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Quotes of the Day:
"A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own."
– H. G. Wells
"You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive."
– James Baldwin
"Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one getting burned."
– Buddha
1. Putin’s New Agents of Chaos
2. Iranian brothers charged in smuggling operation tied to SEALs’ deaths
3. As the Gaza Pier Is Packed Up, Experts Worry About What It Portends for a War in the Pacific
4. A Post-American Europe
5. Army fellowship offers paid degree, editor jobs to revitalize journals
6. Perception Warfare as Both Threat and Opportunity in Israel’s Post-October 7 Existential War
7. Irregular warfare: How fascist leaders use people willing to betray their own country
8. Cheap first-person-view drones now hunting larger prey in Ukraine
9. Disinformation Effort Key to Houthi Red Sea Campaign, Says 5th Fleet Commander
10. DNA on weapons implicates ex-U.S. Green Beret in attempted Venezuelan coup, federal officials say
11. 'Zero Day': New 10-Part Series Imagines What a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Might Actually Look Like
12. Japan's 'megaquake' warning explained
13. New bodycam video shows moment police officer saw Trump shooter just before assassination attempt
14. “Shadow Reserves”: China’s Key to Parry U.S. Financial Sanctions
15. Keep Generational Labels Out of Army Talent Management
16. As Three to One: The Moral Significance of Ukraine’s New F-16s
17. With the world on edge, defense stocks soar
18. Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic -
19. How to Fix the Secret Service Before It Fails Again
20. Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons
1. Putin’s New Agents of Chaos
We ignore this at our peril.
History certainly rhymes. The authors provide some important background as well as current assessments.
This is political, irregular, and unconventional warfare, subversion and sabotage, and operations in the gray zone. Choose a name to describe this.
Excerpts:
By now, Western spy agencies can no longer claim ignorance of the Russian arson and sabotage campaign, and U.S. and NATO officials have begun raising the alarm. The Kremlin appears to be seeking to have Europeans experience more directly the costs of the war in hopes of eroding public support for the Ukrainian war effort. Moreover, a larger attack on Western infrastructure could have far-reaching, destabilizing effects.
Still, Putin’s sabotage strategy has put the West in a difficult situation. Given Western efforts to avoid direct conflict with Russia, Western leaders are reluctant to call for a larger military response to these attacks, which could trigger uncontained escalation. Even now, after months of such operations, Western leaders seem prepared to look the other way when they deem it necessary.
In early August, in the landmark prisoners-for-hostages deal with Russia, the United States, Germany, and other Western countries agreed to return several high value Russian intelligence operatives in exchange for the release of Russian opposition leaders, journalists, and human rights activists, including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been held in Russian prisons. Among those handed over by the West was the convicted assassin Vadim Krasikov, a close confidant of Putin who has been directly implicated in operations in the West. That Putin went to the airport to greet the assassins and spies in person will inevitably boost the morale, and aggressiveness of the intelligence agencies.
Political expediency aside, the West may be limited in the kinds of counter operations it can launch in the face of continued acts of Russian sabotage. For one thing, the United States and its allies cannot easily respond in kind, because they are not officially at war with Russia. But there is another problem, as well: U.S. and European counterintelligence agencies lack the ability to implement full-scale measures to stop Russian sabotage operations, because to be truly effective, these must include drastic steps that are in practice only feasible under totalitarian regimes.
After all, the Soviets attempted to control and surveil all foreigners’ movements within the Soviet Union, but such an approach would be anathema in any Western democracy. What the West needs is a collective intelligence strategy, and it needs to start now—before a large-scale attack makes calibrated responses far more difficult.
Putin’s New Agents of Chaos
How Russia’s Growing Squad of Saboteurs and Assassins Threatens the West
August 9, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin · August 9, 2024
On July 26, on the day of the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris, unknown attackers pulled off a coordinated sabotage operation on France’s national railway, leaving millions of passengers stranded. No one initially claimed responsibility for the attack, which is still being investigated; France’s interior minister has suggested that “ultra-left” extremists may have been responsible. Yet intelligence experts have also asked whether Russia might have been involved. “The Russian angle is certainly a strong one,” Javed Ali, a counterterrorism expert and former member of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, told “PBS NewsHour” after the attack.
Although there has been no clear evidence implicating Russia, there are strong grounds for these suspicions. Over the past few months, the French government has taken a more aggressive stance in its support for Ukraine, and the Russian government holds particular grievances against the International Olympic Committee, which banned Russian athletes from competing in the games this year. What is more, since the early months of this year, European and U.S. intelligence officials have connected a spate of sabotage operations across Europe to Russia’s GRU intelligence service. These attacks have involved arson and other tactics. They have sometimes targeted transport networks. And they have occurred in more than half a dozen European countries, including the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
In March 2024, a Ukraine-linked warehouse in Leyton, East London, was set on fire. The British police arrested four people on charges that included planning an arson attack and assisting Russian intelligence. The following month, a facility in South Wales belonging to the British defense, security, and aerospace company BAE was hit by an explosion and caught fire—an attack that has not yet been attributed but which follows the pattern of others. Also in April, German authorities arrested two men with dual German and Russian citizenship on suspicion of plotting sabotage attacks on a military base in Bavaria, accusing one of the suspects of being in contact with Russian intelligence. And in May, Poland detained three men—two of them Belarusian and one a Polish citizen—for carrying out acts of arson and sabotage on behalf of Russia.
Even more startling, in mid-July, CNN reported that U.S. and German intelligence had disrupted a plot by Russian agents to assassinate Armin Papperger, the head of leading German arms maker Rheinmetall, which has been a major supplier of artillery shells to Ukraine. The assassination of a foreign national, on foreign soil, would mark a dramatic departure from previous Russian tactics abroad—and even those of the Soviet Union.
Drawing on a resurgent Russian spy force and a new army of local recruits in target countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin has opened a new chapter in Russian gray zone operations in the West. Over the past six months, Russian-backed forces have signaled that they are prepared to attack Western industrial and transport infrastructure—and also, in some cases, Western citizens. Moreover, in deploying such tactics, the Kremlin appears to be seeking to escalate as much as it can without triggering a military response.
The West has found itself completely unprepared for this new challenge. For now, the United States and its European allies have dealt with each attack separately, rather than as part of a broader campaign. And although some operations have been disrupted, NATO countries have thus far failed to develop a collective approach to the threat. With the potential for causing large-scale chaos, or worse, these attacks could become a destabilizing threat at a time of political uncertainty in Europe and a closely fought presidential election in the United States.
THE BOLSHEVIK UNDERGROUND
Although Russia’s sabotage campaign has caught the West by surprise, it is not entirely new. In June, Philip H. J. Davies, a leading British intelligence scholar, wrote that “the West has had three decades to collectively, institutionally forget about the threat from nation-state sabotage.” In fact, even during the Cold War, although they planned for such actions, Soviet intelligence agencies never used them against the West. It was even earlier, before World War II, that the Soviets perfected this strategy.
After the Russian Revolution, in 1917, the Bolsheviks viewed sabotage operations as an effective way to target the West. At its founding, the Communist International (Comintern)—the worldwide organization of communist parties—ordered its member parties to infiltrate weapons and ammunition facilities in their home countries, and Lenin forced them to also support covert militant cells. These underground cells soon posed such a big problem that the British government conditioned formal recognition of the Soviet Union on the condition that the Soviets put an end to communist activities in the British military and in munitions factories. But during World War II, Stalin disbanded the Comintern in a desperate bid to please the Americans, and the sabotage operations abruptly ended.
A fire engulfing a shopping center in what Polish officials called a Russian-backed arson attack, Warsaw, May 2024
Dariusz Borowicz / Agencja Wyborcza.pl / Reuters
With the onset of the Cold War, the two Soviet spy agencies—the KGB and the military intelligence unit the GRU—devised new plans for sabotage operations in Western Europe and the United States. In the 1950s, the Soviets began planting caches of high explosives and arms across Western Europe, and reportedly in the United States, for this purpose. But they were to be used only in the event of what the Soviets called a “special period”—a euphemism for all-out war with the West.
Since these plans were never activated, Western spy agencies concluded that stepped up deterrence strategies had forced the KGB and the GRU to set aside offensive subversion operations in the West. But the tactics were never fully discarded, as Putin’s intelligence forces have now made clear.
THE DICTATOR’S DYNAMITE
To understand the motivations for Russia’s return to sabotage, it is important to recognize that the Soviets’ reasons for not using it had nothing to do with Western deterrence efforts. At the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet intelligence agencies had plenty of resources available for precisely this approach. After World War II, Soviet military intelligence recruited many agents with long experience in sabotage.
Take Ivan Shchelokov, a young but battle-hardened fighter pilot with an impressive record of blowing up bridges in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Shchelokov and his wife, Nadia, were deployed to Western Europe by the GRU as assassins, their main task “eliminating traitors,” including POWs who had fought for the Germans. A veteran of the Soviets’ brutal war with the Nazis, Shchelokov was aware of the risks. “After a year, out of the five couples carrying out these missions, only Nadia and I were still alive,” he later wrote. Still, he would not have hesitated to blow up ammunition factories or military facilities—or kill the directors of those factories—if ordered to do so.
In Moscow, there were also experienced operators ready to run agents like Shchelokov. In the early 1950s, Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria assigned Nahum Eitingon, the chief architect of the 1940 assassination of Leon Trotsky, in Mexico, to form a special operations brigade to lay plans for blowing up U.S. military bases in Europe. But the order to activate those plans never came. The Soviet Union's internal politics was the chief reason.
In the 1950s, the Soviets began planting high explosives and arms across Western Europe.
In the thaw that followed Stalin’s death and the purging of Beria, there was a backlash against the all-powerful security and intelligence services among the Soviet elite, many of whom had barely survived Stalin’s purges, and under Stalin’s successor Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet leadership sought to bring the security services under Communist Party control. As a result, the intelligence agencies got rid of their most adventurous forces, including Eitingon, who was sent to the gulag for 11 years; Shchelokov was brought home and assigned to a special forces unit in the Leningrad military district. In the years to come, the Soviet military intelligence and the KGB adopted a more cautious approach.
Nonetheless, Soviet intelligence carefully watched the effect of sabotage operations by other groups in Western Europe during the Cold War. In the 1950s, for example, West Germany struggled to find a response to a series of attacks and assassinations targeting German arms traders who supplied weapons to Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN). These attacks were attributed to the Red Hand, a supposed extremist group of French settlers in North Africa, but in reality they were orchestrated by French intelligence, the SDECE. West Germany seemed unable to stop these actions, which put pressure on the German authorities to tighten the rules for the arms trade—exactly what the French wanted.
In the later decades of the Cold War, although the Soviets avoided using sabotage, they understood how effective the attacks were, and kept the option in reserve. This expertise would prove crucial to Putin when he began his broader war against the West in 2014, and especially after Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
PUTIN’S PYROMANIACS
When Putin came to power at the end of the 1990s, he inherited the Soviets’ sabotage capabilities, along with much of the Soviet intelligence infrastructure mostly intact, with the SVR absorbing the foreign intelligence branch of the KGB. In October 1999, just two months after Putin became prime minister and was named an official successor to President Boris Yeltsin, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Armed Services Committee held a hearing on Russian threat perception and possible plans for sabotage against the United States.
During the hearing, Curt Weldon, chair of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, noted that Russia had never disclosed the existence of arms and explosives that the Soviets had stashed in Western countries during the Cold War. Yet these hidden stockpiles were still there: in the late 1990s, Soviet arms and explosives were discovered in Switzerland and Belgium, and the FBI was investigating whether there were similar KGB arms caches in the United States. But the investigation was soon overshadowed by the 9/11 attacks, from which point Russia began to be considered an ally in the global war on terror.
Over the past two decades, as he has extended his power, Putin has gradually revived the more ambitious overseas tactics used by Stalin up until World War II. In 2004, Russian intelligence agents assassinated former Chechen vice president Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar. Ever since, Russian state-sponsored assassinations have never really stopped, and soon came to include a series of poisonings of Russian exiles and opposition figures who had gone to the West.
Bus passengers passing screens showing Putin, Moscow, February 2024
Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Then, in 2014, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine, Putin added sabotage back into the mix, as well. In October and December of that year, a series of ammunition depots in the Czech Republic, a NATO country, were bombed and ultimately destroyed; the Czechs had been supplying weapons to Ukraine. The Czech government didn’t seem to know how to respond; only in 2021, seven years later, would it finally point the finger at Russia.
Following Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the West began to adopt a naming and shaming approach, calling out Russian covert operations in an effort to get Moscow to back down. But Russia’s military intelligence showed no signs of slowing down, and by the late 2010s, Putin’s spy agencies were recruiting a new generation of operatives who combined toughness, no-questions-asked loyalty, and adventurism from Spetsnaz, Russian special forces, some of which were recruited from among veterans of the wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine.
In 2022, Moscow’s badly botched invasion of Ukraine, and the failure of Russian intelligence to anticipate the Ukrainian and Western response, temporarily put these hybrid intelligence activities into disarray. For a while, Russia’s military intelligence struggled to regain its footing. But, as we wrote in Foreign Affairs last winter, as the war in Ukraine quickly evolved into a broader spy war against the West, Russia’s intelligence and security services rapidly regrouped and found a new sense of purpose.
Thanks to the fighting in Ukraine, there was a new wave of war-hardened veterans ready to do whatever it took to disrupt Western aid to Ukraine. It was only a matter of time before the Russian agencies turned to sabotage. They also began recruiting local affiliates in European countries, mostly through criminal networks and sometimes including citizens of Belarus and Ukraine. By the beginning of 2024, Russia was ready to roll out the attacks that have been unfolding across Europe this spring and summer.
Among the boldest of these plans was the effort to assassinate Papperger, the German arms executive. This attack could be a test: Moscow may have been trying to assess the German reaction and the potential of such an operation for changing German public opinion about Germany’s support for Ukraine. In April, the summer house of Armin Papperger in Lower Saxony was set on fire. Even as leftist activists claimed responsibility, Russian agents were following Papperger around planning his assassination.
EUROPE’S SCORCHING EARTH
By now, Western spy agencies can no longer claim ignorance of the Russian arson and sabotage campaign, and U.S. and NATO officials have begun raising the alarm. The Kremlin appears to be seeking to have Europeans experience more directly the costs of the war in hopes of eroding public support for the Ukrainian war effort. Moreover, a larger attack on Western infrastructure could have far-reaching, destabilizing effects.
Still, Putin’s sabotage strategy has put the West in a difficult situation. Given Western efforts to avoid direct conflict with Russia, Western leaders are reluctant to call for a larger military response to these attacks, which could trigger uncontained escalation. Even now, after months of such operations, Western leaders seem prepared to look the other way when they deem it necessary.
In early August, in the landmark prisoners-for-hostages deal with Russia, the United States, Germany, and other Western countries agreed to return several high value Russian intelligence operatives in exchange for the release of Russian opposition leaders, journalists, and human rights activists, including the Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who had been held in Russian prisons. Among those handed over by the West was the convicted assassin Vadim Krasikov, a close confidant of Putin who has been directly implicated in operations in the West. That Putin went to the airport to greet the assassins and spies in person will inevitably boost the morale, and aggressiveness of the intelligence agencies.
Political expediency aside, the West may be limited in the kinds of counter operations it can launch in the face of continued acts of Russian sabotage. For one thing, the United States and its allies cannot easily respond in kind, because they are not officially at war with Russia. But there is another problem, as well: U.S. and European counterintelligence agencies lack the ability to implement full-scale measures to stop Russian sabotage operations, because to be truly effective, these must include drastic steps that are in practice only feasible under totalitarian regimes.
After all, the Soviets attempted to control and surveil all foreigners’ movements within the Soviet Union, but such an approach would be anathema in any Western democracy. What the West needs is a collective intelligence strategy, and it needs to start now—before a large-scale attack makes calibrated responses far more difficult.
- ANDREI SOLDATOV is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Editor of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of the Russian secret services’ activities.
- IRINA BOROGAN is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Co-Founder and Deputy Editor of Agentura.ru.
-
They are the co-authors of The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin.
Foreign Affairs · by The Compatriots: The Russian Exiles Who Fought Against the Kremlin · August 9, 2024
2. Iranian brothers charged in smuggling operation tied to SEALs’ deaths
Capture, arrest, and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. Or is there a drone in their future?
Excerpt:
The brothers are at large. Pahlawan and three of his crew members have been in custody since the Navy SEAL team intercepted their small vessel, described as a dhow, in January.
Iranian brothers charged in smuggling operation tied to SEALs’ deaths
militarytimes.com · by Matthew Barakat · August 8, 2024
Two men linked to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard are now facing terrorism charges in the U.S. in connection with the interception of a vessel in the Arabian Sea that resulted in the deaths of two Navy SEALs earlier this year.
The new indictment announced Thursday by federal prosecutors in Richmond, Virginia, charges two Iranian brothers, Shahab Mir’kazei and Yunus Mir’kazei, as well as a Pakistani boat captain, Muhammad Pahlawan, with providing material support to Iran’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program, among other charges.
The brothers are at large. Pahlawan and three of his crew members have been in custody since the Navy SEAL team intercepted their small vessel, described as a dhow, in January.
RELATED
Navy IDs two SEALs who died during sea mission off Somalia
Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Christopher J. Chambers and Navy Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class Nathan Gage Ingram went missing this month.
While boarding the dhow, U.S. officials say Navy Special Warfare Operator 1st Class Christopher J. Chambers fell overboard as high waves created a gap between the two boats.
As Chambers fell, Navy Special Warfare Operator 2nd Class Nathan Gage Ingram jumped in to try to save him, according to U.S. officials familiar with what happened.
Both Chambers and Ingram were declared dead after an 11-day search failed to find either man.
The search of the dhow turned up a variety of Iranian-made weaponry, including cruise and ballistic missile components, according to court documents.
U.S. officials say the dhow was part of an effort to supply weapons to Houthi rebels in Yemen, and that Houthis have stepped up attacks on merchant ships and U.S. military ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Houthis have been designated as a terrorist group by the State Department since February, according to the indictment. The Revolutionary Guard Corps has been designated a terrorist group by the State Department since 2019.
The new indictment contains additional details linking the dhow to Iran. It alleges the two brothers who work for the Revolutionary Guard Corps paid Pahlawan 1.7 billion rials — about $40,000 in U.S. dollars — to carry out multiple smuggling operations from Iran to the Somali coast near Yemen.
The federal public defender’s office, which was appointed to represent Pahlawan, declined comment Thursday. The two Iranians, who are not in custody, do not have attorneys listed. Arrest warrants for both brothers were issued Wednesday.
3. As the Gaza Pier Is Packed Up, Experts Worry About What It Portends for a War in the Pacific
I can't recall how many wargames I have participated in in the Asia Pacific over the last 30-40 years (they are a lot) but I recall many times planners proposed LOTS - "logistics over the shore" to meet the logistics needs of the warfighter.
We need to fully understand our capabilities and their application in various scenarios and their ability to actually support war plans as advertised.
As the Gaza Pier Is Packed Up, Experts Worry About What It Portends for a War in the Pacific
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Steve Beynon · August 8, 2024
The U.S. Army, every few years, would break out a series of pontoons and boats and practice creating a pier where none existed before to land vehicles and cargo. It usually went pretty well, and it almost never generated any attention.
Sometimes, weather would get in the way, and so the last time the service successfully speared a pier into a beach was 2020. But it wasn't a capability that drew a lot of attention.
That all changed in March when the system, known as the Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore, or JLOTS, was hauled out for a mission facing intense international scrutiny -- delivering aid to Gaza. While the pier would help offload nearly 20 million pounds of aid, a stream of issues, breakdowns, injured service members and delays have led to questions about the Army ability to build these piers and the health of the service's watercraft community.
There were the three injuries -- including one so severe that the service member never returned to duty -- the circumstances of which were never explained. The pier broke apart, leaving several Army boats and their crews stranded on the beach in Gaza. While the soldiers were evacuated fairly quickly, it took several days for the Israelis to return all the boats into the water.
But the pier concept isn't just about delivering aid. It's a capability that military strategists say could be key to fighting an island-hopping campaign in the Pacific.
Dr. Salvatore Mercogliano, a maritime historian and former merchant mariner who worked with JLOTS during the 1990s, stressed to Military.com that the Gaza mission "should be a warning bell for everybody about what a Pacific operation would look like."
While politicians have focused on the cost of the system and the politics of using military forces to deliver aid to Palestinians, military experts have concentrated on the overall viability of the pier concept, and some are raising concerns that the Gaza mission exposed vulnerabilities that will become costly if JLOTS is ever deployed in combat.
The land service largely ignored its amphibious capabilities for decades with boats so old some engines were built in "West Germany," according to a now-retired Army warrant officer who served on these vessels.
JLOTS missions are run by the 7th Transportation Brigade -- sometimes dubbed "The Army's Navy."
The unit practices a mission similar to what it would execute in Gaza -- putting a long pier onto a "bare beach" to offload vehicles and supplies. The unit last tried to execute the mission last year in Australia as part of Exercise Talisman Sabre after 14 months of careful preparations, but the effort ended up being scrapped due to rough weather.
Before that, a JLOTS pier was practiced in the United Arab Emirates in 2020 and South Korea in 2015. The 2015 exercise, the last time that a pier was successfully anchored into bare sand on a beach, took two attempts due to weather.
"I think it's a critical capability going forward for the Department of Defense, and it's got to be prioritized in sustainment, in modernization," retired Col. Randy Nelson, once a commander of the 7th Transportation Brigade, told Military.com.
Nelson, in an interview Monday, conceded that "Mother Nature gets a vote" on the operations, but he argued that the unit has "a play to fix that and put it back in place. … That's their job."
Military officials told reporters at the start of the mission that the pier was expected to deliver up to 150 trucks of food or 2,000,000 meals per day. It's not clear whether it ever reached that goal. Shortly after the pier began operating, Pentagon officials shifted to using "metric tons of aid" as their metric.
When Military.com asked Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder, how many tons of aid a truck would carry or how many people a ton of aid would feed, he said the Pentagon would research the answer but never provided it. The result is that making a direct comparison to what was promised versus what JLOTS ultimately delivered is difficult.
After delays in getting set up, food was slow to flow across the pier. Then, it became clear that the Pentagon would be responsible for the aid only up to the point it reached the beaches of Gaza. Questions about whether the food was actually reaching Palestinians were passed off to the U.S. Agency for International Development or the United Nations’ World Food Program.
Those distribution efforts were stymied by security concerns and finally led Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh to concede in June that aid was "not flowing the way it should."
Despite these issues, getting aid into Gaza through other routes was even more challenging and, at one point, the pier ended up providing the second-highest volume of aid from any entry point into Gaza.
"Twenty million pounds of aid on the beach is exactly why you brought the pier," Nelson said. "The fact that you had to recover it, repair it, recover it, repair it and put it back in … it's immaterial."
While the Army ran into issues out of its control, such as choppy water, the mission's lackluster impact raises questions over how the service can conduct more complicated water-based missions in a combat environment.
Both Nelson and Mercogliano argued that the Army shouldn't be judged too harshly since it was asked to do a job under difficult conditions -- namely, an inability to step foot on the beach.
"That really makes it difficult to do because you would have other methods to land cargo beyond just the Trident pier," Mercogliano explained, referring to the pier connected to the Gaza shore that ended up breaking loose in rough seas and then being removed for the same reason three times. "You'd be able to bring watercraft right to the beach -- you'd be able to do just a variety of different things."
Creating a connection to shore would be critical for the Army if war broke out in the Pacific, with watercraft missions key to moving supplies to the front lines. Those capabilities haven't been truly stressed in decades, and while the Gaza mission encountered challenges, such as choppy waters, combat in the Pacific would face those same obstacles but under more austere conditions.
"This was a high visibility, low threat test of the capability that we may actually need in a degraded environment in the Pacific in the future," said Katherine Kuzminski, a defense expert at the Center for a New American Security, or CNAS, a national security think tank. "On the flipside, it was good we tested a capability that we don't traditionally use to perhaps drive some improvements for combat environments."
The Army has made an enormous evolution since the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- with virtually every piece of gear a soldier uses seeing several upgrades, as well as new technology tactics making their way into every ground combat unit's playbook. But its watercraft operations have been largely left to obscurity as the Global War on Terror mostly took place in landlocked terrain in the Middle East and those capabilities received little, if any, publicity.
"That really built up a culture of: hide our head in the sand, stay quiet, do the bare minimum we can to not get in trouble, and they won't defund us," the now-retired warrant officer said.
Amid this culture, problems festered, and the boats started to fall apart.
The officer said that, during his time in the community, he saw boats caked with rust and key parts that were impossible to get fixed because the manufacturers have all gone out of business.
"The Army doesn't know what it wants to do with watercraft," Mercogliano said. "They are always at the bottom of the totem pole and so they have been neglected at times in terms of resources [and] whether they want the program even to continue."
The result of this resource shortage is that, according to the now-retired warrant officer, the crews struggle with keeping the boats in one piece.
The officer provided Military.com photos and emails that documented an issue with the bow ramp -- the key component that allows a crew to easily roll cargo on and off the boat -- on one boat that included serious issues with the hinge that connected it to the rest of the ship.
They also said that they had witnessed a bow ramp fall off of another Army landing craft while they were at sea and sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
"It's not the soldiers, it's not the command, it's the equipment that needs to be invested in," Nelson said.
In testimony to lawmakers in 2023, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth described the service's watercraft as "niche," but underscored those capabilities are much more relevant now and are in desperate need of a revamp as the service invests heavily in the Pacific.
Nelson detailed concerns regarding the service's equipment in an Army-published article in 2014, writing that "forces lack the ability to meet current and emerging requirements."
"Army forces lack a sufficient combination of speed, range and payload to rapidly shift combat-ready maneuver forces," he added.
Despite the maintenance issues and the lack of clear investment from the Army, Mercogliano says that the system has value when it's used in the right settings.
One example he cited was the system's use in Haiti in 2010.
"It was a very good Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore operation because it was done in Port au Prince, you were in an enclosed harbor, you were replacing … facilities that had been destroyed by earthquake," he said. "If you have the right operating environments, it works good."
military.com · by Konstantin Toropin,Steve Beynon · August 8, 2024
4. A Post-American Europe
We need to be careful about US retrenchment. The vacuum created by a US reduction in forces and commitment will likely lead to conflict whether in Europe or Asia.
A question that we should ask when reading these types of articles and proposals. Are the authors wittingly or unwittingly supporting Putin's (and other malign actors') political warfare strategy?
Excerpts:
The ideal moment to have shifted responsibility for Europe back to Europeans would have been soon after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when NATO’s raison d’être disappeared, but the current moment will do. It may seem counterintuitive to suggest reducing the United States’ role as Europe’s sentry as the continent faces its biggest war since World War II. Paradoxically, however, the costs of and responses to the conflict in Ukraine make a clear-eyed strategic adjustment workable.
Russia’s intent may be malign, but its capabilities constrain it. Other European states also lack the capacity to make a play at charging across the continent. Ukraine has proved that motivated defenders can block aggressors even under adverse conditions. These are favorable circumstances for the United States. Moreover, the massive advantage Europe possesses in latent power suggests that Washington would have ample time to decide whether and when it might have to swoop back in to counter a hegemon.
Today, calls for the United States to cling to leadership in Europe ignore the opportunity and direct costs involved and Washington’s increasingly important interests elsewhere. The United States is staring down $35 trillion in debt, a $1.5 trillion annual budget deficit, a growing challenge in Asia, and pronounced political cleavages that make solving these challenges more difficult. With no indication that the fiscal picture will improve or evidence that domestic pressures are abating, policymakers need to reassess the United States’ foreign obligations. Given that the United States has accomplished its central goal in Europe, the moment has come to follow through on what the framers of its postwar strategy there intended. It’s time to take the win.
A Post-American Europe
It’s Time for Washington to Europeanize NATO and Give Up Responsibility for the Continent’s Security
August 9, 2024
Foreign Affairs · by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson · August 9, 2024
For decades, U.S. policy toward Europe stayed the same: Washington anchored itself to the continent via NATO and acted as the region’s main security provider while the European members of NATO accepted U.S. leadership. Today, however, much of the Republican Party has departed from this consensus, opting instead for a policy summed up by Donald Trump’s comments on “delinquent” NATO countries: “If they’re not going to pay, we’re not going to protect.” In other words, the United States may remain committed to Europe, but only if European states pay up. Democrats, for their part, have dug in deeper in response to this shift. President Joe Biden has affirmed the “sacred” Democratic commitment to European defense and trumpeted the admission of Finland and Sweden to NATO as a great achievement of his administration. Kamala Harris has signaled no departure from Biden’s position as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
A debate about the U.S. role in Europe is long overdue, but both sides have wrongly defined the issues and interests at play. In fact, the United States has the same cardinal interest in Europe today that it has had since at least the early 1900s: keeping the continent’s economic and military power divided. In practice, pursuing this goal has meant preventing the emergence of a European hegemon. Unlike the continent in the mid-twentieth century, however, Europe today lacks a candidate for hegemony and, thanks in part to the success of U.S. efforts after 1945 to rebuild and restore prosperity to Western Europe, another hegemonic threat is unlikely to emerge.
The United States should recognize that it has achieved its main goal in Europe. Having successfully ensured that no country can dominate the continent, it should embrace a new approach to the region. Under a revised strategy, the United States would reduce its military presence on the continent, Europeanize NATO, and hand principal responsibility for European security back to its rightful owners: the Europeans.
A FINE BALANCE
For more than 100 years, the United States has had one enduring national interest in Europe: keeping the continent’s economic and military power split among multiple states by preventing the emergence of a European hegemon that sought to consolidate that power for itself.
In World War I and World War II, Washington went to war to stop Germany from dominating Europe. NATO, founded in 1949, was designed to foreclose the possibility that a single country could take over the continent. As Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that year, the two world wars “taught us that the control of Europe by a single aggressive, unfriendly power would constitute an intolerable threat to the national security of the United States.”
U.S. support for NATO was a reasonable move at a time when the Soviet Union was threatening to overrun the continent, wartime memories were fresh, and Germany’s future was unclear. Yet even back then, Washington’s goal was not to take permanent responsibility for European security. Instead, NATO was intended as a temporary expedient to protect Western European states as they recovered from World War II, facilitate Western European efforts to balance Soviet power, and integrate West Germany into a counter-Soviet coalition that would also help civilize German power. In 1951, as the supreme Allied commander in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower noted, “If in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”
To that end, Presidents Harry Truman and Eisenhower tried to pull together a “Third Force” of European power by encouraging France, the United Kingdom, West Germany, and other Western European states to combine their political, economic, and military resources against the Soviet Union. Once formed, this Third Force would relieve the United States of the duty to serve as Europe’s first line of defense. Only as it became clear in the late 1950s and early 1960s that Western European states worried as much about Germany as they worried about the Soviet Union did the United States reluctantly accept a more enduring role in the alliance.
Today’s Russia is a shadow of the Soviet threat.
Today, however, the situation is vastly different. For the first time in centuries, Europe lacks a potential hegemon. Fears of an imperial Germany have given way to anxieties over a stunted geopolitical role for Berlin, turning the “German problem” on its head. Other capable states, such as the United Kingdom and France, recognize that the distribution of power is not conducive to expansion.
Russia, meanwhile, lacks the resources and opportunity to mount a hegemonic challenge. With a population of 143 million people, compared with the European NATO countries’ roughly 600 million, it lacks the manpower to conquer Eurasia. The European members of NATO have an economy roughly 10 times bigger and significantly more developed than Russia’s. Even the most pessimistic estimates available show that European countries spent significantly more on defense than Russia even before the costly invasion of Ukraine and before the resulting increases in European defense spending. According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies, Russia spent roughly $75 billion in 2023, whereas NATO’s European members together spent over $374 billion.
Of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated its willingness to use force, a pronounced interest in dominating Ukraine, and a capacity to sustain high-intensity operations. What it has not demonstrated, however, is a meaningful capability to project military power across long distances. Not only was the initial Russian thrust toward Kyiv beaten back, but also much of the combat since has occurred within a few hundred miles of the Russian-Ukrainian border. The result has been appalling destruction, but it hardly provides evidence of a military ready to sweep across the continent.
If, after more than two years of fighting, Russia has been unable to defeat an economically and militarily weaker Ukraine, it does not pose a hegemonic threat to Europe. And although Russia could certainly try to replenish its military capabilities, European states’ responses to the conflict have shown a willingness to counter opportunities for future aggression. Today’s Russia is a shadow of the Soviet threat.
TAKE THE WIN
With no candidate for European hegemony lurking, there is no longer any need for the United States to take the dominant role in the region. Without Washington at the helm, Europe today would have normal international politics—which, admittedly, includes the prospect of some interstate conflict at the periphery—without opening the door to a hegemonic challenge.
And yet Washington refuses to take the win. Having foreclosed the possibility of a European superpower emerging, NATO’s eastward expansion has created new interests involving weak, vulnerable states that are much harder to secure. This creates political pressure for the United States to remain in Europe on the grounds that Europe cannot defend itself.
Still, for all the attention paid to the question of whether Europe can defend itself, it is peculiar that “Europe” is rarely defined. The effort to unite European countries into a larger political unit originated with noble aims: former French Prime Minister Robert Schuman described the goal as making “any war between France and Germany not merely unthinkable but materially impossible.” Despite European integration, however, the nation-state continues to dominate European politics. France and Latvia are both European countries, but their defense needs—and relevance to the United States—differ.
It is unsurprising, then, if one includes the small and vulnerable countries that border Russia in the Europe to be defended, Europe may not be able to easily defend itself. Tellingly, war games over the last decade have strongly suggested that in the event of a conflict with Russia, the United States and its partners would still struggle to prevent some of its more vulnerable members from facing significant damage.
On the other hand, if “Europe” means something in line with traditional U.S. interests—keeping the core areas of military and economic power on the continent divided—the matter is less daunting. Again, the distribution of military and economic power today is such that there are many states that, together or alone, could prevent Russia from achieving hegemony. Nuclear weapons provide another deterrent: France and the United Kingdom have their own nuclear arsenals, and other countries in Europe—Germany in particular—could easily acquire ones if they felt threatened enough. How one defines Europe determines how easily Europe could defend itself. But the central U.S. interest in Europe is not at risk.
BACK TO BASICS
Amid growing demands at home and in Asia, a course correction is in order. The idea would not be to isolate the United States from Europe but to shift the U.S. role from provider of first resort to balancer of last resort.
First, the United States should start withdrawing some of its troops from Europe, forcing the responsibility for providing the conventional forces needed to secure Europe back onto European shoulders. Right now, the United States has roughly 100,000 troops stationed on the continent, with the largest concentration in Germany. A good place to start the drawdown would be with the 20,000 additional troops deployed by the Biden administration in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Once those troops are pulled out, Washington should signal its intent to resume the withdrawal of 12,000 troops from Germany, a plan that Trump approved and Biden froze. Two structured rounds of withdrawal would drive the point home: Europe’s most powerful countries need to step up. Eventually, the additional U.S. forces and equipment in Europe could be progressively drawn down, shifting the burden of Europe’s conventional deterrence needs to Europeans.
Making these moves now would take advantage of Europeans’ evident willingness to do more for their own defense since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Germany exemplifies this newfound interest. The initial Russian offensive was enough to shock Germany into canceling the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and announcing plans to spend an additional $108 billion on defense over four years as part of its Zeitenwende, or “turning point.”
Although the way Germany has spent these funds prevented the Zeitenwende from generating serious military power, its leaders have embraced the need to rebuild German capabilities—some of the country’s most popular elected officials, such as Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius, are proponents of rearmament. Capable states such as France, Poland, and the United Kingdom have followed a similar course. Withdrawing troops and materiel, the tangible expression of U.S. leadership, would accelerate this process by requiring European states to bear responsibility for their defense and preventing them from continuing to lean on the United States.
At the same time, policymakers should realize that Europe cannot quickly fill shortfalls in certain areas. In particular, the U.S. nuclear umbrella and its intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities would take time to replace under even the best circumstances. Accordingly, Washington should continue to provide Europe with assistance in these areas for several years while helping Europe rectify capability gaps over the long term. Just as the United States provides intelligence and assistance in identifying targets to states that are not treaty allies like Ukraine, so can it credibly promise to provide these services to NATO members, even as it draws down its conventional forces. This may also involve reevaluating U.S. opposition to Germany’s acquiring nuclear weapons, although it is unlikely that Germany would reach for the bomb in any conceivable scenario.
Washington should encourage European states to invest in their own defense-industrial base.
The payoff here would be significant. One 2021 analysis by MIT professor Barry Posen estimated the budgetary savings of shedding the conventional deterrence mission in Europe at $70 billion to $80 billion per year. Given inflation and the additional forces and efforts dedicated to Europe since 2022, the savings would be even bigger today.
Second, to facilitate the creation of more European military power, the United States should drop some of its long-standing demands on how Europe arms itself. For decades, Washington has insisted that European states purchase materiel from the United States and avoid procuring forces that duplicate those of the United States. These requirements undermine domestic support for military investment in Europe and limit the continent’s ability to create and sustain its own military power. Rather than urge European states to buy American and avoid duplication, Washington should encourage European states to invest in their own defense-industrial base.
Conditions are ripe for rebuilding the European defense-industrial base: the sense of threat is high, the initial steps taken after the Russian invasion of Ukraine have borne fruit, and Europe already produces key weapons such as main battle tanks. Washington ought to lean into these dynamics. Because new military capabilities take a long time to develop, adjusting U.S. policy now would help ensure that Europe has the domestic capabilities needed to tackle the continent’s problems for decades to come.
Moreover, because modern military equipment is expensive to produce, encouraging European states to buy European would generate political pressure for increased European defense spending. Just as the concentrated economic benefits from military spending make it hard for the United States to close bases or production lines, so would the economic benefits weigh on similar decisions in Europe. By encouraging Europe to develop its defense-industrial base, Washington could also incentivize multinational coordination to allow longer production runs, lower the cost of procurement, enhance interoperability, and allow for more efficient military planning and budgeting.
When pushed to take day-to-day responsibility for continental security, European states would have to bear the full costs of their security choices.
Finally, the United States should gradually transform NATO into a European-run and led alliance. To start, Washington should encourage the European members of the alliance to create a “European pillar” within NATO—a vehicle for members of the alliance to work out common positions on defense and security matters without American input. The U.S. president should make clear that the next supreme Allied commander will be a European, breaking with a 75-year practice in which an American always held the post. And the United States should reduce the depth of its engagement in NATO committees, deferring to allies, for example, in policy debates within the Deputies or Defense Policy and Planning Committees, where consensus on security, political, and organizational matters is shaped.
All these steps would make clear that the United States expects the Europeans to manage the alliance on a day-to-day basis. They will be well positioned to do that: NATO’s considerable bureaucratic infrastructure makes it possible to build upon habits of cooperation acquired over the alliance’s long life. U.S. policy does not need to aim at formal withdrawal from or continued membership in NATO; it simply needs to make clear that Washington’s tenure as Europe’s pacifier is coming to an end, and if European defense planners feel that leaves a hole to fill, they must fill it themselves.
In effect, the United States would return the transatlantic relationship to its roots. As an offshore power, Washington would help keep the balance but not seek to dominate the continent itself. Beyond freeing up American attention and resources, a right-sized relationship would also have a salutary effect on European strategic planning: when pushed to take day-to-day responsibility for continental security, European states would have to bear the full costs of their security choices. At a time when policymakers across the continent are pushing ambitious and costly policies—such as adding Ukraine to NATO and possibly entering the war in Ukraine themselves—turning responsibility for Europe’s security over to Europeans would reduce the incentives for these states to promote reckless policies.
NEVER LET A CRISIS GO TO WASTE
The ideal moment to have shifted responsibility for Europe back to Europeans would have been soon after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when NATO’s raison d’être disappeared, but the current moment will do. It may seem counterintuitive to suggest reducing the United States’ role as Europe’s sentry as the continent faces its biggest war since World War II. Paradoxically, however, the costs of and responses to the conflict in Ukraine make a clear-eyed strategic adjustment workable.
Russia’s intent may be malign, but its capabilities constrain it. Other European states also lack the capacity to make a play at charging across the continent. Ukraine has proved that motivated defenders can block aggressors even under adverse conditions. These are favorable circumstances for the United States. Moreover, the massive advantage Europe possesses in latent power suggests that Washington would have ample time to decide whether and when it might have to swoop back in to counter a hegemon.
Today, calls for the United States to cling to leadership in Europe ignore the opportunity and direct costs involved and Washington’s increasingly important interests elsewhere. The United States is staring down $35 trillion in debt, a $1.5 trillion annual budget deficit, a growing challenge in Asia, and pronounced political cleavages that make solving these challenges more difficult. With no indication that the fiscal picture will improve or evidence that domestic pressures are abating, policymakers need to reassess the United States’ foreign obligations. Given that the United States has accomplished its central goal in Europe, the moment has come to follow through on what the framers of its postwar strategy there intended. It’s time to take the win.
- JUSTIN LOGAN is Director of Defense and Foreign Policy Studies at the Cato Institute.
- JOSHUA SHIFRINSON is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.
Foreign Affairs · by Justin Logan and Joshua Shifrinson · August 9, 2024
5. Army fellowship offers paid degree, editor jobs to revitalize journals
An excellent Army initiative.
We must not only out-fight our enemies, we must out-think them. Reading and writing are key contributions to being able to out-think our adversaries and these revitalized journals can provide one necessary platform to share knowledge and understanding.
Army fellowship offers paid degree, editor jobs to revitalize journals
militarytimes.com · by Todd South · August 8, 2024
The Army announced a new fellowship program this week to educate officers in professional writing, offering a paid graduate degree and hands-on journalism experience as part of its broader effort to enhance military writing skills.
The Maj. Gen. Edwin “Forrest” Harding Fellowship is part of The Harding Project, an initiative launched in 2023 by the Army’s top commander to enhance and encourage professional writing within the service and introduce new ideas and approaches to the modern battlespace.
Since the project’s inception, a dozen soldiers have been working to revive the Army’s branch journals and magazines, including the “Infantry,” “Armor,” “Air Defense,” and “Special Warfare” titles, which serve as the storehouse for current military debate and thought.
The fellowship will select six fellows annually to spend a year at the University of Kansas earning a graduate degree in journalism before being assigned as full-time editors of one of the Army’s branch journals for a two-year stint.
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Army leaders want soldiers to write about the issues facing the force
“Good writing, good thinking, doesn’t really have a rank.”
Those editors will then bring their expertise back to their units.
“Like the observer controllers who serve at our combat training centers, these leaders will return to operational units as experts in their branches with superior communications skills,” said Gen. Gary Brito, head of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command.
Over the past decade, some branch journals, once the go-to place for specialized military news and study, have become dormant or less frequently used. For example, the last time “Armor” magazine had an editor serving in uniform was 2006, according to officials.
The decline is partly due to a high rate of operational commitments but also a shift in how soldiers and leaders consume information, similar to trends in civilian media.
When the Harding Project launched last year, it adopted a simplified online approach. It uses its website to post easily searchable articles and blog-style posts. Users can also download a chat application to read and engage with others on their mobile device.
As part of an awareness campaign, the Army is releasing a special issue of “Military Review” in print and on a new online platform. The issue will included articles on writing techniques, running a unit writing program and how to offer respectful dissent in written forums.
The service plans to distribute 18,000 print copies of the journal to battalion-level and higher headquarters within the next month.
Maj. Emily Lopez, a civil affairs officer, was among the first crop of editors selected earlier this year. She has served as editor-in-chief of “Special Warfare” magazine since June aside Sgt. 1st Class Ben Latigue, a special forces medic.
“I think the beautiful thing about being a military editor in chief is we’re part of the connective tissue back to the force,” Lopez told Army Times.
Both she and Latigue came to the positions after operational rotations within special operations.
Editors’ duties goes beyond copyediting and spell-checking articles. One of The Harding Project’s priorities is fostering conversation and debate and garnering ideas from the force.
Lopez and Latigue have spent recent months at various primary military education events and forums, asking students about the hot topics in their fields.
Drawing on that audience feedback, they aim to bring more relevant content to readers and boost soldiers’ engagement with the journals and online writing forums.
How to apply
The Maj. Gen. Edwin “Forrest” Harding Fellowship will accept submissions through Sept. 10.
The fellowship is open to any active-duty captain, master sergeant or chief warrant officer 4 in the following branches — infantry, air defense, military intelligence, chemical corps, engineer, military police, transportation, quartermaster, ordnance, finance, civil affairs, psychological operations and special forces.
Applicants must also have graduated from the Captains Career Course, hold a bachelor’s degree with a 3.0 grade point average and not have a graduate degree that was paid for by the Army.
An Army board will review submissions in late September and announced the fellows in mid-October, Lt. Col. Zachary Evans, special assistant to the Army chief of staff, told Army Times.
Application packet information is available on the Army’s Human Resources Command website.
About Todd South
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
6. Perception Warfare as Both Threat and Opportunity in Israel’s Post-October 7 Existential War
Another name (perception warfare) to add to our list. I still have my slide of 100 names of LIC from 1994.
"Threats and the Words We Use: A Thought Experiment - War on the Rocks"
https://warontherocks.com/2013/11/threats-and-the-words-we-use-a-thought-experiment/
My snakrieness aside, we have to deal with perception and cognitive warfare.
Excerpt:
These methods of misinformation are part of a trend of mobilizing and exploiting advanced “perception warfare” alongside Iranian-backed Hizbullah and Hamas terrorism, which has intensified since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. These examples underscore the importance of examining perception as a tool of war, its threat to Israel’s international standing, and how Israel can use its own perception warfare.
Perception Warfare as Both Threat and Opportunity in Israel’s Post-October 7 Existential War
jcpa.org · by Dr. Dan Diker
Institute for Contemporary Affairs
Founded jointly with the Wechsler Family Foundation
Vol. 24, No. 15
- Hamas’s cognitive war against Israel since the October 7 invasion has been a significant weapon. Perception warfare leaves a lasting impact on the international public and has led to a surge in antisemitism globally.
- Under Iran’s guidance, Hamas and other terrorist groups use social and mainstream media to portray themselves as legitimate political entities and “freedom fighters.” This strategy shapes perceptions among various audiences, including Israelis, Palestinians, and U.S. political circles.
- After the October 7 attacks, Hamas successfully weaponized classic Palestinian propaganda themes. Their disinformation campaign portrayed their barbaric mass terror assault as noble “resistance,” altering global perceptions and garnering sympathy even from moderate Muslims and the international community.
- The global perception shift caused by Hamas propaganda positioned a radical Islamic terror organization against a democratic state.
- Israel must enhance its soft power capabilities to influence various audiences, including its enemies. Israel’s enemies must perceive the loss and despair of a long war against Israel.
- Learning from historical examples (Soviets, Nazis, Chinese Communist Party, and Iran), Israel should educate its citizens to recognize enemy perception warfare and proactively use civilian soft power to shape foreign opinion.
Hamas’s cognitive war against Israel since its October 7 invasion has been a critical weapon in its arsenal. Hamas has gained global sympathy for its fabricated accusations: Israel starves Gazans, refuses to send in humanitarian aid, targets civilians with malice of forethought, and fires on tent cities, hospitals, mosques, and residential buildings. While all of these charges have been refuted, including the Hamas Ministry of Health casualty numbers, this perception warfare leaves a long-lasting impression on the international public. A global spike in antisemitism across North America and Europe, Nazi conspiracy themes on social networks, and widespread protests casting Jews and Israelis as murderers and racist war criminals have proven themselves as effective weapons in engineering public reception.
Hizbullah’s deadly rocket attack on the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Golan Heights on July 27, 2024, which killed 12 children and injured scores of others on a soccer pitch, triggered a firestorm of media coverage, is a case in point. Both the IDF and the U.S. government confirmed that the Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket was fired from the Lebanese town of Chebaa by Iran-backed Hizbullah,1 designated as a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States, and most Arab Gulf States.2
However, some Arabic-language news outlets and social media influencers blamed the bombing on Israel.3 Al-Araby reporter Christine Rinawi4 was one of many Arab media personnel who platformed the fabricated narrative alleging an Israeli Iron Dome misfired.5
Qatar-based Al Araby’s Rinawi, in a helmet and bulletproof “PRESS” vest, reported live that a man “in a Magen David Adom” (Israel’s version of the Red Cross) shirt told her that “eyewitnesses” said that Israel fired the rocket that hit the soccer field. Rinawi then noted that this alleged source told her that he could not report the truth, fearing Israel would imprison him.6
Middle East Eye, a Qatar-funded media outlet, clipped Al-Araby’s report and posted it on Instagram. As of July 30, the post had 23.6 thousand likes, and Instagram users made hundreds of approving comments.7
This false claim spread quickly across Arab media outlets and social networks.8 These media outlets, primarily based in Qatar, Hamas’s principal backer, attempted to contextualize the tragedy, charging that Israel illegally occupies Majdal Shams, many of whose residents, including the murdered children, hold Syrian citizenship. The Arab media implied that Israel killed Syrian nationals but “framed” Hizbullah to extend its war with Hamas to Hizbullah in the north. This claim ignored months of Hizbullah’s rocket barrage, drone war, and targeted shooting into northern Israel.9
[U.S. spokespersons in the White House and State Department emphasized on July 30 that the attack in Majdal Shams was in “northern Israel.”10]
This misleading media coverage was not limited to Arab news sources. Following the attack, the front page of the Washington Post featured a picture of the funeral of the Druze children, with a headline that declared, “Israel hits targets in Lebanon.” This disconnected photograph and headline created the false perception that Israel had attacked Arab children in Lebanon as opposed to the truth of Hizbullah’s deadly attack against Druze children in Israel’s Golan.11
These methods of misinformation are part of a trend of mobilizing and exploiting advanced “perception warfare” alongside Iranian-backed Hizbullah and Hamas terrorism, which has intensified since the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel. These examples underscore the importance of examining perception as a tool of war, its threat to Israel’s international standing, and how Israel can use its own perception warfare.
Under Iran’s direction, Hamas, Hizbullah, and other terrorist groups have utilized social and mainstream media to project a narrative that presents them as legitimate political entities and “freedom fighters,” transforming the perception of multiple target audiences. These include the Israeli public, the Palestinian public, and perhaps most importantly, the U.S. political and public audiences.
The steep rise in global antisemitism following the October 7 massacre in southern Israel is in large part a result of Hamas’s successful perception warfare campaign. The Iranian-backed Hamas has modeled its anti-Zionist, antisemitic propaganda and disinformation after its ideological predecessors: the Nazis, the Chinese, and the Soviets. These regimes have all significantly influenced Palestinian leaders and movements, from Haj Amin al-Husseini in the 1920s to the Palestine Liberation Organization, beginning in the 1960s.12 The Palestinian cause has succeeded exponentially through time in making anti-Israel propaganda appeal to Western and global audiences while simultaneously appealing to the Arab and Muslim world with religious ideology and symbolism and Arab unity messages.
Iranian regime-sourced and -directed disinformation warfare against Israel and world Jewry, frequently masked as anti-Zionism, complements traditional terrorism acts by Hamas, Hizbullah, and Houthi proxies as part of Iran’s “hybrid warfare” strategy. As Ron Schleifer notes, in psychological operations, “psywar” proponents demoralize a civilian population through fear, terror, and emotional manipulation.13 Perception warfare as a concept is broader than psywar or political war, as it interferes with the audience’s discernment of the conflict as a whole. The neutral audience observing a conflict accepts the enemy’s messages, influencing the way those audiences receive and interpret information. Images, ideological messages, and emotional appeals shape a particular perception of the conflict that benefits the enemy.14
Iran and its proxies’ perception warfare has dominated social and mainstream media networks. For example, Qatar, Hamas’s most crucial state sponsor, influences audiences of hundreds of millions through its media giant Al Jazeera, which has showcased its narrative of the “Palestinian issue” in Arabic, English, and other languages. For example, Al Jazeera’s AJ+ venue shapes public opinion worldwide with messages tailored to Western audiences, often diametrically opposed to their messages in Arabic.15
Perception Warfare in the Middle East
Al Jazeera is only one example of a general trend of authoritarian regimes using media tools to control information and shape public consciousness. Perception warfare can be projected outward to foreign audiences and inward to local audiences. Regimes spread messages to support their agenda and ensure continued control while enhancing their political legitimacy. This type of psychological operation is widely used by Russia and communist China, as shown in its “Three Warfares” model.16
Maintaining domestic and international legitimacy among Islamist and other terror groups is especially important in the conflict-ridden Middle East. Psychological warfare is a crucial tool for legitimizing totalitarian military actions as well as terror groups, garnering public support, and deterring enemies.
Cultural and religious symbolism are essential elements of perception operations, particularly in the Middle East. Symbols and images of Palestinian youth flashing victory signs, telling heroic stories, and making Quranic references serve as powerful tools for maintaining morale and support for jihad. In Islam especially, religious beliefs are intertwined with political and military struggles, mobilizing forces to fight.17
October 7 and Perception Warfare
The aftermath of October 7 underscored the successful antisemitic weaponization of classic Palestinian propaganda themes. Hamas’s disinformation campaign succeeded in positioning, as noble “resistance,” its unilateral, strategically designed, barbaric mass terror assault, which killed some 1,200 civilians. Hamas propaganda altered global perceptions, convincing the West, moderate Muslims, and the international community to sympathize with a radical Islamic terror organization against a democratic state.18
In its continuing perception warfare, Hamas has uprooted facts: the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry’s fabricated death statistics;19 the erroneous accusation that the IDF bombed Al Ahli Hospital in November 2023, which was revealed to be an errant rocket shot by Palestinian Islamic Jihad militants;20 hiding armaments in UNRWA and other schools and residential buildings;21 doctored and directed visual images and video distributed on social media;22 using hospitals and mosques as military bases and as tunnel shaft entrances – are but a few examples.23
Yet, Hamas’s targeted disinformation has enhanced its success on the military and international battlefield for public opinion. Hamas perception warfare has yielded mendacious international accusations: the IDF’s “starvation warfare,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” culminated in the recent rulings of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice charging Israel with criminal presence and activity in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza.24
Israel’s Options for Fighting the War of Perception
It is incumbent that Israel expose, educate, and engage multiple audiences to the reality of its “seven-front” war being waged against it by the Iranian regime and its terror proxies. To strengthen its international standing and legitimacy, Israel must bolster its own home audience while exposing the Axis of Evil’s media manipulation to Western and global audiences.
Risks to the Home Audience
Perceptions pushed by local and foreign mainstream media, whether intentional or not, may cause “battle fatigue” and despair in Israel’s resilient population, becoming part of an existential threat to the Jewish state. For example, Israeli media’s emphasis on returning the October 7 hostages “at any price” may play to Hamas’s advantage. Similarly, foreign calls for a “ceasefire” may weigh on the Israeli psyche. These messages and antisemitic and anti-Zionist ones have become ubiquitous on social media platforms such as TikTok, with its Chinese-run algorithm, or pushed by Russian and Iranian bots.25
These media exposure factors may affect the home audience’s perception of success and victory in the war and military and diplomatic actions and outcomes. While Arab Muslim culture, defined strongly by concepts of honor and shame more than by numbers of dead, may perceive and declare themselves “victorious” for executing the October 7 massacre, despite the costs. Alternatively, Israelis may perceive the outcome in Gaza as “less than victory” because of the outstanding hostage issue and global disapproval.
The “Toda’a” Approach
To prevent this potentially harmful outcome, Israel’s government, media, and civil society must move from a hasbara (defensive “explanation” of policy) communications approach to a toda’a (assertive perception) communications approach. For this to happen, Israel must deemphasize the importance of defensive explanations for its actions but rather create assertive offensive narratives to attack and undermine its enemies. Assertive information and perception management in both military and civilian arenas are essential ingredients in exposing and educating multiple audiences on Iran’s propaganda machine.
Israel needs to improve its soft power arsenal to impact various audiences, including the enemy. The enemy must perceive the loss and despair of a long war against Israel. Israel’s historical enemies, the Soviets, the Nazis, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Iranian regime – have all skillfully mobilized soft power. Though the Israeli public is remarkably resilient, its citizenry must be educated to identify the use of enemy perception warfare and proactively mobilize its own civilian soft power to shape foreign perception in the West and the Arab world.
Israel’s perception warfare must also undermine the mass indoctrination against the Jewish state on Western university campuses. The all-encompassing “intersectionality” narrative that has come to dominate the Western discourse, naming Israel the villain and Hamas the victims, must be defeated by undermining its historical and intellectual falsehoods.26 Assertive perception warfare has the power to reverse the inversion of legitimacy whereby Israel has been recast as a terror organization while Hamas is presented as freedom fighters. These Soviet-era narratives and tactics must be eradicated.
To achieve success, Israel must invest resources in civilian awareness, information operations, and governmental allocations to bolster Israel’s national security against perception warfare threats. Soft power must move the Jewish state from defense to offense in its twenty-first-century existential war of perception. This would push Iran, its Hamas, Hizbullah, and Houthi terror loyalists onto their heels, impeding them from driving the mendacious narrative that has successfully co-opted the Western discourse.
* * *
Notes
jcpa.org · by Dr. Dan Diker
7. Irregular warfare: How fascist leaders use people willing to betray their own country
I am not making any partisan political judgement on this article. I am including it because of the reference to DOD's Irregular Warfare Center. (IWC) I think that is the basis for Mr. Hartman's Irregular Warfare tagline in the headline.
However, this is an editorial comment/question: Will the next administration call for the disbanding IWC due to its "analysis" here?
Excerpts:
The Irregular Warfare Center was created within the U.S. Department of Defense in 2021 by Congress; in their January 23, 2024 report “Russian Information Warfare Strategy: New IWC Translation Gives Insights into Vulnerabilities” they show how Putin’s efforts have had considerable success recruiting average Americans within the US. For example, as one of hundreds of Putin’s early efforts to help Donald Trump become president, they note that the year of Trump’s election:
“On 21 May 2016, two protest groups faced off in Houston near an Islamic cultural center to demonstrate competing opinions on Texas’ future. Both groups, one which was protesting the perceived Islamization of Texas, and the other in support of the Islamic community, had been organized on Facebook pages. At first glance, this seemed like a normal and innocuous part of the U.S. political process.
“Unbeknownst to most participants, however, both Facebook pages had been created by Russian actors seeking to exacerbate political discord in the United States. This event was not an isolated case; it was a part of a coordinated effort by Russia to meddle in the U.S. elections, both in the social media space and in the physical domain.”
Irregular warfare: How fascist leaders use people willing to betray their own country
milwaukeeindependent.com · by Thom Hartmann
Trump lies when saying that the guilty verdict against him, by a jury of his peers that his own attorneys picked was an illegitimate and politically motivated show trial.
Trying to help Trump destroy Americans’ faith in our democracy and its justice system, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s spokesman recently said of Trump’s trial:
“If we speak about Trump, the fact that there is simply the elimination, in effect, of political rivals by all possible means, legal and illegal, is obvious.”
Hungary’s dictator Viktor Orbán and Italy’s neofascist Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, both also argued that Trump is the victim of political persecution.
Right wing media commentators and Republicans in Congress have leaped at the opportunity to echo Putin and Orbán.
This sort of propaganda is called “irregular warfare” (IW) — warfare by means outside of troops, bombs, navies, etc. — and the U.S. used to be an expert at it. Typically, irregular warfare involves the use of propaganda, proxies, or people willing to betray their own country.
Irregular warfare is part of how the U.S. and western Europe brought down the Soviet Union (although that system also disintegrated from within under the weight of its own corruption and rot), with propaganda systems like the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe.
A keen observer of this process was an irregular warfare leader based in East Germany at the time. Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin supervised spying and propaganda operations within East Germany until the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he moved to Moscow where, in 1999, he became the head of the Russian government and is now the longest-serving Russian leader since Stalin.
Having been on the receiving end of U.S. and western European propaganda efforts, Putin dedicated himself to turning the tables on us, since the democratic example of America – and other western nations – is a thorn in his autocratic side. And he’s had considerable success, including helping get his man Trump into the White House where Donald then handed a western spy over to Putin’s Foreign Minister Lavrov in a secret Oval Office meeting during his first month in office.
Two months later, U.S. intelligence had to pull another spy out of Russia because they had evidence Trump had given his name to Putin as well. Trump may well represent the single most successful irregular warfare program Putin has ever run against America.
On July 31, 2019, as Trump was ramping up his 2020 campaign, he had another of what by that time were more than 16 private, unrecorded conversations with Putin. The White House told Congress and the press that they discussed “wildfires” and “trade between the nations.” No droids in this car.
The following week, on August 2nd, The Daily Beast’s Betsy Swan reported that Trump had just asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for a list of all its employees (including all our “spies” across the world) who had worked there more than 90 days, and the request had intelligence officials experiencing “disquiet.”
Fourteen months later, The New York Times ran a story with the headline: “Captured, Killed or Compromised: C.I.A. Admits to Losing Dozens of Informants.” The CIA then alerted American spies around the world that their identities had probably been compromised, apparently by President Donald Trump himself.
Also in 2019, when the international press verified that Putin was paying the Taliban bounties to kill American service members in Afghanistan – and 4 had already died as a result, Trump refused to demand the practice stop, another possible sign that Putin ran him, not the other way around.
As The New York Times noted at the time:
“Mr. Trump defended himself by denying the Times report that he had been briefed on the intelligence… But leading congressional Democrats and some Republicans demanded a response to Russia that, according to officials, the administration has yet to authorize.”
Instead of stopping Putin from offering the bounties, Trump shut down every U.S. airbase in Afghanistan except one – there were about a dozen, intentionally crippling incoming President Biden’s ability to extract U.S. assets from that country in an orderly fashion.
Today, Republicans — particularly House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) and committee members Cory Mills (R-FL) and Michael Lawler (R-NY) — have used the resulting chaos and associated American and Afghan deaths as a political club to beat up President Biden.
Trump also took an axe to the Voice of America — an institution viscerally hated by Putin for half a century — appointing a rightwing hack and friend of Steve Bannon’s to run the organization, who promptly fired the heads of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia and shifted their coverage away from defense of democracies. According to The Washington Post:
“He ousted the diplomats and media professionals on oversight boards and replaced them with low-level Trumpists from other government agencies…
“Having driven off the American media professionals at VOA, Pack went after the more than 70 foreign journalists who work for the organization, refusing to support the renewal of their U.S. visas as they came up. He claimed to be acting for security reasons and insinuated, on no evidence, that some of the staff were spies. … Now, they are being forced to repatriate, in some cases at personal risk. A VOA report in late August said 15 were returning home and another 20 had visas that will expire by the end of the year.
“They weren’t Pack’s only targets. He attempted to fire the board and cut off the funding of the Open Technology Fund, an organization that supports Internet freedom initiatives, such as tools to circumvent firewalls. A court blocked the firings, but the fund was forced to suspend 49 of its 60 projects. Among those affected were journalists and activists resisting government crackdowns in Hong Kong and in Belarus.”
The damage to the Voice of America continues to this day as most of Trump’s people are still there; just three months ago, The Hill ran an article titled “Putin’s influencers? Why is taxpayer-funded VOA spreading his propaganda?”
But Putin’s efforts at irregular warfare against the United States have extended far beyond his apparent manipulation of Donald Trump to betray spies and kneecap American anti-fascist propaganda programs.
The Irregular Warfare Center was created within the U.S. Department of Defense in 2021 by Congress; in their January 23, 2024 report “Russian Information Warfare Strategy: New IWC Translation Gives Insights into Vulnerabilities” they show how Putin’s efforts have had considerable success recruiting average Americans within the US. For example, as one of hundreds of Putin’s early efforts to help Donald Trump become president, they note that the year of Trump’s election:
“On 21 May 2016, two protest groups faced off in Houston near an Islamic cultural center to demonstrate competing opinions on Texas’ future. Both groups, one which was protesting the perceived Islamization of Texas, and the other in support of the Islamic community, had been organized on Facebook pages. At first glance, this seemed like a normal and innocuous part of the U.S. political process.
“Unbeknownst to most participants, however, both Facebook pages had been created by Russian actors seeking to exacerbate political discord in the United States. This event was not an isolated case; it was a part of a coordinated effort by Russia to meddle in the U.S. elections, both in the social media space and in the physical domain.”
Another example was the promotion of Putin’s assertion the month before he invaded Ukraine in February 2022 that the U.S. and Ukraine were running bioweapon labs in that besieged nation. As NBC News reported in March, 2022 as the invasion was moving ahead full steam:
“Boosted by far-right influencers on the day of the invasion, an anonymous QAnon Twitter account titled @WarClandestine pushed the “biolabs” theory to new heights…
“Much of the false information [about the alleged biolabs] is flourishing in Russian social media, far-right online spaces and U.S. conservative media, including Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News.”
When viewed in context, Putin’s successes at irregular warfare against the United States, designed to tear our society apart, have been quite breathtaking.
During the summer of 2020, as Trump and Biden were squaring off for the election that year, in the small Oregon town of Klamath Falls about 200 locals showed up downtown with guns, baseball bats, and whatever other weapons they could find around the house. They were in the streets to fight off the busloads of Black Antifa marauders they believed Jewish billionaire George Soros had paid to put on a bus in Portland and was sending their way.
Of course, George Soros had done no such thing and there were no busloads of Black people. But the warnings were all over the Klamath Falls Facebook group, and, it turns out, similar Facebook groups for small towns all over America, apparently as part of another Russian disinformation effort.
From coast to coast that weekend white residents of small towns showed up in their downtown areas with guns, rifles, hammers, and axes prepared to do battle with busloads of Black people being sent into their small white towns by George Soros.
In the tiny town of Forks, Washington, frightened white people brought out chainsaws and cut down trees to block the road leading to their town. In South Bend, Indiana police were overwhelmed by 911 calls from frightened white people wanting to know when the “Antifa buses” were arriving. And in rural Luzern County, Pennsylvania, the local neighborhood social media group warned people that busloads of Black people were “organizing to riot and loot.”
Similar stories played out that weekend from Danville, California to Jacksonville, Florida, as documented by NBC News. It was both a successful test of using social media to create mass panic among credulous Trump followers and, perhaps, a planning session for the violence ABC News documents Trump is trying to gin up if he loses this fall.
One of Putin’s greatest recent IW successes came last July when Federal District Judge Terry Doughty, a hard-right Trump appointee, blocked federal agencies from informing social media companies about Russian and other efforts to spread disinformation on their platforms. In March of this year four Republicans on the Supreme Court granted cert and the case was heard; we’re awaiting the ruling which could come any day.
The issue may be moot: Russia is now moving their efforts to promote Trump and encourage civil strife in the U.S. away from their own trolls posing as Americans, now using instead Trump-aligned US-citizens and congressional Republican influencers.
These include using rightwing media commentators, average citizens active on social media, and even members of Congress who’ve bought into Russian propaganda from issues around Ukraine to vaccines to the alleged theft of the 2020 election (and “planned theft” of 2024). As the Irregular Warfare Center notes:
“[F]uture Russian foreign-targeted OIEs [Operations in the Information Environment] appear to be shifting toward proxy operations, including semi-independent and strategically-chosen influencers on social media, rather than using a directly-controlled team of professionals, as was the case in 2016 with Yevgeny Prigozhin’s “troll factory” that worked to interfere in the U.S. elections.”
This possibility of Trump (and thus Putin) seizing control of U.S. intelligence agencies should he be elected is freaking out former senior U.S. intelligence officials. The headline at Raw Story says it all: “Intel officials ‘very concerned’ about Trump’s intentions for spy agencies.”
The simple reality is that Russia has been using IW techniques in Putin’s war against America — particularly in his efforts to reinstall Trump in the White House — for over a decade and those efforts are now being amplified on a daily basis by Republicans in Congress, rightwing media outlets, and some of our largest social media companies.
With the ability of our government to work with social media and news outlets to combat Putin’s irregular warfare handicapped, and the possibility that Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court will further handcuff the Biden Administration’s efforts, the possibility increases that Russia’s useful idiots could succeed in helping Trump prevail this November.
And the election season is now just beginning. Buckle up: to paraphrase Trump’s invitation to January 6th, this is going to get wild.
Thom Hartmann
Jason Allen (AP), Matt Rourke (AP), Elizabeth Williams (AP), Yuki Iwamura (AP), Christine Cornell (AP), and Mike Roemer (AP)
© Thom Hartmann, used with permission. Originally published on The Hartmann Report as How Fascist Leaders are Using “Irregular Warfare” Against America
Subscribe to The Hartmann Report directly and read the latest views about U.S. politics and other fascinating subjects seven days a week.
milwaukeeindependent.com · by Thom Hartmann
8. Cheap first-person-view drones now hunting larger prey in Ukraine
Warfare is so complex today. Drones are going to alter our fire and maneuver techniques down the squad level. And the tactical term "overwatch" will take on new meaning in both the offense and defense. We can use drones to improve our overwatch of maneuvering forces but our offensive and defensive forces will need overwatch to detect and counter the eyes and firepower of enemy drones.
Cheap first-person-view drones now hunting larger prey in Ukraine
Defense News · by Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo · August 8, 2024
MILAN – Low-cost first-person-view drones are proving increasingly capable of striking larger platforms — such as combat helicopters — in Ukraine, as their pace of development has accelerated to allow them to fly faster and further.
On Aug. 7, the Ukrainian military released footage showing one of its unknown models of FPV drones successfully hitting the tail rotor of a Russian Mi-28 Havoc attack helicopter over the battlefield.
The hit represented one of the first filmed strikes on a manned Russian helicopter, in flight, using a Ukrainian FPV platform. While these variations of drones have been used widely across the battlefield, experts say efforts to use them to bring down larger, expensive aircraft have been previously unsuccessful.
“There were numerous attempts of Ukrainian FPVs trying to chase Russian helicopters before, but all such attacks were near misses,” Sam Bendett, a research analyst at the U.S.-based Center for Naval Analyses, said. “It’s difficult to pilot an FPV drone towards a military helicopter flying at high speeds.”
Although it is not possible from the available recording to certify the overall impact of the hit on the aircraft, Bendett says that the fast-paced evolution of these small drones and the ways they can be used should be watched closely by militaries globally.
“The sky over the [Ukraine] battlefield is now teeming with fast-flying FPVs hunting much larger prey, and assuming one can be piloted to the helicopter’s vulnerable part — like its rear propeller — major damage can be done,” he said.
Helicopters have proven especially vulnerable throughout the war in Ukraine, due in part to the proliferation of ground-based air defenses that have rendered manned flight across the battlefield extremely difficult.
As of July 27, Ukraine’s military intelligence unit, HUR, reported that Russian forces have lost up to 326 helicopters since the start of the invasion. Bendett notes that some of Moscow’s rotorcraft are larger and fly at slower speeds than the Mi-28, which could offer more occasions for a successful FPV attack.
FPV drones were introduced relatively early on in the war to fulfill different tasks. In late 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the country’s intention to produce one million of the platforms in 2024.
Whereas initially the drones had a significantly limited range, between 3 to 5 kilometers on average, Bendett says that number has expanded to 15-20 kilometers today.
The future use of FPVs in combat will likely involve them flying “in swarms and groups in order to overwhelm adversary defenses,” according to Bendett.
Beyond this, other military experts argue that the rise of this new threat alongside the already exposed vulnerabilities of helicopters will necessitate a reconsideration of the use and role of rotary aircraft.
“The future use of helicopters in combat can and should be rethought, especially with the growth of unmanned systems,” Serhii Kuzan, a former adviser to the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense, told Defense News. “It is quite likely that their role as strike means may change after the Russian-Ukraine war, as potentially this feature will be used by attack drones or even unmanned helicopters.”
Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.
9. Disinformation Effort Key to Houthi Red Sea Campaign, Says 5th Fleet Commander
Excerpts:
The Houthi use of propaganda and a calculated narrative evolved as early as the Sa’ada Wars, which began in 2004, between the Houthis and Yemen’s government., according to a report from Yemen-based Sanaa Center, which examined the Houthi’s media strategy.
In 2014, the Houthis took over government channels and newspaper offices and expanded their propaganda, according to the report.
“In the years since the 2014 takeover, a calibrated media campaign has emerged, in which the Houthis seek to use “Popular Revolution Day” on Sept. 21 to eclipse the celebrations and commemorations of the republican revolution marked on September 26, with events and recurrent messages designed to legitimize their rule,” reads the report.
When it comes to the Red Sea, the Houthis have used government-controlled news sites and social media sites, like X, to share claims of attacks on commercial ships, with Houti spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e posting almost daily.
The Houthis narrative focuses on their cause — in the case of the Red Sea attacks, justice for Palestine — while ignoring the own problems they’ve caused, including the food crisis in Yemen caused by the civil war between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, Wikoff said.
Disinformation Effort Key to Houthi Red Sea Campaign, Says 5th Fleet Commander - USNI News
news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 7, 2024
Houthi spokesman claims attack on USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69)
As USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) left the Red Sea, on its way home, the Houthis attacked, sinking the ship. Or at least, that’s what the Yemeni-based group claimed, according to social media posts from the group’s leaders and their supporters.
The Houthis never struck Ike, which arrived home safely in Norfolk, Va., on July 14.
The fake strike on Ike is part of a disinformation campaign the Houthis have used as part of their tactics in the Red Sea, where they are striking commercial ships, Vice Adm. George Wikoff, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, said during a Naval Institute and Center for Strategic and International Studies event Wednesday.
The Houthis have been aggressive when it comes to bending their narrative to fit their needs, Wikoff said. It’s been a tactic for about a decade, he added.
The claim of sinking Ike is not the first time the group, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, claimed to take down the aircraft carrier. The group sent off a number of posts on social media site X with Eisenhower Commanding Officer Capt. Christopher “Chowdah” Hill combatting the rise of disinformation with his own posts about Taco Tuesday or memes, USNI News previously reported.
The Houthi use of propaganda and a calculated narrative evolved as early as the Sa’ada Wars, which began in 2004, between the Houthis and Yemen’s government., according to a report from Yemen-based Sanaa Center, which examined the Houthi’s media strategy.
In 2014, the Houthis took over government channels and newspaper offices and expanded their propaganda, according to the report.
“In the years since the 2014 takeover, a calibrated media campaign has emerged, in which the Houthis seek to use “Popular Revolution Day” on Sept. 21 to eclipse the celebrations and commemorations of the republican revolution marked on September 26, with events and recurrent messages designed to legitimize their rule,” reads the report.
When it comes to the Red Sea, the Houthis have used government-controlled news sites and social media sites, like X, to share claims of attacks on commercial ships, with Houti spokesman Brig. Gen. Yahya Sare’e posting almost daily.
The Houthis narrative focuses on their cause — in the case of the Red Sea attacks, justice for Palestine — while ignoring the own problems they’ve caused, including the food crisis in Yemen caused by the civil war between the Houthis and the Yemeni government, Wikoff said.
“They’re seeding tremendous unrest,” Wikoff said. “They don’t care for the people that they’re claiming to represent with widespread dire humanitarian assistance requirements, the worst famine in 40 years in the region, 30 million people at risk of starvation, and they just seem to continue to threaten shipping and those very ships that will bring aid to them and bring aid to people.”
The Houthis can argue that they are raising their profile with the Red Sea attacks, retired Navy Capt. Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher with RAND in early July. While they may not have global ambitions, their attacks have made it so they are getting focus as a player in the Middle East region.
Houthi claims vs effectiveness
Sailors aboard USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) render assistance to distressed mariners at sea in the Red Sea, June 15, 2024. US Navy Photo
Based on Sare’e’s social media account, the Houthis have waged an effective campaign against commercial ships in the Red Sea. Reality tells a different story, with many Houthi missiles and drones either shot down by Operation Prosperity Guardian participants or falling into the Red Sea or Gulf of Aden,, according to U.S. Central Command and the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization.
Based on maritime data and Wikoff’s comments Wednesday, the Houthis have been effective at discouraging commercial ships from traveling through the Babe el-Mandeb Strait due to the risk of attacks. Traffic dropped around 50 percent between November, when the attacks began, and February, Wikoff said. Ships began choosing to go around the Cape of Good Hope instead of risking potential Houthi disruptions.
While the Houthis have sunk at least three ships and caused the death of a mariner, the attacks that do hit ships have generally caused little damage. Operation Prosperity Guardian has also been effective at shooting down Houthi drones and missiles, Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder told reporters in June.
The Houthis claim to hit ships even when their weapons miss, Martin said, adding they are not worried about accuracy like U.S. Central Command, which puts out daily updates on Red Sea activity.
“Perception is reality, and that’s what the Houthis are creating,” he said.
The Houthis began attacking ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden in November 2023, following Israel’s bombardment of Gaza in response to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. Between December 2023 and February 2024, the number of container ships transiting through the Red Sea dropped by 90 percent, according to a report by the Defense Intelligence Agency released in June.
The Houthis first attacked commercial ships connected to Israel, expanding to those with ties to the U.S. and United Kingdom following coordinated strikes by the two countries, in partnership with other nations. The Yemen-based group then began to attack any ship going to or from Israel, as well, before declaring they would attack nearly any commercial ship transiting through the Red Sea, as well the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea, USNI News previously reported. The Houthis have also claimed they would target some ships in the Mediteranean Sea.
There has been some stabalization in the region since February, Wikoff said, with 1,000 ships passing through the Bab Al-Mandeb Strait versus 2,000 before the Houthi attacks, but it is not an “acceptable solution.”
“So right now the idea is, continue to maintain that decision space, try to preserve the where we are right now, to allow other levers of government, other levers of the international community, to pressurize the Houthis to stop what they’re doing in the maritime,” Wikoff said.
Commercial shipping companies do not want to go through the Bab el-Mandeb until there is more stabilization in the region, Wikoff said.
There was not a huge spike in inflation as a result of the shipping changes, he said, so there is less pressure on commercial companies to sail through the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, with some companies calling it the “strait of convenience,” Wikoff said.
Companies also do not want to have to pay the insurance premiums associated with going through the strait, Martin said.
Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Mason (DDG-87) conducts a vertical replenishment with the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69) while the ships operate in support of Operation Prosperity Guardian (OPG) in the Red Sea, Jan. 8, 2024. US Navy Photo
Operation Prosperity Guardian, the coalition of international partners, inlcuding the U.S. to protect commercial ships, and attacks on Houthi infrastructure and weapons by the U.S., the U.K. and other allies are degrading the Houthis’ ability to strike ships, Wikoff said.
But they have not stopped them, he said, adding that it is difficult to find the center of gravity that can be used to have more effective deterrence.
“So trying to apply a classic deterrence policy in this particular scenario is a bit challenging,” he said. “What we’ll continue to do with the operations we’re doing will be a shock absorber, and that’s what the military has provided.”
But while the Pentagon says the U.S. is degrading the Houthi abilities, they continue to be able to attack ships, Bradley Bowman, senior director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told USNI News in a statement this week.
“The United States has continued to destroy Houthi offensive capabilities in Yemen, but the terror group continues to have sufficient means to threaten shipping. This offers insights regarding the size of the terror group’s arsenal and suggests that the Houthis continue to enjoy a supply of arms from its patron in Tehran,” Bowman said in the email. “An effort to destroy capabilities in Yemen that does not devote sufficient attention and resources to interdicting weapons shipments from Iran to Yemen is not unlike the homeowner cleaning up puddles but ignoring the hole in the roof.”
Bowman said that a majority of vessels that continue to travel through the Red Sea are able to do so safely, in part because of the Navy and Operation Prosperity Guardian.
“But the Houthis only need to succeed every now and then to achieve their objectives,” he said.
Related
news.usni.org · by Heather Mongilio · August 7, 2024
10. DNA on weapons implicates ex-U.S. Green Beret in attempted Venezuelan coup, federal officials say
We need to include a new TTP at Robin Sage and ensure we wipe down all the weapons we intend to provide to the indigenous force and ensure none of our DNA is on the weapons.
I guess this means that the former Green Beret's unconventional warfare mission was not sanctioned by the US government.
(note my sarcasm with both comments)
DNA on weapons implicates ex-U.S. Green Beret in attempted Venezuelan coup, federal officials say
By JOSHUA GOODMAN
Updated 12:38 PM EDT, August 8, 2024
AP · August 8, 2024
MIAMI (AP) — Federal investigators say they found the DNA of a decorated former U.S. Green Beret on some of the 60 automatic weapons he allegedly smuggled from Florida to South America as part of a failed 2020 coup attempt against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
The allegations were detailed in court papers filed days after Jordan Goudreau’s arrest last week and contain the strongest evidence yet linking him to illegal arms trafficking that facilitated the amphibious raid, which ended with several fighters killed and two of Goudreau’s former U.S. Special Forces colleagues locked away for years in Venezuela.
The plot, exposed by The Associated Press two days before the incursion, was carried out by a ragtag group of Venezuelan army deserters whom Goudreau allegedly helped arm and train in neighboring Colombia. Goudreau later claimed responsibility for the putsch, but said he was acting in concert with the Venezuelan opposition to protect democracy. He also said he was in touch with then-President Donald Trump’s administration, which made no secret of its desire to see Maduro gone, even though there’s no evidence U.S. officials blessed the invasion.
After Goudreau’s arrest in New York last week, a federal magistrate initially allowed filmmaker Jen Gatien to put up her $2 million Manhattan loft as bond to secure Goudreau’s release. But prosecutors appealed and now it’s up to a judge in Tampa, Florida, where Goudreau was indicted, to determine whether he should remain behind bars pending trial.
Prosecutors arguing that Goudreau is a flight risk presented what they called “overwhelming” evidence that he knowingly violated U.S. arms control laws, and that he tried to hide after learning he was under investigation. Those efforts including moving his bank accounts into cryptocurrency, obtaining a Mexican driver’s license and allegedly sneaking back and forth across the U.S. border into Mexico and Canada, where he was born and lived until emigrating and enlisting in the U.S. Army.
Internet searches on Goudreau’s cell phone allegedly included “how to run and stay hidden from the feds,” “how to be a successful fugitive on the run” and “what happens if I run from the law.”
Although the 48-year-old has no criminal record and was a three-time Bronze Star recipient in Iraq and Afghanistan, prosecutors argued he was both a danger to the public and a flight risk because of his firearms expertise, access to a sailboat at an Air Force base in Tampa and $10,000-a-month in military retirement disability income.
“Goudreau thoroughly researched, and acted on, illegally leaving the United States and evading law enforcement detection,” prosecutors wrote. “Now that he has been charged with serious violations that carry significant prison sentences, Goudreau has every incentive and wherewithal to flee — this time for good.”
Gustavo Garcia-Montes, an attorney for Goudreau, pushed back on prosecutors’ portrayal of his client and pointed out that Goudreau voluntarily met with federal investigators prior to his arrest.
“He is attending school, has attended court several times, depositions, and lives at an air force base,” Garcia-Montes said. “He is not a flight risk.”
Prosecutors said evidence to be presented at Goudreau’s trial includes sales records for firearm sound suppressors, night vision devices and laser sights — some of which have serial numbers that match weapons seized in Colombia by police when the plot began to unravel. All require a U.S. government export license Goudreau didn’t have.
While prosecutors didn’t say how they obtained Goudreau’s DNA, they say it was found on two of the approximately 60 automatic weapons that were assembled at the Melbourne, Florida, warehouse where Goudreau was living and his company, Silvercorp, was based.
From there, Goudreau and a co-defendant, Yacsy Alvarez, a Venezuelan living in Colombia, allegedly arranged to transport the weapons to Colombia on a private plane owned by Alvarez’s boss, a Venezuelan businessman with close ties to the government of the late Hugo Chávez.
Prosecutors allege Goudreau also spent $90,000 on a yacht he used to transport ammunition, body armor plates and magazines for AR-15 rifles. Some of the weapons never made it because the yacht sank in the middle of the Caribbean. Goudreau and an unnamed associate had to be rescued by a passing natural gas tanker.
Goudreau’s odyssey is the subject of a forthcoming documentary titled “Men of War,” co-directed by Gatien and Miami-based filmmaker Billy Corben.
Gatien registered a Florida production company with Goudreau in 2021 and is described in court records as his girlfriend. His attorney at the bond hearing said the two have lived together for two years while Goudreau attends the New York Film Academy. But upon being handcuffed outside Gatien’s apartment, Goudreau used an expletive to tell the FBI she wasn’t his girlfriend.
If convicted, Goudreau faces between 10 and 20 years in prison.
JOSHUA GOODMAN
Goodman is a Miami-based investigative reporter who writes about the intersection of crime, corruption, drug trafficking and politics in Latin America. He previously spent two decades reporting from South America.
twittermailto
AP · August 8, 2024
AP · August 8, 2024
11. 'Zero Day': New 10-Part Series Imagines What a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Might Actually Look Like
Taiwan's influence operation? I look forward to watching this.
'Zero Day': New 10-Part Series Imagines What a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Might Actually Look Like
military.com · by Blake Stilwell · August 8, 2024
In the wake of a new Taiwanese election, the Chinese People’s Liberation Navy and Air Force surround the island of Taiwan and cut off access to the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan’s stock market crumbles and banks fail. Hackers, infiltrators and Chinese sympathizers wreak havoc on Taiwan’s infrastructure. Foreigners and citizens begin to flee as water, electricity and communications are cut across the island nation. Everything happens over the course of a single week, and everyone knows what’s coming: a full-scale Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
This is the nightmare scenario imagined by the new 10-part Taiwanese television series “Zero Day.” The show’s 17-minute trailer, released on July 23, 2024, racked up 1.5 million views in just two weeks, which aren’t Marvel-level numbers but is still impressive, given the timeframe. The trailer has left many viewers in Taiwan understandably shaken.
For many Americans, the defense of Taiwan is a potential flashpoint for a “great power” war between the United States and China, a conflict that decision-makers in Washington, D.C., see as all but inevitable. But that potential battlefield is still thousands of miles away while, for the 23.5 million people in Taiwan, the threat of an invasion can cast a shadow of fear and anxiety over daily life.
"Frankly, everyone has their own fears and imaginations about the war, but in our daily lives, many avoid it or even pretend it doesn’t exist,” Hsin-mei Cheng, former journalist and showrunner of "Zero Day," told CNN. “But as the crisis looms larger over the past two years, I think it’s about time we take a hard look at it and open this Pandora’s box.
“For me, the war has already begun in Taiwan,” she added. “It is not being fought through guns and cannons, but through information and infiltration. It’s permeating our daily lives.”
The Chinese government considers Taiwan a breakaway province that will one day be reunited with mainland China, whether the people on the island want it or not. As Chinese military power grows, its shows of force and strength in the Taiwan Strait have become bolder and more frequent, even as the United States continues to guarantee the island’s security.
Each of “Zero Day’s” 10 episodes depicts an independent aspect of Taiwanese life affected by the fictionalized invasion, as they experience a countdown to the day Chinese troops land on Taiwan’s shores. Hsin-mei Cheng gathered a team of experienced directors to create the series while raising money from wealthy, pro-independence investors and the country’s Ministry of Culture.
The countdown begins after a PLA aircraft “disappears” in the Taiwan Strait in what looks to the Taiwanese leadership like a dreamed-up pretext for China to deploy ships and aircraft to the area. China shuts down the area for what appears to be a staged search-and-rescue mission. It ends with a Chinese military force landing on the Taiwanese island of Kinmen and preparing to make an initial assault. The pre-invasion salvo of misinformation depicted in “Zero Day” includes tactics that only recently became a deep concern for world leaders, such as the deployment of AI-generated deep fakes of Taiwan’s president to lull the population into surrendering.
As part of its strategy, China uses a deepfake AI video of Taiwan's leader declaring war on the mainland. (Zero Day Cultural and Creative Co.)
Anyone who doubts that a show can have a significant long-term effect on real political situations need only look at the November 1983 airing of the made-for-TV movie “The Day After.” Its depiction of the consequences of a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union shook Americans awake to the realities of the Cold War and nuclear weapons. It even prompted President Ronald Reagan to rethink his hardline Soviet foreign policy.
“I hope the show can serve as a wake-up call to the Taiwanese people: What should we do when we still have the right to choose?” Cheng said.
“Zero Day” has not yet completed production, but plans to wrap filming in November for a 2025 premiere.
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military.com · by Blake Stilwell · August 8, 2024
12. Japan's 'megaquake' warning explained
For all our friends in Japan.
Japan's 'megaquake' warning explained
09 Aug 2024 03:49PM
channelnewsasia.com
TOKYO: Japan's earthquake scientists say the country should prepare for a possible "megaquake" one day that could kill hundreds of thousands of people - although they stress the warning does not mean a colossal tremor is imminent.
The Japan Meteorological Association (JMA) warning is the first issued under new rules drawn up after a 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster killed around 18,500 people.
WHAT DOES THE WARNING SAY?
The JMA's "megaquake advisory" warns that "if a major earthquake were to occur in the future, strong shaking and large tsunamis would be generated".
"The likelihood of a new major earthquake is higher than normal, but this is not an indication that a major earthquake will definitely occur during a specific period of time," it added.
The advisory concerns the Nankai Trough "subduction zone" between two tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean, where massive earthquakes have hit in the past.
WHAT IS THE NANKAI TROUGH?
The 800km undersea trough runs from Shizuoka, west of Tokyo, to the southern tip of Kyushu island.
It has been the site of destructive quakes of magnitude eight or nine every century or two.
These so-called "megathrust quakes", which often occur in pairs, have been known to unleash dangerous tsunamis along Japan's southern coast.
In 1707, all segments of the Nankai Trough ruptured at once, unleashing an earthquake that remains the nation's second-most powerful on record.
That quake - which also triggered the last eruption of Mount Fuji - was followed by two powerful Nankai megathrusts in 1854, and then a pair in 1944 and 1946.
HOW MUCH IS AT STAKE?
Japan's government has previously said the next magnitude 8-9 megaquake along the Nankai Trough has a roughly 70 per cent probability of striking within the next 30 years.
In the worst-case scenario 300,000 lives could be lost, experts estimate, with some engineers saying the damage could reach US$13 trillion with infrastructure wiped out.
"The history of great earthquakes at Nankai is convincingly scary," geologists Kyle Bradley and Judith A Hubbard wrote in their Earthquake Insights newsletter.
And "while earthquake prediction is impossible, the occurrence of one earthquake usually does raise the likelihood of another", they explained.
"A future great Nankai earthquake is surely the most long-anticipated earthquake in history - it is the original definition of the 'Big One'."
HOW WORRIED SHOULD PEOPLE BE?
Japan is reminding people living in quake zones to take general precautions, from securing furniture to knowing the location of their nearest evacuation shelter.
Many households in the country also keep a disaster kit handy with bottled water, long-life food, a torch, radio and other practical items.
But there's no need to panic - there is only a "small probability" that Thursday's (Aug 8) magnitude 7.1 earthquake is a foreshock, according to Bradley and Hubbard.
"One of the challenges is that even when the risk of a second earthquake is elevated, it is still always low," they said.
"For instance, in California the rule of thumb is that any given earthquake has around five percent chance of being a foreshock."
channelnewsasia.com
13. New bodycam video shows moment police officer saw Trump shooter just before assassination attempt
Video at the link: https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/08/politics/police-body-cam-video-trump-shooting/index.html
New bodycam video shows moment police officer saw Trump shooter just before assassination attempt | CNN Politics
CNN · by Curt Devine, Holmes Lybrand, Isabelle Chapman, Zachary Cohen · August 8, 2024
Video shows moment police saw would-be Trump assassin just before shooting began
03:05 - Source: CNN
CNN —
Dramatic video obtained by CNN shows, for the first time, the moment a police officer climbed up to the roof of a building overlooking the Donald Trump rally on July 13 and saw the former president’s would-be assassin just before the shooting began.
Other footage from the rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, which CNN obtained through a public records request, shows local officers lamenting that they told Secret Service to post officers near the building the gunman fired from days earlier.
A video from the Butler police officer’s body-worn camera shows how the officer was hoisted up by his colleague onto the roof, quickly dropping down after he sees the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks.
Amy O'Kruk/CNN
Related article Minute-by-minute: Visual timeline of the Trump assassination attempt
Approximately 40 seconds later, Crooks turned back and fired eight shots at Trump, who was hit in the ear. Seconds later, a Secret Service sniper shot and killed Crooks.
After the encounter, the officer runs around to another side of the building before running to his police car to retrieve a rifle.
“F**king this close bro,” the officer who saw Crooks says to another officer. “Dude, he turned around on me.”
One officer asks where the shooter is and the officer, panting, says, “He’s straight up.”
“Who’s got eyes on him?” the officer asks. “He was right where you picked me up, bro. He was on that left side.”
Over the radio a voice says: “We have two civilians – tending to them,” and later, “I need an ambulance in the back.”
This video was released by Butler Township Police Department in response to CNN’s public records request that asked for any body-camera video or dash-camera video involving Butler Township officers or personnel related to the rally and shooting at Butler Farm Show on July 13. The township initially declined to release the content but did after CNN appealed.
‘Don’t put up your head - he’s right there’
On the dashboard camera of the officer who came face-to-face with Crooks, three shots can be heard ringing out, followed by five more shots fired in rapid succession.
“Don’t put up your head – he’s right there!” the officer shouts to others after opening his car half a minute after the shots were fired.
Shortly after, video shows law enforcement officers attempting to access the roof.
“He’s got glasses, long hair,” the officer who saw Crooks tells several others climbing up the side of the building. “Yo, Mike, I climbed the wall and I popped my head right in front of him bro, he’s got a book bag, he’s got mad sh*t, AR laying down.”
“But watch out because he can f**king come right down on you over there,” the officer warns.
The officer adds later: “Before you m*therf**kers came up here I popped my head up there like an idiot, by myself, dude. He turned around, I f**king dropped.”
When they ultimately access the top of the building, footage shows Crooks’ lifeless body, his rifle and a trail of blood running down the side of the roof.
Officers say they asked for Secret Service help earlier that week
In a separate video released by the Butler police, one officer can be heard telling colleagues about 10 minutes after the shooting that he had told Secret Service to post law enforcement by the building that Crooks fired from.
“I f**king told them they need to post the guys f**king over here,” the officer said. “I told them that, the f**king, the Secret Service, I told them that f**king Tuesday. I told them to post f**king guys over here.”
Another officer replied that he wasn’t “even concerned about it because I thought someone was on the roof. I thought that’s how we — how in the hell can you lose a guy walking back here?”
“I talked to the Secret Service guys, they were like, ‘Yeah, no problem, we’re going to post guys over here,’” the first officer said.
Secret Service posted three local counter snipers inside one of the adjacent buildings, one of whom took pictures of Crooks earlier that day and left his post to go looking for the soon-to-be shooter.
In a statement Thursday, the Secret Service said it is reviewing the newly released body-camera video.
“The U.S. Secret service appreciates our local law enforcement partners, who acted courageously as they worked to locate the shooter that day,” said Anthony Guglielmi, an agency spokesperson. “The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump was a U.S. Secret Service failure, and we are reviewing and updating our protective policies and procedures in order to ensure a tragedy like this never occurs again.”
Local law enforcement 'cannot say that' future Trump rallies will be safe
02:15 - Source: CNN
Documents from shooting range show Crooks’ preparation
On Thursday, Sen. Chuck Grassley released documents obtained from the shooter’s gun club that revealed new details about Crooks’s preparation in the months leading up to the attempted assassination of Trump.
The records from Clairton Sportsmen’s Club, reviewed by CNN, show Crooks visited the gun range a total of 43 times after establishing a membership on August 10, 2023 – less than a year before the assassination attempt
Sign-in sheets provided to Grassley, an Iowa Republican, by Clairton Sportsmen’s Club also indicate Crooks spent the majority of his time at the rifle range – rather than other designated areas for firing pistols or shotguns – in the months immediately preceding the rally where he ultimately used the same type of weapon to shoot Trump.
Crooks attended target practice at the club three to six times per month in 2024, before making one final visit at 2:45 p.m. on Friday, July 12, 2024 – the day before the Trump rally, according to the records obtained by Grassley.
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN · by Curt Devine, Holmes Lybrand, Isabelle Chapman, Zachary Cohen · August 8, 2024
14. “Shadow Reserves”: China’s Key to Parry U.S. Financial Sanctions
Excerpts:
Beijing readily exploits the unpredictability of the shadow reserve system. A portion of Beijing’s shadow reserves are held in accounts with influential international banking entities — a move that effectively raises the stakes of financial confrontation. Should Washington strike at the dollar balances of Baowu Steel, one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises, if they are held by London-based bank HSBC? What about HSBC’s dollar holdings on behalf of the China Investment Corporation, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds? The China Investment Corporation holds 60 percent of its public equity portfolio in U.S. stocks and about 50 percent of its total assets in alternatives funds, many of which are dollar-based or U.S.-domiciled.
Washington could always opt to expand the aperture of its financial sanctions beyond those it has levied on Moscow. But freezing the balances of China’s state-aligned firms or striking at the dollar holdings of Chinese mammoth sovereign wealth funds, where these reserves hide, would amount to waging unrestricted financial warfare. And it would risk unleashing “financial Armageddon.” When faced with a similar prospect, the leaders of Edwardian Britain called off well-laid plans of punishing embargo against Imperial Germany in the early days of World War I.
Any effort to target China’s unofficial reserves would increase the unpredictability of Chinese countermeasures accordingly. Chinese leaders appear confident that real geoeconomic power is derived from dominance over world trade. As such, Beijing might elect to respond asymmetrically by leveraging its dominance in the mining, refining, and processing of at least twelve critical materials across industries like new energy, advanced electronics, and healthcare.
Slowly and deliberately, shadow reserves are helping China achieve a perceptible degree of diversification within the dollar system even as Beijing works toward the internationalization of its own currency. The de-dollarization of China’s official reserves via shadow reserves goes some way toward addressing Xi’s concerns about financial security. Xi’s confidence in China’s financial security is one of many factors governing his tolerance for risk-taking in the Taiwan Strait. The marginal degree of safety already provided by China’s shadow reserves might leave Beijing more confident in its insulation from American sanctions than traditional metrics like the overall volume of China’s trade conducted in dollars would otherwise imply.
What’s certain is that China’s patient efforts to insulate its banking system against the threat of U.S. financial sanctions must cast serious doubt on the prospect of successfully coercing Beijing with financial power. A combination of financial, suasive, and diplomatic power alone cannot guarantee peace in the Western Pacific. Rather, the unreliability of financial sanctions should reinforce the principle that military force, not financial power, will be dispositive in a material escalation of confrontation by Beijing.
“Shadow Reserves”: China’s Key to Parry U.S. Financial Sanctions - War on the Rocks
warontherocks.com · by Christopher Vassallo · August 9, 2024
In the ongoing U.S.-Chinese financial war, Beijing has focused on insulating China’s strategic trade from dollar-based financial sanctions. This objective has animated the growing push for China-Saudi renminbi settlement. It has also accelerated Chinese efforts to deepen ties with crude oil suppliers inclined to buck the West.
One of the most effective and longstanding means of financial “de-risking,” however, has been the Chinese central bank’s steady shedding of its official U.S. dollar reserve holdings. This development is important because it will impact Washington’s ability to impose financial sanctions on China in the event of an invasion or blockade of Taiwan.
In recent years, despite escalating financial competition with the United States, Beijing has not been abandoning dollars entirely. Still, only about a third of China’s goods trade is settled in renminbi. Instead, Beijing has created a new layer of protection for the dollars it needs to sustain the Chinese economy in times of extreme geoeconomic stress. These dollars have been sloughed off the central bank’s balance sheet and pushed down into the country’s sprawling banking system. Here, they are hard for U.S. sanctioneers to find, and more painful for the United States to freeze.
These unofficial reserve dollars have a name — “shadow reserves” — and they offer a strong defense against all but the most aggressive program of anti-China financial sanctions. Beijing’s patient, nearly decade-long expansion of shadow reserves poses a major obstacle to financial sanctions aimed at China. The diversification of Beijing’s dollar holdings means that countermeasures designed to target these dollars must strike at a wider swath of China’s economy than would otherwise have been the case. To get at these dollars in any comprehensive way, U.S. officials would have to freeze the dollar balances of China’s two major sovereign wealth funds, as well as those of marquee Chinese international state-owned enterprises and policy banks. This is a difficult task in itself. What’s more, though, since banks and investment firms on Wall Street are deeply entangled with Chinese entities of this size, the pain imposed by such sanctions cannot be reliably contained.
In short, these shadow reserves should lead American policymakers to temper expectations about their ability to implement financial sanctions on China’s banking system, even in a world where the dollar remains dominant globally.
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The Rise of Shadow Reserves
Since about 2015, China’s official holdings of dollar reserves have been shrinking even as China is conducting more trade today in dollars, in absolute terms, than back then:
The mystery is where all the dollars have gone. The People’s Bank of China continues to require dollars to intervene in the currency markets to keep the renminbi exchange rate stable against the dollar at about 7.2. Equally importantly, Chinese firms still require access to the U.S. dollar derivatives market — financial contracts like futures, options, and swaps used for hedging large-scale physical trading operations — to conduct the kinds of risk management and credit operations that China’s overwhelming dominance of global trade necessitates.
The term shadow reserves was first used by analyst Brad Setser to describe Beijing’s systematic effort to push dollars down into its banking system. They’ve ended up on the balance sheets of its sovereign wealth funds, state commercial banks, and policy banks — and off the books of the People’s Bank of China’s official reserve holdings. In practice, all these entities report to the Party the same way the central bank does. China’s shadow reserves are one reason efficient balance sheet management can still occur under conditions of shrinking official dollar reserves.
One way to appreciate the growth of the shadow reserve system might be to observe the wider availability of dollars circulating in the Chinese state-owned commercial banking system after the central bank’s official dollar reserves began shrinking in 2015. Mirroring the decline in official holdings has been an increase in dollars on the balance sheets of firms like Bank of China. This development is one reason it has become steadily cheaper for Chinese borrowers to obtain dollar-denominated loans. In bankers’ jargon, the “spread” between Bank of China’s short-term dollar lending rate and the U.S. Treasury’s short-term rate has “compressed”:
The “Marginal Propensity to Sanction” Principle
Typically, several reasons are given for the emergence of China’s shadow reserves. These include Chinese financial elites’ pursuit of higher yielding assets, the repurposing of dollars toward Belt and Road Initiative loans, and Chinese responsiveness to U.S. criticism about currency manipulation.
What these reasons do not account for is President Xi Jinping’s elevation of the concept of “financial security” since the summer of 2015 when China experienced a capital flight crisis. In 2017, Xi equated financial security with national security in remarks to a study session of China’s Politburo, the highest governing body. These days, he regularly cites the concept. This obsession with financial security — driven by Beijing’s keen understanding of how Washington historically conducts financial warfare, and its recognition that Chinese trade might someday be a target — has shaped the formation of China’s shadow reserves.
Since the Cold War, Washington has reliably adhered to what I would call a “marginal propensity to sanction” principle in its exercise of financial war: Whether Washington imposes sanctions on a certain entity is linked to its perception of that entity’s systemic importance to global macroeconomic stability. If the entity is too central, sanctions are less forthcoming.
While every dollar is de jure subject to Washington’s jurisdiction, some dollars are more vulnerable than others. In 2022, in a move Moscow anticipated, Washington and its allies froze Russia’s central bank reserves; at that time, they did not freeze the dollar balances of Russia’s largest energy giant, Gazprom, or its largest bank, Sberbank.
China can expect its shadow reserves to afford a similar measure of security, if confronted with Russia-style financial sanctions.
During the Cold War, it was precisely the communist bloc’s understanding of Washington’s marginal propensity to sanction that contributed to the emergence of what was known as the “eurodollar market,” where claims on offshore dollars were not subject to the same U.S. regulatory constraints. The first ever eurodollar may even have been deposited by the nascent communist government in Beijing when, at the outbreak of the Korean war, Beijing quietly transferred a portion of its dollar-denominated reserves to a neutral European bank on the continent. At the time, dollars could not be discarded entirely; they were needed to finance Chinese trade with some of its Asian neighbors. The Central Intelligence Agency later assessed that the leaders of communist states generally elected not to “hold more than working balances” of U.S. dollars in U.S. banks. Instead, they parked the dollars necessary for trade in European banks, where they “would be safer (that is, less likely to be blocked by government authorities) than balances held in the United States.”
By dispersing dollars across the Cold War–era international banking system, Beijing successfully secured its dollar assets from the long arm of U.S. financial warfare during the Korean war and throughout decades of embargo, without eschewing dollars altogether. Their dollars found security in obscurity.
Sanctions a Painful Prospect
To the central bankers of today’s China, the beauty of the shadow reserve system lies in its unpredictability. Shadow reserve dollars are not just harder to locate across the Chinese banking system than the People’s Bank of China’s official reserve holdings. Once found, they are also bound to provoke agonizing in Washington over the escalatory implications of targeting them.
Beijing readily exploits the unpredictability of the shadow reserve system. A portion of Beijing’s shadow reserves are held in accounts with influential international banking entities — a move that effectively raises the stakes of financial confrontation. Should Washington strike at the dollar balances of Baowu Steel, one of China’s largest state-owned enterprises, if they are held by London-based bank HSBC? What about HSBC’s dollar holdings on behalf of the China Investment Corporation, one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds? The China Investment Corporation holds 60 percent of its public equity portfolio in U.S. stocks and about 50 percent of its total assets in alternatives funds, many of which are dollar-based or U.S.-domiciled.
Washington could always opt to expand the aperture of its financial sanctions beyond those it has levied on Moscow. But freezing the balances of China’s state-aligned firms or striking at the dollar holdings of Chinese mammoth sovereign wealth funds, where these reserves hide, would amount to waging unrestricted financial warfare. And it would risk unleashing “financial Armageddon.” When faced with a similar prospect, the leaders of Edwardian Britain called off well-laid plans of punishing embargo against Imperial Germany in the early days of World War I.
Any effort to target China’s unofficial reserves would increase the unpredictability of Chinese countermeasures accordingly. Chinese leaders appear confident that real geoeconomic power is derived from dominance over world trade. As such, Beijing might elect to respond asymmetrically by leveraging its dominance in the mining, refining, and processing of at least twelve critical materials across industries like new energy, advanced electronics, and healthcare.
Slowly and deliberately, shadow reserves are helping China achieve a perceptible degree of diversification within the dollar system even as Beijing works toward the internationalization of its own currency. The de-dollarization of China’s official reserves via shadow reserves goes some way toward addressing Xi’s concerns about financial security. Xi’s confidence in China’s financial security is one of many factors governing his tolerance for risk-taking in the Taiwan Strait. The marginal degree of safety already provided by China’s shadow reserves might leave Beijing more confident in its insulation from American sanctions than traditional metrics like the overall volume of China’s trade conducted in dollars would otherwise imply.
What’s certain is that China’s patient efforts to insulate its banking system against the threat of U.S. financial sanctions must cast serious doubt on the prospect of successfully coercing Beijing with financial power. A combination of financial, suasive, and diplomatic power alone cannot guarantee peace in the Western Pacific. Rather, the unreliability of financial sanctions should reinforce the principle that military force, not financial power, will be dispositive in a material escalation of confrontation by Beijing.
Become a Member
Christopher Vassallo is a doctoral candidate in economic history at the University of Cambridge. He was formerly an associate at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager.
Image: Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Christopher Vassallo · August 9, 2024
15. Keep Generational Labels Out of Army Talent Management
Those generational labels always confuse me. I only know that I am over the hill as a boomer.
Excerpt:
The Army has embraced simple typologies in the past, but, in recent years, has shown an ability to adopt more evidence-based talent management practices. For example, the Army used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in leader development for many years, in spite of more valid models of personality being available. However, more recently, the Army’s assessment programs have adopted instruments that more accurately capture individual variation in personality traits, rather than types of personality. Adopting more scientifically valid approaches for understanding age diversity will similarly help advance the Army’s goals of modernizing talent management. Although recent recruiting reforms are showing promise, further innovation will depend on an accurate understanding of age and other demographic characteristics, employing evidence-based approaches instead of generational stereotypes.
Keep Generational Labels Out of Army Talent Management - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Allison Abbe · August 9, 2024
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Use of generational labels is spreading, as the temptation to lump vast numbers of individuals into categories based purely on birth year apparently proves too difficult to resist. The Army is unfortunately not immune. For all its recent progress toward more evidence-based approaches to talent management, defense leaders seem to accept and repeat myths about generations in the workforce. Baby boomers, Generation X, millennials, Generation Z, and now Generation Alpha—all of these allegedly have distinct characteristics associated with a window of birth years, known in scientific literature as cohort effects. Despite having captured the popular imagination since at least the 1960s, generations can be a misleading concept and do not provide a sound basis for shaping military personnel policy. Mismanaging age diversity puts the military services at risk of falling behind in the competition for talent, with recruiting shortfalls consequently creating secondary pressures to promote some young leaders too early. Defense leaders should avoid using generations as a shortcut for thinking about age and instead rely on more data-informed approaches to recruiting and talent management.
Shortfalls in recruiting understandably prompt leaders to look to social science to inform solutions to organizational problems, and generational concepts find a receptive outlet in the limits of human cognition. Although humans’ long-term memory capacity is expansive, working memory capacity is limited. Since cognition can only actively retrieve and operate with a limited set of information at any one time, grouping into categories is helpful. People routinely rely on categories and groupings to process more information, but this is beneficial only if the categories reflect meaningful commonalities in the real world. When the categories do not correspond to real shared characteristics, relying on them for management and decision-making can lead to systematic bias and predictable errors. Generations are one such grouping that serve as a shortcut in communication, even while they mislead and conceal.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has extensively documented the limitations of scientific research on generations, demonstrating that most of the research cannot distinguish “generation effects” from age effects (i.e., developmental influences common during specific age periods, like young adulthood) or societal period effects (i.e., social influences common during, for example, a postwar period). Furthermore, researchers David Costanza and Cort Rudolph have identified how generational labels have spawned myths affecting workforce planning and management. For example, the notion that generations require unique management practices, or the notion that the millennials or Gen Z are uniquely disrupting work norms creates inaccurate expectations and potentially ineffective management practices.
Research indicates four hazards associated with generations as a construct for decision makers:
1. Generations obscure. The concept of generations implies that the categories are precise, when in fact they are not consistently distinguishable. Researchers are inconsistent in identifying where the cutoffs should be. Did Generation X start in 1961 or 1965? Does it include individuals born in the 1980s or not? When did the millennial generation start? Even as the Pew Research Center advocates using generations as an analytic tool, they acknowledge that “generations are often considered by their span, but again there is no agreed upon formula for how long that span should be.”
In addition, social science concepts of generations do not correspond to biological concepts of generations. In popular dialogue and in social science, generations are not genetically derived, but rather are socially constructed. If derived from genetics, they would likely be longer than they are defined by social scientists, differing by sex and over time. Further, defining a twenty-year age span as a generation obscures the maturation of the generation through multiple age groups at any given time, a current problem with understanding millennials who now span both young adulthood and middle age.
2. Generations oversimplify. Using generational groupings misleads by converting numerical continuity into discrete categories. Simplifying to generational labels, rather than understanding age to be a continuous variable, offers simplicity for convenience rather than accuracy. Defense leaders often use a generational label when they are really referring to age effects. When they say that Generation Z seeks purpose at work, do they mean that members of that generation will prioritize purpose over other features, like pay and predictability, for the rest of their working lives? Or do they just mean that young people prioritize purpose right now, as they are just starting their careers and may not yet have long-term financial commitments, like mortgages or children? This distinction is important because it shapes policy and resource decisions regarding compensation, assignments, and occupation choices.
3. Generations overgeneralize. Many generational analyses are simply socially endorsed stereotypes, disregarding the amount of variation within an age group. For example, one analysis by CNA identified characteristics of millennials as a distinct group, but also acknowledged that their technology exposure varied widely within the generation, countering the popular idea that people in this age group can uniformly be considered digital natives. These generalizations may encourage leaders to see members of a particular generation as more homogenous than they actually are, and risk becoming normative rather than merely descriptive. Younger members of the workforce may infer that they should behave according to a reported trend, such as that younger people are more narcissistic or more likely to switch jobs.
4. Generations overlook the impact of cultural shifts across the workforce, not just on young people. Major societal events broadly impact the population, something known as period effects, and singling out their impact on distinct generations neglects how these events affect the entire workforce. For example, young people may expect more flexibility in work hours and location following their experiences with online education and remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. But older workers now similarly expect more opportunities for remote and hybrid work.
Generations provide a shorthand for talking about age, but they may harm more than they help. And they are unnecessary. There are at least three ways leaders can better deal with age differences in the workforce. First, they can simply talk about age, treating age as the continuous variable that it is. This approach allows for the possibility that young people may mature out of certain preferences and tendencies, whereas generational labels imply static characteristics unlikely to change over time.
Second, leaders and talent management practitioners can focus on the shared experiences that result from societal change and how those experiences affect the workforce. There may be differences in how age groups experience these events, but a focus on the events and experiences allows for variation within age groups and acknowledges change over time. Some events, like the widespread availability of generative artificial intelligence, will impact multiple age groups and multiple stages of the human capital life cycle—not just young workers, and not just one human resource function like recruiting or selection.
Third, incorporating behavioral science will help provide data-informed foundations for shaping talent management. As the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report advocates, more rigorous research designs can help human resource and talent managers better distinguish age and cohort effects. These differences are important in providing enterprise leaders with appropriate policy recommendations for the challenges of a dynamic talent marketplace.
The Army has embraced simple typologies in the past, but, in recent years, has shown an ability to adopt more evidence-based talent management practices. For example, the Army used the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator in leader development for many years, in spite of more valid models of personality being available. However, more recently, the Army’s assessment programs have adopted instruments that more accurately capture individual variation in personality traits, rather than types of personality. Adopting more scientifically valid approaches for understanding age diversity will similarly help advance the Army’s goals of modernizing talent management. Although recent recruiting reforms are showing promise, further innovation will depend on an accurate understanding of age and other demographic characteristics, employing evidence-based approaches instead of generational stereotypes.
Allison Abbe is professor of organizational studies at the US Army War College and the Matthew Ridgway chair of leadership studies. Her research focuses on the development of leadership and intercultural skills in national security personnel. She has previously worked as a research psychologist and program manager in defense and intelligence organizations and holds a PhD in social and personality psychology.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Nathan Clinebelle, US Army (adapted by MWI)
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Allison Abbe · August 9, 2024
16. As Three to One: The Moral Significance of Ukraine’s New F-16s
Excerpts:
In short, the arrival of F-16s to Ukraine will be an important development in its ongoing war against Russian aggression. The Ukrainians will be able to use the aircraft to defend civilian and military installations across the country. The jets will be used to shoot down Russian missiles, destroy Russian drones, and potentially even fight off Russian airplanes. Eventually, they will also be incorporated into Ukraine’s military for offensive purposes.
But the symbolism behind their arrival is also significant. Receiving these fighters suggests that the West is truly committed to helping Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Providing the Ukrainians with these advanced and expensive jets suggests that the West trusts that the Ukrainians are ready to operate and utilize this machinery, and that the commitment to Ukraine’s defense and its growing interoperability with NATO remains strong. This has become a significant moment in the NATO-Ukrainian relationship.
As Three to One: The Moral Significance of Ukraine’s New F-16s - Modern War Institute
mwi.westpoint.edu · by Mark Temnycky · August 9, 2024
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After two and a half years of fighting against the Russian incursion, the Ukrainians have finally received their long-awaited F-16s. This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced that the first batch of the US-made jets had made it to Ukraine. He did not specify how many fighters had arrived, but it was reported that Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands have together pledged seventy-nine total to Ukraine.
The inclusion of F-16s in Ukraine’s arsenal will be welcomed and will have an immediate military effect. The aircraft will bolster Ukraine’s defenses, especially in the skies. The fighters can be used to defend Ukraine from Russia’s constant missile strikes and fight off Russian drones and aircraft.
Aside from this defensive boost, using these jets will also expand what Ukraine can achieve offensively. Given the aircraft’s specific suite of capabilities, the Ukrainians will be able to strike Russian military targets without needing to use their ground troops to penetrate Russian military areas on land. The jets can also be used to target Russian troop positions and ammunition depots. While the F-16s will not immediately give Ukraine air superiority in the conflict—something neither side has managed to accomplish—it will strengthen Ukraine’s military position in the air domain and provide for some degree of greater control over the skies.
The full military impact will not be felt immediately, however, for several reasons. First, it will take time to incorporate these jets into Ukraine’s air defense systems. Second, while Ukrainian pilots have undergone rigorous training to learn how to operate the F-16s, for now only a few select groups of pilots know how to operate the aircraft. Third, after finally receiving the long-anticipated aircraft, the Ukrainian military will be cautious with how it utilizes them and eager to protect the small fleet of F-16s from Russian strikes. So although the aircraft’s introduction gives Ukraine an advantage, it will not be enough to shift the entire tide of the war. Nonetheless, from the standpoint of military impact, it is a welcomed boost.
Aside from the military capabilities of these aircraft, however, there is another significant benefit of their arrival in Ukraine—related to symbolism, morale, and other less tangible factors. Their importance should not be underestimated; they are the forces that Napoleon referred to when he said that in war, “the moral is to the physical as three to one.”
The arrival of these jets will provide a morale boost to Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. Ukrainians understand the significance of the aircraft and how it can be used to enhance their country’s defense capabilities. Since the start of the war, the Ukrainians have called on the West to provide them with this state-of-the-art aircraft so that it can be used to protect the country. The fact that the jets have finally arrived suggests that the international community will remain standing with Ukraine as it continues to fight for its independence and survival against Russia. It is a symbol of unity and strength between NATO and Ukraine.
Furthermore, the F-16 is seen as an “iconic fighter” around the globe. The aircraft has been the “front-line combat plane of choice for the NATO alliance . . . for 50 years.” In addition, the jets have become synonymous with strength. Numerous countries around the world have long sought to acquire these aircraft, not just to operate them but to be able to claim them in their inventory.
In addition, incorporating these jets into Ukraine’s air force shows that Ukraine’s military is modernizing and changing. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainian military consisted of old Soviet vehicles and equipment. When the first Russian invasion of Ukraine began in 2014, the Ukrainians started to work closely with Western partners. Ukraine participated in a series of training exercises and demonstrations with NATO members, and its international supporters worked to help it reform its military. This helped it meet Western defense standards.
Ukraine’s military doctrine transformed over time, and Ukrainian soldiers learned how to operate Western weapons and equipment. This led to growing Ukrainian interoperability with the West.
Over the past two and a half years, Ukraine’s military and volunteer battalions have received thousands of Western weapons and vehicles. Ukraine’s ability to halt the Russian offensive and force the Russians out of various parts of the country suggests that the Ukrainians can operate Western machinery. Now, with the acquisition of F-16s, this development has further united Ukraine with NATO as the Ukrainian military continues to modernize and transform its arsenal and defense capabilities. In other words, the acquisition of Western weapons, vehicles, and technology, and Ukraine’s successful ability to operate this equipment with ease, suggest that Ukraine is far more integrated with the West than critics may think.
In short, the arrival of F-16s to Ukraine will be an important development in its ongoing war against Russian aggression. The Ukrainians will be able to use the aircraft to defend civilian and military installations across the country. The jets will be used to shoot down Russian missiles, destroy Russian drones, and potentially even fight off Russian airplanes. Eventually, they will also be incorporated into Ukraine’s military for offensive purposes.
But the symbolism behind their arrival is also significant. Receiving these fighters suggests that the West is truly committed to helping Ukraine in its fight against Russia. Providing the Ukrainians with these advanced and expensive jets suggests that the West trusts that the Ukrainians are ready to operate and utilize this machinery, and that the commitment to Ukraine’s defense and its growing interoperability with NATO remains strong. This has become a significant moment in the NATO-Ukrainian relationship.
Mark Temnycky is an accredited freelance journalist covering Eurasian affairs and a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. He can be found on X @MTemnycky.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: Master Sgt. Andrew J. Moseley, US Air National Guard
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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Mark Temnycky · August 9, 2024
17. With the world on edge, defense stocks soar
The military industrial congressional complex (MICC)
From Ike:
1. “Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime.”
2. “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.”
3. “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
4. “We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.”
https://blog.ucsusa.org/jknox/four-quotes-from-eisenhowers-military-industrial-complex-speech-that-still-resonate-today/
With the world on edge, defense stocks soar
Defense News · by Scott Sacknoff · August 8, 2024
About two and a half years ago, the world changed. Geopolitical tension rose in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, forcing NATO and European nations to emerge from years of complacency to recognize the threat that remained on their doorstep.
This was followed by the attack by Hamas on an Israeli music and arts festival in October 2023 and the subsequent response by Israel in the Gaza Strip — and so far only minor skirmishes in the region between other players.
And with the Chinese government increasing its military budget by an estimated 6% to $296 billion in 2023, spending by Japan and Taiwan each grew 11%.
The result of these actions has hardened the resolve of nations and brought security front and center to political discussions. In 2023, government spending on defense increased to a record $2.443 trillion for the procurement of military equipment and supplies to combat threats; to support allies; and to bolster border security.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute think tank, this is the ninth consecutive year of increases, with last year’s gain of 6.8% the highest level ever recorded.
These resources have funneled through to the global corporations that build, maintain, support and sell the weaponry and supplies. In the U.S. alone, defense spending grew from $721.5 billion in fiscal 2020 (before President Joe Biden took office) to a proposed fiscal 2025 national defense budget of about $926.8 billion; a 28.5% increase.
Defense News’ Top 100 list contains 68 publicly traded companies — or at least their parent organizations — that represent about 73% of the list’s total FY23 defense revenues of $603.9 billion. Exclude China’s presence on the list, and the percentage increases to 89%.
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We reveal who’s up and who’s down for 2024, based on fiscal 2023 defense revenue.
As one would anticipate, the world’s publicly traded defense stocks have seen their price per share rise higher, producing steady gains over the prior two years. Right or wrong, stock prices are a proxy for the health of the defense sector and of investor confidence.
Since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, defense stocks have risen by 48%, as defined by the SPADE Defense Index. Assets invested in the sector’s exchange-traded funds are up 268% and now total more than $11 billion, including Invesco’s exchange-traded fund, which has quadrupled its assets during this time.
At the firms themselves, recent quarterly reports from many defense companies, both large and small, show backlogs at historic highs.
Results for the first quarter of 2024 by RTX ($202 billion), Lockheed Martin ($159 billion) and others saw these firms post truly astonishing numbers.
Even Boeing, despite its recent issues with its commercial aircraft and cost overruns on some military programs, maintains a backlog of $529 billion — more than six times its total revenue in FY23.
Ramping up the production volume of an older system is more profitable than the margins for developing new technologies and systems, so defense firms should see a direct translation from reducing their backlogs to increased bottom-line profits.
“The math is simple,” according to Mike Stone, a reporter at Reuters. “For example, to meet demand for missile defenses, production of Patriot interceptors for the U.S. Army — a projectile fired at an incoming missile with the aim of knocking it down — will rise from 550 to 650 rockets per year. At around $4 million each, that’s a potential $400 million annual sales boost on one weapons system alone.”
While sporadic supply chain disruptions and issues related to hiring additional staff remain, firms are working to increase production capacity for the weapons systems and equipment required to supply Ukraine’s war effort, support Israel and restock national assets.
Through June 30, 2024, the SPADE Defense Index had gained 11.5% on the year, keeping it near historic highs. Such performance is not atypical. Over the past 27 years, the sector produced positive gains in 22 of them and outperformed the U.S. stock market in 18.
From an investment perspective, while a conclusion or resolution to hostilities in the various ongoing military theaters would likely lead to some investor pullback as a short-term reaction, defense firms should likely see strong support in the coming years as backlogs are reduced, and as potential hot spots in Asia, Oceania, Europe and the Middle East remain active.
For example, Hezbollah — the Iran-backed militant and political organization operating out of Lebanon and considered a terrorist group by the United States and the United Kingdom — is one of the most heavily armed nonstate groups in the world, with an estimated capability that is 10 times that of the militant group Hamas, based in the Gaza Strip.
An all-out war between Hezbollah and Israel would be devastating to both sides and to Lebanon as a whole.
And while current actions are carefully calculated to avoid a major escalation, with near daily exchanges of fire along the border, it only takes a single stray rocket causing mass casualties to see things get out of control, fueling yet another leg of market gains.
Yet, despite this growth and the importance of firms operating in the defense sector to maintain national security and stability, it should be noted that the valuation of firms operating in this space remains notably small.
Case in point: The combined FY23 revenues of Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft are 49.5% greater than the cumulative defense revenues of those found on the Top 100 list.
Likewise, 16 firms individually have a market valuation greater than the five highest-ranking U.S. defense prime contractors — RTX, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman — combined. (Those 16 firms, as of press time, are Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Aramco, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Meta, Novo Nordisk, Broadcom, Tesla, Eli Lilly, Visa, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase.)
From an economic standpoint, the defense sector is not large and has plenty of room to grow.
Still, for investors, a portfolio of defense sector stocks has shown to be a solid investment in both good times as well as troubled ones. In the coming quarters and years, as firms work through their contract backlogs and shift to new and ongoing threats, the sector remains poised for continued growth.
Scott Sacknoff manages the SPADE Defense Index, a modified capitalization-weighted index made up of companies operating in the defense, homeland security and government space sectors.
18. Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic -
Ccnolusion:
The all-volunteer force was always intended to be supported by a stand-by draft. That being said, it should be understood — by political leaders, military leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, by the American public — that conscription is and must necessarily be the option of last resort. The political will that would be necessary to move the needle on any issue involving conscription is nearly insurmountable. As such, it is likely that the only circumstance where the reintroduction of conscription would be even plausible is a crisis of the highest order — the very same motivation that is spurring Ukraine, Taiwan, and many others to reexamine their conscription systems.
Preparing for the Possibility of a Draft Without Panic - War on the Rocks
Taren Sylvester and Katherine Kuzminski
warontherocks.com · by Taren Sylvester · August 8, 2024
Conscription — a practice most Americans believe should be relegated to the dustbin of history — has returned as an uncomfortable topic of conversation among U.S. allies and adversaries alike. This has generated concern and even conspiracy theories among American voters. But a candid discussion would be healthier. The fact is, if the United States hopes to deter or defeat a Chinese attack on Taiwan, it should be prepared to effectively implement a draft. To be clear, this is a solution of last resort, but one that may be necessary.
Right now, U.S. mobilization has not been tested in decades. As a result, current ideas about how it would function are woefully out of date. Being prepared to execute a draft requires buy-in from across all branches of government — and society writ large.
At a minimum, the executive branch and Congress should actively pursue a more proactive approach. The National Security Council should take the lead on mobilization exercises. Congress should also get out ahead on expanding Selective Service System registration to all Americans between the ages of 18–25, thereby preventing future legal challenges to the current all-male registration system when time may be of the essence. Policymakers should also consider the skills that would be required in a future conflict and how the nation would sustain its economy while maintaining the human capital required in large-scale combat operations. Finally, the professional all-volunteer force should consider and train for a possibility in which they would have to absorb conscript forces into their ranks.
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Changing Times
The world has watched as Russia and Ukraine wrestle to align operational requirements with social and political considerations. In August 2016, Norway implemented a universal conscription model — including, for the first time, a requirement for women. Sweden — which introduced an all-volunteer model in 2010 — reauthorized conscription in 2017. Lithuania reintroduced conscription in 2015 after removing it in 2008 and Latvia reintroduced conscription in January 2024 after removing it in 2006. France, which ended conscription in 1996, and Germany, which ended conscription in 2011, have recently begun political debates about the potential for future conscription. In a historic and controversial move, the Israeli government passed a law to conscript ultra-Orthodox men for the first time in history. The widespread resurgence of conscription across the globe has started to raise the question among Americans: Could a draft ever happen again in the United States? What would that look like?
A recent proposal to automate Selective Service System registration for men on their 18th birthdays coupled with debate that the current all-male registration should be expanded to include all Americans has generated public rumors that the nation is on a wartime footing. These concerns are unfounded, but Americans’ confusion and anxiety over the use of the draft is understandable. The nation’s last experience with the draft — the Vietnam War — was atypical and continues to generate controversial questions. Was the threat existential to America’s existence, requiring the level of conflict necessary to use a draft? Was the draft implemented equitably across race and social class? For many, the answer to both questions was “no.” Any use of a draft in a future conflict will require addressing the errors of Vietnam.
For several reasons, the United States actively decided to move from a mixed force of conscripts (draftees) and professional service members to the all-volunteer force in 1973. The all-volunteer force provides a smaller but more professionalized force than its predecessor, increasing the standards of those who serve across metrics including mental aptitude, physical strength, training, and unit cohesion.
Yet just because the United States transitioned to volunteers does not mean that the nation would never need to call upon a draft in the future. The United States may still need to mobilize forces in a conflict that poses an existential threat to the nation’s existence. Existing analysis indicates that the opening salvos of a conflict over Taiwan would generate U.S. casualty rates not seen since the two World Wars. In considering the possibility of a draft in support of a future Taiwan scenario, it is worth examining the history of the draft in the United States and the circumstances under which a draft was considered and enacted.
Prior to World War I, conscription was the exception — not the norm — for the U.S. military. For the first 140 years of American history, the peacetime military was a barebones institution, relying on mobilization of state militia forces to expand to meet threats and then quickly demobilized again. There was no large standing peacetime army. There were significant limits to the use of militia forces in the 19th century — namely, federalized militia forces could not be used outside the territorial bounds of the United States. Such constraints emphasize historical debates regarding the proper use of the military beyond its geographical borders and the nation’s role in the world — questions that were highlighted during the Spanish-American War, when the American military was deployed overseas for the first time.
The World Wars differed from anything the United States had previously experienced. War in Europe was not fought on the fringes — it crawled across the entirety of the continent. The introduction of trench warfare, chemical weapons, and a terrible revolution in munitions churned through men at a terrifying pace. Britain and France could not sustain their forces through recruitment alone and both resorted to conscription. For their part, American leaders sought an answer to mobilization that would provide the necessary manpower to prevail on the battlefield while maintaining domestic interests. Enter the 1917 Selective Service Act.
The priority for the architects of the 1917 Selective Service Act was designing a system to produce the required manpower with a selection mechanism that was as equitable as possible. They further prioritized making allowances for local involvement in a federal process and weighing competing priorities from different states, economic sectors, and societal interest groups. The challenge then, as it has been throughout U.S. history, was balancing the conflicting social mores of personal freedom and collective equality that are both foundational to the American experiment. In total, 2.8 million men were drafted in World War I.
When Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, the U.S. Army had fewer than 200,000 soldiers, a fraction of the more than 4 million serving at the end of World War I. As the page turned on another grim chapter in history, the United States once again found itself without a sufficient mobilization capacity to meet the operational demands of protracted conflict with high casualty rates. In the case of World War II, Congress moved to enact a draft before the United States was forced to join the war. This allowed for open debate on the parameters of conscription across American society before the constraints of mobilization were imminently necessary. Besides resulting in a more equitable application of conscription than in World War I, the peacetime draft prepared the nation to respond swiftly and decisively to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Over the course of the conflict, more than 19 million men were drafted.
Americans tend to look at conscription during the world wars through the lens of nostalgia, with the perception that these conflicts were more pure expressions of good versus evil than in recent conflicts. But the reality is that conscription was controversial among contemporaries. In World War I, 15 percent of men refused to register with Selective Service and a further 12 percent of those drafted deserted the military after induction. In World War II, nearly 375,000 men evaded the draft.
During the Cold War, the U.S. desire to deter Soviet aggression prompted political and military leaders to reinstate a draft in 1948. Even at the height of the Korean War, the manpower need was never so great as it was during the World Wars. More men were granted exemptions for education and dependence, especially in the 1960s interwar period. As time passed with minimal resistance to a peacetime draft, it became the new normal. However, the burden of service was no longer shared by all American men, as many in the upper and middle classes could avoid it with relative ease. When the demand for and deployment of conscripts increased as the United States entrenched itself in Vietnam, resistance to the draft grew rapidly.
In the years since the transition to the all-volunteer force, any discussion of reintroducing conscription has generated fear of returning to the Vietnam-era draft. However, current circumstances more closely mirror the political state of the nation in the mid-1910s than the 1960s. Today, the United States is as far from the last use of conscription during the Vietnam War as the drafters of the 1917 Selective Service Act were from the Civil War. While the United States has been involved in a number of conflicts in this time and has taken an ever-growing role in world affairs, domestic concerns are remarkably similar and the challenge of consensus-building in Congress is equally difficult. What is different is the existence of the all-volunteer force — an advantage that the U.S. military did not have preceding both World Wars. This offers a more professionalized force than existed before the World Wars and increases the threshold at which the conscription of citizens would be a politically viable option.
Contemporary Considerations
Set against this history, current debates about potential uses of conscription in peacetime fuel fears that the United States is on a path to a modern draft. At the same time, some commentators have recommended conscription as a solution to the military’s recruiting troubles or as a way to reinvigorate civic duty among an apathetic American populace.
Yet the threshold to execute a draft is high — as it should be. Conscription has never had a political constituency in Congress. It remains a serious, costly, and potentially deadly tool meant to protect Americans from the extreme consequences of an existential threat. Furthermore, a draft cannot happen overnight. Before a draft can be enacted, Congress would have to pass an amendment to the Military Selective Service Act reauthorizing induction, which would allow those registered with the Selective Service System to be conscripted into the military. Age-old debates over deferments, exemptions, service time commitments, and conscientious objector parameters, as well as newer debates like whether women should be included in the draft, will need to be hashed out. Assuming Congress has successfully amended the Military Selective Service Act, it is up to the president to call for a draft to begin. Once the president has authorized a draft, the Selective Service System must expand from four regional offices to 56 state and local offices nationwide and begin activating thousands of local draft boards.
All of these steps would be conducted under the full scrutiny of the American public, the media, and U.S. allies and partners — and will be visible to America’s adversaries. For the very reason that conscription is the nation’s option of last resort and will unfold before the eyes of the world, the mechanisms that oversee and administer the draft should be ready to work if they are needed. This makes recent legislative moves intended to shore up the Selective Service System all the more important.
We recently conducted a year-long study examining the potential challenges the United States may face in executing a draft, given that the systems and processes required to do so have not been stress-tested in over 50 years. And there are plenty of them: the potential for legal objections to the all-male registration system; the current rates of ineligibility for military service; the current strain on Military Entrance Processing Stations to meet steady-state requirements; a lack of data regarding expected exemption, deferment, or conscientious objector requests; a lack of general understanding across society of what may be required of alternative service for conscientious objectors; and a lack of training among the professionalized military on how best to absorb and fight alongside conscripts in the future. Each of these challenges is worth examining and rectifying for the sake of strengthening the nation’s ability to defend itself without advocating for a draft. The nation’s ability to credibly signal its potential to endure and prevail in a protracted conflict can serve as a deterrent to future conflict provocation by would-be adversaries.
As our research revealed, time will be of the essence in any conflict that would require a draft. Many of the challenges listed above can be reckoned with right now — saving valuable time when it will matter most. Congress can prevent drawn out legal battles regarding the constitutionality of an all-male draft by addressing the question of Selective Service System registration for all Americans between the ages of 18–25. Regular whole-of-government exercises testing the nation’s mobilization capacity can expose unforeseen logistical challenges and address them before they are stressed. And the Department of Defense, along with individual services, can study how conscripted forces would be trained, equipped, and absorbed within the context of the all-volunteer force.
Conclusion
The all-volunteer force was always intended to be supported by a stand-by draft. That being said, it should be understood — by political leaders, military leaders, and, perhaps more importantly, by the American public — that conscription is and must necessarily be the option of last resort. The political will that would be necessary to move the needle on any issue involving conscription is nearly insurmountable. As such, it is likely that the only circumstance where the reintroduction of conscription would be even plausible is a crisis of the highest order — the very same motivation that is spurring Ukraine, Taiwan, and many others to reexamine their conscription systems.
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Taren Sylvester is a research assistant in the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Katherine Kuzminski is deputy director of studies and director of the Military, Veterans, and Society Program at the Center for a New American Security.
Image: U.S. National Archives
Commentary
warontherocks.com · by Taren Sylvester · August 8, 2024
19. How to Fix the Secret Service Before It Fails Again
No one is ever rewarded for reducing missions or workloads.
How to Fix the Secret Service Before It Fails Again
The agency suffers from a classic Washington problem—it’s been tasked with doing too much.
By Eliot A. Cohen
The Atlantic · by Eliot A. Cohen · August 8, 2024
After the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last month—in which the bullet missed achieving lethality by less than an inch—Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle was called on the carpet by the House Oversight Committee. On July 22, she took full responsibility for the failure to protect Trump, whose ear was nicked by the bullet. In a spasm of self-contradiction, however, she then declared that she would stay on the job “and be responsible to the agency, to this committee, to the former president and to the American public.”
That taking responsibility and accepting accountability might entail offering her resignation was not Cheatle’s considered view. However, the avalanche not of criticism but of condemnation that she received from the committee led to an abrupt about-face and resignation the day after her testimony.
It is a pity that in America today, senior executives do not believe in the old Navy notion that if the ship runs aground, no matter the reason, the skipper takes the hit; in a case like this, a decent respect for those one serves requires at least a sincere offer to resign. Instead, within government and outside it, those who fail at the top too often have to be forcibly pried from their position of power rather than leave with a dignified acceptance of one of leadership’s heavier burdens.
The denunciation of Cheatle was thoroughly bipartisan, a rare thing in the United States these days. But she was not the only one failing to accept accountability. Were they honest with themselves, the members of Congress would have done so as well, because in some nontrivial measure they have helped set Cheatle, her predecessors, and her successors up for failure.
The story of the Secret Service is, in part, a story of the way that government, particularly Congress, finds organizing itself excruciatingly difficult. Congress adds missions to agencies but rarely subtracts them, thereby putting career civil servants in an impossible situation.
Read: Five questions for the secret service
Abraham Lincoln created the Secret Service in 1865 to help stanch the counterfeiting epidemic that accompanied the Civil War. Sensibly enough, the Secret Service was put into the Treasury Department, where it would remain for nearly 140 years. At the end of the 19th century, and in a more formal way at the beginning of the 20th, it took on the mission of protecting the president, a necessity reinforced by the assassination of President William McKinley.
As is the nature of such things, the mission grew. In 1908, protection of the president-elect. In 1917, the president’s immediate family. In 1951, vice presidents, vice-presidential families, and vice presidents–elect. In 1963, a former first lady and her children. In 1971, visiting heads of state, distinguished foreign visitors, and U.S. officials abroad on special missions. In 1976, presidential and vice-presidential nominees and their spouses within 120 days of the general election. In 2008, protection of former vice presidents, their spouses, and minor children. Meanwhile, in 1970 the Secret Service, through what became its uniformed branch, took over the physical protection of the White House grounds; foreign diplomatic missions in the Washington, D.C., area; and any presidential offices.
But this is not all. The original mission—investigating counterfeiting—did not go away. And indeed, further missions were added: in 1933, investigation of Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation fraud; in 1986, security of the U.S. Treasury Building; in 1990, investigations into crimes against federally insured financial institutions; and in 1994, technical and analytic assistance to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
There were, occasionally, attempts to rationalize this growing mountain of assignments. In 2003, for example, the Secret Service was transferred, sensibly enough, to the Department of Homeland Security, although there have been efforts to move it back. And periodically, a few members of Congress have wondered about the Secret Service’s multiple roles. But they’ve done nothing of note about it. The upshot is that an agency that is small by federal-government standards—a roughly $3 billion budget and 8,000 employees (although it says it needs almost 10,000)—is large in absolute terms, and requires focused management.
Common sense would suggest that an organization this big, and with a mission as crucial as protecting the nation’s leaders and their families, should focus on that mission and nothing else. Directors of the Secret Service should have only one thought in their mind—keeping the growing number of men and women they have been ordered to protect safe. Common sense would say that plenty of other federal law-enforcement agencies could pick up the financial-crimes portfolio, or help locate lost children. But common sense has trouble breaking through the sloth and inertia, not to mention the penchant for performance rather than legislation, that beset Congress.
The Secret Service is an unlovable organization. As residents of the nation’s capital know, its officers are humorless and brusque in the discharge of their duties. I have had the sense in dealing with them that I am one misinterpreted gesture from being spread-eagled on the ground. It is, moreover, disquieting to see the motorcades that shut down traffic, sirens blaring, heavily armored SUVs charging behind waves of motorcycles and police cars. We are a long, long way from the idea that the White House is actually the people’s house, and that a president should be as accessible as, say, Teddy Roosevelt, who famously shook more than 8,000 visitors’ hands on New Year’s Day 1907. The protective cocoon of the Secret Service is one of a number ways in which presidents soon lose the feeling that they are merely a servant of the people—powerful for a time, but an employee of a republic rather than a scion of a monarchy.
Read: A terrible new era of political violence in America
But it is unlovable for a reason. When the Secret Service fails in its main mission, as happened when President John F. Kennedy was shot, and as nearly occurred on July 13, 2024, it can upend the nation’s history. When its agents’ discipline breaks over, say, sexual adventures with local prostitutes, it is international news that discredits more than just the officers. The Secret Service is a bureaucracy that requires a unique combination of analytic skills, tactical competence, advanced technology, and willingness to take a bullet for someone you may dislike intensely. There are few more demanding and stressful jobs in law enforcement.
The men and women of the Secret Service should be held to account for their screwups—but so, too, should those who could make their lives a lot simpler by allowing them to focus on their main mission, and nothing but that mission. Someone else can chase the counterfeiters.
The Atlantic · by Eliot A. Cohen · August 8, 2024
20. Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons
Palmer Luckey’s Defense Startup, Anduril, Raises $1.5 Billion to Produce AI-Powered Weapons
The company plans to build a Tesla-style, software-optimized factory to manufacture autonomous drones and other battlefield tech.
Wired · by Will Knight · August 8, 2024
Palmer Luckey has come a long way from hacking together virtual reality headsets in a garage. Today, the Oculus VR founder’s defense tech startup, Anduril, announced that it has raised $1.5 billion in addition to developing a new manufacturing platform to produce “tens of thousands of autonomous weapons” a year.
The funding round, led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital, could help the seven-year-old Anduril transition from a flashy defense industry upstart to a more serious US defense contractor.
It also reflects a shift in military thinking, as policymakers adapt to the prospect of battlefields ruled not only by tanks and fighter jets, but also by drones and artificial intelligence, and they search for ways to ramp up America’s capacity to produce military hardware to match that of a prospective adversary such as China.
In addition, Anduril is betting that it can parlay a lean and efficient tech industry approach to manufacturing into a new way of producing weapons systems at scale. The company says it has developed an AI-powered manufacturing platform, called Arsenal, to speed up the production of its growing armory of drones and other hardware.
Greg Allen, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says the Pentagon is getting more serious about working with nontraditional defense contractors and investing in small, cheap, autonomous systems. “The stars are aligning in terms of the [Department of Defense] changing its approach, new companies coming with a different approach, and the venture capital community finally willing to put big money at risk to make things change,” he says.
Anduril says that Arsenal will follow the kind of approach used in high-tech manufacturing by companies like Apple and Tesla. This means designing products with manufacturing in mind and using software to monitor and optimize manufacturing operations. The company says it will also rely on a supply chain that is more resilient because it will source components primarily from the US or allied nations.
The company says it will spend several hundred million dollars to build the first factory of this kind, the sleek Arsenal-1, at an undisclosed location. Anduril has already ramped up its manufacturing capabilities in recent years, with a factory in Mississippi for building solid rocket motors and another in Rhode Island for producing drones.
Rendering of Anduril's planned Arsenal-1 factory.Anduril
In a manifesto titled “Rebuilding the Arsenal of Democracy,” Anduril says the moves are designed to counter a critical US military weakness that was exposed when the war in Ukraine quickly depleted US weapons caches. “Our stockpile of critical munitions has taken years to produce and would take just as long to replace,” the report reads. “Years of war games suggest the US military would run out of these weapons in less than one week of a war with China.”
Anduril’s manifesto also references Tesla’s software-heavy approach to car design and its ability to rapidly scale up the production of electric vehicles, despite industry skepticism, as inspiration for its manufacturing tilt. “Leading commercial companies are achieving what many thought impossible because they are, first and foremost, software companies, and it is software that enables them to design, develop, and manufacture their hardware products in entirely new and different ways,” the report reads.
Anduril’s move also appears inspired by a Pentagon initiative called Replicator, launched last August, which is funneling money into companies capable of producing thousands of “attritable,” or expendable, autonomous systems per year. The program has allocated money to AeroVironment, the company that makes Switchblade drones, as well as makers of autonomous surface vessels, details of which are classified.
The war in Ukraine is also prompting a shift in military thinking around the importance of low-cost drones equipped with AI software. In May, Anduril won a contract to develop a new kind of drone for the US Air Force and Navy, called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, which will have sophisticated autonomous and swarming capabilities.
A study on the Collaborative Combat Aircraft program coauthored by CSIS’s Allen notes that the project signals a new approach from the Department of Defense, inspired by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as well as reports suggesting that the Chinese military is preparing to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. “Everything needs to change, and it needs to change fast,” he says.
Wired · by Will Knight · August 8, 2024
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
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