividly remember the anxiety I felt driving through the mountains to my monthly drill weekend during my reporting partnership with The Texas Tribune investigating the Texas National Guard’s failures at the border.

And that’s where I begin to wonder whether Walz’s choice was really his to make after the political die was cast.

Would a battalion commander prepping for a potential combat deployment want a command sergeant major who was seeking political office and denouncing the war? Would the soldiers on the line question the motivations of a leader who actively, publicly and diametrically opposed the administration exercising lawful civilian control over their unit? How would the men with stars on their collars feel about the liberal political upstart from southern Minnesota?

Regardless of when he asked to retire (or when he personally learned the deployment was confirmed), Walz left the unit with enough time for another man, retired Command Sgt. Maj. Thomas Behrends, to take the battalion’s reins for 10 months before going overseas. In the years since the grueling 22-month deployment, where the unit was involuntarily extended as part of the Iraq troop “surge,” Behrends has spoken out repeatedly against Walz.

He epitomizes the feelings of those who believe the now-VP candidate’s duty to his soldiers was paramount, other factors be damned. Behrends has characterized Walz as a “coward” and a “traitor” during media interviews.

After more than six years of juggling, I still get frustrated. Often it feels like there are too many balls in the air to track. It’s only gotten harder as I’ve progressed in my respective careers. Losing my job knocked me off-balance, too.

For those of us predisposed to service, the idea of walking away with more left to give is unnerving. But those of us familiar with the realities of part-time soldiering see it happen every day; we lose good men and women who are ready for their act to end.

I fear that I won’t recognize when it’s my turn to stop juggling someday. Will there ever be a right moment?

Walz’s decision makes one thing clear: Sometimes leaving means letting a ball drop — and living with the consequences.

Winkie’s views are his alone and bear no relation to the official policy or position of the National Guard or the Department of Defense.

Politico

13. Lawmakers push Pentagon for clarity on domestic military deployments

Lawmakers push Pentagon for clarity on domestic military deployments

militarytimes.com · by Leo Shane III · August 15, 2024

A pair of Democratic lawmakers are asking senior defense leaders to clarify the rules for deploying military personnel on U.S. soil amid increasing political rhetoric about changing such restrictions so that units can respond to immigration or protest problems.

In a Wednesday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. C.Q. Brown, the representatives — Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey — asked the leaders to clearly and publicly explain the limits of military use for domestic issues, calling it a matter “essential to maintaining our democracy” in the near future.

“We feel compelled to look ahead to decisions that you, as the most senior defense officials, may be called upon to make in the next six months,” the pair wrote. “These decisions will fall squarely into the constitutional roles that you swore to uphold and we know you both respect. We are relying on you to preserve the system that our Founding Fathers designed.”

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In their letter, Slotkin and Sherrill — a former Navy pilot — asked the military leaders for public assurances that the limits on domestic use of military forces are still in effect, and that federal laws prohibit any president from ordering troops to circumvent those rules for political purposes.

They also asked for assurances from the Pentagon leaders that “if a President were to issue such an [unlawful] order, you would refuse to carry out the order.”

Defense Department officials declined comment on the letter but said they would follow up directly with the two congressional offices.

What the military can and cannot do on American soil has been a friction point among Republicans and Democrats in recent years, particularly concerning comments from Donald Trump during and after his presidency.

Trump has suggested he would use active-duty troops and guardsmen in the deportation of immigrants from America, and said the military could be used as a domestic police force to respond to urban violence or public protests.

In addition, officials with the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project — which Trump has sought to distance himself from, despite having numerous connections to organizers — have suggested that the next president could deploy military personnel to fill domestic law enforcement roles across the country as he or she sees fit.

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The Posse Comitatus Act currently prohibits federal military forces from such domestic law enforcement work unless the president invokes emergency powers. It does not limit state governor’s ability to deploy National Guard troops from responding to local emergencies, such as natural disasters or riots.

About Leo Shane III

Leo covers Congress, Veterans Affairs and the White House for Military Times. He has covered Washington, D.C. since 2004, focusing on military personnel and veterans policies. His work has earned numerous honors, including a 2009 Polk award, a 2010 National Headliner Award, the IAVA Leadership in Journalism award and the VFW News Media award.

14. Pentagon needs to speed up its integrated-deterrence efforts, Joint Chiefs chair says

Pentagon needs to speed up its integrated-deterrence efforts, Joint Chiefs chair says

In an interview, Gen. Brown says sending stealth fighters to the Middle East will deter broader conflict.

defenseone.com · by Audrey Decker

U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Charles Brown participates in a news briefing at the Pentagon on July 25, 2024, in Arlington, Virginia. Alex Wong/Getty Images

In an interview, Gen. Brown says sending stealth fighters to the Middle East will deter broader conflict.

By Audrey Decker

Staff Writer

August 15, 2024 03:25 PM ET

• Strategy
• Middle East

OMAHA, Nebraska—The U.S. government needs to be quicker about rolling out new integrated deterrence efforts, the Pentagon’s top military officer says, as global tensions have risen since the Biden administration made the concept a key part of its national-security strategy.

“What is old is new again. What is new is further complicated by emerging domains and technology. We needed a deterrence strategy to be integrated by design to deal with these modern challenges, and I would argue we need to be faster at developing and applying our new framework,” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. CQ Brown said Wednesday during U.S. Strategic Command’s Deterrence Symposium.

The U.S. needs to bring back some Cold War deterrence practices, Brown said, as it moves towards a whole-of-government approach to deterrence. The chairman didn’t say specifically which operations or structures might resurface as part of integrated deterrence, which aims to coordinate efforts across domains, regions, U.S. agencies, and allies and partners, according to U.S. officials.

The chairman’s comments come after the Pentagon announced the deployment of forces to the Middle East to deter Iran and Hezbollah following the killing of a top Hamas political leader in Tehran. The U.S. sent stealthy fifth-generation fighter jets and a cruise-missile submarine, and accelerated the deployment of an aircraft carrier strike group to the region.

“In this case, because the temperature has risen just a bit, we are bringing capability in, and it's really designed to not only help Israel defend itself, but also deter broader conflict, and so without getting into specifics of how we’re going to use those capabilities, the capabilities are sending a strong message that we do not want a broader conflict,” Brown told Defense One in an interview.

The U.S. has been trying to deter a broader conflict in the Middle East after Hamas attacked Israel in October and the subsequent war in Gaza. But whether U.S. deterrence in the Middle East has worked is still up for debate following multiple attacks on U.S. troops in the region since Oct. 7, and with Israel and Hezbollah increasingly trading fire.

“After Hamas moved to Israel, it opened up windows of opportunity for a number of different entities. For Hamas, for Lebanese Hezbollah, for Iran, Iran-aligned militia groups, for the Houthis, for the United States with allies and partners, and I think the same thing occurs when you start thinking about escalation management as you move forward. The world is much more complex, and it's not as simple as it was during the Cold War,” Brown said during the conference.

The Pentagon now has to factor multiple adversaries into its deterrence planning—some of which have objectives that are so important to them that no deterrence approach would be effective, Brown said.

To achieve deterrence, the U.S. needs to understand its adversaries' thinking and culture, the changing information environment, and how new technologies are changing the game, Brown said.

“Different groups assign different values to their variables for cost, risk and gains. They vary between countries, between regions and between cultures and determining at what point cost and risk exceed gains varies. It’s important we understand our adversaries perspective and how they view their priorities, their values and their place in the world,” he said.

15. Rewind and Reconnoiter: Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism? with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

Excerpts:

And finally, with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would change about your argument or piece?

We would not change the analysis a great deal, and in fact, would go on to expand on the various arguments in our book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published by Columbia University Press in January 2024. Social media radicalization and the leaderless resistance strategy remain the key centers of gravity in this movement’s survival and in our inability to make lasting inroads — with little evidence that our failures will reverse anytime soon. The one signal change that does, however, concern us is the growing threat of violence from far-left extremists and Islamist and Middle Eastern elements that could create a symbiotic upward spiral of violence — each feeding off the other to create a far more febrile and potentially combustible situation in the United States this fall than we had envisioned when we completed the writing of the book in 2022 and the final revisions in mid-2023.

In addition, although we warned in November 2019 that the threat posed by the violent far right was escalating, we likely would have dismissed any predictions that these forces would coalesce with such force and momentum at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The mainstreaming of these violent ideologies and movements remains shocking to even those who have studied these trends for years.

Rewind and Reconnoiter: Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism? with Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

​

Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware

August 15, 2024

In their 2019 article, “Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism?” Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware discussed the rising frequency of extreme right-wing terrorism. Given the surge in political violence in the last five years, we have invited them back to revisit and expand upon their original argument. 

Read more below. 

Image: Wiki Commons (Photo by Luis Alejandro Apiolaza)

In your article “Are We Entering a New Era of Far-Right Terrorism?” written in 2019, you argued that far-right domestic terrorism, particularly lone-wolf far-right terrorism, has experienced a resurgence resulting in the urgent need for political disruption of far-right ideology. In the past five years, how has this trend of emerging far-right ideology evolved?

Our article was published in November 2019, after a string of lone-actor, digitally enabled white supremacist terrorist attacks that struck New Zealand, the United States, and Europe that year. Most lethally, Brenton Tarrant attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, killing 51 worshippers. Follow-on attacks hit Poway, California; El Paso, Texas; Baerum, Norway; and Halle, Germany, each outburst of violence claiming lives on behalf of their white supremacist justifications. The acts of violence built on a wave of terrorism that had already visited communities including Oslo, Norway, in 2011; Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2018.

This particular vein of white supremacist violence has continued throughout the 2020s. Most notably, Tarrant’s manifesto was largely plagiarized by an American white supremacist who opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. Similar violence has also struck Jacksonville, Florida, and Bratislava, Slovakia. As a result, there has been a shift of focus of domestic law enforcement attention and resources in the United States away from foreign threats and to what is termed RMVE — racially motivated violent extremism.

Beyond the white supremacist ideology, seditious, anti-government extremism also poses a threat to a number of Western countries. In the United States, this threat was most clearly and dangerously demonstrated by the Jan. 6 terrorist attack at the U.S. Capitol, in which a mob of rioters inspired by a wide range of ideologies coalesced at the direction of former President Donald Trump to “walk down Pennsylvania Avenue … to try and give [Republicans] the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.” As the 2024 elections come into view, this dangerous force, among other threats — including from violent, far-left extremists — is again gathering momentum.

How have policies in the West regarding far-right terrorism changed since 2019? What policies need to be implemented in order to slow the continuing growth of far-right terrorism?

When it took office in January 2021, the Biden administration swiftly appointed a special assistant to the president and special advisor to the homeland security advisor on countering domestic violent extremism. The new domestic terrorism point-person would oversee the development of a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, published in June 2021. The document was a credible if somewhat ambitious attempt to identify the key vulnerabilities in the effort to counter domestic terrorism, including social media and their reluctance to police hate speech.

There are still many weaknesses in our response, in large part due to a shortfall in political will to counter domestic terrorism. A more effective strategy to combat far-right terrorism would involve more determined efforts to counter the incitements to violence, sedition, and hatred that remain prevalent on social media, including by reforming Section 230; new legislation to specifically criminalize domestic terrorism; and a much broader countering violent extremism architecture, that would counter conspiracy theories and personal susceptibilities to radicalization at the ground level.

Of course, many of the conspiracy theories that support far-right terrorist mobilization today are deeply entrenched, and it might take generations to unwind them.

How, if at all, do you see the recent European Parliamentary elections and the increasing prevalence of extreme right-wing ideology encouraging terrorism in Europe?

Elections in Europe are less likely to inspire acts of violence from the far right. For starters, there appears to be a broader consensus in Europe about the urgent threat posed by domestic terrorism, with political divisions not quite as sclerotic and polarizing. 

What do you think the future holds for far-right domestic terrorism in the West?

The situation is serious enough that several American scholars have openly predicted that the United States is heading for civil war. In articles in CNN and Foreign Policy, we have challenged those predictions, arguing that the geographic diversity of today’s violent far right will cripple the secessionist aspirations that usually accompany true civil war. However, the scenario we fear is perhaps no more encouraging: a widespread, sustained, and unpredictable period of violence akin to the Northern Irish Troubles.

Much will be determined by the outcomes of the 2024 election. A Donald Trump victory might inspire the kinds of targeted white supremacist terrorist attacks against minority communities that accompanied the time when he was president, with terrorists perhaps inspired by Trump’s symbolization of a “renewed white identity” driving violently inclined individuals toward violence. A Trump defeat might inspire a different form of violence, more akin to Jan. 6, involving violent extremists launching attacks against the government to avenge perceived wrongs such as claims of electoral fraud. Either scenario would cause widespread damage, claiming more lives and further undermining national unity, stability, trust, and goodwill.

And finally, with the benefit of hindsight, is there anything you would change about your argument or piece?

We would not change the analysis a great deal, and in fact, would go on to expand on the various arguments in our book, God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published by Columbia University Press in January 2024. Social media radicalization and the leaderless resistance strategy remain the key centers of gravity in this movement’s survival and in our inability to make lasting inroads — with little evidence that our failures will reverse anytime soon. The one signal change that does, however, concern us is the growing threat of violence from far-left extremists and Islamist and Middle Eastern elements that could create a symbiotic upward spiral of violence — each feeding off the other to create a far more febrile and potentially combustible situation in the United States this fall than we had envisioned when we completed the writing of the book in 2022 and the final revisions in mid-2023.

In addition, although we warned in November 2019 that the threat posed by the violent far right was escalating, we likely would have dismissed any predictions that these forces would coalesce with such force and momentum at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The mainstreaming of these violent ideologies and movements remains shocking to even those who have studied these trends for years.

***

Bruce Hoffman is senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council of Foreign Relations and a professor at Georgetown University.

Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and DeSales University.

Together, they are the authors of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America (Columbia Univ. Press).

16. Russia’s Post-War Military Recruiting Strategy Emerges

Conclusion:

Recruiting is a numbers game. When the war ends, how much of the Russian population will remember the cost? For some in Russian society, trust in the military has been broken by how the war in Ukraine is being fought, and no amount of the Kremlin’s money, spin, or censorship will overcome that. The Russian government is taking steps to keep that segment as contained as possible, while it works to keep everyone else enveloped in its preferred narratives. Ultimately, rebuilding the personnel of Russia’s future military will hinge on its ability to lure volunteers with large salaries and social benefits once the war in Ukraine ends, while pivoting to new messaging and carefully crafted narratives about patriotism and the duty to the motherland. For some, this will be enough.

Russia’s Post-War Military Recruiting Strategy Emerges - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Dara Massicot · August 16, 2024

After the war in Ukraine freezes or ends, the Russian military will begin a long-term effort to regenerate equipment and personnel. How will they recruit the next generation of professional enlisted soldiers and officers, having sustained an estimated 350,000 casualties in Ukraine since 2022? My research finds that the Russian government is already considering this challenge and has begun implementing a strategy for post-war recruiting with a coherent logic. Russia’s strategy is made of three elements: offering higher wages and benefits, tightly managing public engagement and perceptions of the war to suppress bad news and limit protests and collective bargaining, and revising recruiting themes for a post-war context.

While the Kremlin may have a strategy, will enough of the Russian population want to join the military when the war is over? The answer is complex and depends on how the war ends and how it is perceived within Russia. If the high wages and social benefits currently on offer in wartime can be even partially maintained in the post-war period, with salaries that are currently double the national average, future recruiting could be more stable than Russia’s adversaries might hope for. For some Russians, financial incentives alone will not be enough. The Russian military’s actions at war — high-casualty tactics and poor treatment of personnel and their families — undermine three pillars of recruiting and retention that were critical to gaining the public’s trust in the military over the last 15 years: perception of good order, discipline, and well-being in the military; improved service conditions; and broader public perceptions of military prestige. To offset the challenges to come, the Kremlin is revising its approach to target the next generation of recruits.

Become a Member

Efforts to Build a More Professional Military Before 2022

Prior to invading Ukraine in 2022, the Russian military spent nearly 20 years trying to develop a more proficient and professional military. It conducted frequent internal polling of servicemen to learn what factors motivated them to join and remain in service, and it borrowed some concepts from Western militaries. The government allocated billions of rubles to improve military service conditions and raise the prestige of a military career to attract and retain personnel, especially from 2009 onward. The military overhauled training programs; improved barracks and bases; modernized equipment; instituted measures to reduce corruption, hazing, and criminality; and offered improved wages, housing, and other social benefits to officers and professional enlisted personnel.

Several metrics suggest that these efforts paid off. Rates of draft evasion and hazing declined, the military became a highly trusted institution according to polls, its members reported higher levels of job satisfaction according to internal surveys, and Russia’s contract service personnel numbers grew. While conscripts were always a part of the Russian military’s vision and remain so today, by the late 2010s, Russia was recruiting more professional soldiers than conscripts and its military academies were full. However, reforms remained a work in progress, and they did not resolve several of the persistent problems of Russian military culture that had hampered the military’s proficiency and effectiveness prior to the war in Ukraine.

Wartime Recruiting

The Kremlin has taken extraordinary measures to replenish its casualties — currently estimated at 350,000 — since invading Ukraine in 2022. It has attempted three recruiting phases: a hasty recruiting effort in the summer of 2022 that failed to meet requirements, the subsequent mobilization of 300,000 citizens in September 2022, and a second recruiting campaign that has been ongoing since the winter of 2023. Currently, the Russian government is offering high salaries, large signing bonuses, and other social benefits like housing or mortgage support, debt relief, help with utility bills, guaranteed slots in universities for veterans or dependents, and other benefits that extend to the soldier’s immediate family (and parents in some cases). By July 2024, base salary and combat pay combined were double the average national salary at 200,000 rubles a month, putting military wages in the top 10–15 percent of Russian salaries nationally. Patriotism and peer pressure to join friends or family who are already fighting also motivates some volunteers. This campaign has been sufficient to staff offensive operations in Ukraine, albeit while showing some signs of strain — Russia has raised financial incentives a few times to continue to recruit volunteers.

Amid an ongoing labor shortage in Russia, the military was forced to make several policy changes to expand the recruiting pool. In 2022, the military raised service age limits, reduced barriers to foreign fighters and former mercenaries, and lowered many physical and mental health standards. The Ministry of Defense dropped the requirement for a clean criminal record and now recruits directly from prisons, following the Wagner model. Today, the only crimes that disqualify prospective volunteers from serving as a contract soldier are sex crimes against minors, treason, espionage, and terrorism. These lowered standards have averted another round of mobilization for now, but they also created serious problems for the military, like the reintroduction of criminality and discipline problems into units — the sorts of problems that plagued the Soviet and Russian militaries in the 1980s through early 2000s and damaged society’s view of the institution. These extraordinary wartime recruiting measures fill gaps in the short-term but create other long-term consequences for the military’s culture and perception within Russia.

Recruiting for the Future: Big Rubles and Big Spin

My RAND research finds that the Russian government appears aware of potential recruiting headwinds after the war in Ukraine ends and is already implementing a strategy for post-war recruiting. Their efforts generally fall into three categories: offering higher wages and benefits, tightly managing public engagement and perceptions of the war to suppress bad news, and increasing military–patriotic education in schools to target the next generation of recruits.

Material benefits were an important recruiting and retention tool for the Russian military before the war in Ukraine, when salaries and benefits were lower. If Russian authorities can maintain some aspects of the current competitive salaries, enlistment bonuses, and other social benefits of the last two years, it will attract those who are enticed by economic considerations. Housing benefits and mortgage support are particularly attractive benefits, according to prewar internal military polling of Russian servicemen and their families. However, Russia’s ability to fund these expensive benefits after the war ends is not guaranteed. The Russian defense budget faces significant internal pressures, and there are likely to be tensions and tradeoffs between personnel spending and an expected massive rearmament program that will stretch into the 2030s. Even within the personnel spending category of the defense budget, which is classified, the military will have to decide how to allocate rubles for retaining current personnel, recruiting new personnel, and the looming challenge of financing portions of veteran entitlements and benefits. Russia’s personnel spending burden will also depend on the size of the force. Former Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s request to raise the military’s size to 1.5 million, with nearly 700,000 of that figure being professional soldiers, seems unaffordable and unrealistic, given competing financial priorities and official prewar numbers hovering around 420,000.

Managing Perceptions

The Russian government is trying to manage public perceptions of the war to suppress bad news, limit protests and collective bargaining, and shape public views of the military for the future. Its reasons for doing so are probably mostly tied to maintaining domestic stability, but this approach has important implications for military recruiting too. Specifically, the government’s efforts to manage public perceptions fall into three broad categories: framing the war in Ukraine as an existential conflict against the West to raise the stakes and increase the sense of patriotism and duty; linking World War II photos and iconography to the war in Ukraine while casting its soldiers as liberators and heroes; and suppressing or outright criminalizing negative information about casualties, war crimes, and poor combat performance.

When discussing the “special military operation” in Ukraine, the Russian government frequently references World War II and its iconography to link the two wars in the public’s mind. It has used the orange and black St. George’s ribbon (which commemorates that war) pervasively in imagery throughout the war, even more so than in recent conflicts. Russian political officers put World War II–era slogans — such as Stalin’s “Not One Step Back!” — in materials distributed to frontline units, and officials cast Russian soldiers as heroes and liberators sent to “denazify” Ukraine. In Russia, billboards toggle between some of the most iconic Soviet photographs of World War II — such as Soviet troops on top of the Reichstag in 1945 — and Russian troops in Ukraine.

Moscow is also using proven themes in its wartime recruiting campaign, such as appeals to patriotic duty, responsibility, obligation, and masculinity. Common phrases include “Russia: my history, my heroes, my soul, my country, my journey”; “You’re that real man [Ti zhe muzhik]. Be one”; and “Contract service is the choice of real men.” These themes are chosen for their resonance and effectiveness, as they are consistent with prewar Russian polls on patriotism and attitudes toward military service. These polls noted respondents’ frequent responses that “real men” join the military, and that patriotism is a debt to one’s country that is to be repaid when asked.

Russia also suppresses narratives that highlight problems with the war, banning many platforms like the website formerly known as Twitter and YouTube, and some Western news media and think tanks. It has arrested its citizens for “disparaging the Armed Services” by using new laws available since 2022. Russia-based defense analysts can no longer discuss many aspects of the war or military capabilities lest they run afoul of new classification and censorship legislation. The Russian government has also brought many leading military bloggers into their fold, giving them information in exchange (presumably) for a reduction in criticism. Further, information has reached many families about the nature of service in the Russian military at war, so much so that the authorities have taken several steps to ban cell phones at the front and intimidate soldiers’ families to prevent them from coalescing into a group. The government’s efforts have kept much of the Russian population generally supportive and passively engaged in the war, or unable to engage in large-scale protests. In this regard, the Kremlin’s effort to manage perceptions of the war and domestic discontent has been successful.

At the same time, the carefully managed distance between the troops and the population will likely have long-term social repercussions for Russia when the war ends and soldiers are demobilized, and this will create challenges for recruiting the future force. Even now, the Russian population thus far appears wary to embrace its soldiers and veterans — with some calling them the “Noviy Afghantsy (or new Soviet-Afghanistan war veterans)” — which bodes poorly for future public trust in the military. For the past two years, some returning soldiers have committed violent crimes in Russia and received lenient sentences. The Russian government is now paying attention to the looming social problem of postwar reintegration, creating new positions and NGOs, and introducing new narratives on TV to that seek to frame veterans as stable men who have experienced personal growth and resilience.

Russia is already eyeing the next generation of recruits by expanding patriotic education in schools. After the active phase of the war is over, casualties will decline and memories will fade, and the military hopes to find willing recruits ready to enlist. To help achieve this, the government raised patriotic education funding from $70 million dollars in 2022 to $430 million in 2023. Since 2022, Russia has built additional youth military–patriotic camps, established patronage-like relationships between local military units and schools, funded additional patriotic media targeted at children, changed history lessons about Ukraine, and introduced more military arts and crafts for elementary school students. Russian schools now include mandatory lessons on the war, and soldiers and veterans speak in classrooms and in youth clubs. One particularly ill-advised program invited ex-Wagner mercenaries and veterans from the front to meet students and show them combat footage from their phones. Only a few teachers have resigned in protest over the risks these programs pose to the children.

By suppressing negative information and introducing preferred narratives into schools now, the government seeks to reframe the war and convince boys that the war is not so bad as claimed elsewhere and that it is a heroic and just war against Ukraine and NATO. Russia has not yet targeted the parents of today’s pre-teen and teenage boys. Before the war, the top factors cited by Russian parents that convinced them the military had improved since the 1990s and 2000s were better military equipment, a reduction in hazing and more professional commanders, and better service conditions (e.g., better food and higher pay). Given the changed context in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine, new recruiting themes may be needed to appeal to parents in the future. Some of the successful recruiting themes from today are likely to carry forward into the future recruiting environment, but targeted toward families. These include themes like “real men” serve and do their duty, the military is a way to earn money and improve social mobility for the family, and serving or dying in uniform can bring honor to the family.

The Motherland Calls — What is the Answer?

While the military wants to recruit professional volunteers into its ranks after the war in Ukraine ends, the success of that endeavor depends on the willingness of the Russian population to sign up. That willingness will depend on many factors: how the conflict ends, how demobilization is managed, if the conflict is viewed as a failure or success inside Russia, and if postwar benefits and patriotism hold. After the war freezes or ends, if Russia can continue to offer high salaries, housing support, and other social benefits, it can attract those who are motivated by economic considerations, particularly as memories fade and casualties decline. With the right messaging, it can likely attract those with patriotic motivations — messages like the need to defend the motherland from NATO, the Russian army can withstand Ukraine and NATO together, and so on. To offer high salaries and benefits, Russia must select the number of officer and professional enlisted billets that it can afford, during a time when the defense budget will also be bearing the weight of a long-term regeneration and procurement program.

On the other hand, there are many intangible factors that influence an individual’s choice to join the military. The recruiting themes that worked in a prewar context — perceptions of order and discipline, better commanders and service conditions, and views of the military as a respectable or prestigious career — may no longer work in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. The incomplete and distorted information about the war that is provided by Russian authorities stands in stark contrast to the reality that thousands of Russian soldiers and their families are experiencing. The military’s actions at war — notably the deception it used against its own soldiers at the outset, harsh discipline and brutal command styles, and intimidation of soldiers’ families — harkens back to some of the darkest aspects of Soviet military culture that the Russian military spent 15 years and billions of rubles to convince the population it intended to change.

Recruiting is a numbers game. When the war ends, how much of the Russian population will remember the cost? For some in Russian society, trust in the military has been broken by how the war in Ukraine is being fought, and no amount of the Kremlin’s money, spin, or censorship will overcome that. The Russian government is taking steps to keep that segment as contained as possible, while it works to keep everyone else enveloped in its preferred narratives. Ultimately, rebuilding the personnel of Russia’s future military will hinge on its ability to lure volunteers with large salaries and social benefits once the war in Ukraine ends, while pivoting to new messaging and carefully crafted narratives about patriotism and the duty to the motherland. For some, this will be enough.

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Dara Massicot is a senior fellow in Carnegie’s Russia and Eurasia Program and an adjunct researcher at RAND.

Image: Vyacheslav Argenberg via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Dara Massicot · August 16, 2024

17. The Joint Reconnaissance Strike Complex: Marine and Army Experimentation in the First Island Chain

Excerpt:

Campaigning requires not just deploying combat-credible forces into the first island chain, but also the demonstration of meaningful capability. Hopefully the first of many future experiments, ARTP 23.4 showcased the ability of Army reconnaissance to provide a stand-in sensing capability to Marine firing assets in service of the maritime component’s sea-denial strategy. A standing fires-based joint task force is the ideal solution to managing assets effectively, but adding a joint component to existing exercises is a good jumping off point. US Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility is a truly joint theater where the maritime component rightfully claims primacy but can be sensed and struck from the land. Service parochialism threatens an opportunity to build an integrated and effective deterrent to malign actors in the region. Breaking down these barriers requires time, trust, and familiarity. Interoperability is often aspirational or assumed, but the benefit of rehearsals and exercises is clear. The urgency of the theater demands it.

The Joint Reconnaissance Strike Complex: Marine and Army Experimentation in the First Island Chain - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Sean Parrott, A. J. Vitanza · August 16, 2024

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If conflict were to break out in the Indo-Pacific region, geography and the tyranny of distance would combine with the capabilities of the region’s militaries to produce a very different kind of war than anything the US military is accustomed to. Prognosticators think it will be a war fought with missiles and drones, at long range, with victory turning on informed and timely decisions—blind the enemy before he can blind you. The tools needed to sense and strike at the enemy’s critical systems rely on the network known as the reconnaissance-strike complex. This complex is composed of an abundance of joint sensors, shooters, and command-and-control nodes dispersed geographically across the Indo-Pacific. Its effectiveness rests on the ability to converge these assets to deliver effects and open windows of opportunity when faced with a first-strike operation from an adversary like China. These systems’ interoperability must be validated through exercises and rehearsals on key maritime terrain, with all relevant components of the joint force. The United States Army and Marine Corps conducted one such rehearsal during Artillery Relocation Training Program (ARTP) 23.4 in Hokkaido, Japan this year. The exercise highlighted the friction involved in planning and executing a joint exercise without preexisting relationships. However, once the task force was established, it brought to bear the full spectrum of communications, fires, and multidomain reconnaissance capabilities, illustrating what only an integrated joint force can accomplish in the first island chain.

ARTP is a historically unilateral United States Marine Corps rehearsal conducted in Japan four times a year. The program exercises the rapid deployment of cannon and rocket artillery from 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines to key locations in the Pacific. In March 2024, for the first time ever, the United States Army’s 25th Infantry Division sent a reconnaissance troop to enhance the exercise. The unit, operating as a multidomain reconnaissance company (MRC), conducted reconnaissance/counterreconnaissance and cross-domain sensing for the artillery battalion. Exercise objectives included validation of joint sensor-to-shooter linkages, integration of digital communications architectures, and reconnaissance in a challenging subarctic environment. Breaking down the traditional barriers to joint force integration was key to success and required significant planning and communication in advance of the operational rehearsal. Many of these hurdles, including communications-security sharing agreements and frequency authorizations, can be eliminated with the creation of standing policies at the combatant command level. The Marine battalion and MRC had to overcome them on their own, but once they did, and once the task force deployed from Okinawa, the preestablished command relationship allowed for seamless integration on the ground in Hokkaido and set a precedent for how a joint reconnaissance-strike complex might work in practice.

The test of any fires system lies in the flexibility, redundancy, and survivability of the network of sensors and shooters. Whether in space or under the ocean, sensors in theater provide the ability to sense and make sense in every domain. This information, synthesized in a variety of ways, can be sent to a menu of shooters to converge effects on a target. While this is done at the operational level by units like the Army’s multidomain task forces, in any future conflict tactical integration will be just as important. During ARTP 23.4 the Army MRC used cross-domain effects including small unmanned aircraft systems and electronic warfare to identify littoral threats in Hokkaido. They passed targeting data over the horizon to HIMARS (High-Mobility Artillery Rocket System) launchers in Iwo Jima and Korea to strike the targets, delivering a concentrated effect using systems dispersed across the first island chain. The kill web used service-organic equipment, while operating with minimal electromagnetic signature. The ability for land-based forces to integrate with maritime elements to achieve sea denial is key to the US Indo-Pacific Command campaigning strategy. Every unit west of the international date line is a potential sensor that can be leveraged, given the ability to communicate and feed data into the network. However, not all sensors are created equal.

Dr. Jack Watling, in his book Arms of the Future, makes a distinction between “stand-in” and “standoff” sensors. Stand-in sensors provide more precision and detail, though remaining vulnerable to counterreconnaissance efforts in ways standoff sensors are not. The MRC serves as a stand-in sensor that can leverage standoff sensor capabilities if properly resourced. Utilizing cross-domain effects to pinpoint targets allows for the cueing of further capabilities to acquire useful targeting data. In this way, the MRC operates as the hub of the kill web, connecting the various sensors and shooters digitally to converge effects on enemy systems. During ARTP 23.4, the MRC blended electronic warfare, small unmanned aircraft systems, and traditional ground-based reconnaissance techniques to eliminate numerous enemy multiple-launch rocket systems. Survivability moves, camouflage, and emissions control can provide a deterrent against standoff sensors, but they proved ineffective against an all-weather reconnaissance unit in close contact. On an increasingly sensor-saturated battlefield, the ability to blind hostile stand-in sensors while maximizing friendly assets will be key. This type of warfare, traditionally described as the reconnaissance/counterreconnaissance fight, is best contested by stand-in forces. Elements like the MRC serve as eyes of the joint reconnaissance-strike complex, enhancing accuracy and lethality. The best way to leverage the MRC is through codified and habitual partnerships.

Establishing a joint reconnaissance-fires complex will take a concerted effort from all branches of service to maintain these habitual relationships and thereby mitigate the inherent friction that will arise during conflict. A quicker joint targeting cycle will lend itself to more efficient bilateral integration in a region where allies are the ultimate arbiter of authorities for US forces. The complexity of a jointly networked fires system invites many questions about authorities and command relationships. A traditional unilateral fires complex has access to fewer targeting assets but needs less deconfliction in each zone of fire. A joint reconnaissance-strike complex provides maximum targeting assets but with more complex deconfliction requirements. What must be rehearsed on a consistent basis is how to incorporate the entirety of joint force sensors and shooters, while maintaining the shortest possible kill chain. Additionally, procedures and techniques for shifting the kill chain between centralized and decentralized control in an efficient manner must be developed. The political and military situation will be fluid and demand an equally flexible fires process.

During ARTP 23.4, the MRC and 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines were able to validate the feasibility of the joint fires complex, albeit at the lowest tactical echelon. Scaling this capability will raise issues of asset management, target engagement authority, and prioritization of targets in the first island chain. To manage these issues, the fires coordination cells at each echelon will need to be more robust than what exists currently. The sliding spectrum of competition, crisis, and conflict needs to be interconnected with the targeting cycle; as the situation shifts from competition to conflict the timely engagement of targets cannot be bogged down by a centralized target engagement authority. Assets that might belong to multiple services will be needed to effectively sense and destroy critical threats. The efficiency gained in sliding authorities can only be accomplished through consistent and realistic rehearsals with the joint force. Preeminent units like the Marine Littoral Regiment and the Army’s 1st Multi-Domain Task Force must rehearse the joint targeting cycle in all available exercises, codifying how they want to tackle this problem in a future conflict. There are numerous exercises in the Indo-Pacific region that are already executed annually yet are often unilateral among the services. The few integrated exercises tend to involve parallel play, with each service conducting its own part without a unified command structure. Liaisons should be present to serve as any part of the joint targeting cycle to practice this as they did in ARTP 23.4. This lateral and vertical integration is already being utilized by the United States’ pacing threat: China has put increased emphasis on its own joint fires integration, necessitating adaptation from US forces.

Campaigning requires not just deploying combat-credible forces into the first island chain, but also the demonstration of meaningful capability. Hopefully the first of many future experiments, ARTP 23.4 showcased the ability of Army reconnaissance to provide a stand-in sensing capability to Marine firing assets in service of the maritime component’s sea-denial strategy. A standing fires-based joint task force is the ideal solution to managing assets effectively, but adding a joint component to existing exercises is a good jumping off point. US Indo-Pacific Command’s area of responsibility is a truly joint theater where the maritime component rightfully claims primacy but can be sensed and struck from the land. Service parochialism threatens an opportunity to build an integrated and effective deterrent to malign actors in the region. Breaking down these barriers requires time, trust, and familiarity. Interoperability is often aspirational or assumed, but the benefit of rehearsals and exercises is clear. The urgency of the theater demands it.

Captain Sean Parrott is a US Army officer serving in 1st Battalion, 27th Infantry Regiment at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii. He most recently commanded the cross-domain effects company.

Captain AJ Vitanza is a US Marine Corps field artillery officer currently serving in 3rd Battalion, 12th Marines as the assistant operations officer.

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

Image credit: Cpl. Jaylen Davis, US Marine Corps

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Sean Parrott, A. J. Vitanza · August 16, 2024

18. Iran is weaker than we think. It’s time to take advantage.

Excerpts:

The lesson learned that the ayatollah has no clothes — that the Islamic Republic is not 10 feet tall and bulletproof — should be a wake-up call in Washington too. Israel’s determination to defend itself and willingness to strike blows in the heart of Iran stands in sharp contrast to the United States — despite a larger economy and military — which runs away from confrontation with Tehran due to an irrational fear of escalation.

Tehran’s proxies in the region have consistently targeted American troops and interests. The regime is racing forward with its nuclear program, too. Not only has Washington failed to hold Tehran accountable, but its non-stop calls for de-escalation in the face of escalation provoke the regime to act more aggressively and with greater impunity.

Between Israel’s demonstrated ability to send a missile through Iranian air defense in April and its more recent capacity to take out a high-level asset in Tehran under the regime’s protection, Washington defense and intelligence planners should understand the Islamic Republic is far more fragile than its information operations would suggest. 

The Haniyeh assassination is a window for the U.S. to seize. This is not a time for restraint or de-escalation. This is a moment to maximize pressure on Khamenei, increase support for the Iranian people and improve the odds that the Islamic Republic crumbles into the ash heap of history. 

Iran is weaker than we think. It’s time to take advantage.

by Saeed Ghasseminejad and Richard Goldberg, opinion contributors - 08/14/24 1:30 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/4825990-iran-vulnerability-hamas-assassination/?utm

The Islamic Republic of Iran is weak and vulnerable, far more than the regime would have us believe. 

That’s the biggest takeaway from last week’s suspected Israeli assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran — and it delivers important messages to the ayatollah, his terror proxies, the Iranian people and Washington policymakers. 

Haniyeh’s killing while under maximum protection by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tells Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, that Israel has deeply infiltrated the ayatollah’s intelligence and security establishment. Furthermore, unlike in previous years, Israel is now prepared to use its power to strike the Islamic Republic at the highest levels within Iran. 

In recent years, Israel has conducted several covert operations in Iran, the most significant being the 2020 elimination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the godfather of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear weapons program. 

But the elimination of Haniyeh, both in terms of his political position and the operation’s complexity, which required planning in a very short time, indicates the extraordinary level of Israel’s infiltration inside the regime and its increased resolve to target its enemies — even if such strikes come with the risk of strong retaliation.

Israel’s capability and will to target Iran’s highest officials, along with its ability to target military and economic infrastructure through military, cyber and other covert means, lets the Islamic Republic know that its actions could increasingly lead to the killing of high-ranking officials inside Iran. It also shows that there is a strong Israeli advantage in any future wide-scale war. 

Haniyeh’s assassination sent an even louder message, however, to the leaders of Tehran’s terror proxies — not only Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar in Gaza but Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and other Iran-directed groups. 

Israel has the ability to strike anyone, anywhere at any time — whether it’s Hezbollah’s chief of staff in southern Beirut or Hamas’s commander-in-chief in Tehran. Entanglement with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp ultimately proves fatal, whether a terrorist on the regime’s dime operates in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza — or even Iran. 

If Israel stays on offense like this, it can effectively disrupt the operational coordination between the head and tentacles of the terror octopus.

But adversaries are not the only stakeholders taking note of Israel’s bold actions. The Iranian people — those who oppose the Islamic Republic — are also emboldened by a regime that increasingly appears ineffective and incompetent.

While the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s Basij forces can succeed in murdering Iranians in the street, the most elite levels of the guard’s security apparatus are no match for covert actions. Iranians, including Khamenei himself, are left to wonder just how many high-level officials in Tehran are willing to sell out an ideologically bankrupt regime for the right price. 

The people of Iran and the state of Israel share a common interest in seeing the Islamic Republic collapse, and each side has capabilities and potential that can support the other in this effort. Israel may find more partners on the streets of Iran to further weaken the regime from within and ultimately bring it down.

The lesson learned that the ayatollah has no clothes — that the Islamic Republic is not 10 feet tall and bulletproof — should be a wake-up call in Washington too. Israel’s determination to defend itself and willingness to strike blows in the heart of Iran stands in sharp contrast to the United States — despite a larger economy and military — which runs away from confrontation with Tehran due to an irrational fear of escalation.

Tehran’s proxies in the region have consistently targeted American troops and interests. The regime is racing forward with its nuclear program, too. Not only has Washington failed to hold Tehran accountable, but its non-stop calls for de-escalation in the face of escalation provoke the regime to act more aggressively and with greater impunity.

Between Israel’s demonstrated ability to send a missile through Iranian air defense in April and its more recent capacity to take out a high-level asset in Tehran under the regime’s protection, Washington defense and intelligence planners should understand the Islamic Republic is far more fragile than its information operations would suggest. 

The Haniyeh assassination is a window for the U.S. to seize. This is not a time for restraint or de-escalation. This is a moment to maximize pressure on Khamenei, increase support for the Iranian people and improve the odds that the Islamic Republic crumbles into the ash heap of history. 

Saeed Ghasseminejad and Richard Goldberg are senior advisors at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

19. What military history tells us about Ukraine’s Kursk invasion By Gian Gentile and Adam Givens

Excerpt:

These three case studies suggest that Ukraine’s audacity has created an advantage. After gaining and maintaining the initiative against the enemy, it can still win its war against the Russian invaders.

What military history tells us about Ukraine’s Kursk invasion

Initiative is everything.

By Gian Gentile and Adam Givens

August 15, 2024 02:52 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Gian Gentile

The Ukrainian ground offensive into the southern Kursk region of Russia is as bold an operation as they come, particularly when put in the broader context of military history.

It difficult to know, at this point, Ukraine’s intent for this risky operation. Perhaps Kyiv aims to draw in Russian ground troops, weakening their offensive elsewhere. Perhaps it wants to drive Russian artillery northward, beyond range of Ukraine’s Sumy region. Perhaps the goal is to capture prisoners to exchange for Ukrainian soldiers held in Russia, or to hold a sliver of land before negotiations begin. Perhaps it is intended mainly as an assault on Putin’s political credibility.

But the ambiguity of the operation’s aims underscores its boldness. At least now, in Kursk proper, and in the larger political realm, Ukraine has the initiative. And in war, as military history shows, initiative is everything.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace,” Gen. George Patton is said to have told his commanders: audacity, audacity, always audacity against an enemy in the field. Patton knew that through boldness he could gain and maintain the initiative against the enemy.

Military history offers three interesting cases of this kind of bold risk-taking. Two ultimately proved successful, while the third ended in failure. All three offer this critical lesson: that it is imperative to gain the initiative and to maintain it with subsequent sustainable actions.

In the fall of 1776, George Washington’s Continental Army, fighting for independence from its colonial master, Great Britain, suffered a stout defeat at the Battle of Long Island. After suffering such a demoralizing rout, most generals would have scurried off with the aim of fighting another day.

But Washington didn’t do that. Instead, he dispatched his army to press the enemy anew: south into New Jersey, where it attacked two British outposts at Princeton and Trenton. By crossing the frozen Delaware River, Washington caught the British off-guard and soundly defeated both outposts. The result proved more than a tactical defeat for the British. By taking Princeton and Trenton, the Continental Army basically cut off British outposts to the west from their main base in New York City.

Washington’s audacious move sent the British Army scurrying back to the safety of its defenses in New York City. It grabbed the initiative back after the defeat on Long Island, buoying Continental Army morale and rejuvenating the patriotic cause. The new-found confidence in his army would remain, even after future losses, for the remainder of the war.

The second case is Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon in September 1950. Combined U.S. forces retook the South Korean coastal city three months after the North Korean invasion had pushed Republic of Korea and U.S. forces all the way south, to the port of Busan.

In the weeks leading up to the landing, MacArthur received pushback from certain members of the U.S. military who argued that Inchon was too risky. The landing site was too far to the north on the peninsula, they said, which would make it difficult for the amphibious landing forces to link up with the planned breakout by the defenders around Busan.

In some ways, the opposition to McArthur’s Inchon plan resembles the criticism Ukraine received in the initial days of its invasion of Kursk. The operation was too risky, skeptics argued. Ukrainian forces were already heavily committed along the frontlines with Russia, and they couldn’t afford the costs in material and manpower that the Kursk invasion would incur.

But the Inchon invasion worked. It allowed U.S. Army and Marine forces to quickly mass on the beach, followed by a quick and decisive movement west, toward Seoul, and south, toward Busan, where they linked up with the breakout operations by U.S., Republic of Korea, and British troops. In the following weeks, UN forces, under U.S. leadership, pushed the North Korean invaders back north, well past the 38th parallel that split the Korean Peninsula in two.

Then MacArthur pressed on, his forces approaching the Yalu River that marked the Chinese border. The cocksure general disregarded clear intelligence indicating that the Chinese Army was likely to enter the war to prevent UN forces from uniting the peninsula under South Korean writ.

Indeed, they did exactly that in late October 1950, crossing the Yalu and beating back the UN advance. Over the next several months, China’s People’s Volunteer Army drove UN forces south of Seoul. By spring 1951, the U.S. had launched a counteroffensive under a new commander, but could only claw back to the 38th Parallel, where the war stalemated.

For Ukraine, the lesson from MacArthur is: Don’t allow initial success from an audacious military action to generate unchecked confidence; don’t become so convinced of your proficiency that you disregard the capabilities and intentions of your enemy.

This was also the lesson that the German Army failed to learn on World War II’s Eastern Front. Germany invaded the Soviet Union in summer 1941, pressed eastward in an unstoppable tide, and by year’s end was pushing on the gates of Moscow. Then came the Red Army’s counterattack.

By early summer 1943, Soviet forces had regained enough ground to create a vulnerable salient: a bulge into the German lines in southeastern Russia, just north of the Ukrainian cities of Sumy and Kharkiv and quite near today’s Ukrainian Kursk offensive.

On July 4, the German Army launched a bold, audacious counterstroke, attacking the bulge from the north and the south with the aim of pinching the Soviets off and destroying nearly half-a-million soldiers. After about a month of heavy fighting—and the largest tank battle in the history of warfare—the German attack on Kursk stalled and failed.

It failed largely because the German Army, at that point in the war, didn’t have the operational depth of forces to sustain their counteroffensive beyond the first few weeks. It also failed because the Germans were not fighting for the same objective as the Soviets. The Red Army’s fight was existential: a struggle for their homeland against a brutal invading force. The German Army, by comparison, fought to achieve Hitler’s rapacious goal of lebensraum, or living space for the German people. The motivations of fighting forces are not inconsequential.

Kursk offers many lessons for the Ukrainians today. Even in the boldness of the current incursion, the Ukrainians must be ready to accept when the spread of their military forces has culminated. They will inevitably reach a point where, if they don’t shift to the defensive—either in Kursk or back in Ukraine—they risk catastrophic defeat in detail.

Russians today, and Vladmir Putin in particular, should learn from the Germans and their failure at Kursk in 1943, and ultimately the overall defeat of Germany in WWII: an enemy who defends their homeland in a fight for their existence is tough to beat. That is especially the case when that enemy applies bold, risk-taking operations that are sequenced and sustained with follow-on obtainable objectives.

These three case studies suggest that Ukraine’s audacity has created an advantage. After gaining and maintaining the initiative against the enemy, it can still win its war against the Russian invaders.

Gian Gentile is the Associate Director at RAND’s Army Research Division.

Adam Givens is an Associate Policy Researcher at RAND.

defenseone.com · by Gian Gentile

20. Why the U.S. Military Needs to Imitate Ukraine’s Drone Force

Why the U.S. Military Needs to Imitate Ukraine’s Drone Force

By Lorenz Meier and Niall FergusonAugust 13, 2024 10:31 AM EDT

Meier is the Chairman of the DroneCode Foundation and founder and CEO of Auterion. He is a MIT 35-under-35 Innovator and creator of Pixhawk, the most widely used drone autopilot and MAVLink, the industry standard for communication, also used by the U.S. Department of Defense. He holds a PhD in computer vision and drone engineering.

Ferguson is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. He is the author of 16 books, most recently 'Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.' He is also the founder of advisory firm Greenmantle and a founding trustee of the new University of Austin.

TIME · by Lorenz Meier

Imagine it is 2028 and there is a coordinated parallel attack executed by Russia on one of the Baltic states and by China on Taiwan. Under such a scenario, Russia would attempt to seize NATO territory and China would blockade Taiwan as a fait accompli to undermine alliance cohesion.

As things stand, NATO’s conventional forces would struggle to withstand such a Russian assault. And it would take weeks, if not months, to deploy American troops to the Indo-Pacific region.

The Cold War solution to this kind of problem involved the threat of using tactical nuclear weapons. Small tactical nuclear weapons made it highly risky to mass mechanized formations for a large-scale assault, as they would become a perfect target for such nukes. They were crucial to the official NATO plan to defend against a Soviet onslaught through the so-called Fulda Gap in western Germany.

Such an onslaught from the East is once again possible. Russia is now building up two new armies larger than the armies of half of NATO combined. Soon, armchair strategists will have to learn about the Suwalki Gap—the area around the Lithuanian-Polish border, which would be the shortest route from Belarus to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Meanwhile, China is building roll-on, roll-off ferries that are nominally civilian, but have started to take part in military exercises. They are part of a sustained effort to amass the naval assets necessary for a prolonged blockade of Taiwan—and if necessary a war at sea.

But would whoever is U.S. President in 2028 be willing to meet such challenges with tactical nuclear weapons and all the associated risks of escalation to World War III? Have we no better deterrent than the old threat of Armageddon?

The good news is that we do now.

In contrast to nearly all predictions, when Russia’s offensive was launched in February 2022, Ukraine not only thwarted the initial assault, but drove back and then held what was once considered the number two army in the world. It has stemmed the Russian tide not only through the heroism of its own troops but also by employing drones in the hundreds of thousands.

Ukraine is the first nation to have created a new military branch, the Unmanned Systems Forces of Ukraine. This is a pivotal moment akin to the creation of the world’s first air force, the Royal Air Force, formed on April 1, 1918, seven months before Britain’s victory in World War I. Ukraine’s use of drones is transforming warfare as fundamentally as airplanes once did.

NATO forces have, in comparison, small drone arsenals in the hundreds or low thousands. But that is changing. Earlier this summer, U.S. Indo-pacific Command revealed its ”hellscape” strategy to fill the waters around Taiwan with tens of thousands of unmanned boats, submarines and drones in the event of a Chinese move against the island.

The Replicator Initiative, announced by Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks a year ago, is intended to provide the manufacturing base that will enable hellscape. Six NATO countries recently announced their own version of hellscape to deter Russia: the European drone wall.

Unlike large standing armies, drones that are being held in reserve do not take up a lot of space, do not need to be fed, and are not drawing salaries. Unlike tactical nukes, drones do not produce fallout. But they can provide a comparable level of tactical deterrence.

An arsenal of millions of autonomous drones is a credible threat to a mechanized assault or a flotilla of ships. A state-of-the-art drone swarm could halt a Russian invasion or a Chinese blockade. Ukraine has proven this by blunting large-scale Russian mechanized attacks and crippling Russia’s Black Sea fleet. Kyiv’s expert use of drones is the reason it has been able to launch a surprise offensive deep into the Russian region of Kursk.

More from TIME

The implications for legacy military hardware are profound. Interestingly, the debate on tanks versus drones today echoes the one on battleships versus airplanes a century ago. Today’s drones are the equivalent of the barn-built biplanes of World War I, which barely resemble their modern jet-powered counterparts. Far more formidable unmanned munitions are coming. We are already seeing so-called “deep-strike” drones: Iranian Shahed drones used by Russia and the long-range drones built by Ukrainian startups. En masse, such drones can overwhelm even advanced air defenses. It remains to be seen if Iran and its proxies have enough such weapons to overwhelm Israel’s defenses in the coming days. If not, their recent threats will prove empty.

A similar revolution is underway in naval warfare. As Elliot Ackerman and James Stavridis have argued, and as Ukraine has shown in the Black Sea, deep-strike drones can also be used against naval targets. Like tanks, large surface ships, including aircraft carriers, are at risk of obsolescence.

This year, for the first time in history, Ukraine and Russia are building drones on an industrial scale. The evolution is from one operator directing a single drone to one operator directing whole flocks. By the end of 2024, we shall see for the first time what we call autonomous mass—swarms of drones in the thousands being directed by a handful of operators, relying less and less on ground control.

The shift to unmanned warfare is unstoppable. That is the lesson we have learned from Ukraine. For the United States, however, the Replicator Initiative and hellscape plan are just a start. What we need now is to build the Unmanned Systems of America.

The alternative could be a catastrophic failure of deterrence on the watch of the next President.

TIME · by Lorenz Meier

21. Ukraine on the Offensive

Excerpts:

Through much of the past two and a half years of fighting, a popular view of Russian strategy has been that Putin is seeking to outlast his adversary by simply exhausting Ukraine and its Western partners. But Russia itself is not immune to exhaustion. For Kyiv, forcing Russia to burn through as many of its military resources as possible has become a way to hinder Putin’s goal of adapting the Russian economy to a state of perpetual war. In the long run, Ukrainians want to make Russians themselves tire of the conflict.

For now, the arrival of new supplies of military equipment has allowed Ukrainian forces to defend the population better. Consider the long-awaited delivery of F-16s. For example, as of mid-August, after the first planes arrived from the Netherlands, Ukrainian military officers in the Kharkiv region were noting a reduction of Russian glide-bomb attacks. Even though it was not clear that any F16s were present in the area, the mere fact that Ukraine now had the capability to hit Russian aircraft carrying the bombs had become a form of deterrence.

One of the growing realities of this war is how different it looks close up. Months before the Kursk invasion, when many Western observers perceived the war to be stalled, the view from Kyiv was different. In the spring of 2024, it was already clear to many of Ukraine’s military leaders that Russia was expending enormous amounts of manpower and firepower each day and that this would help Ukraine in the long run. As this summer’s campaigns have unfolded, Ukraine’s task has been not only to defend its own strategic assets and show resilience against relentless Russian attacks, but also to destroy as many Russian resources as it can to make Putin and Belousov’s war economy impossible. This may not offer an immediate path to victory, but it can prevent Russia from exploiting its current position and do much to diminish Russia’s potential for future gains. At least in part, this strategy seems to be working.

Ukraine on the Offensive

How Kyiv’s Attack on Russia—and Successful Defense of Its Northern Flank—Has Changed the War

By Nataliya Gumenyuk

August 16, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Nataliya Gumenyuk · August 16, 2024

Launched on August 6, Ukraine’s surprise cross-border offensive into the Kursk region of Russia has startled the world. Not only is the operation far and away the largest Ukrainian attack into Russian territory since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022; it also has come at a time when Ukrainian forces were struggling to preserve their already stretched resources along the existing 3,300-mile front. Yet as of mid-August, Ukrainian forces had penetrated dozens of miles into Russia and gained control of 74 villages and towns in the Kursk region, according to Ukraine’s top military commander. Ukraine has also taken more than 100 Russian prisoners.

At this stage, it is too early to assess the success of the operation. So far Kyiv has said its primary aim is halting Russian artillery attacks from the Kursk region into Ukrainian territory. According to the Ukrainian government, more than 255 glide bombs and hundreds of missiles have been launched at Ukrainian towns from the region since the beginning of the summer. Kyiv also hopes to use the POWs in a prisoner exchange to release Ukrainian soldiers from Russian captivity. Even more important, the operation could force the Kremlin to redeploy some of its troops from southern and eastern Ukraine. Previously, it was Ukraine that had to draw from its existing deployments to counter Russian attacks.

Politically, the Kursk offensive serves another purpose. It allows Kyiv to address its partners from a position of strength and puts the growing debate about potential cease-fire negotiations in a different light. Few Western observers expected any significant Ukrainian offensive this summer, let alone one that could penetrate well into Russia. If nothing else, Kyiv has demonstrated that it is very much still in the fight, easing recent concerns about its staying power. Moreover, Ukrainian troops have shown that they are capable of planning and unleashing a surprise large-scale offensive in total secrecy despite the presence of drones and satellites on the battlefield that can see almost everything.

This is a striking contrast to the first six months of the year, when the frontlines remained largely static despite intense fighting. By early 2024, citing a sense of impasse, many Western analysts were pushing for some kind of settlement with Moscow. Although there was no official support for this from Kyiv, some experts had also begun proposing ceding Ukrainian territory to bring an end to the fighting. Yet as recent events have shown, the war is not exactly at a stalemate: both sides have launched major actions since the late spring, and thanks to the arrival of new weapons and new defenses, the balance of power has shifted. Although much has been made of polls showing mounting war fatigue among Ukrainians, few are prepared to give up significant parts of their country to reach a settlement. Ukrainians are also wary of any plan that would freeze the frontlines where they are now, which would leave Russian forces on their doorstep and poised to launch a new invasion at any time.

Amid these concerns, the Kursk operation has also shown just what is at stake for Kyiv and why it is continuing the fight. Whether in the daily grind of the eastern front or in bold new offensives, Ukrainian forces are seeking to keep Russia off balance and to make the war far more costly—and above all, to prevent Moscow from strengthening its own war machine further.

KHARKIV’S DEFIANCE

To understand what the Kursk incursion means for Ukrainians, it is crucial to follow recent events in and around Kharkiv, the country’s second largest city and a crucial bastion of its northeast region. On May 10, the Russian army began a long-anticipated assault on the city, which lies near the Russian border and is home to 1.3 million civilians. Since the fall of 2022, when the Ukrainian army liberated this area, it had remained relatively calm by comparison with the east and the south, and many Ukrainians displaced from the Donbas had sought refuge there. A Russian occupation of even part of Kharkiv would have been a dramatic setback for Ukraine.

Yet that didn’t happen. During the early days of the May offensive, Russian forces moved five miles into Ukrainian territory, with heavy fighting in the border area around Kharkiv. But Ukrainian forces succeeded in halting the advance, and by by the end of the month, it was clear that the city would not be taken. Today, Russian forces continue to press the fight near Kharkiv, but the stalling of the offensive marks something of a turning point in the war this year: barring a cataclysmic change in the balance of forces, it is now highly unlikely that Russia will be able to capture Kharkiv or any other large Ukrainian city.

This outcome was not foreseen by Western observers. When Russia’s spring assault began, international headlines initially portrayed it as an existential threat to Ukraine. Up to 50,000 Russian troops were approaching Kharkiv while aircraft sent huge glide bombs from Russia’s side of the border with largely no impediment.

By March, Ukraine’s air defenses had almost run out of ammunition, in part because of the months-long delay in a $61 billion aid package that remained stuck in the U.S. Congress. The Kremlin had taken advantage of this shortfall to destroy Kharkiv’s power grid. From that point on, scheduled power cuts became a feature of daily life in the city. Moreover, Kharkiv lacked any missile defense system equivalent to the U.S.-supplied Patriot force, which had been prioritized to protect Kyiv itself. As a result, during the first weeks of the invasion, the city was exposed to lethal bombardment. On a single day in May, seven people were killed and 16 wounded during an attack on a publishing house; two days later, 19 were killed in an attack on a hypermarket.

Kyiv has demonstrated that it is very much still in the fight, easing recent concerns about its staying power.

By early June, however, additional ammunition for air defenses had been delivered. Ukrainians were now capable of hitting the Russian aircraft that were carrying the missiles and even of reaching targets in the neighboring Belgorod region of Russia from where many glide bombs were launched, thus limiting the threat to Kharkiv. Ukraine was also able to stabilize the situation with the arrival of a few support brigades, although this left some Ukrainian positions in the Donbas more vulnerable. Since then, Russia has launched frequent missile strikes at Kharkiv almost daily, but glide bombs have become rarer.

Although intense fighting continues around Kharkiv, a strong defense has shifted the mood in this city, an important center for Ukrainian industry, logistics, and scientific research. Since the opening weeks of the Russian attack, Kharkiv has been functioning and full of life: hospitals, state institutions, cinemas, shopping malls, and many small businesses are fully operating. Despite a strong military presence, the city has the look and feel of an urban center in full swing. In survey published in early August, around 70 percent of Kharkiv residents agreed that “invincibility” was one of the city’s main characteristics.—that “life goes on,” and “people do their jobs despite fears.” The city has also rallied around the armed forces and municipal employees who have continued to work—even during air raid warnings that may last for nine to 12 hours per day—as well as firefighters and energy workers who rush to fix infrastructure after Russian attacks.

With the fighting all around it, Kharkiv has strived to reinvent itself and acquire a new purpose. Although its large foreign student population departed at the start of the war, it has welcomed some 200,000 Ukrainians displaced from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, for example. For many, it is easier to find regular work in this large city than in more agricultural regions to the west. Residents who have so much to lose—freedom, their way of life, their homes—prefer to talk about their city in terms of how much Ukraine has to defend there.

MOSCOW’S BOMB POWER

A larger reality underscored by the successful defense of Kharkiv, one that has until now been too little appreciated in the West, is that Russia is unlikely to take a major Ukrainian city in the future. Although the threat to the city grabbed international headlines, there was never a moment during Moscow’s May offensive that Kharkiv could have fallen. On the contrary, the past few months have shown Ukrainians that at this stage, Kharkiv and other crucial cities close to the frontlines—Dnipro, Mykolaiv, and Zaporizhzhia—remain out of reach for Russia’s ground forces.

By contrast, Russia’s attacks on smaller towns and villages on the front lines have been utterly devastating, including for some that are very close to Kharkiv. Take Lyptsi, a village less than a mile from the Russian border. Until early May, life was relatively normal there. But Lyptsi was one of two major settlements that stood in the way of Russia’s advance on Kharkiv and has served as a Ukrainian military outpost. Thus, starting that month, the village was hammered with glide bombs. According to Ukrainian soldiers based there, they have sometimes been targeted by up to ten glide bombs per hour. The local school, kindergarten, and hospital were destroyed. Hardly a single building in Lyptsi is still standing. All civilians have fled.

Of course, ravages to frontline towns, especially in the Donbas, began long before this summer. But Lyptsi’s fate shows how much Russian strategy has evolved since the war began: Russian forces now make little pretense that they are trying to capture Ukrainian towns and bring them under Russian domination. Instead, they simply seek to obliterate them. This is a shift from two years ago, when Ukrainians in the east faced a different Russian threat.

A Ukrainian soldier firing at Russian troops in Kharkiv Region, Ukraine, May 2024

Valentyn Ogirenko / Reuters

Consider the experience of Vovchansk, a Ukrainian town of 17,000 near the Russian border in the Kharkiv region. Within hours of the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces occupied the town, which became fully isolated from Ukrainian territory; the only way for residents to escape the war was to cross the border to Russia. When Ukrainian troops liberated the area six months later, they found a population that had gone through a horrific occupation.

As soon as the Russians had taken over the town, a local factory was turned into a detention and interrogation facility. At its peak of operations, up to 300 Ukrainians were held there. One Ukrainian who was interrogated there described the way he and other detainees were treated. “They attach clothespins to your ears,’’ he said. “Your hands are tied behind the chair.” He was able to escape; others were not so lucky. Many described beatings, and women were threatened with rape. One local resident, Kostia Tytarenko, who was 21 at the time, was abducted by the Russian military on a highway near Vovchansk in the summer of 2022 and taken to Russia.

Now Vovchansk has suffered a different fate. Until this spring’s assault, some 3500 people had remained there, but as Russians troops moved into it, nearly all of them left—this time mainly to Kharkiv. In two weeks, not more than 50 people remained. Today, it is not abusive Russian occupiers that Ukrainians in the east fear most, but Russian bombs and Russian drones. They know that the Kremlin’s forces no longer have the capability to capture their cities and try to make them Russian. But along the frontlines, they can destroy what they can’t dominate, forcing Ukrainians to abandon their homes.

THE DEAL PUTIN WANTS

Amid their grinding efforts to defend largely ruined towns along the frontlines, Ukrainians fear that Kyiv's Western partners could someday force them to accept a more permanent Russian occupation of their land in the interest of ending the war. This tension dates to early 2024, when many Western commentators began to talk more insistently about the possibility of a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine. There was even talk that Putin might be ready to make a deal. At the time, I tried to verify these rumors with my Russian colleagues—independent journalists and analysts who still have contacts inside Russia.

As I learned, Putin was trying to capitalize on a sense of Western war fatigue, encouraging voices in the West who were questioning continued support for Kyiv at a time when Ukraine was already short on military resources. In fact, Russia had no interest in a deal: at the start of the year, Russian generals were already bragging about a possible assault in Kharkiv in May, a plan that was ultimately carried out. It seems likely that the Kremlin was exploiting Western talk of negotiations to try to undermine Ukrainian morale.

In the long run, Ukrainians want to make Russians themselves tire of the conflict.

Ukrainians are not interested in playing this game. It is not hard for them to see what a deal on Russia’s terms could mean. At the outset of the war, Putin officially titled Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the “special operation in Donbas”—a campaign aimed at “liberating” the part of that eastern Ukrainian region, which includes Luhansk and Donetsk, that it had not captured in 2014. (Even if Luhansk is now in Russian control, Russia has been unable to occupy two major towns in the region, Sloviansk and Kramatorsk.) Gaining or declaring full control over the Donbas would give the Kremlin an easy exit strategy: it could effectively freeze the frontlines where they are now while boasting that it had achieved its declared war aims.

Obviously, this is not an outcome that Ukrainians are prepared to contemplate: the presence of Russian troops along hundreds of miles in the east, even with a frozen conflict, would be a permanent threat. Moreover, the region is important to millions of displaced Ukrainians who hope to return and can remember a past in which the Donbas was a fulcrum of the country’s industry.

From a practical standpoint, there is little for Ukraine to hold onto in heavily bombed border towns like Vovchansk. While even small retreats are psychologically painful for those in the military who have spent years defending these few dozen acres of land, the loss of villages in the Donbas today does not have much effect on Ukrainians’ overall attitudes about the war. Industrial towns such as Bakhmut and Avdiivka are already in ruins; heavy industry, once the region’s pride and glory, has been destroyed beyond recognition. Under Soviet rule, especially under Stalin, the region became a center for metallurgy and mining through an enormous level of harsh Soviet planning. Heavily mined, polluted, and now filled with spent ammunition, the region cannot return to that past. Regardless of how ambitious Kyiv’s postwar reconstruction plans are, it will be impossible to reindustrialize eastern Ukraine to the extent it once was. Donbas as the heart of the Ukrainian industry is gone forever.

But if Ukrainians have few illusions about how much has been lost, they also understand that now is not the time to negotiate. Although recent polling indicates that more Ukrainians are open to territorial concessions to end the war, these findings are less clear than they may appear. For one thing, even with growing numbers voicing such flexibility, they are still a minority of Ukrainians, and a large majority of the population maintains a high level of confidence in victory. For another, although more Ukrainians may agree today that fighting over a few miles of scorched earth is not that important, that doesn’t mean that more of them are prepared to give up important cities in the east, including those currently under Russian control.

MAKING RUSSIA PAY

Should the West push Kyiv to negotiate, Ukrainians can easily imagine the likely outcome: military support from their allies would diminish, since some Western governments would find it illogical to provide further military aid while peace talks were getting under way. Meanwhile, the Kremlin would continue to produce weapons. Moscow has already made clear that it seeks to further militarize its economy, presumably to prolong the war. Thus, during its assault on Kharkiv this spring, Putin reshuffled his cabinet and, in a surprise move, replaced his longtime defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, with Andrei Belousov, an economist. Not just known for his loyalty to Putin, Belousov is an economic planner who believes the entire economy can be rebuilt around the war. In his new position, his job is to transfer all available government revenue, including income from taxes and natural resources, to achieve military goals—in other words, to make the state capable of waging permanent war. Russia’s defense budget already constitutes 7 percent of GDP, one of the largest ratios in the world, and analysts expect it could rise to as high as 10 percent under Belousov.

Moscow’s new war economy poses a major challenge to Kyiv. The Ukrainian government has had no choice but to follow suit and adjust its economy to secure the permanent availability of weapons and resources for defense. As a democratic state, Ukraine cannot force its private economy to go on a total war footing, but it can provide incentives for businesses to participate in the war effort and ensure greater tax enforcement, since its entire defense budget comes from tax revenue. Somehow, the military war of attrition that both sides have been waging has become an economic one as well. And this may also be one of the reasons why Ukraine’s Kursk offensive is so important.

Through much of the past two and a half years of fighting, a popular view of Russian strategy has been that Putin is seeking to outlast his adversary by simply exhausting Ukraine and its Western partners. But Russia itself is not immune to exhaustion. For Kyiv, forcing Russia to burn through as many of its military resources as possible has become a way to hinder Putin’s goal of adapting the Russian economy to a state of perpetual war. In the long run, Ukrainians want to make Russians themselves tire of the conflict.

For now, the arrival of new supplies of military equipment has allowed Ukrainian forces to defend the population better. Consider the long-awaited delivery of F-16s. For example, as of mid-August, after the first planes arrived from the Netherlands, Ukrainian military officers in the Kharkiv region were noting a reduction of Russian glide-bomb attacks. Even though it was not clear that any F16s were present in the area, the mere fact that Ukraine now had the capability to hit Russian aircraft carrying the bombs had become a form of deterrence.

One of the growing realities of this war is how different it looks close up. Months before the Kursk invasion, when many Western observers perceived the war to be stalled, the view from Kyiv was different. In the spring of 2024, it was already clear to many of Ukraine’s military leaders that Russia was expending enormous amounts of manpower and firepower each day and that this would help Ukraine in the long run. As this summer’s campaigns have unfolded, Ukraine’s task has been not only to defend its own strategic assets and show resilience against relentless Russian attacks, but also to destroy as many Russian resources as it can to make Putin and Belousov’s war economy impossible. This may not offer an immediate path to victory, but it can prevent Russia from exploiting its current position and do much to diminish Russia’s potential for future gains. At least in part, this strategy seems to be working.

• NATALIYA GUMENYUK is a Ukrainian journalist, CEO of the Public Interest Journalism Lab, and Co-Founder of The Reckoning Project.

Foreign Affairs · by Nataliya Gumenyuk · August 16, 2024

22. We Need a Real Marine Corps To Fight a Two Front War By Gary Anderson

Excerpts:

Most naval and geopolitical experts are appalled by the concept and the resulting loss of combined arms capabilities. A recent report by the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) bemoans the loss of that combined arms combat power. This is particularly disturbing because CNA is the FFRDC* think tank designated to support the Marine Corps.

Like the retired general officers who generally advise the senior active leadership, CNA was apparently cut out of the process. Wargaming supporting Force Design minimized the lack of logistical support and the viability of platforms such as the landing ship medium. MCCDC (Marine Corps Combat Development Command), responsible for the development of future operational concepts was also absent from Force Design planning.

The Former Commandant and his team that rushed Force Design into development overlooked or willfully disregarded the nation's capability to fight and win two MRCs. Legendary Marine Corps hero "Chesty Puller" was fond of saying that "the road to Hell is paved with the good intentions of Second Lieutenants," now the same can probably be said for Four Star Generals.

We Need a Real Marine Corps To Fight a Two Front War

By Gary Anderson

August 14, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/08/14/we_need_a_real_marine_corps_to_fight_a_two_front_war_1051632.html

The Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) transits the Strait of Hormuz, Aug. 4, 2021. Iwo Jima is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to ensure maritime stability and security in the Central Region, connecting the Mediterranean and the Pacific through the western Indian Ocean and three strategic choke points. (U.S. Navy photo by Smn Logan Kaczmarek)

The term "axis of evil" (AOE) originally coined by President George W Bush in response to the attacks on September 11^th, 2001, included adversarial foreign governments that sponsored terrorism and sought weapons of mass destruction, namely Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Certainly not a Warsaw Pact-like organization. However, today's axis of evil may come closer to threatening the U.S. with a multi-front war, a war we are not ready for.

The new AOE, if it exists, consists of China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. US intelligence suggests there are plans afoot to coordinate any Chinese attack against Taiwan, East China Sea or South China Sea with military action elsewhere. The most likely candidate is Iran. Russia is otherwise engaged, and North Koreas is not ready to engage in a major regional conflict (MRC),

Until 2019, the United States was reasonably well positioned to wage a two-front war, The theory was win-hold-win, Win in the major theater (in this case China). Hold in the secondary theater (Iran here); then win in MRC 2. 

The key to the two MRC strategy was the United States Marine Corps. The Marine Corps had several capabilities vital to the second MRC.

The Marine Corps previously had a rapid reaction air-alert capability that could put a light infantry force on the ground within twenty-four hours. This, combined with army light infantry, (82d Airborne, 101st Air Assault, and 10th Mountain divisions). These elements would act as a tripwire to discourage the adversary from crossing the line of departure or as a blocking force on the brink of hostilities.

The real Marine Corps contribution would come with the arrival of a Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit with a small, but potent combined arms team replete with armor, artillery, aviation, and assault engineers. In the Iran example it would be the MEU stationed 24/7 in the Persian Gulf/Indian Ocean region. Next would come a full combined arms capability in the form of a Maritime Pre-positioned Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MPS) with a full complement of tanks, artillery, combat aircraft, and assault engineers.

In the Iranian case (second MRC), the MPS set stationed at Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean would be used. As needed, the other two MPS sets could be added to make up a full division/ air wing/ logistics team or corps- sized Marine Expeditionary force. If needed additional divisions, and air wings could reinforce the MEF as needed. This was exactly what happened in Desert Shield/Storm and Iraqi Freedom, but that capability no longer exists. 

Inexplicably, starting in 2019, the Marine Corps transformed itself from a robust combined arms team into a combination of light infantry and coastal artillery.

Even if the Marine Corps had retained the combat capabilities lost through divestment, it would have been crippled by the failure of the Navy’s amphibious shipbuilding deals made for the Marine Corps.

These divestments were made to allow the Marine Corps to implement its poorly conceived first island chain, China-centric Force Design concept that has the Corps buying anti-ship missiles for use in a blue water fight that will likely never happen.

Most naval and geopolitical experts are appalled by the concept and the resulting loss of combined arms capabilities. A recent report by the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) bemoans the loss of that combined arms combat power. This is particularly disturbing because CNA is the FFRDC* think tank designated to support the Marine Corps.

Like the retired general officers who generally advise the senior active leadership, CNA was apparently cut out of the process. Wargaming supporting Force Design minimized the lack of logistical support and the viability of platforms such as the landing ship medium. MCCDC (Marine Corps Combat Development Command), responsible for the development of future operational concepts was also absent from Force Design planning.

The Former Commandant and his team that rushed Force Design into development overlooked or willfully disregarded the nation's capability to fight and win two MRCs. Legendary Marine Corps hero "Chesty Puller" was fond of saying that "the road to Hell is paved with the good intentions of Second Lieutenants," now the same can probably be said for Four Star Generals.

* FFRDC - Federally funded research and development center.

Gary Anderson retired as Chief of Staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab.

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