Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"Everything secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."

– Lord Acton

"What is the essence of America? Finding and maintaining that perfect, delicate balance between freedom 'to' and freedom 'from'."

– Marilyn Vos Savant

"I go by the great republican principle, that the people will have the virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom [to the offices of government]."

– James Madison

1. H.R. McMaster: America’s Weakness Is a Provocation

2. Tactical Solutions Will Not Fix a Strategic Defect

3. Uprooting the Enemy: A New Paradigm for Irregular Warfare Analysis

4. China to hold military drills with Russia in September

5. Hezbollah relies on 'sophisticated' tunnel system backed by Iran, North Korea in fight against Israel

6. Japan warns of ‘new era of crisis,’ asks for record defense budget

7. Eyeing more special forces business, GDIT acquires AI, tech firm Iron EagleX

8. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9, 2024

9. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, September 9, 2024

10. Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic

11. Diplomacy Beyond the Elections: How China Is Preparing for a Post-Biden America

12. China says top diplomat Wang Yi to visit Russia this week

13. Time to retire ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’?

14. Ukraine hits MOSCOW in huge drone attack, killing at least one woman

15. How the Space Force Can Better Tell Its Story

16. The Long Shadow of Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Debacle

17. Ukraine Launches 144-Drone Barrage on Russia, Targeting Moscow and Key Regions

18. Don’t Hype the Terror Threat

19. Europe Takes a Trumpian Turn

20. Dissecting China’s purported carrier strategy against Taiwan

21. How our military can deter foreign conflicts and win future wars

22. Hawks want a new Cold War but are cagey about the cost. So we did the math.

23. Sen. Tuberville blocks promotion of Lloyd Austin’s top military aide

24. Watchdog challenges SOCOM’s plan to buy new armed aircraft to watch over special ops troops

1. H.R. McMaster: America’s Weakness Is a Provocation

An excellent essay on multiple levels.

But it is an important essay for both presidential candidates (and perhaps even more importantly, their advisors) to read and internalize.

Our strategic weakness is our fear of escalation. What makes it worse is that we telegraph our fear of escalation (our foreign policy/national security "prime directive" seems to be "no escalation"). This gives our enemies great freedom of action and makes us strategically weak.

H.R. McMaster: America’s Weakness Is a Provocation

thefp.com · by H.R. McMaster · September 9, 2024

On August 21, Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin went to the Democratic National Convention to beg for their son Hersh’s life. A week later, Hamas terrorists shot and killed him in an underground tunnel in Gaza, where he had been held hostage for 11 months. President Joe Biden’s response was a letter of condolence.

That’s as strong an example as any of why rivals, adversaries, and enemies perceive Washington as weak, feckless, and unwilling to respond to grave and increasing threats facing America and our allies. It is likely that the president’s diminished capacity, no longer hidden by his White House staff, combined with the pattern of tepid responses to egregious acts of aggression, will lead to more aggression and greater danger to America’s security.

I do not carry water for any candidate for president. I served as an officer in the United States Army for 34 years and was studiously nonpartisan: I chose to follow General George C. Marshall’s example and never voted while I was on active duty.

In 2017 and 2018, I was former president Donald Trump’s national security adviser. He was a flawed commander in chief—mercurial, inconsistent, and easily distracted. He proved susceptible to manipulation by foreign leaders, influence peddlers, and some members of the administration who viewed me and others as impediments to their agendas because we tried to preserve Trump’s independence of judgment. Donald Trump and I grew apart and, after thirteen months, it was clear to both of us that I was used up.

But in the months before he fired me, I saw how Donald Trump’s experience and personality traits were a double-edged sword. They disposed him toward disruptive changes to previous unwise policies—especially in the realm of foreign policy. It is hard to imagine another president bucking conventional wisdom to pursue what became the Abraham Accords or taking on the bureaucracy to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem or cut off aid to corrupt international organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

Unfortunately, his disruptive nature also rendered him, at times, unable to stick with some of his best decisions. For example, by early 2020 he had reversed the South Asia strategy that he had announced in August 2017, resurrecting the fundamental flaws of the Obama policy of 2009–2016 such as giving the Taliban a timeline for U.S. withdrawal and indulging the delusion that the Taliban had moderated itself. Trump, like Obama, asked Pakistani leaders to help broker peace even as they perpetrated violence and invited the virulently anti-American prime minister, Imran Khan, to sit next to him in the Oval Office. Then, he even invited the Taliban to visit Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11 before canceling the visit at the eleventh hour.

But no matter what they thought of Trump, America’s allies and our enemies did not view the 45th president as weak. He was erratic, but his course reversals created a sense of unpredictability that can be helpful, even unintentionally, in deterring our adversaries.

Unlike Trump, the Biden administration has gone to great lengths to be predictable. But our enemies have perceived this White House as reliably weak.

The perception of weakness comes, in part, from Biden’s bias toward “containment,” “de-escalation” and the wrongheaded assumption that war and violence is based on “miscalculation” rather than aggression.

Early in his administration, the president and senior officials were at pains to define America’s “redlines” in their meetings with the leaders of Russia and China. After a summit with Putin in June 2021, President Biden reported that “the tone of the entire meeting was good, positive” as he laid out “some basic rules of the road that we can all abide.” But the reported “redlines” communicated in that Geneva meeting—such as a Russian attack on major U.S. infrastructure—seem to have been interpreted by Putin as a green light for everything else, including the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Last month, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met outside Beijing to “maintain channels of communication and responsibly manage the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.” The White House’s readout emphasized America’s “commitment to defending its Indo-Pacific allies” and its “concern about the PRC’s destabilizing actions against lawful Philippine maritime operations in the South China Sea.” Three days later Chinese forces surrounded and rammed the flagship of the Philippine Coast Guard in what was the seventh act of Chinese aggression against the U.S. treaty ally in the month of August alone. The Biden administration responded with a sternly worded statement from a State Department spokesman.

Even worse, the theocratic dictatorship in Iran has viewed the Biden administration attempts to resurrect the Obama policy of conciliation (through the release of frozen assets and the failure to enforce sanctions) as a way to fill its coffers, intensify its proxy wars in the Middle East, and make headway toward its twin goals of expelling the United States from the region and annihilating Israel. The calls from Washington for de-escalation of the conflicts Tehran is fomenting sound to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei like license to escalate on his own terms.

Meanwhile, the president’s tragic but undeniable cognitive decline means that America’s enemies are especially emboldened in the coming months. The danger will be greatest now–during the 57 days before the election—and then in the period between the election and the inauguration of the 47th president.

The combination of the White House’s obsession with de-escalation and the president’s mental state means that our enemies and adversaries are emboldened in their common mission: Tear down the existing U.S.-led international order. Indeed, Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Christopher Cavoli warned in April that the four members of an axis of aggressors—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—are “more cohesive and dangerous than any threat the United States has faced in decades.”

We have a sense of how Trump will respond to Iranian aggression. He frequently told me “everywhere I see problems [in the Middle East] there is Iran.” He knows what the return address is for the violence not only against Israel but also in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. He is certain to ramp up sanctions enforcement against Tehran to limit the resources available for Iran’s proxy militias and terrorist organizations.

His potential response to Russia is less clear. Trump was first to provide Ukraine with defensive capabilities in December 2017, but his statements about ending the war in Ukraine in one day and reluctance to sustain military assistance to Ukraine are causes for deep concern, as is his persistent yearning for an entente with Putin.

To counter Chinese economic aggression, he is certain to expand the use of tariffs and tools of economic statecraft such as export controls and outbound investment screening, which would demonstrate a degree of continuity with the Biden administration. He is likely to bolster military support for treaty allies Japan and the Philippines, in part because both allies have dramatically increased defense spending. So has Taiwan, but Trump’s ambiguous rhetoric including complaints about Taiwan stealing the U.S. computer chip manufacturing industry and statements like “Taiwan should pay us for defense,” because “you know, we’re no different than an insurance company” could encourage Chinese aggression.

We also need to ask, of course, what will President Kamala Harris do? How would she handle things?

Harris has given a single interview and has no policy page on her website, but for a window into the policies of a potential Harris administration we can look to those who advise her on foreign affairs and national security. As Jay Solomon has written in these pages, Phil Gordon—one of the architects of the 2015 Iran deal—is one of her key advisers. That, among other rumored potential hires, indicates a likely continuation of the Obama-era Democratic disposition to conciliate dictators in the Middle East such as Ayatollah Khamenei and be tough on U.S. allies such as Israel.

As far as her record as vice president, Harris has said that she was the “last one in the room” with President Biden as they executed their botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, which claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members and 170 Afghans, and handed Bagram Airfield over to the Taliban. It was nothing short of a disaster.

But because Harris has said so little about her policy positions, she has an opportunity to acknowledge the growing danger from the axis of aggressors, recognize that the perception of weakness is provocative, and break with the Biden administration approaches of escalation management and conciliatory approach to adversaries. But it is hard to imagine that Harris will outline an approach to foreign policy substantially different from the Democratic-establishment consensus.

Hard to imagine because, to choose just one example, when Michigan Public Radio asked Tim Walz in an interview last week about Israel’s war against Hamas, he answered:

“Well, I think first and foremost, what we saw on October 7 was a horrific act of violence against the people of Israel. They have certainly, and the vice president said it, I’ve said it, have the right to defend themselves, and the United States will always stand by that. But we can’t allow what’s happened in Gaza to happen. The Palestinian people have every right to life and liberty themselves. We need to continue, I think, to put the leverage on to make sure we move towards a two-state solution. I think we’re at a critical point right now. We need the Netanyahu government to start moving in that direction. But I think those folks who are speaking out loudly in Michigan are speaking out for all the right reasons.”

Where is the condemnation of Hamas? If there is to be any hope for enduring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the destruction of an organization determined to destroy Israel and kill all the Jews should be regarded as a precondition. Why was all of Walz’s criticism reserved for our ally? And the idea that people calling for intifada on the streets of Michigan are “speaking out for all the right reasons” is ludicrous.

It would be good for Vice President Harris to clarify her position on this, as with so much else.

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the period of maximum danger may be the days between November 5, 2024 and January 20, 2025. Our enemies will see a President Biden who lacks the mental sharpness and energy to confront aggression. President Harris or Trump will confront a world in crisis.

Alas, I also suspect that crises will extend to the homefront. It’s not hard to imagine one candidate winning a narrow victory and the loser claiming that the result was fraudulent or skewed by foreign interference.

So what can we do? Support whoever is elected. Urge him or her to strengthen our nation, abandon the obsession with de-escalation, and convince the axis of aggressors that they can no longer pursue their objectives with impunity.

Never have I been more concerned about the fate of my nation—and of the free world.

H. R. McMaster, a retired United States Army lieutenant general, is a former White House national security adviser and the author, most recently, of At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House.

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thefp.com · by H.R. McMaster · September 9, 2024

2. Tactical Solutions Will Not Fix a Strategic Defect

Another very important essay from Matt Armstrong. This is not the first time Matt has criticized calls to rebuild the capability of the US Information Agency and the Active Measures Working Group. As usual he provides the argument and the analysis to show why simply reactivating USIA and the AMWG are tno the solutions to our information influence weakness.

Tactical Solutions Will Not Fix a Strategic Defect

A shallow understanding of the problem means focusing on symptoms not the root cause

https://mountainrunner.substack.com/p/a-flawed-understanding-aimed-at-symptoms?utm

Matt Armstrong

Sep 09, 2024

A colleague recently referred me to the following passage in the recent Commission on the National Defense Strategy report and asked, “What would you do?”:

Implementing the [National Defense Strategy] requires a skilled, global, rapid communication and messaging ability to compete with the mis- and disinformation machines supported by Russia, China, and others—including even the Houthis, who have managed to turn attacks on trade and free navigation into a Middle East cause célèbre. Both State, primarily through the Global Engagement Center, and DoD need to rebuild the kind of ability provided by the U.S. Information Agency and the Active Measures Working Group during the Cold War to communicate and counter U.S. adversaries’ pervasive messaging and propaganda. This requires the ability and authority to provide and respond to content at the speed of the news and social media cycle.

I wouldn’t answer the question, however, because the report presents a flawed understanding of the historical and contemporary context of our international information operations’ organizational structure and practices. Moreover, the authors mistakenly suggest that policy and information are independent, emphasize reactive responses rather than proactive integration, and undervalue the impact of presidents and cabinet secretaries on our current capabilities and potential reforms. Through this glaring omission, the authors absolve the offices most responsible for the current condition—the Oval Office and the President’s direct reports, from the cabinet to the national security staff—and hope a tactical effort will fix a strategic defect.

The report implies that we “got it right” with the US Information Agency (USIA), an organization created to segregate the informational element from policy, a separation that was premised on authorities it was never granted, and, within four years, began calls for major reforms or reintegrating the operation into the State Department.1 The Active Measuring Working Group (AMWG) was created because USIA did not, institutionally, do what the report’s authors think it did. As a history on AMWG notes, the “inclination to challenge Soviet disinformation declined over the 1960s until, by 1975, there was no organized, overt effort to expose Soviet disinformation at all.” And then there is the Global Engagement Center (GEC), created to both compensate for years of absent leadership at the State Department and to make something new rather than fix what is there.

The report’s entire paragraph on information (114 words) is faulty, unhelpful, and useless concerning moving toward a practical and enduring solution. Ignoring the rest of their report, here is my quick and dirty replacement (118 words):

Implementing the NDS requires a comprehensive approach of integrating the informational elements of policy with the making and conduct of policy. Informational efforts and policies must be mutually reinforcing to the maximal extent feasible. This posture begins with the President and requires each cabinet secretary, and their subordinates, to instill and support the necessary operating principles within their organizations. It is not likely more authorities are necessary, but clarification of authorities is required. Abilities and speed will follow with appropriate empowerment, education, and encouragement to act within and across organizations provided appropriate support and protection is provided by leadership. We lack the necessary dynamism because we have more fear of the errant message than of the errant munition.

If the report had something similar to my paragraph, I would quickly answer my colleague’s question. But it didn’t, so let me explain my criticism before answering.

A Story Hiding in Plain Sight

Nearly twenty-three years have passed since Richard Holbrooke asked, “How can a man in a cave outcommunicate the world’s leading communications society?” His complaint highlighted a critical lack of leadership, a persistent issue that worsened after decades of inattention. While it’s clear that poor leadership led to our current situation, many mistakenly believe that simply restructuring will magically resolve the problem. In reality, leadership is the driving force behind an organization’s success, and it is leadership that enables and supports the structure, not the other way around.

Holbrooke condemned the government’s cumbersome systems for supporting foreign policy through “public diplomacy, or public affairs, or psychological warfare, or—if you really want to be blunt—propaganda.” Though written immediately after the September 11th attacks, his critique remains relevant.

Despite our nation’s overwhelming supremacy in modern communications, our government primarily communicates with the Muslim world through pathetically outdated or inappropriate technologies and a bureaucratic structure that is not remotely up to the task. The senior official in Washington working on these issues is the under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, now Charlotte Beers, a successful advertising executive with no prior government or foreign policy experience. The people in the structure she inherited (she has been in office just a few weeks) are the vestiges of the U.S. Information Agency, a Cold War agency that was folded into the State Department in 1998-1999. Its personnel have limited background or experience for the issues they must now address.

Holbrooke correctly identified the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs as the government’s chief international information operations officer. And note that he did not call for resurrecting an agency disbanded only two years earlier. Positioned within the foreign policy machinery, the undersecretary was the conceptual and operational successor to the USIA Director.2 Separating USIA’s broadcast operations, less than 30% of the agency’s staff, into an independent agency was irrelevant.3

The Commission’s neglect of the undersecretary underscores their focus on organizational structures rather than leadership.4 Given the office’s history since 2001, it is not surprising it was overlooked. However, its status should have prompted greater scrutiny from the Commission and other observers.

Holbrooke’s critique that the officeholder lacked government or foreign policy experience has been a recurring issue. The limited view of the office’s potential led to low hiring standards, apathy in filling the position, and marginalization and ineffectiveness of the broader functions. Since its creation in 1999, the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs has been vacant for nearly half its existence.5 Successive administrations consistently failed to fill this key leadership role, reflecting a disregard for its importance in proactively shaping public perceptions and understanding and advancing foreign policy goals and in leading reactionary efforts to counter and mitigate adversarial disinformation and incidental misinformation. The prolonged vacancy of a senior position and a lack of engagement from leadership above and adjacent can and does significantly damage an organization’s reputation, relevance, and effectiveness.6

Holbrooke recognized the undersecretary’s office could have been crucial in international communication efforts, from addressing disinformation, misinformation, and information gaps. The Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP) inherited the largest element of USIA and reported directly to the undersecretary. It was responsible for a wide range of activities, including on-the-ground operations worldwide, printed materials, direct digital initiatives, and supporting broad State Department requirements and interagency requests. However, due to feckless leadership, IIP declined, bypassed, and dismantled.7

Workarounds by the White House and the State Department led to a series of short-lived organizations notionally below the undersecretary to compensate for a variety of shortcomings, including the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism (CSCC), the Global Strategic Engagement Center (GSEC), and the Global Engagement Center.8 Between Holbrooke’s public question and CSCC, there were countless other efforts: Strategic Communication Policy Coordination Committee (PCC, September 2002), co-chaired by the National Security Council and the State Department; the PCC set up an interagency Strategic Communications Fusion Team (December 2002); then there was the White House’s Office of Global Communications (OGC, January 2003); and so on. Some may recall Interagency Policy Committees (IPCs), like the Strategic Communication IPC, or the essentially meaningless National Framework for Strategic Communication (March 2010). Experiments were replaced or whithered away from a severe lack of interest in the informational side of policy from above and allowing bureaucracies to return to their comfort zones.9 The President and the cabinet must be on the same page and maintain pressure to get it right, but they haven’t. Putting people in a room and hoping for the best isn’t leadership or strategy.

Interested readers should look at a report examining the different approaches to the undersecretary and the USIA Director. Uliana Artamonova, a research fellow at Russia’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations, shared her report with me in March 2022. This is an excerpt from “Faceless Leadership of American Public Diplomacy: HR Crisis in the Post-Bipolar Era” (this link points to a scrubbed PDF stored at my old blog, mountainrunner.us):

Comparison demonstrates a considerable change of patterns: since 1999 persons in charge of American public diplomacy have been changing more often and the position itself stayed vacant longer then it did in 20th century. There have been many acting nominees during the past decade whereas in the time of USIA there has been none. In addition, [this] article studies [the] characteristics of directors of USIA and of Under Secretaries of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs. Analysis of education, professional background, personal relationship with the president (or lack of thereof) demonstrated that standards for candidates for the position of Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs are significantly lower than the ones that were applied to candidates for the directorship of the USIA.

When offices matter, they get filled and they get supported. A December 2011 report by the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy that my staff and I, as the executive director of that commission, authored compared the gaps between confirmed undersecretaries for the public diplomacy office, the Under Secretary for Global Affairs (now the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights), and the Under Secretary for Political Affairs. Differences in the turnover, vacancy, and tenure of the three undersecretaries for the dozen years the public diplomacy office existed to that point is revealing.

Data as of December 2012. Source: Staff Report on the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, December 12, 2012.

Turnover happens, but there are telltale signs when something isn’t right. As Holbrooke noted, there can be a mismatch between requirements and the selection criteria and a lack of support from above and from adjacent offices, neither of which will be magically fixed by a new organization. Undoubtedly, qualified people were identified and approached for the job, and just as likely, these candidates stipulated sensible requirements of support, access, engagement, and responsibilities that did not comport with ossified views of “how things are done.”

Secretary of State Dean Acheson captured the dysfunction, as it should be labeled, of the State Department, which John Foster Dulles amplified when he took the office under Eisenhower and successfully reduced an excised information function from the department into USIA. Speaking of the department’s information role, assigned to it in August 1945, and its intelligence role, a natural function of the department before the war and returned to the department after, Acheson had this to say:

The Department muffed both of these opportunities. The latter, research and intelligence, died almost at once as the result of gross stupidity… [in 1947] the State Department had abdicated not only leadership in this field but any serious position. Information and public affairs had a better chance and were well served by several devoted assistant secretaries. Eventually. they succumbed to the fate of so many operating agencies with which the State Department has had a go, including economic warfare, lend-lease, foreign aid, and technical assistance.

In all these cases, either the Department was not imaginative enough to see its opportunitity or administratively competent enough to seize it, or the effort became entangled in red tape and stifled by bureaucratic elphantiasis, or conflict with enemies in Congress absorbed all the Department’s energed. Then, in the stock market phrase, the new function was “spun off” to live a sort of bloodless life of administration without policy, like the French bureaucracy between Bonaparte and de Gaulle.10

It is easier to do nothing. In the case of setting aside hiring this undersecretary, a career Foreign Service Officer (FSO) is nearly always tapped to serve as the acting official. An FSO has never nominated or confirmed to the position, reflecting the diminished view of the career within the department and the requirements of the office. But, as Artamonova noted, FSOs did serve as USIA Directors.

The trajectory of Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is a story of the low regard successive presidents and secretaries of state held for the informational side of policy. It’s also a tale of overlapping efforts, often redundant and increasingly substitutive.

Inconvenient truths

Anyone who continues to think that interest in the informational side policy diminished because the US Information Agency disappeared must confront two inconvenient truths: why USIA existed, why AMWG was created, and why was USIA broken up.11 First, as noted above, USIA existed because the Secretary of State, with the President’s permission, rejected that informational policy—including preemptively and reactively addressing disinformation, misinformation, and gaps of information—was fundamental to US foreign policy, not just national security. In 1945, before the USS Missouri sailed into Tokyo Bay, the Secretary of State and the State Department, with the President’s concurrence, agreed that “Modern international relations lie between peoples, not merely governments” and that “International information activities are integral to the conduct of foreign policy.”12 This idea was ultimately rejected in practice and form, and this marginalization continues today and is found in the Commission on the National Defense Strategy’s framing.

Despite decades of evidence that creating USIA was a mistake, based on the authorities it was never granted, there is no evidence that I am aware of that suggests the reintegration of USIA’s non-broadcast functions into the State Department were viewed as an optimization to recenter information in foreign policy. On the contrary, the perceived cost-savings was a major factor: why continue this Cold-War function? This ignorant and short-sighted view came from the same place that militarized our foreign policy and marginalized information from policy and national security. We want to believe the information function merely reacted to the Cold War, but we realized its importance before we realized there was a cold war. This thinking is wrong, illogical, nonsensical, and a defect readily exploited by adversaries.

“What would you do?”

My answer to what I would do rests first on restating the question as the original framing was invalid. The first step toward a solution is not a new organization but establishing leadership. Such leadership must start in the Oval Office and must it be persistent. When invoking USIA, I bet most people will think of the tenure of Charles Wick, or secondarily the appointment of Edward R. Murrow. Both reflect Presidential support. On the latter, Murrow complained about USIA’s limited integration and short-sightedness of US foreign policy when he said he should be in on the take-offs, not just the crash landings. Another complaint, just as applicable today, is that favored method of hurling electrons thousands of miles is the easy part, directly engaging people on the ground is hard, expensive, and most impactful. On the former, I don’t think analysts realize that Wick was not just close to the President, but Wick had the support and expectation to act, something the undersecretaries, save perhaps one, lacked.

The buck stops and starts with the President. But it must flow downward and, like a river, it must be continuous. This means cabinet secretaries, especially but not only the Secretary of State, understand the necessary integration of information and policy and to lead their organizations accordingly. Think of the integration as the military thinks of combined arms, of bringing together different elements of combat power in a complementary and reinforcing manner. Expanding beyond combat power provides a greater appreciation, whether in war or something short of all-out-war.

It is necessary to remember, in the first place, that this war is not one that is being fought by the military forces alone. There are economic, psychologic, social, political and even literary forces engaged, and it is necessary for us in order to defeat the enemy, to understand fully the strength of each. Nor can the investigation stop with the forces of the enemy: it must extend to each country in the world and to every people. The question of winning the war is far too complicated and far too delicate to be answered by a study of only the powers and resources of the nations in arms.13

We consistently fail to appreciate the informational side while adversaries rationally embrace it. The militarization of foreign policy means we are less adept and capable of responding to non-military threats beyond economic warfare. Call this political warfare or something else; these activities easily bypass the Maginot Line military deterrence we’ve built and rely upon. We can complain, but the “information” method is cheap and deniable and supports multiple, even contradictory, attacks. Victory doesn’t mean rebuilding factories or occupying forces, and it can be more enduring. And we let them. They don’t need to try hard to deny these activities since our meager punishments over decades are clearly ineffective and not dissuasive.

Reports calling for “rebuilding” some capacity purport to come from a deep dive or from deep experience, but they don’t, or at least the final product doesn’t show it. These reports inflict on their readers tropes, assumptions, and inaccurate history aimed at symptoms but not the underlying problems. They rarely question what came before and whether they were effective or not. Invoking USIA and AMWG in the same breath is one example. Another example is ignoring the many reports that appeared seemingly every two years from 1961 through the late 1970s arguing that USIA is inadequate and must be reintegrated with foreign policy.

We should not take the tactical route to “rebuild the kind of ability provided by the U.S. Information Agency and the Active Measures Working Group” and paper over exploited defects we must fix. We need the leadership that enables, encourages, and supports the prioritization and integration of the informational side of policy. We cannot stop being reactive without this change. Our adversaries appreciate and center information knowing we are conceptually and organizationally handicapped by leadership that is uncomfortable in this area. We can pretend it’s new, but that’s false and irrelevant. Until the President understands and directs his subordinates accordingly, we will continue to fail to defend against, dissuade, or effectively utilize the informational elements of policy. As a result, we will continue to be outcommunicated because of our decisions, not theirs.

John Foster Dulles happily broke up the predecessor to USIA, the International Information Administration. Formed in 1952 by Secretary of State Dean Acheson, IIA was a semi-autonomous unit within the State Department to streamline the management, budgeting, integration, and accountability of the government’s overseas information and engagement programs within the department and across the government. IIA’s size was considerable, comprising half of the department’s personnel and over 40% of its budget. IIA chaired an interagency coordinating committee that included the State Department, CIA, the Defense Department, and the Mutual Security Agency (overseeing military and economic aid to Europe), positioning it to help an increasingly complex government with mutually supporting words and deeds. The IIA Administrator reported directly to a Secretary of State and managed a portfolio far broader than USIA’s and had direct lines of authority across the State Department and into the field. IIA also owned the State’s department’s relevant relationships with interagency partners and operated with a broader interpretation of “information” than today’s generally narrow concept of words and pictures. USIA never had the responsibilities and authorities it was intended to have. “Buyer’s remorse” emerged within four years, with reports appearing nearly every two years recommending that if needed changes (which largely aligned with the original but never implemented design) weren’t made, the agency should be reintegrated into the State Department. The confusing term “public diplomacy” was adopted in the 1960s as part of the agency’s fight for survival. The modern interpretation of the Smith-Mundt Act as an anti-domestic propaganda law, rather than its actual function as an anti-disinformation and anti-misinformation enabler, stems directly from Senator Fulbright’s attacks on and attempts to shutter USIA (and Radio Free Europe). Fulbright had hoped USIA would close within a few years of its creation. Dulles, for his part, had, before becoming Secretary of State, made clear in 1945 his support for a cabinet-level Department of Peace (a sister of sorts to the still-named Department of War) similar to what IIA became.

It is inaccurate to say the structure of USIA adhered to contemporaneous recommendations. The Rockefeller Committee on Government Organization recommended creating an organization that looked a lot like IIA, not USIA. The Jackson Committee also called for an organization that looked like an elevated but not substantially revised IIA, not fragmented agency with a fraction of the programs and authorities that became USIA. The then-influential and relevant Advisory Commission on Information, today known as the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, reversed its support for keeping the programs within the State Department if the replacement was a Cabinet-level agency, a position that would compensate for inaction and the lack of consistent leadership from the State Department and the White House.

That the undersecretary’s portfolio was smaller than the USIA Director’s followed a trend since the USIA Director’s portfolio was also smaller than the position and organization USIA replaced. Relatedly, the USIA Director had a direct line to public affairs operations in the field, whereas the undersecretary had a dotted line, at best, to these offices. The undersecretary had—which likely remains true today—little to no say in who the chief public diplomacy officers are at the nation’s embassies and consulates abroad. Around 2010, the undersecretary argued for and earned “consultative hiring” authority to have a say in who was hired as the public affairs officer at about a dozen or so posts abroad. The subsequent undersecretary squandered this limited authority, and the next undersecretary wasn’t even aware of it. This consultative hiring authority followed the rise of the Arab Spring. The undersecretary wanted to replace a key public affairs officer in a pivotal North African country and was blocked because other elements in the department felt “it would look bad for the to-be outgoing PAO.” Even keeping the PAO in place and assigning an appropriately skilled PAO was blocked since that, too, would “look bad” for the current PAO.

Establishing the Broadcasting Board of Governors as an independent agency did not diminish the authority of the undersecretary relative to their predecessor. The since-renamed US Agency for Global Media’s networks perform a crucial role in combating disinformation, correcting misinformation, and providing information to specific foreign audiences that lack access to accurate and truthful news. It is a vast operation, but not a global one by design (intent and statute). One BBG CEO mistakenly claimed the agency was the nation’s “bulwark” (his word) against foreign disinformation. The State Department always had access to the agency and its networks, and its failure to utilize this access is a related example of failed leadership enabled by higher leadership.

I assume (or hope) there was at least some discussion about the undersecretary beyond the position’s existence during the analysis phase and the report’s production.

Since October 1, 1999, and through August 27, 2024, the office has been vacant 43.8% of the time if we count only officeholders confirmed by the Senate to the position. Setting aside the Clinton administration, when the office was established during the Bush administration, it was vacant 37.2% of the time. During the Obama administration, it was vacant 21.8% of the time. It was vacant 93.2% of the time during the Trump administration term. It has been vacant 68.4% of the time during the Biden administration (and it’s filled by an acting official now). The median tenure is 465 days ( about 15 months), and the median gap between incumbents is 258 days (about 8.5 months). If you prefer averages, it’s 507 days (less than 17 months) and 338 days (about 11 months), respectively. I began tracking this vacancy in 2011 as the executive director of the US Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. We issued a report in December 2011. See my January 2012 post on that here: https://mountainrunner.us/2012/01/whither_r-2/

For more than a dozen years, I’ve heard from many (and I agree with this consensus) there was one exception to the pattern: Jim Glassman. His term was short, but not only did he come into the position with experience in international affairs, information flows, plus some government experience, he was able to get things done, which attracted collaborative efforts.

In 2011, the head of IIP told me he wouldn’t speak with the assistant secretary of state for public affairs because of concerns the PA sought to take over IIP. I followed up with the assistant secretary on this, and, besides a laughing, said, “is that why he doesn’t return my calls?” A few years ago, IIP was broken up, with most of it going to the Bureau of Public Affairs, renamed the Bureau of Global Public Affairs. Old public diplomacy hands told me they felt a more appropriate name was the Bureau of Greater Public Affairs to reflect, they argued, the greater emphasis on traditional domestic-focuses PA rather than shifting PA toward a global posture. Along those same lines, when I started working on correcting the erroneous and harmful take on the Smith-Mundt Act, serving public diplomacy officers and former USIA officers, more of the latter than the former, tried to dissuade me from that line of work. One yelled at me that I would destroy US public diplomacy because the department was only interested in speaking to the American public. The myth of the firewall nature of the Smith-Mundt Act can be traced to USIA alumni promulgating it to insulate PD activities from domestic PA activities. Every example here is an example of failed leadership, from presidents to secretaries to undersecretaries.

Providing statutory authority for GEC was driven by an interest in expanding its scope to include Russia and to protect it from potential elimination by a possible and then incoming Trump administration. However, the GEC authorization was entangled with a contentious issue: abolishing the board of the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). The board served as the primary firewall preventing the politicization of the agency’s broadcast operations. Eliminating the board meant the singular head of the agency, the Chief Executive Officer, became a political appointee nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate. A key supporter of this political CEO told me it would be just like the USIA Director, which was, in his view, an apolitical appointment. This take was naive and false. In the House, the GEC bill was sponsored by the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), whereas the BBG bill was sponsored by the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). Both bills were amendments to the pending National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The HASC Chair threatened to block the BBG amendment. In response, the HFAC Chair threatened to block the GEC amendment because such an amendment was the domain of HFAC. The HASC Chair conceded and allowed the BBG amendment into the House version of the NDAA, expecting the amendment would disappear in the Senate version. However, several senior leaders intentionally misled the Senate while actively withholding information from most of the BBG Governors, including me.

See, for example, Chris Paul’s Whither Strategic Communication? (2009).

Acheson, D. (1969). Present at the creation: my years in the State Department (1st ed.). Norton, p127.

The decision to shutter the agency was finalized in 1997.

MacMahon, A. (1945). Memorandum on the Postwar International Information Program of the United States (July 5, 1945). US Government Printing Office. An abbreviated December 1945 edition is more known (the difference was the elimination of chapters looking at 1945-1946 fiscal year-end issues with Congress and budget and organizational issues related to the war continuing into 1946). The Office of War Information (OWI) used this report and this text in its recommendations to Truman, per the President’s request, on the disposition of OWI’s functions after the war. Those recommendations were adopted by Truman and used for his August 31, 1945, executive order that transferred the international information activities of OWI and the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) to the State Department.

I’ll give you the reference, but I’m not sure you’ll believe it. The year is not a typographical error. Military Intelligence Division of the US Army General Staff. (1918). The Functions of the Military Intelligence Division, General Staff. Military Intelligence Division, General Staff.

3. Uprooting the Enemy: A New Paradigm for Irregular Warfare Analysis

Frank Hoffman will appreciate the emphasis on understanding (as do I) but Frank has long been an advocate for making understanding a principle of war. (only half sarcastically as we all know the principles of war are inviolate!)

Frank Hoffman's Principle of Understanding. I am a supporter of Dr. Frank Hoffman’s idea that we need a new principle of war called understanding. Although that seems like a no-brainer – as far back as Sun Tzu we have been told that we must know our enemies and know ourselves to be victorious. We all know we need to understand war and warfare, the conditions that give rise to conflict, and the politics that lead to and end conflict. Yet even though the need for understanding is so obvious that we think we do not need to even mention it, it is surprising how so many of our failures can be traced to our lack of understanding. SOF, through its various assessment capabilities and engagement with indigenous populations can make a key contribution to understanding.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2018/07/eight-points-of-special-warfare.html

This is an excellent paper for academics and the intelligence community and analysts.

The 36 page "occasional paper" can be downloaded here: https://irregularwarfare.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Occasional-Paper-2024-1-September-Publish.pdf

Yesterday at the 10th Annual Future Security Forum (Arizona State Unification and New America Foundation) I listened to the Vice Chairman describe his multi-functional responsibilities overseeing the joint force. He provided an excellent overview of the future of the Joint Force and the challenges but one of the points he made really resonated. that is that we should not neglect "the old." There are a lot of lessons from history that still apply and even as we seek new cutting edge tech and concepts there are some old things that are still useful or are in fact timeless.

One of those old (and timeless) things in Army special operations is the concepts of assessments,; e.g., area studies, area assessments, target audience analysis, civil reconnaissance, and civil information management. While Dr. Krohley has provided an outstanding analytical model there are a few things to keep in mind. One is that information must be collected on the ground, in person, and directly from the operational area. Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs operators must collect information and do this as a matter of routine. Their demonstrated skills must be recognized and valued. Analysis can supplement this information with all the great data they can collect from other open sources (and classified as well) and then conduct their analysis using the excellent concepts Dr. Krohley has described.

All of this information needs to be exploited to inform the development of campaign plans and then for continuous assessment of those campaign plans with a particular emphasis on challenging assumptions.

I would recommend a study of our work in the Philippines which from day one (and actually before day one) was informed by assessments. We used standard SOF doctrine concepts of area study (prior to deployment), area assessment (continuous while deployed), target audience analysis to inform influence operations, and civil reconnaissance and civil information management to support targeted civil military operations.

Lastly, I will again emphasize that the operators collecting this information must know that analysts are exploiting their information and that their information is valued by leadership and is used to inform campaigning.

Uprooting the Enemy: A New Paradigm for Irregular Warfare Analysis - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Nicholas Krohley · September 10, 2024

Editor’s Note: This article and accompanying report are a part of Project SOF in Competition. The report, Integrated Understanding: Re-Thinking the Human Environment of Military Operations, is the first of the Irregular Warfare Initiative’s occasional paper series. If you would like to contribute to this Special Project, please submit proposals and ideas to Adam Darnley-Stuart with the subject line “Project SOF Submission / Proposal.”

Occasional Paper 2024-1 September PublishDownload

Irregular warfare is a vital instrument in America’s national security toolkit. As we compete on the global stage with states like Russia and China while maintaining pressure on terrorist networks and drug cartels, irregular warfare enables the US government to “campaign to assure or coerce states or other groups through indirect, non-attributable, or asymmetric activities.” Put another way, irregular warfare is a means to apply subtle (yet potentially sharp) pressure that advances our national interests via sophisticated and multifaceted campaigns in the “gray zone” between peace and outright war.

This begs a question for the irregular warfare community: what is the foundational analytical view from which these campaigns are designed, implemented, and evaluated? Within the national security establishment, irregular warfare is typically discussed as an activity through which certain ends are achieved by applying a particular set of means. Far less attention is paid to the situational understanding from which such activity should flow. How do we develop a focused understanding of the issues that matter within a given time and place, so that we know where, when, and how to implement irregular approaches?

Uprooting the Enemy: A New Paradigm for Irregular Warfare Analysis – Insider: Short of War

From this vantage, the irregular warfare community has gotten ahead of itself. The desire is to be “operators” who conduct irregular warfare—without having institutionalized a robust, consistent, and scalable approach to generating the necessary understanding to do so effectively. If the US government wants to step up its game on par with Russia’s “New Generation Warfare” and China’s “Unrestricted Warfare,” a solid analytical foundation of threats and opportunities is a critical prerequisite.

Irregular warfare demands a focused and granular understanding not only of our enemies and adversaries, but also of the environment where we confront them. Waging strategically meaningful irregular warfare campaigns thus requires an understanding of operational environments that is far broader than what is provided by enemy-centric intelligence. This, in turn, calls for a high-end exploratory and analytical enterprise that can identify and assess key features of the information and civilian environments, establish their connectivity to the activities and interests of our opponents, and then drive the development of subtle and sophisticated courses of action to uproot those opponents from the human terrain. That, after all, is the fundamental value proposition of irregular warfare.

This should be seen as an opportunity: professionalize the analytical foundation from which the US wages irregular warfare. At present, there is no unifying analytical framework to examine the operational environment of irregular warfare, and no attendant signature product (or products) to anchor the design, implementation, and evaluation of campaigns. Institutionalizing such an exploratory and analytical approach, and standardizing fit-for-purpose analytical outputs, would generate a host of benefits for the practitioners of irregular warfare—and likewise for American national security interests writ large.

The Challenge of Understanding

The challenge of developing the optimal understanding of a given operational environment is by no means unique to the practice of irregular warfare. On the contrary, the US military has struggled throughout the past two decades to structure its view of operational environments for counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency (COIN). The fundamental issue is the inescapable fact that the complexity and dynamism of the real world preclude any attempt at a comprehensive understanding of any operational environment. Fighting within their borders against an intimately familiar enemy, there is no prospect of the Ukrainians achieving “comprehensive” understanding on the battlefield. The same dynamic holds for the Israelis in Gaza, despite the exceptionally narrow geographic remit of that campaign. Practitioners have no choice but to prioritize and structure their view. The challenge, therefore, is to develop the best possible understanding of the dynamics that matter most within a given context.

The special operations community, for its part, took a molecular view of the battlefield during counter-terrorism campaigns within the Global War on Terrorism. Day after day, year after year, special operations forces (SOF) methodically picked apart enemy networks around the globe. In so doing, they became a hi-tech lethal targeting powerhouse—mastering a process through which terrorist networks were disrupted and degraded. However, the distortions and limitations of this molecular view were decisive factors in SOF’s inability to translate tactical excellence into strategic outcomes. Organizations like al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the constellation of Shi’a militias that resisted the United States in Iraq were not molecules in suspension, but rather organic outgrowths of the human terrain. The underlying analytical paradigm that drove SOF’s lethal targeting barrage was incomplete, insofar as it did not see that connectivity. Consequently, sustainable results remained elusive as these networks regenerated and evolved.

The challenge of developing an optimal understanding of the operational environment was also central to the inability of COIN enthusiasts to pivot from theory to action. The signature achievement of the COIN endeavor—the “Surge” to secure greater Baghdad in 2007 and 2008—was premised on a basic misunderstanding of the dynamics of violence in the Iraqi capital. This misunderstanding was not the byproduct of analytical error, but rather structural and methodological faults in the way that the US military as a whole sought to understand Baghdad.

The Surge’s population-centric approaches assumed that the populace held agency vis-à-vis patterns of violence, and that “winning hearts and minds” could shape its trajectory. This a priori belief was a core tenet of COIN theory. On the atomized human terrain of post-Saddam, post-sanctions, and post-sectarian war Baghdad, this was simply not the case—but the US military lacked a systematic approach to explore and understand the connectivity between insurgent networks and the general population. Irrespective of the popularity of aphorisms like “the population is the center of gravity” and “the human terrain is the decisive terrain,” contextual insights were siloed off from enemy-centric intelligence reporting and marginalized within the military’s intelligence architecture. Put another way, the problem was not that analysts misjudged the ways in which grassroots societal dynamics shaped patterns of violence, but rather that those dynamics were not prioritized and integrated within the military’s core view of the battlefield.

Our closest allies also faced these exact same challenges. In 2021, the British Army commissioned an independent review of difficulties encountered in achieving Integrated Action—the doctrinal mandate to harmonize and synergize lethal and non-lethal instruments of power. This study, previously unpublished, offered a sharp critique of the investigative tools prescribed by British doctrine for the exploration of operational environments. It also exposed structural faults in the intelligence architecture into which information was fed, processed, and synthesized to produce understanding. A disjointed, siloed approach to making sense of complex environments created insurmountable obstacles within the intelligence fusion process and prevented British forces from seeing their opponents as an integral feature of the human terrain. This, in turn, precluded Integrated Action.

The Future of Analysis in Irregular Warfare

Looking to the present, the irregular warfare community must learn from the challenges of the past twenty years and refine its view of operational environments. What are the signature products that should drive the planning of irregular warfare campaigns and provide a structured understanding of an adversary as an integral feature of the human terrain? What analytical methods should be used to create these products? What role should Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLMs) play in generating this type of understanding and how should we manage expectations around the siren call of effortless insight “at the push of a button?”

All of this should be a field for urgent, competitive experimentation within the irregular warfare community. Practitioners should be comparing and contrasting the merits of fieldwork-based, human-centric work versus data-centric AI/LLM outputs. We should be field-testing new exploratory and analytical approaches that frame our view of operational environments (while relegating the ASCOPE/PMESII crosswalk to the ash heap of history), and refining the tradecraft required at the point of collection. We should also be prototyping new analytical products, with the active participation of combatant commanders and their planning staffs.

One potential signature deliverable, outlined in the doctrine note linked above and detailed further in a recent book, is the “Root Map” analytical product. This product would detail, for example, “the roots of Chinese activity and influence in the South China Sea,” “the roots of Russian activity and influence in Georgia,” or “the roots of the Islamic State’s activity and influence in Khorasan Province” using a consistent set of analytical criteria, leading to a standardized output for irregular warfare.

Looking back to the “molecular” paradigm that defined SOF’s approach to the Global War on Terrorism, a better metaphor would have been that of a tree, with branches and limbs representing the enemy, as well as a root structure through which the enemy connects into the human terrain of an operational environment. The molecular view was blind to this root structure, and so hacking away at branches and limbs had the effect of pruning enemy networks.

Figure 1: Root Map Illustration

The Root Map product would broaden the investigative scope of enemy-centric intelligence, to systematically identify and evaluate an opponent’s position in an operational environment. This would establish a shared framework for the design, practice, and evaluation of irregular warfare campaigns across the competition continuum. It could be oriented at the strategic level, examining the roots of an adversary within a theater of operations. Alternatively, the same view could be oriented at the hyper-local level, within a single city or a neighborhood therein. This would break down the investigative and analytical silos that have previously separated the military’s view of the enemy from the work of the various capabilities tasked to explore and understand the civilian and information environments, and it would also enable joint and inter-agency collaboration.

The net result would be a consistent foundation from which irregular warfare campaigns could be designed, executed, and evaluated. The irregular warfare community of practice seeks to develop sophisticated, multi-faceted campaigns against our adversaries. As noted by the British, this sort of “integrated action” cannot be achieved without an integrated understanding of enemies and adversaries as inter-connected features of an operational environment. The Root Map product could provide that understanding, and the image above could also stand as an emblem of an irregular warfare enterprise in the business of surgically picking apart its enemies through targeted strikes upon key nodes and vulnerabilities, while simultaneously uprooting them from operational environments.

Dr. Nicholas Krohley is a consultant and researcher. He is the Founder of FrontLine Advisory, and the author of The Death of the Mehdi Army: The Rise, Fall, and Revival of Iraq’s Most Powerful Militia. Nick specializes in the first-hand examination of localized dynamics of conflict, development, and urbanization in the developing world. He received his PhD and MA from King’s College London and his BA from Yale University.

Main Image: Green Berets with 1st Battalion, 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) alongside their Marine counterpart move through a swamp during a Jungle Warfare Exercise. May 23, 2021. (Photo courtesy of 1st Special Forces Group (Airborne) via DVIDS)

The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the Irregular Warfare Initiative, Princeton University’s Empirical Studies of Conflict Project, the Modern War Institute at West Point, or the United States Government.

If you value reading the Irregular Warfare Initiative, please consider supporting our work. And for the best gear, check out the IWI store for mugs, coasters, apparel, and other items.

4. China to hold military drills with Russia in September

The two senior members of the Dark Quad will show off their military capabilities.

China to hold military drills with Russia in September

channelnewsasia.com

Russian President Vladimir Putin and China's Vice President Han Zheng speak during the plenary session of Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, Russia, Sep 5, 2024. (Photo: Kremlin Pool Photo via AP/Vyacheslav Prokofyev, Sputnik)

09 Sep 2024 02:27PM (Updated: 09 Sep 2024 02:36PM)

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BEIJING: China said on Monday (Sep 9) it would hold joint military drills with Russia this month, as the allies deepen ties that have seen NATO dub Beijing an "enabler" of Moscow's war in Ukraine.

Naval and air forces will take part in the North-Joint 2024 exercises in the skies and around the Sea of Japan and Sea of Okhotsk, off Russia's coast, China's defence ministry said.

"This exercise aims to deepen the strategic cooperation level between the Chinese and Russian militaries and enhance their ability to jointly deal with security threats," the ministry said.

The two sides will send naval fleets to "relevant sea areas of the Pacific Ocean" for a joint maritime patrol, and China will also participate in Russia's Ocean-2024 strategic exercise, it added.

The ministry did not give a specific date when the drills will take place.

In July, the two countries held joint drills in the waters and airspace around Zhanjiang, a city in southern China's Guangdong province.

Those drills came the same week that NATO leaders warned China had "become a decisive enabler" of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, prompting Beijing to warn the United States-led military bloc against "provoking confrontation".

Russia and China have ramped up military and economic cooperation in recent years, with both railing against "Western hegemony", particularly what they see as US domination of global affairs.

They declared a "no limits" partnership shortly before Moscow launched its offensive in Ukraine in 2022.

Last month, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia's economic and trade links with China were "yielding results" as he met Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Moscow.

Source: AFP/nc

5.Hezbollah relies on 'sophisticated' tunnel system backed by Iran, North Korea in fight against Israel

It is good to see we are finally recognizing north Korean support.

Excerpts:

Hezbollah is believed to have begun mining its tunnels after the Second Lebanon War in 2006 in close coordination between Iran and North Korea after Tehran reportedly derived "inspiration" from Pyongyang and the tunnels that it developed in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Iran deemed North Korea a "professional authority on the subject of tunneling" due to its experience in digging tunnels for military use when it attempted to drill tunnels across the Korean Demilitarized Zone in an attempt to militarily invade areas just north of Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

While the tunnels and their intended use were never realized by the authoritarian nation, two of the four neutralized tunnels uncovered were reportedly capable of accommodating up to 30,000 troops per hour along with armaments like armored personnel carriers, tanks and field artillery – an operational blueprint Hezbollah has turned to in its fight against Israel.

The report found that Hezbollah under the advisership of North Korea – a relationship that may have begun as far back as the 1980s – built two types of tunnels across southern Lebanon, "offensive tunnels and infrastructure tunnels."

Hezbollah relies on 'sophisticated' tunnel system backed by Iran, North Korea in fight against Israel

foxnews.com · by Caitlin McFall Fox News

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Despite Israel’s nearly one-year-long war with Hamas in Gaza after the Oct. 7 attacks, security experts continue to sound the alarm that Jerusalem’s greatest threat actually lies to the north in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has developed a sophisticated tunnel system.

Hezbollah, an Islamic terrorist organization that has long had the backing of Iran, has over the last two decades developed a network of tunnels that stretch more than 100 miles in cumulative length throughout southern Lebanon.

Though the existence of the tunnels has been known for decades, the significant role they play in arming Hezbollah has once again come to light during the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza, where terrorists have not only relied on tunnels for operational rearmament and maneuvering capabilities but also to house hostages taken by Hamas nearly a year ago.

While it is estimated that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have eradicated roughly 80% of Hamas’ tunnels, Hezbollah’s tunnels, which have largely remained untouched since the war in Gaza began, are believed to be far more sophisticated and "significantly larger," according to a report by the Alma Research and Education Center, a nonprofit organization that researches Israeli security challenges along its northern border.

NETANYAHU HITS BACK OVER GLOBAL PRESSURE TO MAKE CEASE-FIRE CONCESSIONS, SAYS DEMANDS ARE 'IMMORAL', 'INSANE'

A guided tour by the Israeli army on June 3, 2019, shows the interior of a tunnel under the Lebanese-Israeli border. (JACK GUEZ/AFP via Getty Images)

Hezbollah is believed to have begun mining its tunnels after the Second Lebanon War in 2006 in close coordination between Iran and North Korea after Tehran reportedly derived "inspiration" from Pyongyang and the tunnels that it developed in the aftermath of the Korean War.

Iran deemed North Korea a "professional authority on the subject of tunneling" due to its experience in digging tunnels for military use when it attempted to drill tunnels across the Korean Demilitarized Zone in an attempt to militarily invade areas just north of Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

While the tunnels and their intended use were never realized by the authoritarian nation, two of the four neutralized tunnels uncovered were reportedly capable of accommodating up to 30,000 troops per hour along with armaments like armored personnel carriers, tanks and field artillery – an operational blueprint Hezbollah has turned to in its fight against Israel.

The report found that Hezbollah under the advisership of North Korea – a relationship that may have begun as far back as the 1980s – built two types of tunnels across southern Lebanon, "offensive tunnels and infrastructure tunnels."

This image provided on Friday shows the comparison between tunnels dug by North Korea and Hezbollah. (Alma Research and Education Center)

The offensive tunnels were intended for similar operational use as North Korea’s, and at least six tunnels were discovered by IDF forces that led into Israeli territory during Operation Northern Shield, which began in December 2018.

Alma's research found that some of Hezbollah’s tunnels are also capable of transporting ATVs, motorcycles and other "small vehicles," though it did not specify the number of terrorists that they could accommodate.

The tunnels are equipped with "underground command and control rooms, weapons and supply depots, field clinics and specified designated shafts used to fire missiles of all types," the report said, noting that arms like rockets, surface-to-surface missiles, anti-tank missiles and anti-aircraft missiles can be fired from "shafts" in the tunnels. "These shafts are hidden and camouflaged and cannot be detected above ground."

DOJ CHARGES HAMAS LEADERS OVER 'TERRORIST ATROCITIES' IN OCT 7 ISRAEL ATTACK

The tunnels are believed to connect the capital of Beirut, where Hezbollah’s central headquarters is located and its logistical base in the Beqaa Valley near the Syrian border, to southern Lebanon.

This image provided on Friday lays out the areas where Hezbollah has infiltrated in Lebanon. (Alma Research and Education Center)

"We call this inter-regional tunnel network ‘Hezbollah's Land of the Tunnels,’" the Alma report first released in 2021 detailed, noting the tunnel system is more akin to a "metro" of tunnels rather than one long tunnel.

The second series of tunnels Hezbollah mined, known as the infrastructure tunnels, form an underground network in and near southern Lebanese villages that establishes the first and second "lines of defense" against an Israeli invasion – a project of "enormous magnitude," according to the Alma report.

One such tunnel is estimated to be nearly 28 miles long, prompting the question as to how the terrorist organization was able to get away with building such a sophisticated system without opposition from the Lebanese government.

Hezbollah terrorists take part in a training exercise in Aaramta village in southern Lebanon in May 2023. (AP/Hassan Ammar)

"Hezbollah does try to keep the locations, routes, internal structure, etc., of these tunnels a secret. [It] does this by expropriating territories, by preventing civilians from entering into certain areas and by taking advantage of [its] presence and influence in the government," Boaz Shapira, a researcher with Alma, told Fox News Digital.

Shapira said Hezbollah not only has the support of roughly 40%-50% of the Lebanese population, it is "much better funded, organized, trained and armed" than the Lebanese government, army, police or even the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, which has a force of some 10,500 peacekeeping troops in Lebanon and that were put in place after the 2006 war.

Spanish U.N. peacekeepers stand on a hill overlooking the Lebanese border with Israel on Jan. 10, 2024.

Hezbollah’s cooperation with authoritarian nations like Iran and North Korea has long made it a major threat to Israel.

But its growing power within Lebanon has moved it to the top of the list when it comes to Israeli security threats, according to not only Shapira but also former IDF Major Gen. Yaakov Amidror.

"Lebanon’s government is too weak to counter Hezbollah," Amidror told Fox News Digital. "Everything important is decided by Hezbollah, not by the government."

HEZBOLLAH OPERATIVES KILLED IN ISRAELI AIRSTRIKES AS TERROR GROUP FIRES 100 ROCKETS AT JEWISH STATE

Hezbollah is believed to have as many as 50,000 terrorists and, according to Shapira, its sphere of influence has extended to nearly every branch of Lebanon’s security apparatus.

"Taking action against Hezbollah would be perceived as cooperation with Israel and basically as treason in Lebanon, and in the past year also against the Palestinians," he said. "That means that no one in the army has any incentive for challenging Hezbollah."

Hezbollah terror forces train in southern Lebanon close to the Israeli border. (AP/Hassan Ammar/File)

Shapira said demographics inside the once predominately Christian nation have shifted over the last several decades, and it now has a majority Muslim population – though the U.S. State Department analyzes the breakdown in Muslim populations in Lebanon as nearly equally divided between Shiite and Sunni groups.

"This trend is happening in the army as well. That means that almost every Shiite soldier in the army has a brother, cousin, friend that is a Hezbollah terrorist," Shapira said.

Amidror, a distinguished fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security of America after serving as Israel's former national security adviser to the prime minister and a 36-year veteran of the IDF, told Fox News Digital he believes Israel needs to take a proactive approach when it comes to countering Hezbollah.

Hezbollah fighters form a human barrier during the funeral procession for top Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut's southern suburbs on Aug. 1, 2024. (KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images)

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"We should initiate the war against Hezbollah," he said, noting that the timing of its operation is the main variable that needs to be determined.

"It will not be an easy job. It will be a very, very devastating war for us and for Lebanon," the retired major general said. "Remember that at least 50% of their missiles had been hidden within populated areas.

"The casualties will be huge, [a] devastating war for us and for them," Amidror continued. "This is why it is so problematic to fight these organizations, because they are fighting from within their own population, [and their] targets are the Israeli population.

"When you fight from within civilians and your targets are civilians, it's very complicated to fight it," he added.

foxnews.com · by Caitlin McFall Fox News

6. Japan warns of ‘new era of crisis,’ asks for record defense budget

The 572 page defense white paper can be downloaded here: https://www.mod.go.jp/en/publ/w_paper/wp2024/DOJ2024_EN_Full.pdf

Japan warns of ‘new era of crisis,’ asks for record defense budget

Annual defense white paper identifies China, North Korea and Russia as main threats to Japan’s security.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/japan-defense-north-korea-china-russia-09042024025738.html

By RFA Staff

2024.09.04

Japanese troops take position during a joint military drill and demonstration at Camp Narashino in the city of Funabashi, Chiba prefecture on Jan. 7, 2024.

Richard A. Brooks/AFP

Japan’s defense ministry has released its annual white paper for 2024, warning that the Asia-Pacific region is facing “the most severe and complex security environment since the end of World War II.”

Days before, the ministry requested a record budget of 8.5 trillion yen (US$59 billion) for the next year to boost deterrence.

The English version of the 572-page white paper, which sets out Tokyo’s defense plan, was made public on Tuesday.

In the report “Defense of Japan 2024,” Minister of Defense Minoru Kihara wrote that the international community had entered “a new era of crisis” and was facing “the greatest trial” since World War II.

Kihara singled out China, which has been building up military strength while intensifying activities in the East China Sea and the Pacific, as one of the greatest strategic challenges to Japan, alongside North Korea and Russia.

The ministry assessed that China had been “intensifying changes to the status quo by force” in the entire region around Japan, including in the East China and South China Sea.

Eyeing more special forces business, GDIT acquires AI, tech firm Iron EagleX - Breaking Defense

“The combination of Iron EagleX and GDIT represents a new chapter in our company’s stated goal of having a ‘generational impact on national security,’” said Michael Grochol, Iron EagleX’s CEO.

breakingdefense.com · by Carley Welch · September 9, 2024

U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Shane Keahiolalo, 169th Air Defense Squadron, Hawaii Air National Guard, tests the new Battle Management Training NEXT system at the Western Air Defense Sector, Aug. 26, 2021, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Maj. Kimberly D. Burke)

WASHINGTON — General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT) announced today it is acquiring Iron EagleX, Inc., a Silicon Valley company that provides artificial intelligence, cybersecurity capabilities and software solutions specifically designed to support special forces.

GDIT, a unit of General Dynamics, said in a press release today that this acquisition is “a key part of the company’s technology investment strategy launched last year, which includes investments in technologies such as AI, cyber, software development and quantum.”

“As part of this acquisition, hundreds of highly technical and cleared employees from 18 locations will join GDIT’s workforce of 28,00,” GDIT said. A spokesperson for GDIT said the company could not disclose how much it acquired Iron EagleX for.

Iron EagleX, which is led by retired special ops combat veterans, previously won a nearly $30 million SOCOM contract in March to provide the SOF Digital Applications Program Executive Office with support such as data scientists and data integration specialists. The company also won a max-ceiling $430 million contract in 2022 to provide US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) software solution requirements over 10 years.

“The combination of Iron EagleX and GDIT represents a new chapter in our company’s stated goal of having a ‘generational impact on national security,’” said Michael Grochol, Iron EagleX’s CEO in the press release. “Our team has always focused on delivering positive disruptive change in national security, and as part of GDIT, Iron EagleX will gain access to a tremendous amount of new customers and opportunities to expand on that mission and help make our nation a safer place.”

GDIT said this acquisition “further expands” its work with special forces, specifically SOCOM. The company was awarded a $493 million task order to supply tech support to SOCOM in February.

The acquisition also comes after SOCOM and other special operations officials have made clear their interest in cutting edge tech like AI. Previously, the former top SOCOM acquisition official emphasized how engrained AI will be in everything from acquisitions to operations.

“I think artificial intelligence is a tide that lifts all boats,” Jim Smith, then-acquisition executive for SOCOM, said during SOF Week last year.

However, he added that while developing AI and large language models, industry and the military must also be wary of AI, warning that it won’t be a blanket solution to software modernization.

“I think artificial intelligence is going to be part of our material solution in our software solution approach. I think that’s true. But it’s not a wholesale adoption of generative AI that goes forward,” he said. “Here’s what I worry the most about from an acquisition standpoint: You have to understand the algorithms that are behind AI and we have to understand… the pedagogy, where the information came from and why AI allows that solution.”

breakingdefense.com · by Carley Welch · September 9, 2024

8. Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9, 2024

Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment, September 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-september-9-2024

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attended the Russia–Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Joint Ministerial Meeting of Strategic Dialogue in Saudi Arabia on September 9, likely as part of Kremlin efforts to advance the creation of its envisioned “Eurasian security architecture.” Lavrov held talks with GCC Secretary General Jasem Mohamed Al-Budaiwi, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan, and Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammad bin Salman on the sidelines of the Russia-GCC Strategic Dialogue and emphasized Russia’s interest in enhancing cooperation with Gulf states. Lavrov and Saudi officials discussed strengthening trade, cultural relations, and bilateral investments, and Lavrov invited bin Salman to the BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia in October 2024. Lavrov claimed in July 2024 that Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC) are advocating within the GCC for the creation of a Eurasian security architecture, and Lavrov likely used his meetings with Gulf state leaders to promote this agenda. ISW previously assessed that Russia's proposal of a Eurasian security architecture is consistent with Russia's long-term strategic goal of disbanding Western unity, disbanding NATO from within, and destroying the current world order.

Kremlin officials are likely trying to shape international peace mediation efforts in the war in Ukraine while demonstrating Russia's unwillingness to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov met with Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira and Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar on the sidelines of the Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) meeting in Saudi Arabia on September 9. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) claimed that Lavrov discussed the war in Ukraine with Vieira and Jaishankar but did not offer details. Brazil and the People's Republic of China (PRC) have promoted their "Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis" six-point peace plan — whose key principles favor Russia — since May 2024. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi notably recently reaffirmed India's support for peace in Ukraine based on principles of international law such as respect for territorial integrity and the sovereignty of states. Lavrov, however, reiterated boilerplate Kremlin narratives on September 9 demonstrating Russia's unwillingness to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine, claiming that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's Peace Formula — which is indeed based on principles of international law — is an "ultimatum" and that Russia has never seriously considered the plan. Ukrainian officials have openly invited a Russian representative to attend Ukraine's second peace summit later in 2024.

Key Takeaways:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov attended the Russia-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Joint Ministerial Meeting of Strategic Dialogue in Saudi Arabia on September 9, likely as part of Kremlin efforts to advance the creation of its envisioned “Eurasian security architecture.”

Kremlin officials are likely trying to shape international peace mediation efforts in the war in Ukraine while demonstrating Russia's unwillingness to engage in good-faith negotiations with Ukraine.

The Kremlin leveraged Russian regional elections from September 6 to 8 to integrate trusted Russian military veterans of the war in Ukraine into the Russian government, likely as part of an ongoing attempt to appease Russian servicemembers, boost domestic support for the war, and build out a cadre of Kremlin-affiliated local officials.

The Kremlin refrained from replacing Acting Kursk Oblast Governor Alexei Smirnov during the Russian regional elections, likely in support of an ongoing effort to downplay the societal impacts of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk Oblast.

Ukrainian officials continue to warn that Russian forces are increasingly using chemical weapons in Ukraine.

Russian forces recently regained lost positions in Kursk Oblast amid continued Ukrainian offensive operations in the area on September 9.

Russian forces recently advanced along the Kupyansk-Svatove line, near Siversk, near Pokrovsk, and southwest of Donetsk City, and Ukrainian forces recently regained positions near Siversk.

Russian President Vladimir Putin expanded Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov’s powers on September 9 by allowing him to grant eligible parties within the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) access to Russian state secrets (classified information).

9. Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, September 9, 2024

Israel–Hamas War (Iran) Update, September 9, 2024

https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/iran-update-september-9-2024

Iran recently delivered over 200 Fateh-360 short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, according to Ukrainian intelligence. An unspecified Ukrainian military source told British media on September 6 that Russia transported the missiles to an unspecified Caspian Sea port on September 4. Iran has previously transferred weapons from its Amirabad and Anzali ports on the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan, Russia, on the Volga River. Iran and Russia previously signed an agreement in December 2023 for Iran to send Fateh-360 missiles and Ababil close-range ballistic missiles to Russia. European intelligence sources told Reuters in August 2024 that Russian military personnel are training in Iran to operate Fateh-360 missiles. Fateh-360 missiles have a range of up to 120 kilometers and can carry a payload of 150 kilograms. CTP-ISW previously assessed that Russian forces will likely use the Iranian-supplied missiles to target Ukrainian energy, military, and civilian infrastructure in the coming months.

The Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry summoned the Iranian charge d’affaires in Ukraine, Shahriar Amouzegar, on September 9 following recent reports that Iran delivered hundreds of ballistic missiles to Russia. The Ukrainian Foreign Affairs Ministry harshly warned Amouzegar about the “devastating and irreparable consequences” for Ukrainian-Iranian relations if recent reports about Iran sending ballistic missiles to Russia prove true. Ukraine previously “downgraded” its diplomatic ties with Iran in September 2022 after Iran began supplying Russia with drones for its invasion of Ukraine.

Key Takeaways:

Iran-Russia: Iran recently delivered over 200 Fateh-360 short-range ballistic missiles to Russia, according to Ukrainian intelligence. An unspecified Ukrainian military source told British media on September 6 that Russia transported the missiles to an unspecified Caspian Sea port on September 4. Iran has previously transferred weapons to Russia from its Amirabad and Anzali ports on the Caspian Sea to Astrakhan, Russia, on the Volga River.

Jordan: The Jordanian truck driver that killed three Israeli civilian at the Allenby Bridge border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on September 8 likely acted alone. It is notable that the attacker likely operated alone given that the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kataib Hezbollah congratulated the “Islamic Resistance in Jordan” on September 8 for the shooting attack at Allenby Bridge.

Iranian Nuclear Program: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Raphael Grossi discussed ongoing increases in Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles and noted that Iran has not resolved outstanding safeguards issues with the IAEA on September 9 in Vienna, Austria.

Iranian Retaliation: The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) commander said on September 8 that Iran would take “revenge” for Israel’s “evils” in a “different” way. Israel’s “evils” probably refers to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other Axis of Resistance leaders.

Ceasefire Negotiations: The Biden administration is reportedly re-examining its ceasefire-hostage proposal amid Israeli and US pessimism over the feasibility of a ceasefire-hostage deal.

Syria: The IDF conducted an airstrike targeting a major Syrian weapons facility as part of the Israeli campaign to interdict weapons and supplies flowing to Lebanese Hezbollah.

Lebanon: A veteran Israeli war correspondent said that Israeli deliberations over an offensive in southern Lebanon are “mainly in relation to [the] scope” of the operation, though the “political and security echelon” has not decided to conduct an operation.

10. Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic

A long fascinating read.

Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic

The New Yorker · by Ben Taub · September 9, 2024

A Reporter at Large

For years, Russia has been using the Norwegian town of Kirkenes, which borders its nuclear stronghold, as a laboratory, testing intelligence operations there before replicating them across Europe.

September 9, 2024

“The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with NATO, they need to create a buffer” to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes, a regional counterintelligence chief said. That buffer starts in Kirkenes.Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum for The New Yorker

It was polar winter, one long night. The lakes had frozen in the Far North, and the foxes and the grouse had shed their brown fur and feathers in favor of Arctic white. To survive the months of snow and ice, predators resort to camouflage and deception. But so do their prey.

This piece was supported by the Pulitzer Center.

In the small town of Kirkenes—in the northeastern corner of Norway, six miles from the Russian border—the regional counterintelligence chief, Johan Roaldsnes, peered out his office window at the fjord below. There were eight Russian fishing trawlers docked outside, housing at least six hundred Russian sailors.

The phone rang. The caller was a government employee who worked at the local port. It was not uncommon for Russian trawlers to stop in Kirkenes, but some of these were not among the usual ships. One of them, a fish-processing vessel named Arka-33, had docked weeks earlier and hadn’t left.

“Seems a bit much,” the caller said.

“Might be,” Roaldsnes replied. Uncertainty was his profession.

He walked out of his office, into the cold, and past the church from which the town had taken its name: Kirkenes, “church on the promontory.” There were two clocks on the spire. They showed different times, neither of which was correct.

It was late December, 2022, almost a year since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Roaldsnes had not seen the sun in a month; it wouldn’t rise again for another. Locals call these months the mørketid—the dark time. Most of the time, you can’t see what’s around you, even if you know that it’s there.

Arka-33 was larger than many buildings in town. Before docking, its captain had given only the required twenty-four hours’ notice to Norwegian port authorities. The ship belongs to a Russian crab-fishing company whose C.E.O., according to the OpenSanctions database, used to run at least two private security companies. His wife—who was previously listed as C.E.O.—is a member of the Russian parliament and appears on various sanctions lists. As Roaldsnes drove through the dock yard, he noted that Arka-33 was moored in a position that is used by the Norwegian military’s primary electronic-intelligence-collection vessel when it stops in Kirkenes.

“What’s the new threat that we don’t see?” Johan Roaldsnes, the head of counterintelligence for the region, asked.

A fishing boat was no longer just a fishing boat, in the eyes of Norwegian authorities. That summer, the Russian government had declared that commercial vessels could be co-opted by the military for any purpose. The fjords of Kirkenes open up to the Barents Sea, just a few miles from where the Russian Navy’s Northern Fleet has engaged in espionage and nuclear-war preparations since the earliest days of the Cold War. Locals in Kirkenes, a town of thirty-five hundred people, noticed that Russian fishermen were younger than those who had come before the war in Ukraine, and that they sometimes did physical-training exercises on the decks of their ships.

Russian sailors carry handwritten seafarer passports. “You don’t actually know who is on board,” Roaldsnes told me. “If you do a deep dive on a bunch of sailors, you will eventually find somebody linked to the Northern Fleet.”

Recently, crew on a vessel that had been associated with the destruction of subsea communications cables had steered a motorboat into restricted waters near a Norwegian Army garrison. Were they testing their equipment, or the speed of the Norwegian response? A search of two trawlers had revealed radios that could tune into military frequencies which are used by the Northern Fleet. I asked Roaldsnes whether the trawlers were effectively functioning as intelligence vessels. “No, they’re fishing vessels,” he said. “Well . . .” He winced, and rephrased his assessment: “They fish.”

For the past few years, civilian life in northern Norway has been under constant, low-grade attack. Russian hackers have targeted small municipalities and ports with phishing scams, ransomware, and other forms of cyber warfare, and individuals travelling as tourists have been caught photographing sensitive defense and communications infrastructure. Norway’s domestic-intelligence service, the P.S.T., has warned of the threat of sabotage to Norwegian train lines, and to gas facilities that supply energy to much of Europe. A few months ago, someone cut a vital communications cable running to a Norwegian Air Force base. “We’ve seen what we believe to be continuous mapping of our critical infrastructure,” Roaldsnes told me. “I see it as continuous war preparation.”

The aberrant trawlers left as quietly as they had come. Roaldsnes had spent Christmas privately agonizing over the possibility that there was a special-forces unit scattered among the ships. Was this a dry run for a potential attack? Or was the threat mostly imaginary—a “wilderness of mirrors,” as a former C.I.A. counterintelligence chief once described such things?

After a decade in the P.S.T., Roaldsnes considered it professionally important to never fully make up his mind. Counterintelligence, he later told me, “is like playing tennis without seeing your opponent or whether it’s actually a ball being served to you. It might behave as a ball. But, when you get close, it’s an orange.”

Most Western governments do not appear to think of themselves as being at war with Russia. Russia, however, is at war with the West. “That’s for sure—we are saying that openly,” the Russian representative to the United Nations recently declared. Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute. They are acts of so-called hybrid warfare, designed to subdue the enemy without fighting. The strategy appears to be to push the limits of what Russia can get away with—to subvert, to sabotage, to hack, to destabilize, to instill fear—and to paralyze Western governments by hinting at even more aggressive tactics. “They do it because they can do it,” an air-traffic controller told me, of an electronic-warfare attack that imperils civilian aviation. “Then they deny everything, and they threaten you, saying that, if you don’t stop accusing them of what you know they’re doing, bad things will happen to you.”

Ever since Russia annexed Crimea, in 2014, its military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in Kirkenes, treating the area as “a laboratory,” as the regional police chief put it to me. Some attacks were almost imperceptible at first; others disrupted everyday life and caused division among locals. To understand what was happening in her district, she started reading Sun Tzu.

Then, in early 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. The conversations inside Roaldsnes’s office, in Kirkenes, took on an existential tone, because Vladimir Putin has shown himself to be willing to risk it all over relatively small, strategically important areas. The Article 5 policy of collective defense states that an attack on one NATO member is an attack on all. But would the United States engage in thermonuclear war over a sparsely populated swath of Arctic Norway?

Countries throughout Europe now acknowledge that their people and infrastructure are under ceaseless attack. Yet each incident is, by itself, below the threshold that would require a military response or trigger Article 5. In recent months, agents of Russian intelligence are believed to have assassinated a defector in Spain, planted explosives near a pipeline in Germany, carried out arson attacks all over the Continent, and sabotaged subsea cables and rail lines. A Russian operative injured himself in Paris while preparing explosives for a terrorist attack on a hardware store, and U.S. intelligence discovered a Russian plot to assassinate the C.E.O. of one of Europe’s largest arms manufacturers. Poland’s interior minister said, “We are facing a foreign state that is conducting hostile and—in military parlance—kinetic action on Polish territory.” Every European country that borders Russia is preparing for a wider war in the event of a Russian victory in Ukraine. Poland and the Baltics are digging trenches at their borders and fortifying them, often with antitank obstacles known as “dragon’s teeth.” Finland cast aside seventy years of neutrality and nonalignment to join NATO; Sweden cast aside two hundred.

A Norwegian outpost that overlooks the border with Russia.

Russia’s low-grade attacks are accompanied by threats of nuclear annihilation, both by Kremlin officials and by pundits on state television. In May, the Russian military carried out an exercise in which it practiced initiating a tactical nuclear war. In the context of nuclear escalation, Kirkenes is in one of the most strategically sensitive regions on earth. The other side of the border is the Kola Peninsula, which is filled with closed military towns and airfields, nuclear-weapons storage facilities, and nuclear-submarine ports. “Within a radius of, let’s say, two hundred kilometres of this table, there could be a thousand nuclear warheads,” Thomas Nilsen, a journalist in Kirkenes, told me, over a dinner of reindeer and arctic char. Russia is also using the Barents Sea for research and development of new delivery systems for nuclear weapons, including a subsea nuclear torpedo that could flood a coastal city with a radioactive tsunami, and a nuclear-powered cruise missile with global reach.

“The Kola Peninsula is their strategic security against the West,” Roaldsnes told me. “The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with NATO, they need to create a buffer,” to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes. “That means the ability to control their closest neighboring territory”—the region that includes Kirkenes—“and control access to the waters, to prevent anyone from getting close.” The goal is “the ability to deny access to the Barents Sea,” to protect the Northern Fleet.

But the control of territory is not only a matter of weapons systems. It’s also about people. And here, at the point of contact between NATO and Russia’s nuclear stronghold, it seems that the Kremlin is quietly waging a parallel battle for public sentiment in a small fishing town, geographically isolated from the rest of Norway and the West. As Sun Tzu writes, the path to victory is to win first, and then go to war.

In March, 2022, a few weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, I set off for northwestern Norway to attend a NATO military exercise called Cold Response, in which some thirty thousand troops were practicing Arctic warfare. The exercise involved a staged invasion of Norway, with the Nordic nations defending the area as soldiers from the U.S., Britain, France, and other NATO countries attempted an amphibious assault from the sea. Although no one officially acknowledged it, each country was practicing its likely role in the event of a Russian invasion—and sending a message about NATO unity. “What we are trying to do here is to make sure that there will never be a war in Norway,” one of the top commanders told me. “And the deterrence part of the operation is not really effective if we are the only ones who know it.”

The Russians were invited to send observers to the exercise, partly as a gesture of transparency. They declined, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. During the exercise, men with Eastern European accents reportedly tried to buy Norwegian military I.D.s from drunk conscripts at a bar. (During another NATO exercise, a “tourist” who had logged into his hotel’s Wi-Fi appeared to have been sent by the Russian security services to help in the deployment of a cyberattack.) The paucity of accommodations in remote Arctic towns makes them ripe for spontaneous encounters with high-value targets and their devices; once, as I was having a reindeer burger at a crowded hotel bar, the heads of both the Norwegian and the Swedish Armed Forces brushed past my chair.

One morning, a Norwegian Army spokesman led me through a few checkpoints to a tent, where Pål Berglund, the commander of Norway’s Northern Brigade, was changing his socks. For almost two weeks, he had been living in the back of an infantry vehicle, from which he was running the Norwegian defense. Berglund’s brigade is among the northernmost ground forces on earth. As such, his soldiers were also training allies to endure the challenges of Arctic conditions: cables freeze, lubricants harden, guns jam, vehicles get stuck in the snow. “If you do everything wrong and you’re in the jungle, you will still survive a week or so,” Berglund said. “But if you do everything wrong in the Arctic, it’s a matter of hours before you will freeze to death.”

At a gas station, I ran into the commander of the battalion that guards Norway’s border with Russia. He invited me to Kirkenes, and a few weeks later I travelled there for the first time. It was mid-April, and the air was well above freezing—unseasonably warm for two hundred and fifty miles north of the Arctic Circle. Rain pelted the windows on the bus from the airport into town. One of the company commanders, Fredrik Hodnefjell, arranged to take me on a patrol along the Pasvik River, which marks the border with Russia. He’d originally planned for us to travel on the river’s frozen surface, but it was no longer safe. The ice should have held for another couple of weeks. But the Arctic is warming four times faster than anywhere else on earth.

Hodnefjell picked me up in town, and we drove toward the river. A road sign in both Norwegian and Russian showed that we were heading in the direction of Murmansk, Russia, home to the Northern Fleet. About ten minutes into the drive, we climbed out of the car. Before us were two border posts, four metres apart: yellow and black on the Norwegian side; red and green, with a silver Russian coat of arms, on the other. In the distance, we could see the onion dome of a Russian Orthodox church.

The area was completely silent. There were no signs of people, no animal tracks in the snow. “We are being watched now,” Hodnefjell said.

“By the Russians?” I asked.

“By our own.”

Later that afternoon, we climbed onto a snowmobile and set out into the pine forest, to visit a watchtower that overlooks the Russian town of Nikel, named for the metal its residents once mined. Huge smelting towers burst through the tree line. Not long ago, their fumes polluted the air on both sides of the river, but now the mine is closed. We climbed the watchtower, where a small group of conscripts spends every hour of every day monitoring the border. One of them noted the strangeness of knowing so well what Nikel looks like without ever having been there.

Hodnefjell handed me a pair of binoculars and pointed out a collapsing concrete structure on the Russian side. Beneath it lay the site of the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a nine-inch-wide hole dug more than seven and a half miles down, in an attempt to breach the earth’s crust. The effort failed, but it represented one of the final superlatives of the Soviet Union: the deepest hole on earth.

Map by Francesco Muzzi

I returned to the region several times in the next two years, culminating in a three-month stay that encompassed the mørketid. My time in the Arctic coincided with almost constant military activity, by land, air, and sea. The Finns practiced taking off and landing fighter jets on remote roads, and planting explosives along the routes to Russia; the Norwegians trained Ukrainian special forces in unpopulated fjords. NATO held its first exercises with Sweden and Finland as member states, and the Americans docked nuclear-powered attack submarines in a Norwegian Arctic port. (Russian fishing trawlers, meanwhile, loitered in the port and reported “engine trouble,” as if looking for a pretext to get close to the submarines.)

To better understand the military preparations, I traversed roughly seventy kilometres of the border—mostly in snowshoes, occasionally in boots or on skis—and bunked with conscripts in remote outposts whose walls were coated in ice. The border region is a place where everyday life is imbued with geopolitical significance, where the stakes are visible in what little infrastructure exists amid the vast, unyielding wilderness: radar balls, listening stations, relay towers, a microwave-communications network for the military. On a patrol last November, to monitor the border in the mountains overlooking Russia’s Pechenga valley, two conscripts and I experienced total whiteout, and could hardly distinguish ground from sky. It was just freezing whiteness, minus twenty degrees Celsius—a void. Shortly after midday, everything faded to blue and gray, then to black.

The conscript in front of me, Jørgen Benningstad, led the way; the one behind me, Nikolai Thorsen, dragged supplies in a sled, and stopped every thirty minutes to call in our status and coördinates over an encrypted radio.

After nearly three hours, we arrived at an empty military cabin that had no water or electricity, only a small wood-burning stove. Benningstad and Thorsen took turns in a lookout room—perhaps four feet by six—which had a telescope pointed at Russia, about a hundred metres down the hill. There was a small table that held their radios and a night-vision monocular. But the weather made optical surveillance pointless, so Thorsen opened the window and started listening instead. “We can’t see anyone better than we would hear them,” he said. He stood, motionless, head out the window, neck craning, an ear toward the border line. The Arctic silence was so profound that we could hear the noise of a car’s tires several kilometres away, in Russia.

Thorsen and Benningstad swapped positions every fifteen minutes—ears freezing out the window or warming by the stove. After eight shifts, they put out the fire and packed up their survival packs, and we set off into the black. I never saw any Russians from the border line, except as specks in watchtowers. But each patrol amounts to an assertion of sovereignty, a form of signalling: Look at me looking at you.

Many of the world’s most closely guarded secrets concern the capacity of governments to destroy their enemies while denying them the ability to retaliate. Perhaps the most important of these are the precise locations of nuclear submarines. Russian submarines are designed for stealth, and carry as many as sixteen long-range ballistic missiles that can be launched underwater. The most advanced of these missiles weigh around eighty thousand pounds and carry several thermonuclear warheads, each of which can generate an explosion many times larger than that of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. A single “boomer,” as these submarines are called, can turn a nation into a radioactive wasteland. They are the Russian military’s ultimate investment and security blanket, and their protection is its ultimate priority.

Russia spans eleven time zones and has the longest Arctic Ocean coastline in the world. The Northern Fleet is the country’s primary nuclear deterrent, but its submarines are “prisoners of geography,” as the author Tim Marshall has put it. The fleet’s home base, in the Kola Peninsula, is within range of Norwegian signals-intelligence stations, but it can’t be moved farther east, because the Barents Sea is the only part of the Russian Arctic that has ice-free ports year-round. With each trip to the Atlantic, the submarines must traverse the shallow water of the Barents Sea, making them vulnerable to tracking by NATO forces.

Frode Berg, a former border inspector who was imprisoned in Russia.

Last June, I joined a U.S. Navy crew for a mission aboard a P-8 Poseidon, one of the world’s most advanced submarine-hunting aircraft. We took off from Iceland and flew northeast, toward the Kola Peninsula. A little more than two hours into the flight, the lead pilot, Sandeep Arakali—a twenty-eight-year-old aerospace engineer with two degrees from Stanford—peered out his cockpit window and spotted a U.S. Air Force stratotanker to our right. It was time for an air-to-air refuelling, to maximize the time spent on the mission. Both planes, flying at more than five hundred miles an hour, had arrived at these exact coördinates, over international waters, at the appointed minute.

Arakali approached the stratotanker from behind and from slightly below. The tanker filled the P-8’s cockpit windows—four huge jet engines, spanning my peripheral vision. Arakali leaned over the controls and craned his neck upward. His hands shook wildly, compensating for forces that I could not see; in relation to the stratotanker, the P-8 seemed perfectly still. A young woman, lying prone in the stratotanker’s tail, stared back at him, her face framed by a small triangular window, as she guided a fuel line into the top of the P-8. There was a rush of liquid above us—two tons per minute. Then the line detached, and Arakali descended over the Barents Sea.

To hunt submarines, P-8 crews generally fly at low altitude—sometimes below five hundred feet. The plane resembles a Boeing 737, but behind the cockpit there are only two large windows, for photographing warships, auxiliary vessels, and other objects of interest. The rest of the plane is a closed tube, filled with surveillance equipment and computer banks. Sonar buoys are dropped into the water below, creating a three-dimensional sound map of the underwater area—including any submarines passing through it—which is then shared with NATO ships and submarines, to continuously track the Russians after the P-8 returns to base.

That night, though, the intelligence-collection targets were not submarines but Russian ships: a Northern Fleet destroyer; a Russian-intelligence patrol vessel; a Soviet-era “hydrographic research” ship, operated by the Russian Navy. They hid under rain clouds and storm cover as best they could, making it difficult for the P-8 to get close. Arakali and his co-pilots flew a thousand feet above the ocean’s surface. The electronic- and acoustic-warfare operators kept their eyes glued to their screens. “With each pass, we aim to maximize the surface area for the sensors and other collection equipment,” Arakali told me.

A Norwegian frigate and a British destroyer were also patrolling these waters. When the P-8’s reconnaissance mission was complete, the team did a flyby, as a show of support for its NATO allies. We put on life jackets, standard practice when the plane descends below a thousand feet. The youngest pilot on board, a twenty-six-year-old lieutenant named Rusty Joyce, manned the controls. Almost all of the crew had mustaches, but Joyce’s was so wispy that you could see it only up close. He buzzed the warships at three hundred feet, and banked hard for another pass. I sat by the window, watching ocean swells froth past the tip of the wing.

A Russian operator radioed the flight crew on the public emergency-radio frequency. “Zemlya, Zemlya, Zemlya—Delta Echo Ivory Eagle,” the operator said, using call signs and protocols that had been established during the Cold War. The P-8 crew radioed back, acknowledging their presence off Kola. Sometimes Russian fighter jets escort P-8s farther from their shores.

Later, an air-traffic controller at the Kirkenes airport told me that he’d heard the chatter between the Russians and the P-8, just off the coast. “For us, this is normal,” he said. He had grown up in Kirkenes in the nineteen-sixties. Back then, Russian nuclear submarines occasionally sneaked into the Varanger Fjord, just outside of town. The anomalous period was that of post-Soviet peace, he said. Then, in 2017, a Russian electronic-warfare unit set up a G.P.S. jammer in the mountains facing Kirkenes, causing at least one plane to nearly crash. The jamming was sporadic at first; now it takes place almost every day. The air-traffic controller sighed. “We’re back to the Cold War,” he said. “And I think it’s going to be like this for the rest of my life.”

Johan Roaldsnes occasionally hosts gatherings for current and former intelligence officers at an abandoned police station that faces Russia, a short drive from Kirkenes, on the banks of the Pasvik River. They drink vodka, go in a sauna, jump in the river. Retired spies often struggle with a sense of purposelessness, Roaldsnes said—cut off from the flows of intelligence and the sources they pursued for their entire careers. But they are a fount of knowledge. Until Russia annexed Crimea, the Norwegian security services did not publicly refer to the F.S.B., Russia’s largest intelligence agency, as an adversary. Then, Roaldsnes said, “you had to get in touch with your counterintelligence people from the Cold War, dust them off, gather their insights, and get back to work.”

The P.S.T. estimates that some three hundred people work at the F.S.B. directorate in Murmansk, on the other side of the border; many of them run operations in Kirkenes and the surrounding countryside, designed to probe Norwegian defenses and critical infrastructure. “They do intelligence by trawling,” Roaldsnes told me. “Quantity is their form of quality.”

Roaldsnes, the eldest of three children, was born in 1984, and grew up on a small island off the western coast of Norway. His father was a minister and his mother worked for the municipality. Roaldsnes trained as a mechanic in high school, and went on to study physics at the University of Bergen.

“When I arrived at university, I didn’t know a single soul,” he recalled. “I started to train in Brazilian jujitsu.” A fellow jujitsu fighter, an employee of the local psychiatric hospital, was recruiting young men who could restrain unruly patients. Roaldsnes is six feet three, with dark hair and an athletic build. He signed up to work at the hospital, and before long he “was involved in isolating a patient, together with two police officers,” he said. “I had never had a concept of policing—we didn’t have any police on the island where I grew up. And I was figuring out what to do with my life, so I asked them, ‘How is policing?’ And they said, ‘It’s O.K.’ ” The next morning, he applied to a police academy. “I go a lot by instinct,” he told me. “I don’t have a master plan.”

After three years at the police academy, Roaldsnes attended a career day, where he met a recruiting officer from the police in Finnmark, Norway’s second-largest and least populated province, in the Arctic northeast. Finnmark is more than twice the size of New Jersey, but it has only about seventy-five thousand residents. There are two major offshore oil fields and a handful of small towns, including Kirkenes. One of the largest employers in the province is the Norwegian military.

Roaldsnes arrived at the police station in Finnmark’s administrative center, Vadsø, in the fall of 2010. The town lies just across the Varanger Fjord from Kirkenes. It takes eight minutes to travel between them on a propeller plane, but about two and a half hours by car, tracing the perimeter of the fjord.

To Roaldsnes, the most interesting site in Vadsø was the refugee center, which had more than two hundred rooms and whose occupants accounted for roughly seventeen per cent of the town’s population. Many of them were from Afghanistan or East Africa; there were also a few Chechens. “There was a pretty high crime rate and a lot of fighting,” Roaldsnes said. “So I asked the local police chief if I could be in charge of the refugee facility, from the police side.”

Most of the issues stemmed from clashes among various ethnic groups—“challenges in different languages, dumbed down to violence,” as Roaldsnes put it. He set out to build source networks within the communities, and defused conflicts before crimes took place by enlisting people to tip him off to what was happening. The worst offenders were relocated south, and the rate of violence dropped.

Then, in 2014, a young Chechen who had been staying at the refugee center left to fight with ISIS in the Syrian war. Three other Chechens from Vadsø soon followed. It was then that Roaldsnes was recruited to work for the P.S.T. “It was all centered on Syria,” he said. “Trying to figure out what groups they were in, and whether or not they were in contact with people back home.”

The next year, ISIS was sending operatives into Europe, scattered among hundreds of thousands of refugees and migrants who were coming from Africa and the Middle East. Suddenly, refugees were arriving at Storskog, the only official Norwegian-Russian border-crossing point, six miles from Kirkenes. “It started in May, with a few drips,” Roaldsnes told me. “And then it just rocketed.” Roaldsnes and others in the P.S.T. quickly sensed that “something was off.” The notion that the Arctic migrant route had developed organically didn’t fit with the realities of security in the Kola Peninsula. No one can reach Storskog from anywhere in Russia without a visa or written authorization from the F.S.B., which runs the border.

Norwegian Army conscripts patrolling the border.

It is illegal to cross the border on foot, but migrants seemed to have been made aware of a loophole: they traversed the final few hundred metres in wheelchairs and on cheap children’s bicycles. The P.S.T. began to believe that the Russians were deliberately sending the migrants, to incite discord in the Norwegian population and to test the limits of the country’s humanitarianism. “It was kind of an uncomfortable feeling, at the beginning, to even think that the Russians were doing this on purpose—weaponizing refugees, the most vulnerable segment of society,” Roaldsnes said. The demographics of the arrivals raised questions about F.S.B. involvement. At first, there were mostly Syrians. But then, he said, “we just saw higher and higher numbers of refugees from lots of strange states coming in”—forty-seven countries in all. Stranger still, many of the arrivals spoke Russian; they had been living in Russia for years, and had local residency permits. One was in his final year of medical school.

It soon became clear that a number of the arrivals had been given intelligence tasks. Some asked “unusual questions,” Roaldsnes said; others were apparently instructed to take selfies with Norwegian police or security officials in the background.

One of them, a former government official from a country in Asia, had fled criminal charges at home. In Murmansk, he had been detained and interrogated by the F.S.B. They told him that “if he didn’t comply, or support them with a task, they would let his home country know where he was,” Roaldsnes said. The Russians told the man that, after crossing the border, he should “claim to have secrets vital to Norway, show off his government credentials from his home country, and try to get in contact with Norwegian intelligence,” Roaldsnes continued. “The objective might have been to find out how somebody ends up in a P.S.T. or military-intelligence recruitment trajectory from the migrant stream. Is there a specific house? How do they do it? How do they interview you? Do they check your cell phone?” The man was instructed to send reports back to his F.S.B. handler through unsent drafts of messages in a social-media account.

The man gave himself up at the border and told the Norwegians everything. “Based on the detailed explanation, we assessed that he was likely telling the truth,” Roaldsnes told me.

“So he confessed immediately?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But that might be part of the plot.” The man was eventually deported to his home country.

By November, 2015, more than five thousand asylum seekers had crossed at Storskog; a hundred and ninety-six of them came in a single day. “It was minus fifteen degrees one day,” Roaldsnes recalled. Some asylum seekers were wearing so little clothing that if they weren’t let into Norway they would likely die. Eventually, the Norwegian government declared Russia a safe country for asylum seekers, and started turning people back; at last, the bicycles stopped coming.

Harald Sunde, a member of Kirkenes’s municipal council. “I did not want to be a useful idiot,” he said.

Roaldsnes married another police officer, Synne, and in 2018 they moved to Kirkenes. She became the head of operations for the Finnmark police; he spent a few years running the intelligence-analysis section and then, about two years ago, became a regional head of the P.S.T. “It’s like playing chess every day at work, all while we have only some vague concept of the rules, and of what pieces are in play,” he said. “The important thing about intelligence work is to constantly try to evolve—what’s the new threat that we don’t see?”

Recently, the Russian security services have shifted their tactics from professional espionage to sabotage and destruction, often undertaken by disposable agents—random criminals who are recruited over Telegram and paid in cryptocurrency or cash. “The Russians no longer have any downsides to an operation being exposed,” Roaldsnes said. He sighed. “They ruined a great spy game with this stupid war.”

There was no dawn to mark the first day of 2023—no sunrise, not for another few weeks. In the Russian town of Nikel, thirty miles from Kirkenes, a young mercenary named Andrey Medvedev scaled two fences that had been constructed by the Russian security services not so much to keep Norwegians out as to keep Russians in. He wore white camouflage, and crept down to the banks of the Pasvik River. It looked to be frozen solid, but the only way to test it was to go across.

The ice held, mostly, and Medvedev dragged himself up the opposite bank, his feet and ankles sodden and numb. He pulled a bottle of vodka out of his rucksack and collapsed in exhaustion on Norwegian ground.

The Globus, in Vardø, systems can track the trajectory of Russia’s nuclear missiles.

When Roaldsnes awoke, a few hours later, he learned that there was a strange arrival in police custody. Medvedev was the first commander of the Wagner Group—a Russian paramilitary organization—to present as a defector to the West. Medvedev told the police that he had led a Wagner unit on the front lines in Ukraine, and had witnessed battlefield atrocities committed by his comrades. One of his subordinates—a convicted murderer, who had joined the Wagner Group in return for a pardon—was executed with a sledgehammer, on camera, after the group’s leadership judged him a traitor. “Live like a dog, die like a dog,” Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, had said of the man. Now Medvedev said that he would testify against Prigozhin.

Yet Roaldsnes wondered whether Medvedev posed a counterintelligence risk. How had he managed to slip through the Kola Peninsula, one of the most highly controlled places on earth? Was he really a defector? Or was he a double agent? A fraud?

Medvedev told the police that, as he dashed across the river, he’d heard Russian border guards firing at him and the barking of a military dog sent to chase him down. But the Norwegians found no paw prints at the border, and they had detected no shots.

Kirkenes was no place for a possible defector; the Russians had too great a presence in town. The police quietly relocated Medvedev to Oslo, some nine hundred miles southwest. In the next few months, Medvedev acquired a reputation for erratic behavior and drunken fights. He also sought publicity, and gave inconsistent and unreliable accounts of his experiences in Ukraine. He even apparently tried to cross back over the border, into Russia. A theory developed among P.S.T. officers that the F.S.B.—believing that Medvedev would be a headache, and a drain on resources, for Norway—had not impeded his escape. (Medvedev could not be reached for comment.) Within the P.S.T., he became known as “the agent of chaos.” “At some point, you understand that you’re maybe chasing the loudest balls, and that makes you less able to see the sneaky ones,” Roaldsnes told me. “Two years ago, we got a lot of tips about people photographing a covert safe house,” he said. “We found out that a rare Pokémon was there,” in the augmented-reality game Pokémon Go.

In 2022, the P.S.T. arrested a Russian military-intelligence officer named Mikhail Mikushin, who was working in a research program dedicated to hybrid threats at the Arctic University of Norway, in Tromsø. He was operating undercover as José Giammaria, a Brazilian academic, and had spent several years in Canada, developing his credentials; he had even written about the threat that Russia poses to Arctic security in an article for the Canadian Naval Review. Mikushin’s arrest was unusual. Espionage is rarely prosecuted in Norway. Often, it is better to let rival services carry on using compromised sources and methods. Spies and their handlers communicate through all kinds of signals and codes—a vase in a window, a blip on the radio, a misplaced brick in a wall. Detection is difficult, but the goal in most P.S.T. operations, Roaldsnes said, is to “transform each mystery into a well-kept secret”—and then “close the doors in front of the adversary, without them being aware that we were even there.”

One of the old K.G.B. tactics that has been revived in recent years is the use of “travelling agents,” known as marshrutniki. These people are not really spies, just civilians who are recruited to complete a specific intelligence task, sometimes through extortion or the promise of cash, sometimes through an appeal to their patriotism. “Satellite photos don’t give you everything,” Roaldsnes told me. “You have to have eyes on the target.” Many marshrutniki are dual citizens, or students or businesspeople with legitimate reasons to travel. They don’t need to understand the significance of the assignment; they just have to complete it.

One morning last fall, I boarded a ferry from Kirkenes to Tromsø, a journey of about thirty-six hours along the northernmost coastline in continental Europe. The Varanger Fjord was placid leading out to the Barents Sea. A couple of hours later, I went out on the top deck—just before the small town of Vardø came into view. Only one other passenger seemed to know what would soon appear on the horizon. She was in late middle age, with brown hair, and had positioned herself in such a way that no one inside the boat could see her. I noticed that she was filming the approach to Vardø, her phone propped against the railing but hidden by her torso, which leaned forward in a faux-casual pose. I drew closer. She pulled back the phone. I saw its screen for a second: the language was Russian; the time zone read Murmansk.

Vardø is a fishing village, but its skyline is dominated by successive generations of gigantic radar systems, known as Globus I, II, and III. Officially, the Globus systems monitor “space junk.” But they have another use: they can track and calculate the trajectories of ballistic nuclear missiles. The Globus complex, though it was built by American contractors, is operated by Norway’s military-intelligence service. In the late nineties, a storm blew the cover off one of the radar balls, revealing a system that was aimed straight at the Kola Peninsula.

Russia has signalled its displeasure with the Globus systems by practicing to blow them up. In recent years, bombers have flown toward the radars in attack formations, peeling off just before crossing into Norwegian airspace. Hackers have infiltrated the municipal council’s internal e-mail system, and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church have applied to build a chapel in Vardø, despite no local demand for services.

Now, as the Globus balls loomed ahead of us, passengers started streaming onto the deck. The woman abandoned her surreptitious approach and held up her cell phone, taking a video for at least ten minutes—the whole route to the Globus complex, and the path into the quiet harbor behind it.

After we left Vardø, the likely marshrutnik sat alone, with no luggage. Late that night, we reached a small village called Båtsfjord—the only place besides Kirkenes and Tromsø where Russian fishing boats are still allowed to dock. She tried to get off the ferry, but the staff wouldn’t let her, because there were no scheduled departures.

Another day passed. She seemed to have not prepared for this—she had no change of clothes. When we arrived in Tromsø, close to midnight, she disembarked, wrapped in a blanket stolen from the ship.

T he war in Ukraine is more than a thousand miles south of Kirkenes, and yet it imbues every aspect of the town’s identity, economy, and future. On the day of the invasion, the mayor cried. Russians and their families make up between five and ten per cent of the population, and until recently the town depended on cross-border trade. Roaldsnes could see the war in struggling local businesses; in the layoffs at the ship-repair factory, one of the largest employers in town, after E.U. sanctions prevented work on Russian trawlers; in the despondency and bewilderment of schoolteachers, sports coaches, and politicians, who had spent the past three decades building connections with their Russian counterparts. Many of them had believed that there was something unique and almost borderless about Arctic regional coöperation. Geopolitics was a matter for the capitals, they said; up here, the motto was “High North, low tensions.” Life in the Arctic is difficult enough without worrying about the nuclear warheads just over the horizon. But sentiment had started to change. And when the narrative shifts in Kirkenes, so does the behavior of nations.

Kirkenes was originally a company town, built in the early nineteen-hundreds to exploit an iron-ore deposit. The local mining company employed fifteen hundred people at its peak, but it languished in the eighties, and, with few other economic prospects, the population atrophied. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, opening up the possibility of establishing ties and trade with the nearest city: Murmansk.

Georgii Chentemirov, a journalist exiled from Russia who settled in Kirkenes.

“In the months after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Murmansk was total chaos,” Thomas Nilsen, the journalist, told me. Soldiers went months without wages; some desperate civilians fainted from hunger or froze. Russia’s Northern Fleet was so destitute that it rented out one of its nuclear submarines to transport vegetables to a port in Siberia, potatoes loaded into the missile compartment. “Everything collapsed—everything,” Nilsen, who was freelancing in Murmansk at the time, said. “The currency, the markets, the food-supply chain. Even I, with my foreign currency, had to spend much of my day trying to find food.”

Throughout the nineties, Nilsen researched the environmental ravages of industrial mining and poorly managed nuclear waste in the Kola Peninsula. The region accounted for almost twenty per cent of all nuclear reactors on earth; now it was scattered with decaying tankers and barges loaded with spent nuclear fuel. “There were a hundred and thirty nuclear-powered submarines that had been taken out of operation, and they posed the threat of what you could absolutely call a Chernobyl in slow motion,” he told me. One of the Northern Fleet’s submarines had sunk, in 1989, and hadn’t been salvaged; its reactor lay at the bottom of the Norwegian Sea, along with two torpedoes with nuclear warheads, corroding in salt water. Nuclear waste, marked “for scrapping,” was left outside of shipyards, exposed to weather.

But Kirkenes was suddenly alive. “I came back here for summer vacation in ’92, when the border opened,” a local air-ambulance pilot, Tor Ivar Dahl Pettersen, told me. “It was just the Wild West, and the police had no control. Some Russians set up a bordello down in the industrial area, and everybody knew about it. The ships came in from Russia, and they were selling anything to anyone who wanted it. Cigarettes and vodka, mostly, but you could buy anything but a tank.” He laughed. The Russians “would never want to go back to that again, because it must have been the most depressing moment in their lives. They went from being a superpower to being the poorest men anywhere. And all dignity was gone. They were offering up their wives just to get money for food.”

The newspaper in Kirkenes printed instructions for donating to the soup kitchen in Nikel. A Norwegian former border inspector, Frode Berg, told me that his Russian counterparts were so ill-equipped that in winter, when the temperature was minus thirty-five degrees, they wore sneakers. “We bought them food, and various things for their wives—fabrics and sewing materials, so that they could make clothes,” Berg said. “We’d take them to civilian shops and buy them green jackets. They were very happy. We helped them a lot.”

But it is not clear that the Russians perceived such gestures as they were intended. “The worn-out phrase ‘We feel sorry for Russia’ comes automatically,” a Russian journalist wrote, after a trip to Norway. “Every Russian-speaking person is apparently to be interrogated: Is it true that there is hunger in your country?” Former K.G.B. officers and their families were suddenly reliant on the good will of a mining and reindeer-herding community in one of Norway’s poorest and least developed districts.

In the center of Kirkenes, there is a bronze bust of the late Thorvald Stoltenberg, a former Norwegian minister of defense and foreign affairs, whose son is the current head of NATO. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he led an initiative to unite the business, cultural, and educational interests of Arctic Europe. Norway established an entity in Kirkenes called the Barents Secretariat, to fund projects with such titles as To Russia with Love. “It was about sport, cultural exchange, music, bands going across from one country to another, choir, singing, environmental projects—lots of activities,” Harald Sunde, a member of the municipal council, told me.

Russia opened a consulate in Kirkenes, and local Norwegian officials rushed to revive friendship agreements that had been signed in the late Soviet years with the district of Pechenga and with Severomorsk, a closed military town that serves as headquarters of the Northern Fleet. “That was a strange one,” Sunde said. “It was a friendship agreement with a municipality that you cannot visit.”

For the next two decades, relations bloomed. Norwegians drove into Russia for cheap haircuts, alcohol, and fuel; Russians came to Kirkenes to buy diapers, appliances, and luxury goods. The Kirkenes hockey team joined a Russian league; the Norwegian and Russian border guards held an annual soccer match. “Scandinavian historians, together with Russian colleagues, were willing to narrate the history of our northernmost regions as this kind of romantic idea of a place that transcends borders and countries and time,” Kari Aga Myklebøst, the Barents Chair in Russian Studies at the Arctic University of Norway, told me. “Even though the Barents Region is a political construct from 1993.”

In 2012, Vladimir Putin signed into law new limits on the freedom of expression. “That resulted in many of the Russian N.G.O.s that were working with Norway to be branded as ‘foreign agents,’ ” the term the Kremlin uses to stigmatize and oppress civil society, Nilsen said. “Environmental groups, human-rights groups, youth groups, Indigenous peoples’ groups—pretty much every group that was being supported by the Barents Secretariat faced that risk.”

Nilsen and his colleague Atle Staalesen were employed by the Secretariat, which published their bilingual English and Russian news Web site, the Barents Observer. But, in 2014, when Nilsen wrote a column condemning Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Russian consul-general in Kirkenes at the time, Mikhail Noskov, called the Observer a destructive force in Norwegian-Russian relations. The F.S.B. had repeatedly complained about the Observer to Norwegian authorities. Now an official for the Secretariat asked Nilsen to stop writing about Crimea; he refused, and was subsequently fired. (The Secretariat contests this version of events.) Staalesen quit soon afterward. “The Barents Observer was effectively shut down by the Norwegian government, at the behest of the Russian government,” Staalesen told me. “It was very symptomatic of what was to come.”

“In order to coöperate, you have to turn a blind eye to realities,” a former high-school principal, who spent decades working on cross-border collaborations, told me. “And, from 2014 onward, we had the sense that the security services controlled our Russian partners.” Increasingly, many Norwegians’ Russian contacts weren’t ordinary businessmen—they were officers or proxies of the intelligence apparatus, and they were using the ties between the two countries to turn Norwegians into assets.

In January, a Norwegian man in the district of East Finnmark agreed to meet me at three-thirty in the morning—the night of polar night. I had heard that he was an F.S.B. informant, working under duress. At first, the man repeatedly denied the allegations. Then I told him that I wasn’t guessing; my source was another person from the region who had ended up in F.S.B. custody.

“Then you already know,” he said. “They use any means they can.”

The man had been investigated by Norwegian authorities, who discovered evidence of crimes on his hard drive. The police informed their Russian counterparts, since the man routinely travelled to Russia, and asked for assistance in investigating his activities on the other side. “Of course, when they had this information in Russia, I was called into the immigration office,” the man told me. “They showed the documents from the Norwegian police. And then they said, ‘O.K., we can use this to arrest you, and put you in jail.’ ” The only way out was to coöperate with the F.S.B. “They forced me to sign a contract with them,” he said. The contract was in Russian, which he couldn’t read. But they assigned him a code name, and instructed him to go back to East Finnmark to collect the names of people who worked for the P.S.T.

Since then, the man had been called in to meet with the F.S.B. at least half a dozen times. “They were pushing me all the time,” he said. “Could I get more information?” His work for the F.S.B. exposed him to the risk of prosecution for espionage in Norway. But he had family ties to Russia, and kept going back and forth. He became consumed by paranoia, turning on loud fans to prevent possible microphones from capturing conversations, even with his wife. “It was fucking stressful,” he told me. “I started drinking more, and drinking more.”

Some Norwegians have been compromised in banyas or brothels and then extorted. Others have faced pressure to facilitate corruption and bribes. In one case, a Norwegian businessman claimed to have received an explosive device through a window of his office, in Murmansk, apparently as an inducement to sign over a controlling share of his company. “If your business becomes big enough, the mafia takes over,” a senior military-intelligence officer in Kirkenes told me. “If it becomes even more successful, then the F.S.B. takes over. And then you’re in big, big trouble.”

Another local who ended up in the sway of the F.S.B. was Frode Berg, the border inspector. In 1992, he befriended a man named Anatoly Vozniuk, who served as a Russian border inspector and interpreter. “Everyone liked him,” Berg told me. “He was full of jokes, always smiling.” Vozniuk usually kept a bottle of vodka in his backpack, and when they were alone in the forest he would pull it out and offer some to Berg. “Other Russian officers, if they did the same things that Anatoly was doing, after a short time we’d never see them again,” Berg said. But Vozniuk “was friends with special people—with Russian generals, with colonels,” Berg recalled. “He knew many people in the government in Murmansk.”

During the next decade,the two men became “best friends.” “I called him ‘the monkey,’ ” Berg said, laughing. “I’d be walking in the forest, and I’d hear a chicken clucking at me. And it was him! We would work all day, then sit and eat together, and speak about everything.” Vozniuk would take out the vodka, “and we didn’t go home before it was empty.”

By the early two-thousands, Vozniuk was driving Berg into Russia and introducing him to regional politicians and senior military and intelligence officers in the Kola Peninsula. “He was lifting me up to another level in Russia,” Berg said. “We were meeting different people in the banyas—everyone who had an important position.” When Russian officials visited Kirkenes, Berg was often summoned for drinks. The governor of Murmansk once brought Berg a small statue of a silver rocket, he recalled, “and, when you turned the top, there was a bottle of vodka inside.”

Before long, counterintelligence officers at the P.S.T. concluded that Vozniuk was targeting men like Berg as assets for the F.S.B. “It was always ‘Anatoly, Anatoly, Anatoly,’ ” Berg said. He rolled his eyes.

Vozniuk was taking Berg into restricted military areas, giving him tours of the border stations and of surveillance towers that looked into Norway. Vozniuk never brought him into areas of acute secrecy—submarine ports, military bases. But he made Berg feel like a V.I.P. Then Vozniuk started asking for the names of P.S.T. officers. Berg didn’t see a problem. Vozniuk had already seen the faces of certain officers at official meetings—he just didn’t necessarily know all of their names.

Around 2010, Vozniuk was promoted to serve as the official F.S.B. representative to Norway. I asked Berg whether he suspects that Vozniuk’s promotion was a reward for his success in eliciting information from him. “Yeah, from me and from other people,” he said. “They put it together—all the information that he collected.”

Berg’s story was not done. Shortly after Russia annexed Crimea, Norway’s military-intelligence service recruited Vasily Zemlyakov, an engineer at a shipyard that maintained nuclear submarines for the Northern Fleet. The deal was simple: cash for secrets. Zemlyakov instructed the service to send the money to the home of his cousin Natalya, in Moscow.

Whatever the P.S.T.’s concerns about Berg and his relationship with Vozniuk, the military-intelligence service decided that his routine jaunts across the border made him a suitable courier. In the next three years, Berg made several trips to Russia, and mailed cash and memory cards to Natalya’s address. Berg claims that he didn’t know what the operation was about—he just did as he was told. In return, top-secret files on the Northern Fleet’s strategic nuclear submarines were conveyed to Norway. But the sender was not Zemlyakov, who was in fact working as a double agent. It was the F.S.B.

In December, 2017, Berg made another trip to Moscow. When he stepped out of his hotel, two men grabbed him and brought him to F.S.B. headquarters, a couple of blocks away.

Berg was taken to an isolation cell in Lefortovo Prison, Russia’s notorious detention center for political prisoners, critics, poets, and spies. He recalls being questioned by F.S.B. officers sixteen times. Since Berg didn’t speak more than “vodka Russian,” as he put it, the service brought in an interpreter: his old friend Anatoly Vozniuk.

Berg was charged with espionage, but Vozniuk tried to convince him that he didn’t need independent legal representation. “Take the F.S.B. lawyer,” he said. When Berg opted instead for a well-known attorney for political prisoners, Vozniuk folded his arms and said, “Our friendship is over.” (Vozniuk could not be reached for comment.)

Berg was held for a year and a half before being found guilty of espionage and sentenced to fourteen years in a penal colony. He was exchanged in a spy swap soon afterward. (The Norwegian military-intelligence agency declined to comment.) When I met him in Kirkenes, five years after his release, he handed me a stack of Russian court documents detailing the F.S.B.’s Zemlyakov operation. But it seemed as if the thing that bothered him most about his ordeal was that Vozniuk hadn’t been joking when he’d said their friendship was over. “I tried writing an e-mail to him, and calling,” Berg said. “But Anatoly has changed his number.”

After breaking with the Barents Secretariat, Thomas Nilsen and Atle Staalesen relaunched the Observer as an independent entity. “We were the only Nordic media outlet to publish in the Russian language,” Nilsen said. “We had thousands and thousands of readers in Russia, because people could read the things here that they couldn’t find in other places.”

Their reporting has shown that, for at least the past decade, the Kremlin has been exploiting the Barents coöperation arrangements for intelligence purposes. In some cases, the F.S.B. used cultural projects as cover to send intelligence agents into Norway. But the larger effort has been to gradually establish the narrative that the people of East Finnmark owe their freedom—and perhaps also their land and their history—to Russia. The F.S.B., operating through various cover organizations, has spent decades engaging in ideological subversion in Kirkenes, rooted in the manipulation of local history, in order to make the region more friendly to Russia. “You can use this area to create chaos,” Roaldsnes told me.

It was in this context that Roaldsnes decided to come forward and describe his work—a rare instance of an active-duty counterintelligence officer going public. “One of my fears is that you have a level of intelligence failure in the F.S.B.’s foreign department that says that this region is a good subject to create a crisis for NATO,” Roaldsnes said. He recalled the Russian services’ misreading of Ukraine—their belief that it would take only three days to capture Kyiv, and that many Ukrainians would welcome the Russian Army as a liberating force. That intelligence failure stemmed from the tendency of the Russian security apparatus to report what it thinks the Kremlin leadership wants to hear. He told me, “I’m engaging in kind of an active form of counterintelligence now—to not give any leeway, and to be a bit outspoken about this threat and how it materializes.”

The Russian narrative begins around five hundred years ago, when a marauding Russian bandit named Mitrofan experienced a sudden change of heart. After a life of robbing and killing, he was ordered by God to “go to a land that is not promised and not useful,” as the Russian Orthodox Church later put it. He gave up alcohol and violence, tied a rope around his waist, and walked north, to the valleys and fjords where the Pasvik River spills into the Barents Sea. Mitrofan converted many of the native Sámi people to Christianity, and built a few modest wooden chapels. In death, he became known as St. Tryphon.

In 1826, when Norwegian and Russian officials set out to draw the border between the two nations, they decided that the natural boundary lay in the river. But the remnants of one of St. Tryphon’s chapels, the Church of Boris and Gleb, were just on the Norwegian side of the river in South Varanger, which is now part of Finnmark. The Russians insisted on carving out a small postage stamp of land and designating it as Orthodox—and therefore Russian—territory.

Then, a couple of years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Alexei Badanin, the head of the Orthodox Church on the Kola Peninsula, called into question the legitimacy of the border line—not just the postage stamp but the entire thing. “South Varanger—this is our Orthodox land,” he said. “It was given up in 1826 by unscrupulous officials.” St. Tryphon had built another small chapel about fifteen miles west of Kirkenes. Should that be in Russia, too?

Badanin is a former Northern Fleet commander who in the early two-thousands began dedicating himself to the study and veneration of St. Tryphon. Some years into his religious journey, he took the name Mitrofan, too. Like his namesake, Badanin has spent lots of time on the Norwegian side of the border—meeting local dignitaries and spreading St. Tryphon’s teachings. But some of his behavior struck people as out of synch with his role as a priest: in 2019, for example, he sought to obtain information on a facility that provides drinking water for Kirkenes.

Badanin’s second career has coincided with the transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church into a kind of spiritual arm of the Kremlin’s military-intelligence structure. Priests bless nuclear missiles and tell front-line troops that they will be resurrected if they die in Ukraine. Western security and intelligence services have warned that the Kremlin is particularly reliant on the Orthodox Church abroad—both for recruiting intelligence sources and for carrying out influence operations—because it is not directly affected by international sanctions.

In Finnmark, the work of men like Mitrofan Badanin goes beyond recruitment and propaganda. According to Myklebøst, the professor, it’s about ideological subversion, sensitizing the local population to the idea that Russia’s presence in Finnmark predates that of the Norwegian state. “They use history to legitimatize the idea that this is part of the Russian cultural sphere,” Myklebøst said.

Badanin has taken a particular interest in the history of the Pomors, a small seafaring group that originated in Russia but whose members spent much of the past millennium hunting and fishing in what is now northern Norway. The Pomors left traces of Orthodox crosses wherever they had been. In the past decade, representatives of the Orthodox Church have systematically restored old Pomor crosses and erected new ones. The area coincides with the exact territory that would be most strategically useful to Russia’s nuclear defense—Norway’s entire Barents Sea coastline, all the way up to the Svalbard archipelago, where the top Russian official is believed to be a military-intelligence operative serving under diplomatic cover. (The official denies this.)

“Now that they have the crosses, and a Russian Orthodox priest has been there, sprinkling his holy water, the narrative back home is that these are Russian holy lands,” Myklebøst told me. “This also means that they can be defended militarily.” Last year, Russian outlets started claiming that the Pentagon was constructing a secret biological-weapons laboratory on a small island between Svalbard and mainland Norway. Similar fabrications were made about sites in Ukraine to help justify the invasion.

Badanin, as the leading Orthodox authority in the Kola Peninsula, also oversees a small church in Kirkenes, near the port. Although it’s in Norwegian territory, the local priest—a dual Russian-Norwegian citizen—officially answers to him. Badanin hasn’t visited Norway since the outbreak of the war. But last summer he gave a sermon at the Church of Boris and Gleb, in the Russian postage stamp on the Norwegian side of the river. “Here starts a hostile and unfriendly world,” he told his followers. On another occasion, speaking to a group of soldiers, he wondered what would happen if Russia lost the war in Ukraine: “Is there any point to continue history? Or is it time to bring fire and sulfur to earth, and let everything burn?”

Such threats are not abstract in South Varanger. On October 30, 1961, the Soviet Union detonated the largest ever nuclear bomb, on a remote Barents Sea archipelago called Novaya Zemlya. The explosion was more than three thousand times as powerful as Hiroshima, and generated an “atmospheric disturbance” that “orbited the earth three times,” according to two Soviet scientists who worked on the bomb. Six hundred miles from the blast site, Norwegian conscripts stood transfixed at their border posts, watching the horizon glow.

In recent years, the Russian government has also been using the history of the Second World War and its aftermath to drive a wedge between locals and the government in Oslo. One day, Harald Sunde, from Kirkenes’s municipal council, who has written two local-history books, took me on a tour of the town. Like many people there, he is fascinated by the lingering presence of the war—trenches and bunkers dug in peoples’ back yards, rusted cannisters and remnants of heavy weaponry scattered among the fjords. The Germans occupied Kirkenes for four years and used the area as a staging ground for tens of thousands of troops during a failed assault on Murmansk. The Soviet Air Force, meanwhile, carried out so many bombing runs on Kirkenes that only thirteen homes were left unscathed.

During the Nazi occupation, a number of people in South Varanger were trained by Soviet intelligence to act as partisans—gathering information on German positions and transmitting it covertly to the Soviet Red Army. When the Nazis retreated from the area, in October, 1944, and Soviet troops moved in, “they supposedly treated the civilians very well,” Sunde said. “And they left afterward. They didn’t stay here, like they did in many other areas in Europe, like the Baltic states, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.”

Sunde led me to a monument, just outside the town center, depicting a triumphant Soviet soldier clutching a rifle. The original design called for the statue to be forty feet tall, and for the soldier to be crushing a German eagle under his foot, he said. But, by the time it was under construction, West Germany was being integrated into NATO, and so it was built at half the height, with the foot on a rock.

During the Cold War, East Finnmark was regarded by the rest of Norway as ideologically distant. Norway joined NATO as a founding member; the people of South Varanger elected a Communist mayor. In the fifties and sixties, officers with the domestic-security service—a predecessor to the P.S.T.—carried out illegal surveillance of former partisans and suspected Communists in South Varanger, and sought to prohibit them from being employed at the mine. The Soviets seized on these divisions, establishing a Norwegian-Soviet Friendship Society and pushing the message that Oslo didn’t care about the north—that the government was merely a tool of officials in Brussels and Washington, D.C.

In the nineties, the security service underwent a public reckoning, opening its files to all who had been wrongfully surveilled. The King of Norway apologized to the partisans and honored their contributions to the fight against Nazism. “But this is a very vivid, very important part of public memory in East Finnmark,” Myklebøst said. “At the same time, it’s very clearly used by the Russian Foreign Ministry and its diplomatic representatives in Norway.”

“If you do everything wrong in the Arctic, it’s a matter of hours before you will freeze to death,” a Norwegian Army commander said.

About a decade ago, Myklebøst noticed that the Russian consul-general in Kirkenes had started systematically mapping, restoring, and holding ceremonies at monuments erected to honor Soviet soldiers and prisoners, whom the Nazis imported to Norway to build railway lines, roads, and other infrastructure. The Russians also erected new monuments, and falsely implied that the Red Army had liberated all of northern Norway, not just Kirkenes. Norwegian history enthusiasts—pensioners, mostly, who were upset by the mistreatment of the partisans—attended the ceremonies. The Russian delegations included politicians and Orthodox bishops, and were often organized by the head of the F.S.B.’s veterans group in Murmansk. These “patriotic memory tours,” as the visits were called, received funding from the Barents Secretariat. They also served as cover for at least one F.S.B. agent to travel all over East Finnmark.

In official F.S.B. publications and the Russian press, Norwegian participants were depicted as endorsing Kremlin narratives on behalf of Norwegian organizations that, in fact, did not exist. When the mayor of Vardø attended a ceremony, he was given a St. George ribbon—a symbol of support for the Russian military—and photographed wearing it. Around that time, Putin invited the then mayor of Kirkenes to the Russian Embassy in Oslo, to be awarded the Order of Friendship.

Each October, Russian officials visit the Soviet war memorial in Kirkenes, to commemorate the liberation from the Nazis. Until recently, the monument was “a site of brotherhood and friendship,” Harald Sunde told me. For its seventy-fifth anniversary, in 2019, Putin sent his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, along with the commander of the Northern Fleet. Norway sent its foreign minister, its Prime Minister, and its king. Before the ceremony, Sunde was invited, along with a few other partisan-history enthusiasts, to meet Lavrov. Sunde had discovered a partisan cave in the mountains and written a book about the resistance movement; now he presented a copy to Lavrov, and shook his hand.

Two years later, the new Russian consul-general, Nikolai Konygin, invited Sunde and several other Norwegians to the consulate. He poured them shots of vodka and pinned a medal from the Russian Ministry of Defense to each of their jackets. Sunde was proud of his work on partisan history. But the ceremony made him uncomfortable, and he sipped only half of the shot. Soon afterward, he asked the P.S.T. for advice on how to avoid being exploited for propaganda purposes. “I did not want to be in their pocket,” he told me, of the Russians. “I did not want to be a useful idiot.”

A few days into the invasion of Ukraine, Sunde walked into the consulate and returned his Russian medal, in protest. The next time Konygin spoke at the Soviet war memorial, he told the assembled guests that, just as the Soviets had liberated them from the Nazis, so Russia was now striving to liberate Ukraine.

In October, 2023, Sunde co-wrote an editorial in a local paper, warning that the presence of any Russian official at the annual ceremony would be “an insult to Norway, to Ukraine, and to victims of war in all countries.”

Three days before the event, Sunde walked into a flower shop to order a yellow wreath on behalf of the municipality. The plan was to place it atop a makeshift pedestal—a step stool draped in a blue tablecloth—at the foot of the monument, to represent the Ukrainian flag.

“Have the Russians ordered anything?” he asked the shop owner.

“No, Harald—nothing yet.”

But when Sunde returned to pick up the wreath, two days later, he ran into one of Konygin’s assistants at the shop. The man had come to collect a wreath of identical size, in Russian colors. “You know, you’re not welcome tomorrow, at the monument,” Sunde said to him. The man just smiled and walked away.

Early the next morning, Sunde arrived at the monument to set up the pedestal. The mayor, Magnus Mæland, appeared, and Sunde handed him the wreath. “I don’t believe in low tension anymore,” Mæland, who had been elected just a few weeks earlier, told me. “I believe that we have to be strong, because the only language that the Putin regime understands is strength. If you’re not telling your whole opinion to the Russians, they will take your silence as approval.”

The ceremony was held at 8:30 a.m., to insure that the Russians didn’t beat them to it. There were a half-dozen journalists present, but no townspeople. Mæland addressed the crowd: “In 1944, Ukrainian soldiers were among those in the Soviet Red Army who contributed to our liberation.” He went on, “Today, we support Ukraine in its pursuit of liberation.”

Mæland and Sunde left. Then, just before 11 A.M., a small group of townspeople started to assemble—Russian citizens and their supporters living in Kirkenes. A pair of cars with blue diplomatic plates pulled up to the monument. Konygin climbed out and delivered a speech, wearing a St. George ribbon. The air was frigid—his breath turned to mist as he spoke. Sunde learned of the Russians’ arrival, and hurried over. He stood alone with his arms crossed, his back turned to Konygin in protest. Some of the Russian townspeople snickered.

Konygin finished his remarks, and placed the Russian wreath below Sunde’s makeshift pedestal. Then he retrieved another display—an enormous array with plastic flowers—and placed it over the municipality’s wreath, smothering it.

Sunde turned his head, then whirled around, enraged. “Nikolai, you can’t do that!” he said. He walked over to Konygin, but Konygin acted as if Sunde didn’t exist. He and his retinue walked back to their vehicles and drove off.

To several of the Norwegian journalists at the scene, Konygin’s actions felt like an act of domination, an assertion of Russian power—and perhaps even sovereignty—over a patch of Norwegian land. Sunde called Mæland, who returned and placed Konygin’s plastic flower display to the side of the monument. Mæland began to speak to the journalists and Russians who were still present. “You must respect the South Varanger municipality,” he said.

As he spoke, a Russian woman who lives in Kirkenes slipped behind him. She picked up Konygin’s display and placed it back on top of the municipality’s wreath.

That night, Konygin’s display went missing. It was late October, and the river was still flowing. Then came the mørketid, and when it lifted—when the first dawn came, two months later, and the sun breached the horizon at last—those plastic flowers were entombed in the ice.

After the ceremony, Russian officials summoned Norway’s Ambassador in Moscow and lodged a complaint against Mæland, calling his response to Konygin “an act of vandalism” and a “violation of the memory of the soldiers-liberators.” Soon afterward, an anonymous Facebook account circulated a Photoshopped image of Mæland standing at the memorial as a suicide drone flew at his head. Then Sunde led a successful effort for South Varanger to cancel its friendship agreement with the district of Pechenga. (The agreement with Severomorsk, the headquarters of the Northern Fleet, had been scrapped a year into the war.) “Think of this area as a pot of water on a low boil,” Roaldsnes told me, over a Christmas lunch of salted sheep. “Once in a while, it boils over.”****

The Russian Embassy in Oslo declined to answer detailed questions, claiming that this article is “unworthy of substantive comment, since it is a malicious fiction.” But, while I was living in Kirkenes, last November, days before the sun set for the last time of the year, more Russian hybrid operations that had been tested in Kirkenes started being replicated, at scale, all over Europe. The F.S.B. rounded up migrants from Africa and the Middle East and pushed them across the border into northern Finland, in subzero temperatures. Then a Russian electronic-warfare unit started jamming G.P.S. signals in the Baltic Sea. Tens of thousands of civilian flights have been affected—alarms blaring in the cockpit, passengers blissfully unaware. The Kremlin also issued criminal charges against the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, for her decision to remove Soviet war memorials. “Crimes against the memory of those who liberated the world from Nazism and Fascism must be punished,” a spokesperson for the foreign minister said. “This is just the beginning.”

When the Kremlin first announced mobilizations, to restock the front line in Ukraine, hundreds of wealthy Russians fled to Kirkenes. Suddenly, the hotels were filled with “young Russian men wearing expensive sweatpants,” as Roaldsnes put it. Most of them continued on; Kirkenes was just a choke point on the way out. Many will likely never return—a man from Murmansk parked his Lamborghini at the Kirkenes airport, removed the license plate, and vanished.

Among those who stayed was Georgii Chentemirov, the former head of the journalists’ union in Karelia, just south of the Kola Peninsula. Chentemirov left Russia six months into the war and joined the staff of the Barents Observer. A few months later, the Kremlin declared him a foreign agent, and government officials in Karelia began reposting anonymous blog posts saying that he was a traitor.

In Kirkenes, Chentemirov’s new neighbors are Russians who support the war. “They believe Russian propaganda,” he told me. “I don’t understand it, because Russian propaganda says that we need to destroy Europe. And they live in Europe!”

Chentemirov joined a local boxing class, in a bomb shelter that had been converted into a gym. I joined as well, for several weeks of the mørketid, and was often paired with a fighter from Kherson, near Crimea, who had a thick scar that ran below his left cheekbone, from his nose almost to his ear. I never learned which side of the war he was on—Kherson has been won and lost by each side. Chentemirov, who is six feet three, usually trained against the only other person in the group who was as tall as him: a man in his mid-thirties named Igor, who worked as a driver and courier for Konygin.

There were only two heavy punching bags, so some pairs had to practice on pads that had been duct-taped around concrete support pillars. The coach shouted instructions in Russian. The lights flickered. After class, my sweat always turned into ice. “Some people cannot stand the dark time,” a local had told me. “But you have to be able to cope with it, or else you cannot live here.” Chentemirov and Igor stood on opposite sides of a pillar, punching the concrete between them.

Published in the print edition of the September 16, 2024, issue, with the headline “The Dark Time.”

Ben Taub, a staﬀ writer, is the recipient of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. His 2018 reporting on Iraq won a National Magazine Award and a George Polk Award.

The New Yorker · by Ben Taub · September 9, 2024

11. Diplomacy Beyond the Elections: How China Is Preparing for a Post-Biden America

Conclusion:

Ultimately, China’s long-term strategy is clear: It is looking beyond the current administration to shape U.S. perceptions of China, convincing Washington that its rise does not pose a threat and creating a more favorable environment for advancing its ambitions.

Diplomacy Beyond the Elections: How China Is Preparing for a Post-Biden America

thediplomat.com

China is not just managing tensions but setting the stage to influence the next U.S. administration and push its long-term ambitions forward.

By Seong-Hyon Lee

September 07, 2024

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, second left, accompanied by U.S. Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns, left, meets Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, accompanied by China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi, second right, at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, Aug. 29, 2024.

Credit: Trevor Hunnicutt/Pool Photo via AP

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U.S. President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, recently made a high-profile visit to China, which he described as aimed at the “responsible management” of China-U.S. relations. Sullivan’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping was the first by a U.S. national security adviser in eight years, highlighting its diplomatic significance. While it is tempting to label the visit a success, especially given its timing during the height of the U.S. presidential election race, its practical purpose went beyond managing tensions. It also served as a warning to China not to interfere with the U.S. election.

However, a pressing question remains: Why did China treat Sullivan with surprising cordiality, especially given that Biden himself will soon step down, granting Sullivan a face-to-face meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping?

Just before the national security adviser’s visit, the United States imposed a massive new tranche of sanctions on 42 Chinese firms for supporting Russia’s war efforts in Ukraine. Yet, this didn’t deter Xi from meeting Sullivan.

Some interpret it as a “goodwill gesture” toward the outgoing Biden administration. However, Beijing’s sudden softer tone, evidenced by Xi’s amicable photo-op with Sullivan, warrants deeper analysis. Xi is well-versed in the art of photo-op diplomacy, using such moments to convey his emotions. For example, during his meeting with the late Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo in 2014, Xi adopted a famously solemn expression, avoiding eye contact. When Abe attempted to speak, Xi pointedly turned away, facing the cameras instead.

According to official Chinese Foreign Ministry reports about the visit, Sullivan appeared to have offered a list of assurances that aligned with China’s interests. Sullivan told Xi that “the United States does not seek a new Cold War, does not aim to change China’s system, and does not support Taiwan independence.”

In his meeting with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, Sullivan provided a more comprehensive reiteration on Taiwan that raised eyebrows. He stated that the United States does not support “Taiwan independence,” “two Chinas,” or “one China, one Taiwan.” This is known as the “Three Nos” policy regarding Taiwan.

While elements of this policy had been expressed separately or partially by various U.S. administrations, the last time all three elements were explicitly stated together in an official setting in China was, over 20 years ago, by President Bill Clinton in 1998. In response to Clinton’s “Three Nos,” concerned lawmakers in both the Senate and the House nearly unanimously passed resolutions reaffirming the U.S. commitment to Taiwan.

After Clinton’s statement, subsequent administrations generally refrained from repeating the full “Three Nos” formulation, often focusing mainly on the non-support for Taiwan independence, until Sullivan did so on this occasion.

Moreover, Sullivan requested and was granted a meeting with General Zhang Youxia, marking the first time a U.S. national security adviser has met with a vice chairman of China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) since 2016. Sullivan described this opportunity as “rare.” Zhang, the second-highest military decision-maker in China, used the occasion to emphasize that Taiwan is “the core of China’s core interests” and the “first unbreachable red line in China-U.S. relations.”

Based on these official statements, it is evident that China successfully secured key reiterations from the United States. that align with its interests, while also clearly articulating its own demands.

Notably, the Chinese account of the meeting was more detailed and explicit than the U.S. version. For example, in the English readout Wang outlined five key points in over 950 words, emphasizing that China’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, political system, development path, and the legitimate rights of its people must be respected. Wang further urged the United States to adopt a “correct perception” of China and to cease its economic, trade, and technological suppression.

In the broader context, the meeting appears to be a follow-up to the Biden-Xi summit held in San Francisco last November, during which both leaders committed to reducing tensions, albeit for different reasons. Washington aims to focus on the upcoming presidential election without disruption from China, while China seeks to buy time in the Sino-U.S. competition in order to revitalize its struggling economy.

Xi’s emphasis on seeking “peaceful coexistence” and maintaining “stability in China-U.S. relations” reflects a desire for a stable external environment to address these internal issues. This approach aligns with China’s current focus on economic recovery and its need to navigate domestic challenges without external pressures exacerbating the situation.

From the U.S. perspective, the goal is to prevent China from provoking geopolitical tensions in sensitive regions such as the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The United States also seeks to dissuade China from supporting Russia’s war against Ukraine or forming a trilateral alliance with North Korea and Russia. In contrast, China is keen to avoid further economic and technological pressure as it focuses on economic recovery in a stable external environment.

The fact that Xi agreed to meet with Sullivan supports the interpretation that Sullivan’s talks with senior officials, including Wang and Zhang, were productive. China often leaves the possibility of a meeting with Xi uncertain until the last moment, keeping visiting delegations in suspense. Xi’s decision to meet with Sullivan suggests that he was pleased with the progress made during their discussions.

China’s broader strategy seems to be the creation of a relational blueprint that secures its interests, particularly as the U.S. political landscape shifts. By positioning itself now, Beijing can potentially influence the next U.S. administration, using these agreements as a foundation for future China-U.S. relations that align with its long-term goals.

This reaffirmation of bilateral principles favorable to China could serve as leverage for Beijing in dealing with the next U.S. administration, particularly if Vice President Kamala Harris, who has limited foreign policy experience, succeeds Biden. Given Harris’ likely adherence to Biden’s foreign policy approach, Beijing may strategically use Sullivan’s visit to ensure that, if she assumes office, the agreements forged between Biden and Xi are maintained.

With less than six months remaining in Biden’s term, both nations are preparing for the transition. Washington appears focused on maintaining stability during the election season, while Beijing is balancing its immediate need for economic stability with its long-term strategic ambitions. The disparity between China’s comprehensive readouts and the relatively brief summaries from the United States underscores the differences in their respective approaches.

Ultimately, China’s long-term strategy is clear: It is looking beyond the current administration to shape U.S. perceptions of China, convincing Washington that its rise does not pose a threat and creating a more favorable environment for advancing its ambitions.

Authors

Guest Author

Seong-Hyon Lee

Seong-Hyon Lee, Ph.D., is a senior fellow at the George H. W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations and an associate at the Harvard University Asia Center.

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thediplomat.com

12. China says top diplomat Wang Yi to visit Russia this week

China says top diplomat Wang Yi to visit Russia this week

09 Sep 2024 05:58PM

channelnewsasia.com

BEIJING: China's top diplomat Wang Yi will visit Russia this week for a security meeting of BRICS emerging economies, Beijing's foreign ministry said on Monday (Sep 9).

Wang will attend the meeting of BRICS high-ranking security officials and national security advisers on Wednesday and Thursday in the city of St Petersburg, ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in an online statement.

His visit comes in advance of a BRICS summit next month that President Xi Jinping is expected to attend.

The BRICS group, an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, represents almost half the world's population and has since expanded to include other major emerging economies including the United Arab Emirates and Iran.

During the talks this week, Wang will discuss the "current international security situation", and "major international and regional issues" with BRICS officials, Mao said.

"The world today is one of interwoven turmoil, and various security challenges are complex and severe," she added.

"BRICS countries have always been committed to maintaining world peace, promoting common development, practising multilateralism, and promoting global governance in a more just and fair direction."

The group is set to hold a summit in the southwestern Russian city of Kazan next month, in what the Kremlin hopes will be a chance to expand its influence and forge closer economic alliances.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last week said he was expecting Xi at the Kazan meeting from Oct 22 to Oct 24.

Putin has looked to the Chinese leader for support since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, with the allies boosting trade to record highs as Moscow faces heavy economic sanctions from the West.

Moscow and Beijing both rail against "Western hegemony", particularly what they see as US domination of global affairs, and declared a "no limits" partnership shortly before Russia launched its offensive in Ukraine.

Last month, Putin said Russia's economic and trade links with China were "yielding results" as he welcomed Chinese Premier Li Qiang to the Kremlin.

Source: AFP/rc

13. Time to retire ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’?

Time to retire ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’?

A new name should reflect how the hostilities have grown more complex and spread beyond the region's boundaries.

By Nader Habibi

Professor, Brandeis University

September 9, 2024 11:59 PM ET

defenseone.com · by Nader Habibi

The current phase of fighting in the Middle East began almost a year ago, with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas and the subsequent pummeling of Gaza by Israel. But to many academics, foreign policy experts and international observers, what is taking place is also the latest episode in the decadeslong conflict commonly referred to as the “Arab-Israeli conflict.”

The experience of the past 11 months has led many experts on the region like myself to reassess that term. Is “Arab-Israeli conflict” an accurate reflection, given that the active participants are no longer just Arabs and Israelis? Should we retire that term for good now that the conflict has widened, drawing in the United States and Iran–and potentially Turkey and others in the coming years?

The Arab-Israeli conflict began after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. In what is now Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, but was then the Palestine mandate under British rule, sporadic disputes over land ownership led to violence between the Jewish and Palestinian Arab communities.

When Israel declared independence in 1948, the conflict expanded into an interstate war between Israel and several Arab countries–Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Hence it was named the Arab-Israeli War by both the media and political leaders at the time.

This name remained accurate for several decades as the conflict remained geopolitically and geographically confined to the Arab countries and Israel.

After the initial 1948 war, the unresolved conflict resulted in several other wars between Israel and Arab countries. Some oil-exporting Arab countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, also became indirectly involved by providing financial support for the front-line Arab states and declared oil embargoes against the West during the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Iraq was also directly affected by this prolonged conflict in the 1980s when Israel destroyed its nuclear facilities. Subsequently Iraq targeted Israel with missiles several times in 1991 during the first Gulf War.

The phrase “Arab-Israeli conflict” isn’t heard as much these days, but it’s still commonly in use, including by the United Nations, the United States government, media outlets and many scholars of the region.

Usage of ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ has declined in recent years

However, reference to “Arab-Israeli conflict” obscures the active role of several other participants, particularly in recent decades.

The U.S. diplomatic support for Israel began with President Harry Truman’s decision to be the first to recognize the new state in May 1948. This was followed in the 1960s by an increase in U.S. military and financial support during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency.

Substantial U.S. arms transfers to Israel also occurred in September 1970 when, at President Richard Nixon’s request, Israel mobilized its forces to save King Hussein of Jordan from a Palestinian uprising aided by Syrian forces.

In the following decades, however, the role of the U.S. has expanded into direct involvement in air defense operations against missile and drone attacks against Israel. The U.S. Army air defense units, for example, were used to defend Israel against Iraq’s scud missile attacks as early as the 1990-91 Gulf War.

This U.S. participation has been in evidence since the Oct. 7 attacks, too. In the months after the attacks, U.S. operations have been conducted against missile and drone attacks launched toward Israel by the Houthis in Yemen and by Iran.

By all accounts, the U.S. military support for Israel has played a crucial role in Israel’s military superiority over its neighbors. Therefore, an appropriate name for the broader conflict, I would argue, should reflect this active U.S. participation.

On the “Arab” side of the conflict, too, the adversaries of Israel are no longer limited to Arab nations. Iran is now an active participant; Tehran not only provides military support for groups hostile to Israel, including Hamas, Houthis and Hezbollah, but it has had direct military exchanges with Israel during the current Gaza war.

Furthermore, Iran and Israel have been involved in covert operations and cyberwars against each other for the past 15 years, which have only intensified since the Israel-Hamas war.

And with no resolution to the current fighting in sight, the chances of widening the conflict further shouldn’t be dismissed. Two possible scenarios that can widen this conflict are a serious escalation between Israel and Iran, and the active participation of Turkey.

The intense Israeli bombardment of Gaza and the resulting high casualties have escalated tensions between Israel and Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and politicians from various Turkish political parties have been very vocal in their criticism of Israel’s military operations.

Public anger and anti-Israeli sentiments in Turkey have reached high levels, partly as a result of the extensive coverage of the carnage and human suffering in Gaza. There is even a small possibility that an unexpected event, such as an encounter between the Israeli navy and a Turkish ship approaching Gaza to defy Israel’s naval blockade, might lead to a military exchange between Turkey and Israel. While the likelihood of such an exchange remains small, a military escalation between Israel and Turkey could also be triggered by a major Israeli operation in Lebanon, according to some experts.

Almost a year into the latest phase of fighting in the Middle East, it is clear that the label “Arab-Israeli conflict” no longer reflects the facts on the ground. But “Israeli-Palestinian” or “Gaza-Israeli” fail to take into account the growing number of countries that have a stake – or an active role – in the fighting.

Indeed, in the course of the current Gaza conflict, people have been killed in Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran. Similarly, the list of belligerents includes Hamas and Israel, but also a plethora of Iran-backed militias across the Middle East and the Arab Peninsula.

So where does that leave us?

A more accurate title for the ongoing hostilities needs to better reflect all the major participants.

On one side, we have several nonstate actors and governments from across the Middle East and North Africa, or “MENA,” as the region is commonly called. On the other side we have an Israel heavily reliant on the U.S. for its military prowess and protection, and a United States that is fully committed to the security of Israel. I believe any name for the conflict should acknowledge the U.S. participation.

So, in my opinion, it is better to call this the “MENA-ISRAME conflict” – in which “ISRAME” is constructed by combining the first three letters of “Israel” and “America.”

I acknowledge that it is a bit of a mouthful and unlikely to catch on. But a name that reflects the larger set of participants in the Arab-Israeli conflict is nonetheless needed. It will increase awareness of the destruction, suffering and financial burden that it has inflicted on all the involved countries over its lifetime.

By doing so, it might increase the willingness of the world community, especially the active participants, to put more efforts toward finding a solution that can bring the MENA-ISRAME conflict to an end.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

defenseone.com · by Nader Habibi

14. Ukraine hits MOSCOW in huge drone attack, killing at least one woman

Ukraine hits MOSCOW in huge drone attack, killing at least one woman

Ukraine hits MOSCOW in huge drone attack, sparking apartment building blaze, wrecking dozens of homes and killing at least one woman in shock blow to Putin

By Taryn Pedler

Published: 02:52 EDT, 10 September 2024 | Updated: 05:40 EDT, 10 September 2024

Daily Mail · by Taryn Pedler · September 10, 2024

Ukraine unleashed more than 140 drones on Russia overnight, officials said Tuesday, killing a woman near Moscow, grounding flights and setting off air defences in several parts of the country.

Russia's ministry of defence said in a statement it had shot down 144 Ukrainian drones overnight - '72 UAVs over Bryansk region, 20 over Moscow region, 14 over Kursk region, 13 over Tula region', and 25 more over five other parts of the country.

Moscow regional governor Andrey Vorobyov said in a Telegram post that a 46-year-old woman had been killed and several people wounded when a UAV damaged at least two high-rise apartment building in the Ramenskoye district of Moscow region, some 30 miles southeast of the Kremlin.

Videos of the brutal attack circulating on social media show flames bursting out of windows of a multi-storey residential building, saying that dozens of flats were left severely damaged following the blaze.

'I looked at the window and saw a ball of fire,' Alexander Li, a resident of the district told Reuters. 'The window got blown out by the shockwave.'

The attack marks one of the largest drone assaults against Russia since the beginning of the war.

At least one civilian was killed in the drone attack. Moscow airports shut, major highway closed as massive kamikaze drone attack hit Moscow and nearby regions

The drone attacks damaged at least two high-rise apartment buildings in the Ramenskoye district of the Moscow region

Buildings were left engulfed in flames and several people were left wounded

More than 70 drones were also downed over Russia's Bryansk region and tens more over other regions

Russia's ministry of defence said in a statement it had shot down 144 Ukrainian drones overnight

Videos of the attack circulating on social media show flames consuming residential buildings

Two buildings were hit and destroyed by drone debris

As a result of the attack, four airports servicing Moscow - including major hubs Domodedovo and Sheremetyevo - had cancelled or delayed flights on Tuesday morning, according to state media.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin confirmed a fire had broken out on the runway at Zhukovsky airfield, caused by falling debris from a downed drone.

A major road leading to the capital was also partially closed.

A terrified resident told Shot media: 'I saw a fireball [and] managed to cover my wife.

'It was just a second, a bang and the window was blown out. We were all scared and ran in panic.'

In Bryansk, which borders Ukraine, 'the enemy carried out a massive terrorist attack', regional Governor Aleksandr Bogomaz said on Telegram, adding 'there were no casualties or damage, all attacks were repelled'.

More than 70 drones were downed over the Bryansk region and tens more over other regions, Russia's defence ministry said.

Ukraine launches 'largest ever' drone attack on Moscow after Russia 'bombs Ukraine children's cafe'

Russia says the attacks are akin to 'terrorism' as they target civilian infrastructure.

The latest wave of drones came just a week after Ukraine suffered one of its darkest days after two ballistic missiles killed at least 51 people and injured 219 on September 3.

The missiles hit a military training centre and a nearby hospital in a central region of Ukraine with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowing 'Russian scum will pay for this' following the devastating attack.

Rescue crews and medics saved 25 people, including 11 who were dug out of the rubble, a Defence Ministry statement said.

A damaged residential building following a drone attack in Ramenskoye in the Moscow region on September 10

The aftermath of Ukraine's brutal drone strikes on Russia overnight

The attack marks one of the largest drone assaults against Russia since the beginning of the war

A damaged multi-storey residential building following the Ukrainian drone attack in the course of Russia-Ukraine conflict, in Ramenskoye

A massive wave of Ukrainian drones set off air defences across several Russian regions, officials said on September 10

It also comes as Moscow continued to claim incremental gains in Ukraine's east more than 30 months into its offensive, and as Kyiv's forces pressed their incursion into Russia's region of Kursk.

But Russia on Monday said its forces had captured another Ukrainian village, Memryk, seen as a stepping stone to the Kyiv-held logistics hub of Pokrovsk some 12 miles away.

Kyiv had launched its Kursk offensive on August 6 aiming to force Russia to redeploy troops pressing forward in the east, but Moscow has appeared to intensify its attacks there.

Tense moment Ukrainian sniper duels two Russian soldiers firing grenade launchers at him

Moscow has also kept up its own aerial attacks on Ukraine in recent weeks, including on key energy infrastructure ahead of winter.

Three Russian drones were shot down above Ukraine's Sumy overnight, the regional military administration said early Tuesday, while air defences were also activated around Kyiv.

The military administration in the capital later said there were 'no consequences after the Russian UAV attack'.

Ukraine says it has a right to strike deep into Russia, which invaded Ukraine in 2022, though Kyiv's Western backers have repeatedly said they do not want the war to escalate into a direct confrontation between Russia and the US-led NATO military alliance.

There was no immediate comment from Ukraine about Tuesday's attacks. Both sides deny targeting civilians yet civilians have died in attacks from both sides.

Ukraine's domestic drone industry has been growing rapidly and Kyiv has been stepping up drone attacks on Russian energy, military and transport infrastructure. Russia is the world's second largest oil exporter.

Tuesday's attack follows a deluge of drones Ukraine launched in early September targeting chiefly Russia's energy and power facilities.

Authorities of the Tula region, which neighbours the Moscow region to its north, told Russian state news agency that a drone wreckage fell onto a fuel and energy facility, but that 'technological process' of the facility was not affected.

Daily Mail · by Taryn Pedler · September 10, 2024

15. How the Space Force Can Better Tell Its Story

How the Space Force Can Better Tell Its Story - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Hannah Dennis · September 10, 2024

In February, a tweet by Rep. Mike Turner created national news and panic around a possible new Russian on-orbit nuclear anti-satellite weapon. In the following weeks, senior Biden administration officials responded publicly to provide context, answer Americans’ burning questions, and soothe anxieties. The national security advisor spoke on National Public Radio confirming the assessment that Russians were developing this capability. Then-Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy John Plumb testified publicly before Congress on the potential effects of such a weapon in space. Another senior official speaking at a public think tank event assuaged fears, explaining that this was “not an active capability that has already been deployed,” nor would it be used to “attack humans or cause structural damage on Earth.” But one voice — a voice in which the American public is very interested — remained silent. That was the voice of the U.S. Space Force, and this was a missed opportunity for them to reach everyday Americans.

Space Force leaders face a monumental challenge in establishing, manning, and resourcing a new service. This challenge requires explaining the service’s purpose and contribution to national security, basically telling its story. A strong narrative allows a service to attract the right people, with the right skills and motivation. It helps retain them and inspire them to excellence. It helps convince Congress to provide the financial resources and innovative authorities required for its core missions.

The Space Force has a self-acknowledged public awareness problem and this year, for the first time, the service’s annual budget will dip. Space Force guardians should use the spotlight from real world events — like this story — to educate the public and advocate for resources. Instead, its leadership did not immediately step forward and even declined interviews on its development of counterspace capabilities.

We can’t know why guardians actually chose to stay silent. Senior civilian leaders may have told the military service to hold back, or the service may have self-censored. If the former is true, these civilian leaders have erred. The Space Force desperately needs that national platform, and its leadership has proven their ability to thread the needle in speaking on sensitive issues. Furthermore, it’s normal for service chiefs to address the public on the threat environment. For example, the Army Chief of Staff recently addressed the public through a think tank event about AUKUS. While AUKUS has become a politicized, highly publicized topic, Gen. Randy George used the platform to discuss the Army’s priorities and their value in the joint fight. However, if the Space Force self-censored, that indicates that the service is still suffering from risk averse tendencies inherited from the military space community of the past. The service should find a way to tell its story, which it can and must do within the confines of civilian leadership instruction. Civilian leaders need to pass the mic, and the service should readily and willingly take it.

In a recent report, I conclude that the service fell short of telling this story in its first three years, under its first chief of space operations, Gen. Jay Raymond. Now, the service is four-and-a-half years old. It spent much of the last roughly 18 months instituting lessons from the first three years under the leadership of Raymond’s successor, Gen. B. Chance Saltzman. It has refined its purpose internally and aligned structures, processes, training, and rhetoric with that purpose. The service now has a clearer message and has acknowledged its shortcomings in reaching critical audiences, but work remains to be done. The Space Force should account for public sentiment toward the military and space, capitalize on the current events, and channel its budding professional culture to reach its target audiences and relay its crucial role in national defense. Some guardians have tired of answering the question “what is the Space Force?” and wish to sequester themselves away to “do the work.” But no service is ever done speaking to the people, especially not one with so much ground to make up in the realm of public support.

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Early Iterations of a Story

Russia also made international headlines in November 2021 with a dangerous anti-satellite test. Then also, the Space Force stayed silent. At that time, the service was two years old and guardian leadership was understandably focused on setting up the service, rather than speaking to the public. The service was still grappling with how to understand and package its highly technical, often intangible mission in traditional military terms and concepts.

A mature organization ideally has clearly defined, mission-derived values and refined structures, practices, and a culture bolstering those values, but the nascent Space Force was still conceptualizing its mission and establishing structures and practices, and so its self-image was similarly under construction. Still, three early themes rose to the surface: agility, innovation, and a warfighting spirit.

The simplest ideal — agility — was well defined, drawing from the service’s inherent structural feature (its small size) and the nature of the threat (the near-instantaneous effects of actions in the space). In contrast, the ideal of innovation was too broadly defined, encompassing every aspect of high technology and deviation from the traditional military “way of doing things.” It also supported the public’s unfortunate association of this unfamiliar service with science fiction — an association that early Space Force decisions, intentionally or not, encouraged.

The ideal of warfighting was integral to early advocacy for the service’s independence, but the terms “warfighting domain” and “warfighter” subsequently declined in use. Unlike agility and innovation, the ideal of warfighting draws similarities between the Space Force and its fellow military services. Balancing on the tightrope of doing things differently but maintaining the argument for their independent status was critical for the first few years as the service weathered an administration change and faced potential disestablishment. Additionally, this waffling stemmed in part from a tension between the need to garner public support by discussing the threat and the space community’s historical reticence to lift veils of classification on that threat.

A Stronger Story

Saltzman took the helm at the end of 2022. By this time, Raymond had established the service’s bones. Saltzman could therefore go about the business of refining its structure, processes, and identity.

Under his leadership, the service has published several institutional artifacts, including a Guardian Spirit Handbook; a new mission statement; a theory of success; a Commercial Space Strategy; over two dozen concept notes; and, most recently, Space Force 101, a primer on the service’s purpose, organization, missions, culture, and symbology. The service has successfully reorganized components and created new ones. It has secured authorities to manage talent and acquisition to suit its mission. Guardian leadership has testified on the Hill and spoken at various think tank engagements, and even to Hollywood executives.

Through these artifacts and appearances, a more cohesive, assured voice emerged from the service, and the Space Force’s strategic narrative has evolved. Occasionally more explicit and specific discussion of U.S. counterspace missions has replaced the insistence on a “warfighter” identity. For example, the 2020 Space Force Capstone includes some permutation of the term 40 times, while Space Force 101, released this July, uses the term only once. This shift deftly sidesteps the lightning-rod question “how can a guardian be a warfighter if they face no personal risk” and skips to what matters — a guardian’s contribution to the joint fight in which every U.S. military service combines their capabilities and skills to deter and defeat adversaries across domains. Setting aside this debate should allow a unique, organic culture to develop as guardians train on and execute their missions without a somewhat divisive moniker dictated from above. Discussion of U.S. counterspace missions could be more explicit. Saltzman’s competitive endurance theory of success pulls some punches. Its discussion of counterspace focuses on addressing irresponsible adversary action in the domain, rather than making the case for denying an adversary the benefit of space. Space Force 101 treads similarly carefully. This choice may reflect policy guidance, but a recent call for “space fires” may indicate that policy is slowly loosening.

The service also refined the ideal of innovation. It doesn’t just mean inserting automation everywhere or buying the most bleeding-edge, exquisite technology at every turn. Often the innovation discussed today comes in the form of human capital and bureaucratic solutions.

A new theme has also emerged: professionalism. The Space Force will be a young service for a long time, but it has reached a new stage of maturity. In its beginning, ideals of agility and innovation conjured an image of a scrappy service making do with what it had, doing more with less. As service rhetoric evolved under Saltzman, that scrappy image morphed, at least aspirationally, into something more professional, “institutionalized,” and akin to a traditional military service. This shift evokes a seriousness that befits the service’s serious mission and serious budgetary needs. This theme also contrasts with sillier sci-fi allusions of the recent past and stands in for some of the soberness previously communicated by the term warfighter.

That seriousness and institutionalization comes into a healthy tension with the ways the service differentiates itself — agile systems, a willingness to experiment with unorthodox methods, and a tolerance for failure. The service story shines best when it appeals to service, pride, tirelessness, creativity, deep technical knowledge, and personal responsibility. It suffers when it relies on goofy pop science fiction references and individualism.

The Results

Is this new narrative working? Public opinion, recruitment, and resourcing offer a partial answer.

It is hard to measure public awareness or public opinion. Concerningly, the Defense Department’s market research organization reported that Space Force’s brand recognition among its target audience was at 4 percent in 2024. Still, in the midst of a recruitment crisis, the Space Force has always met its (albeit small) manpower requirements. The scant public polling data on public opinions about space show that interest in exploration has decreased in light of dire conditions on earth. For this reason, early Space Force ads that appealed to the awe-inspiring nature of space may have missed the mark. More recent ads that focus on the identity of a prospective guardian (“are you a square peg trying to fit into a round hole?”) and drive to serve may work better.

Congressional willingness to provide funding and authorities could be an indicator of understanding, but these decisions depend on many more factors than a service’s storytelling. This year, for the first time, the Space Force budget request dipped. This is in part because of tough trades the Department of Defense made under the constraints of the Fiscal Responsibility Act. The overall departmental budget request of $850 billion represents a 1 percent decrease in real dollars from the previous request, while the Space Force request for $29.4 billion represents a 4 percent decrease. The House markup slashed $323 million from the Space Force request, in the form of a temporarily curtailed GPSIIIF program (buying 1 instead of 2 satellites). This cut was due not to a shortcoming in messaging, but rather to the Space Force’s struggle with launch timelines. Other proposed cuts came from research and development. Compared to the other services, the Space Force invests a disproportionate part of its budget (consistently over 50 percent) in research and development, but even with these cuts, the service would have its largest research and development budget to date. Space watchers fret about the budget, but their concerns center on outyear projections that don’t sufficiently fund current projects. This belies more about trades than what Congress is willing to give. House and Senate markups support the Space Force’s requested increase in authorized active-duty numbers to reach an end strength of 9,800 (for those concerned about growth — the service would still be only one-twentieth the size of the Marine Corps, the next largest service).

One area of contention on the Hill indicates room for growth. End strength numbers could increase further depending on how many Air National Guard members consent to transfer to the Space Force and become active-duty guardians under a controversial Department of the Air Force proposal. This approach, radically different from the traditional model, could save money, allow guardians easier transition between part- and full-time status, and help the Space Force compete with the private sector for talent. However, the proposal has riled up Guard advocates and governors, and these constituencies have gained ground on the Hill. The service is losing this information battle, and greater public awareness and favor might have made a difference.

Seizing on the Battles Ahead

Justin Johnson argued in 2021 that the Space Force should worry less about public relations and more about delivering results. Saltzman expressed a similar sentiment, writing that he was tired of talking about the service’s “why” and was ready to talk about its “how.” Yet Saltzman clearly recognizes the importance of speaking to the public. Indeed the service requested $18 million for marketing “to establish the Space Force as a known, credible, and critical military entity.” But where will that money go? In its efforts to garner public attention through expensive marketing campaigns, the service should ensure that they are designed not only to capture the audience’s interest but also to relay the service’s strategic message and display their budding culture. In addition to these campaigns, service leaders should speak directly to issues already on the minds of the American public in a timely fashion. As military space experts, guardians should seize on national headlines and join the chorus providing context and answering questions. Additionally, civilian leadership should identify opportunities to pass Space Force the mic. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall has a great asset in Space Force leadership. They are serious and non-partisan space operators and technical experts with years of experience who are passionate about rectifying their public image. The service has made strides in developing and institutionalizing a narrative that suits its threat environment, missions, and organizational constraints. Now it needs to continue the work of communicating that identity to America.

Become a Member

Hannah Dennis recently left the Center for a New American Security, where she was a research associate in the Defense Program and authored Space to Grow: Foundational Opportunities and Challenges for the U.S. Space Force.

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Hannah Dennis · September 10, 2024

16. The Long Shadow of Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Debacle

There is one decision that is the proximate cause of the entire failed withdrawal from Afghanistan. That was the decision to withdraw the US military and abandon bases and resources that would be necessary to evacuate Americans and those at risk who were in harms way. This was based on the erroneous assumption that the Afghan government was sufficiently strong to remain in power and provide security and the additional assumption that withdrawing Americans before the military would undermine the confidence in the Afghan government and cause it to fall. There are many terrible decision made by all administrations going back to 2002 (the decisions of 2001 were the rights ones). The Biden administration would do well to own this decision and accept responsibility. There is no defense for making this wrong decision. And we should learn the lesson for the future - you never withdraw the military while you still might need to evaluate Americans. We must have a plan to evacuate Americans and those at risk. We did not in Afghanistan.

The Long Shadow of Biden’s Afghan Withdrawal Debacle

A damning House report reveals details and consequences that the press wants to ignore.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/afghanistan-withdrawal-report-house-foreign-affairs-michael-mccaul-joe-biden-kamala-harris-donald-trump-taliban-498a9b12?mod=latest_headlines

By The Editorial Board

Sept. 9, 2024 5:41 pm ET

The bombing area at Abbey Gate is pictured August 26, 2021, in Kabul, Afghanistan Photo: U.S. military's Central Command/Associated Press

A House committee has released a report on the Biden Administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal in 2021, and the press is dismissing the effort as partisan. But credit to GOP Rep. Michael McCaul for adding to public knowledge about a debacle whose consequences continue to harm U.S. security and bear on the stakes in November’s election.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee report is a 350-page indictment of President Biden’s choices at every point, a portrait of a Commander in Chief “determined to withdraw.” A litany of military advisers counseled that the Afghan government would collapse if the U.S. removed the small complement of 2,500 troops in country.

Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, who ran U.S. Central Command at the time, told the committee “he was unequivocal in his advice to the president.” Mr. Biden’s national security adviser Jake Sullivan conducted a review of U.S. policy in Afghanistan—and allowed Gen. Austin Scott Miller, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to attend merely “a single NSC deputies meeting,” the report says. Mr. Sullivan comes in for particular criticism.

The Administration also failed to plan properly for the possible evacuation of Americans. The committee “uncovered that the size of the U.S. Embassy Kabul instead grew during the retrograde,” owing to “a dogmatic insistence” on keeping a diplomatic footprint.

The report says “a significant amount of classified information was left to the Taliban” in the eventual rush to leave. U.S. personnel recalled a scramble to destroy documents and a bonfire in the Embassy courtyard.

The President’s refusal to maintain 2,500 troops meant the U.S. abandoned Bagram Air Base with its secure runway. That meant the evacuation had to be conducted in a panic from Kabul’s civilian airport, with security assistance from the Taliban. That nightmare resulted in 13 dead American service members from a suicide bomber. The report says “at least four Afghan civilians, including children,” fell to their deaths clinging to departing U.S. planes. The White House hailed the evacuation as if it were a Dunkirk-style triumph, when it was really a chaotic humiliation.

The Biden Team says Donald Trump left them little option after he negotiated a deal in 2020 with the Taliban to withdraw in 2021. As we said at the time, Mr. Trump struck a bad deal—not least in excluding the Afghan government from the talks.

But Mr. Biden has shown no such deference to Mr. Trump’s other policies, and the Taliban was violating its Doha promises in any case. Mr. Biden wanted out by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 for the political symbolism, and he imposed his own catastrophic political timetable. He owns that choice.

The press is wrong to consider this old news because the U.S. is still living with the damaging consequences. The report says the Taliban is even now holding seven American citizens, and the fate of Afghan women is horrific. Meanwhile, Afghanistan is again becoming a haven for the jihadists of ISIS-K and al Qaeda. The Islamic State attacks on Moscow and Iran could be preludes to an attack on U.S. targets. The Biden Administration “has not conducted a single strike against ISIS-K since 2021,” the report says.

More broadly, the Afghan withdrawal marked the end of credible American deterrence during the Biden Presidency. You can draw a straight line from the withdrawal to Vladimir Putin’s decision to roll into Ukraine, or why the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen aren’t afraid to fire missiles at commercial ships in the Red Sea.

Vice President Kamala Harris has trumpeted that she was the last person in the room when Mr. Biden decided to withdraw. What did she tell him? Mr. Trump or the moderators at Tuesday’s debate should ask Ms. Harris whether she still stands by Mr. Biden’s decision.

The most important duty of the next President is restoring U.S. deterrence to prevent a larger war. If Ms. Harris defends Biden’s withdrawal, then we’ll know she doesn’t understand the dangerous world we live in.

Ukraine Launches 144-Drone Barrage on Russia, Targeting Moscow and Key Regions

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · September 10, 2024

Moscow regional governor Andrey Vorobyov said in a Telegram post that a 46-year-old woman had been killed and several people wounded as a result of the strikes.

by Kyiv Post | September 10, 2024, 8:32 am

Ukraine launched a massive drone strike overnight, with up to 144 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) targeting multiple regions across Russia, including the capital Moscow, the Russian Defense Ministry reported on Tuesday, Sept. 10.

According to the ministry’s statement, Russian air defenses intercepted 72 drones over the Bryansk region, 20 over Moscow, 14 over Kursk, 13 over Tula, and 25 more across 5 other regions.

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The attack marks one of the largest drone assaults against Russia since the beginning of the war.

Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on the Telegram messaging app that emergency crews were dispatched to several sites across the region, including near the Zhukovo airport and the Domodedovo district – home to one of Moscow’s largest airports.

Ukraine and Russia routinely carry out nighttime drone attacks on each other’s territory.

Drones have reportedly struck three high-story residential buildings in Ramenskoye, a city in the Moscow region. At least one person was killed in the strikes, Governor Andrey Vorobyov confirmed. A 46-year-old woman died, and three others were hospitalized.

“A 46-year-old woman was killed (earlier, it was reported about the death of a nine-year-old child; this information was not confirmed). Forty-three people are settled in temporary accommodation facilities,” Vorobyov reported.

Residents of Kolomna and Kashyra, cities in the Moscow region, have also reported explosions and shooting, with smoke rising over the city.

The moment the drone struck Kashira was captured on video.

“Last night, UAV debris fell on the territory of Gorky and Lugovaya streets in Kashira-1. Shrapnel damaged the glazing of the preschool department and an apartment building on the territory of the private sector,” said the head of the city district, Mikhail Shuvalov.

“There are no other injuries or casualties. Emergency services operators are working at the site,” he added.

Russia’s RIA agency reported that both the Domodedovo and Zhukovo airports were closed for air traffic following the suspension of more than 30 domestic and international flights there and at other airports that serve the Russian capital.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin confirmed a fire had broken out on the runway at Zhukovsky airfield, caused by falling debris from a downed drone. Videos circulating online capture multiple scenes of the blaze at the site.

The pro-Russian Telegram channel Mash reported that Ukraine used “Fierce” aircraft-type drones in the attacks, capable of carrying 50 kilograms of explosives over a distance of up to 1,000 kilometers. The drones targeted Russian military infrastructure and civilian areas alike.

While the Russian Defense Ministry has not officially commented on the scale of the attacks, Ukrainian military intelligence previously suggested their new drones are capable of reaching targets up to 1,800 kilometers away, potentially putting dozens of Russian air bases within range.

Journalism. The newspaper's first print edition came out on Oct. 18, 1995, and went online in 1997.

kyivpost.com · by Kyiv Post · September 10, 2024

18. Don’t Hype the Terror Threat

Excerpts:

It is true that jihadi organizations around the world urge like-minded Americans into action, but this is scarcely new. Twenty years ago, bin Laden and other al Qaeda operatives were given loudly to proclaim that the United States “needs further blows” and warned that they could come at any moment. For the most part, however, such blows failed to materialize.

Wray and others are concerned that terrorists will join the large numbers of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border. Yet of the hundreds of millions of foreign visitors who were admitted legally into the United States in the two decades after 2001 and the millions more who entered illegally, few if any were agents smuggled in by al Qaeda or ISIS. In recent years, some migrants seeking entry have shown up among the two million names in the FBI’s terrorism watch list, but this seems to reflect the fact that the list itself is overly inclusive rather than suggesting constant attempts by jihadis to penetrate the U.S. homeland.

Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of outrage worldwide over American complicity in Israel’s destructive response to the vicious Hamas raid. But nearly a year later, that anger has yet to produce the increase in terrorist activity in the United States that Wray and others have cited as a potential threat.

More generally, the post-9/11 experience suggests that despite official alarm, even if such an increase did occur, it would be manageable without extraordinary actions. Allison and Morrell, however, call for significant policy steps: a review of “all previously collected information related to terrorism,” the use of “national emergency authorities” to prevent terrorists from entering via the southern border, and stepped-up covert U.S. actions all over the world to disrupt jihadi groups. In reality, there is little reason to believe that such measures are necessary.

Don’t Hype the Terror Threat

The Dangers of Official Alarmism

By John Mueller

September 10, 2024

Foreign Affairs · September 10, 2024

Testifying in Congress a few months ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the terrorism “threat environment,” already quite intense, had been further “heightened” when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023. “We’ve seen the threat from foreign terrorists rise to a whole nother level,” he argued. Citing Wray’s warning and those of other U.S. officials, Graham Allison and Michael Morell contend that “the United States faces a serious threat of a terrorist attack in the months ahead.” (“The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again,” June 10, 2024).

But the country has heard such alarms many times before and they have proved unjustified. This was particularly true, of course, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. In those years, Morrell and Allison sometimes joined the chorus of concern. Morell, who was the CIA official in charge of briefing the U.S. president at the time of the 9/11 attacks, recalled the atmosphere vividly in a book he wrote in 2015. “We were certain we were going to be attacked again,” he wrote, a conclusion supported by “thousands of intelligence reports.” In a 2004 book, Allison concluded that “on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.”

Morrell and Allison were hardly alone. As Jane Mayer observed in her book The Dark Side, “The only certainty shared by virtually the entire American intelligence community in the fall of 2001 was that a second wave of even more devastating terrorist attacks on America was imminent.” Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s mayor at the time, remarked later that any security expert would have concluded that “we’re looking at dozens and dozens and multiyears of attacks like this.”

In 2002, U.S. intelligence officials were telling reporters that there might be up to 5,000 operatives trained abroad by al Qaeda inside the United States. After a few years of intensive sleuthing, the FBI found no al Qaeda cells at all in the country. But the agency’s director, Robert Mueller, was not assuaged, telling a Senate committee in 2005 that he was “very concerned about what we are not seeing.”

In 2003, John Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, claimed that there was “a high probability that Al Qaida will attempt an attack using a [biological, chemical, radiological, or nuclear] weapon within the next two years.” Later that year, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft publicly warned that “al-Qaeda plans to attempt an attack on the United States in the next few months,” that it would “hit the United States hard,” and that preparations for such an attack might be 90 percent complete. No such assaults ever materialized, of course: indeed, after the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda never managed to carry out another major strike on the U.S. homeland.

Even after the 2011 U.S. raid in Pakistan that killed the al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden, experts continued to hype the threat the group posed. In the wake of bin Laden’s death, the political scientist Bruce Hoffman predicted that the raid would lead to “acts of retribution, vengeance, frustration and punishment” directed at the United States. The scholar John Arquilla, meanwhile, contended that any “lack of ‘spectaculars’” in attacks al Qaeda carried out after bin Laden’s death “should not be seen as a sign of a weakening al Qaeda, but rather as an indicator of a shift in strategy.”

Evidence seized in that raid, however, strongly suggested that the central al Qaeda organization was little more than an empty shell, harassed by U.S. drone strikes and starved of funds. In the words of the al Qaeda expert Nelly Lahoud, by that point, the group had become notable mainly for its “operational impotence.”

Al Qaeda did inspire would-be jihadis in the United States, and its quasi-successor, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS), inspired even more during its heyday from 2014 to 2017. In the two decades after 9/11, some 125 plots by Islamist extremists targeting the United States were either carried out or were disrupted by the authorities. (Many of the latter were in embryonic stages.) In total, these resulted in the deaths of about 100 people—about five per year, on average. The deaths were tragic, of course, but scarcely monumental; consider that on average, more than 300 Americans die every year from drowning in bathtubs.

THE CURRENT SITUATION

Despite the dire official warnings that Allison and Morrell cite, it is not at all clear that the threat to the United States from international terrorism has increased of late. There continue to be jihadi plots, but the authorities have managed to roll them up with familiar tactics. For example, a recent effort from Iran to enlist someone in the United States to assassinate John Bolton, who served as national security adviser in the Trump administration, was foiled by the FBI.

It is true that jihadi organizations around the world urge like-minded Americans into action, but this is scarcely new. Twenty years ago, bin Laden and other al Qaeda operatives were given loudly to proclaim that the United States “needs further blows” and warned that they could come at any moment. For the most part, however, such blows failed to materialize.

Wray and others are concerned that terrorists will join the large numbers of migrants who illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border. Yet of the hundreds of millions of foreign visitors who were admitted legally into the United States in the two decades after 2001 and the millions more who entered illegally, few if any were agents smuggled in by al Qaeda or ISIS. In recent years, some migrants seeking entry have shown up among the two million names in the FBI’s terrorism watch list, but this seems to reflect the fact that the list itself is overly inclusive rather than suggesting constant attempts by jihadis to penetrate the U.S. homeland.

Meanwhile, there has been a great deal of outrage worldwide over American complicity in Israel’s destructive response to the vicious Hamas raid. But nearly a year later, that anger has yet to produce the increase in terrorist activity in the United States that Wray and others have cited as a potential threat.

More generally, the post-9/11 experience suggests that despite official alarm, even if such an increase did occur, it would be manageable without extraordinary actions. Allison and Morrell, however, call for significant policy steps: a review of “all previously collected information related to terrorism,” the use of “national emergency authorities” to prevent terrorists from entering via the southern border, and stepped-up covert U.S. actions all over the world to disrupt jihadi groups. In reality, there is little reason to believe that such measures are necessary.

JOHN MUELLER is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Ohio State University, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and the author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them.

Foreign Affairs · September 10, 2024

19. Europe Takes a Trumpian Turn

Excerpts:

However, there is now an even deeper problem. The rise of the far right in Europe shows that gaining greater strategic autonomy from the United States is not the unproblematic alternative to NATO that many on both sides of the Atlantic seem to assume it is. What strategic autonomy would mean in practice for most European countries, including Germany, is exchanging dependence on the United States for dependence on one another and especially on France, the EU’s only nuclear power. But the possibility of a far-right government in France—a plausible outcome of the next presidential election, in 2027—makes this kind of dependence on France even less attractive than it already would have been, not least because of Le Pen’s many public ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would be possible to make the argument that it would be preferable for European countries, including Germany, to depend on Le Pen rather than Trump for their security. In particular, a realist might argue that whatever the ideology of their governments, European countries would nevertheless share similar strategic interests, an overlap that would make them more dependable partners. But the EU still imagines itself as standing for values that are the antithesis of those of the far right. Instead of arguing that the EU should abandon those values and pursue an approach based on shared interests, most foreign policy analysts seem simply to externalize the rise of the far right as if it were not also happening in Europe itself.

Having long underestimated the far right, European foreign policy elites are slowly waking up to the way in which it is influencing the EU. But because of how they idealize the EU and imagine the far right as an alien entity, they misunderstand the relationship between the two. They fail to see how much the far right is inherent in the EU rather than an external threat to it. This in turn makes it seem as if there is a straightforward solution to the possibility of a second Trump term: an “autonomous Europe” freed from its dependency on the United States. But reliance on other EU member states that have far-right governments or might have them in the near future risks creating another crisis altogether.

Europe Takes a Trumpian Turn

But the EU Can Survive the Rise of the Far Right

By Hans Kundnani

September 10, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project · September 10, 2024

In the European parliamentary elections in June, far-right political parties did better than ever before. Two far-right alliances are now the third- and fourth-largest groupings in the parliament, ahead of the centrist Renew Europe group. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally emerged as the largest party by far in the European polls, which prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to dissolve his country’s National Assembly and call snap elections. The RN did not win an absolute majority in those votes, but it became the biggest single party in the domestic legislative body for the first time.

These recent electoral gains of the far right in France—as well as successes in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe—have caused no small amount of consternation. The far right’s gains in the last couple of years have forced many centrist proponents of the European Union to wake up to the possibility of a far-right takeover of the EU, something that was long thought of as a conceptual and practical impossibility. From the perspective of these alarmed centrists, the nationalism of the far right poses a fundamental threat to the project of European integration. According to this view, the far right is a kind of alien force inherently antithetical to the EU—it is “anti-European.”

Such thinking rests, however, on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the far right and the EU. In truth, the far right and the EU are much more compatible than many would like to believe. The far right’s fervent “civilizationism,” which sees Europe as a white Christian bloc, is not inherently opposed to the ostensibly liberal project of European integration but rather was always part of it. In fact, as liberal politicians such as Macron increasingly speak about Europe in civilizational terms, the visions of the “pro-European” center right and Euroskeptic far right are converging.

Were the far right to become even more powerful within the EU than it already is, the bloc would not automatically unravel as many imagine. Rather, it would likely proceed further down the path it is already on—what I have called “the civilizational turn” in the European project. Thinking in a binary way about a liberal EU besieged by an illiberal far right externalizes the problem of the far right, obscuring a clearer understanding of how the EU might evolve in the future.

CIVILIZATION AND ITS MALCONTENTS

In Europe, the far right has long been understood primarily—even exclusively—as nationalist. To many who believe in the European project, in fact, this nationalism is precisely what is wrong with the far right. But this argument simplifies the thinking of the far right. As well as being nationalist, it is also civilizationalist—that is, it seeks to speak not only on behalf of a country against Europe but also on behalf of Europe against the rest of the world. In particular, it speaks on behalf of a European civilization that it sees as threatened by nonwhite immigrants whom it believes are replacing Europe’s native population.

Immediately after the European parliamentary elections, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban set up a new group in the parliament called Patriots of Europe, a name that perfectly captures this tension between nationalism and civilizationalism in the imagination of the far right. Members of the far right think of themselves as both nationalists and Europeans. They are not automatically opposed to the idea of European unity. They do tend to be skeptical of further integration and prefer what they call a Europe of sovereign states, but that is not a position that is extreme or exclusive to them. After all, it was also the vision of French President Charles de Gaulle.

In addition to simplifying the far right by focusing exclusively on its nationalism, many have idealized the EU as a cosmopolitan project, similar to the way some Americans idealize the United States and therefore think of former President Donald Trump as “un-American.” Many people in Europe imagine that when they choose to think of themselves as European rather than French, German, and so on, they are in effect saying they are citizens of the world. British Prime Minister Theresa May caricatured the EU as a cosmopolitan project when, while defending Brexit in 2016, she declared, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

The far right and the EU are much more compatible than many seem to believe.

Similarly, supporters of European integration—that is, the removal of barriers to the movement of capital, goods, and people within Europe—often speak of it as if it were global integration. When the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, for example, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso said the European project had shown “that it is possible for peoples and nations to come together across borders” and “that it is possible to overcome the differences between ‘them’ and ‘us.’”

In reality, the EU has always been a project that is analogous to nationalism rather than its opposite—call it regionalism, a kind of quasi nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Its supporters like to believe that it can be based only on civic values. But European regionalism has always also included ethnic and cultural elements connected to Christianity and whiteness. These ethnic and cultural elements of European identity did not simply disappear in 1945 in the wake of the great conflagration of World War II. Rather, they persisted well beyond and informed the European project itself, which, in the context of the Cold War, was imagined as much in civilizational as ideological terms.

There is also a particular American version of this tendency to idealize the EU as a model of multilateralism that is the antithesis of everything that Trump stands for. Yet the EU is already much more Trumpian than many Americans realize, especially in its approach to immigration: it, too, has been building a wall. The EU’s southern border is far deadlier than the United States’ southern border. Over 30,000 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean since 2014—more than five times the number of people who have died crossing the Sonoran Desert or the Rio Grande in the same period. According to Human Rights Watch, the EU’s policy toward migrants is simply to “let them die.”

TSHAPED FROM WITHIN

These two misconceptions—that the far right is nationalist and that the EU is inherently cosmopolitan—have created a blind spot around what a far-right EU might look like. Those who associate the far right exclusively with an insistence on national sovereignty have tended to worry that if the far right became stronger, it would prevent further integration within the EU or, worse, lead to European disintegration—that is, an unraveling of the EU as power is returned from Brussels to member states. But there is also another possibility: an EU in which integration continues, at least in some areas, but takes place along lines that are increasingly set by the far right.

Because of the way that they simplify the far right and idealize the EU, many of the EU’s most ardent proponents imagine that a far-right version of the body would have to be dramatically different from the current iteration—or perhaps even something like its opposite. But it doesn’t. In fact, to conceive what a future far-right EU might look like, just imagine the bloc going further in the direction it has already been going during the last decade, especially on issues around identity, immigration, and Islam. Since the refugee crisis in 2015, the pro-European center right has been increasingly mimicking the far right on these issues.

The pro-European center right has mimicked the far right on immigration.

In this respect, the center-right European People’s Party (EPP) has played a role in mainstreaming and normalizing far-right ideas that is somewhat analogous to the role played by the Republican Party in the United States. The key figure is Ursula von der Leyen, the German Christian Democrat who was reelected for a second term as European Commission president in July. When she first became the European Commission president in 2019, she created a new position of European Commissioner for Promoting the European Way of Life to coordinate an EU approach to migration. In both its name and its operations, this new office made it explicit that migration was not just a difficult policy problem to be resolved but a cultural threat to Europe.

As the far right has continued to rise, the EPP has made it clear that it thinks it must respond by taking even tougher measures to stop immigration than it has already taken since 2015. After the elections in the Netherlands last year, in which the Freedom Party—led by the far-right firebrand Geert Wilders—became the largest party in the Dutch parliament, EPP leaders such as Manfred Weber, the group’s president, said that the way to beat “populism” was to stop asylum seekers making it to Europe. Following the model set by the deal signed in 2016 between the EU and Turkey, the EU has subsequently paid authoritarian states in North Africa to violently stop migrants crossing the Mediterranean—despite the EU’s claims to stand for democracy and human rights.

As the pro-European center right has enabled the far right, the far right has also become more willing to operate within the EU rather than seeking to simply thwart it. It is particularly striking that Fabrice Leggeri—the director of the EU border agency Frontex from 2015 to 2022, during which time the agency’s budget increased from around $160 million to around $830 million—stood as a candidate for the RN in the recent European elections and is now a member of the European Parliament. That the lead EU agency on migration was for the last decade being run by a supporter of Le Pen is a good illustration of how, rather than threatening the EU from outside, the far right has for some time been shaping it from within.

THE AUTONOMY ILLUSION

The rise of the far right in Europe also has implications for current debates about European security. In the last few months, a flurry of proposals have advised Europeans on how to respond to a second Trump presidency—or, as some put it, how Europe can be “Trump-proofed”. Many of those who make these recommendations speak generically of Europe as if it were a clearly defined and unitary actor. But worse than this distortion, many analysts also tend to ignore political developments in Europe itself. In fact, they seem to talk about the problem of European security as if the only far-right government in Europe is Orban’s in Hungary. In reality, there are others, including that of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni—and there could be more in the future.

The current debate in Brussels and other European capitals about the need for European “strategic autonomy”—in other words, an EU that no longer needs to rely on the military protection of the United States—is a rerun of the one prompted by Trump’s election in 2016. Since then, European analysts have focused mostly on the mechanics of how to achieve what Germans call Handlungsfähigkeit, or “the ability to act.” One particular aspect of the problem is that the United Kingdom—a key European security provider, as its leading role in supporting Ukraine has illustrated—is now outside the EU, which limits the potential of the EU as a vehicle for delivering European security.

However, there is now an even deeper problem. The rise of the far right in Europe shows that gaining greater strategic autonomy from the United States is not the unproblematic alternative to NATO that many on both sides of the Atlantic seem to assume it is. What strategic autonomy would mean in practice for most European countries, including Germany, is exchanging dependence on the United States for dependence on one another and especially on France, the EU’s only nuclear power. But the possibility of a far-right government in France—a plausible outcome of the next presidential election, in 2027—makes this kind of dependence on France even less attractive than it already would have been, not least because of Le Pen’s many public ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would be possible to make the argument that it would be preferable for European countries, including Germany, to depend on Le Pen rather than Trump for their security. In particular, a realist might argue that whatever the ideology of their governments, European countries would nevertheless share similar strategic interests, an overlap that would make them more dependable partners. But the EU still imagines itself as standing for values that are the antithesis of those of the far right. Instead of arguing that the EU should abandon those values and pursue an approach based on shared interests, most foreign policy analysts seem simply to externalize the rise of the far right as if it were not also happening in Europe itself.

Having long underestimated the far right, European foreign policy elites are slowly waking up to the way in which it is influencing the EU. But because of how they idealize the EU and imagine the far right as an alien entity, they misunderstand the relationship between the two. They fail to see how much the far right is inherent in the EU rather than an external threat to it. This in turn makes it seem as if there is a straightforward solution to the possibility of a second Trump term: an “autonomous Europe” freed from its dependency on the United States. But reliance on other EU member states that have far-right governments or might have them in the near future risks creating another crisis altogether.

HANS KUNDNANI is a Visiting Fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University and the author of Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project.

Foreign Affairs · by Eurowhiteness: Culture, Empire and Race in the European Project · September 10, 2024

20. Dissecting China’s purported carrier strategy against Taiwan

Dissecting China’s purported carrier strategy against Taiwan - Breaking Defense

Ben Ho in this op-ed maintains that should China deploy flattops in an anti-access Taiwan strategy, it would likely be as "fleets-in-being."

breakingdefense.com · by Ben Ho Wan Beng · September 9, 2024

An F/A-18 fighter jet takes off from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier during a three-day maritime exercise between the US and Japan in the Philippine Sea on January 31, 2024. (Photo by RICHARD A. BROOKS/AFP via Getty Images)

Last month, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) published a report that has a section outlining how China would likely use its aircraft carriers as part of Beijing’s much-touted anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy. Citing declassified sources from Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND), the report added that Chinese carrier operations are “geared towards ‘denying’ the United States military access to the Taiwan Strait area of operations.”

While many naval observers — including this author, who previously covered this issue on these pages — believe that carrier strike groups (CSGs) of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy (PLAN) would only have a limited role to play in a Taiwan contingency, the MAC seems to suggest that this would not be the case — and perhaps with some credibility, given that the council drew its conclusion from MND sources.

How then would such a scenario — let’s say in the late 2020s, which brings China’s carrier total to three — possibly play out and what to make of it?

First and foremost, aircraft carriers are likely a part of the Chinese A2/AD edifice only as far as these vessels draw attention away from other, perhaps more important missions. That said, Beijing would do well to deploy its carriers as a “fleet-in-being” as opposed to capital ships to jostle with the adversary for sea control.

Simply put, a fleet-in-being is a force that does not actively seek battle with the (stronger) adversary, but whose mere existence would be a factor in the calculus of opposing strategists. As Trevor Phillips-Levine and Andrew Tenbusch rightly pointed out in a piece for the Centre for International Maritime Security, enemy fleets-in-being “require considerable diversions of resources and capabilities kept in reserve, whether those fleets are a direct participant in an operation or not.”

This concept of operations would see the Fujian, Shandong, and Liaoning — whether concentrated in a single or two or more task forces — roaming the Philippine Sea, but not actively seeking battle with the US Navy in order to complicate Washington’s calculus and tie up American forces that could be better utilized elsewhere. (If this author were the PLAN commander, he would have two of such entities — one cantered on the much more capable “large-deck” Fujian and the other consisting of the two “light” carriers. Such a disposition of forces should be a meaningful balance between achieving concentration/massing of forces, a key principle of war, and dispersion, which is crucial to signature management in the contemporary battlespace.)

It makes sense for the PLAN to adopt this CONOPS. After all, the Fujian, Shandong, and Liaoning are the crown jewels of the Chinese navy and despite the aegis accorded to them by Beijing’s vaulted, though untested, “fortress fleet,” it would arguably still be suicidal for PLAN flattops to seek battle with the US Navy (USN). Indeed, the latter should deploy at least two carrier groups — possibly more — for a Taiwan operation given the extremely high stakes involved.

Should the Chinese try to fight a 21st-century version of the 1944 Battle of the Philippine Sea, PLAN chieftains know the Americans have the edge in experience. By the late 2020s, the US would have almost 110 years of experience in carrier operations; the Chinese on the other hand, only less than 20. And the USN mainstay carrier-based fighter, the F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, is combat proven, while its PLAN counterpart, the J-15 Flying Shark, is not.

On the other hand, who holds the cards in the numbers game is less clear. While 140-odd aircraft on the two notional US carriers would square off against 110 on all three Chinese flattops, the latter could count to a larger extent on support from land-based airpower. (Admittedly, while a bean-counting exercise of this sort is imperfect in assessing combat capabilities, it nevertheless offers a decent starting point for the discussion.) Tellingly, retired Taiwanese admiral and former vice defense minister Lee Hsi-ming maintained last year that PLAN carriers “would not be able to withstand attacks by the US military.”

How US naval planners react to such a Chinese fleet-in-being depends on what they make of this force. American commanders steeped in the concept of sea control should bear in mind what transpired in the Cape Engano engagement of the 1944 Battle of Leyte Gulf. There, the entire US carrier force involved in the battle was deployed against its Japanese counterpart, and it turned out that the latter was just a decoy to divert attention from the Leyte beachhead — with almost disastrous consequences for the Americans.

Think also of the disproportionate effects a single US carrier force or two had in the early months of the Pacific War on the Japanese war effort. To illustrate, Imperial Japan was so taken aback by the 1942 Doolittle Raid (which had minimal tactical effects, but which was strategically profound) that it devoted an entire operation — the Midway campaign — to seek a decisive battle with US flattops.

In that regard, every single USN platform seeking out Chinese CSGs would be one less American asset away from what should be the main effort, which is to relieve the by-then beleaguered Taiwanese forces. And every single day the USN devotes to finding its adversary on the high seas buys more time for the People’s Republic in its military operation against Taiwan.

To accentuate the fleet-in-being concept while exploiting the mobility of warships in general at the same time, China would also do well to not tether its carriers to an area 300 to 800 kilometers off eastern Taiwan, as the Mainland Affairs Council report believes these vessels would do. The figures raised suggest that Chinese CSGs would station themselves such that eastern Taiwan is within range of carrier airpower. As per the MAC, such a disposition of forces would bring about an “east-west pincer attack” on, “an all-round island siege” of Taiwan.

To be sure, this modus operandi could divert Taiwan’s attention to its east coast and complicate its defense planning. However, this CONOPS violates to some extent the tenet “do not tie a mobile fleet to a piece of ground.” Indeed, this author wrote last year that such a set-up could see the Chinese navy “boxed in from four directions between unfriendly forces,” not just two as the MAC report contended.

PLAN strategists well versed in history would also note that this set-up is reminiscent of what the Japanese did during the initial phases of the Battle of Midway. What happened was that Imperial forces were split between two competing objectives — to fight the US fleet and to subjugate Midway island. This decision, which violated the principle of war regarding the selection and maintenance of the aim, contributed to the Japanese debacle in the battle.

All in all, it should not come as a surprise that China might use its carriers in a somewhat unconventional manner during a Taiwan conflict. In recent years, naval commentators have written about deploying the aircraft carrier in non-traditional ways, with the article by Phillips-Levine and Tenbusch mentioned above going as far as recommending that the flattop be used as “bait.”

Given the Chinese proclivity to worship at the altar of Sun Tzu and use deception as a stratagem of warfare, one would probably not want to bet against the People’s Republic using its flattops ingeniously.

However, even if utilized in a secondary role, given the exalted, even phallic, status of aircraft carriers for China — or for that matter, any country which owns them — one who expects them to be relatively weakly defended come wartime a la Imperial Japan’s Northern Force during the Battle off Cape Engano is going to be badly disappointed.

Ben Ho writes on airpower and naval issues.

breakingdefense.com · by Ben Ho Wan Beng · September 9, 2024

21. How our military can deter foreign conflicts and win future wars

Excerpts:

"No plan survives contact with the enemy" is one of the most misquoted military wisdoms, which belongs to Prussian Chief of General Staff Helmut von Moltke the Elder. He is known for serving as the architect of Prussian military supremacy in mid-19th century Europe.

What von Moltke actually said was far more nuanced. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." A diligent and skillful planner, he stressed the importance of having an adaptable plan, which can be modified in rapidly-changing conditions. The proper plan, in his view, must include multiple options, factoring in various possible outcomes. And that can only be achieved through thorough preparation.

Regretfully, I don't believe such preparation exists in the Defense Department. In 2001, prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon had no pre-existing plan. Operation Enduring Freedom, seeking to destroy al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power, was therefore, based on reused elements of the CIA’s previous contingency plans for collaboration with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and some options hastily prepared by the U.S. military, including the Joint Special Operations Command.

The Pentagon’s lack of preparation and culturally ignorant approach to war has resulted in the failure to anticipate how the insurgents in Afghanistan (and subsequently in Iraq) would adapt, fight and stymie the world’s most sophisticated and technologically advanced military. The insurgents’ employment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) enabled them, the weaker side, to gain advantage over U.S. forces. IEDs - which were responsible for 60% of all American fatalities and half of American casualties in Afghanistan - mitigated U.S. advantages in resources, technology, and ground combat. These homemade gadgets mangled our military hardware and maimed our service members.

To defeat even low-tech adversaries, U.S. planners must learn to out-improvise them, rather than count on the technological crutch of advanced weaponry. Outsmarting your opponent requires doing your homework on him prior to deploying onto the battlefield.

Defining ahead of time what victory looks like will help avoid defaulting to nation-building, senseless fighting and loss of U.S. lives for twenty years in a country like Afghanistan. It is called "the graveyard of empires" for a reason.

How our military can deter foreign conflicts and win future wars

'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,' Sun Tzu wrote

By Rebekah Koffler Fox News

foxnews.com · by Rebekah Koffler Fox News

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As a former DIA intelligence officer specializing in Russian war-fighting strategy and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mindset, I recently had the honor to brief one of the U.S. combatant commands on major security threats to our homeland. This briefing and my interaction with high-ranking officers and their staff prompted me to pen this piece.

As the world has become increasingly unstable under the Biden-Harris presidency, the risk of the U.S. military having to fight a three-theater war has never been higher. The United States is already involved in two conflicts – the Russia-Ukraine one, by proxy, in Europe and another one in the Middle East, as Israel is defending itself against the Iranian-led Axis of Resistance. A war with China over Taiwan also may erupt as early as next year, according to a high-ranking U.S. military officer who heads up U.S. Air Mobility Command.

But how can America win three simultaneous wars if it has struggled to win one single war in a quarter of a century? Think Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Libya. No decisive meaningful military victory has been achieved by U.S. forces in these conflicts, despite the fact that it has faced much smaller opponents who lack advanced weaponry and some don’t even have a regular army. That is despite the fact that, tactically, our military is the best war-fighting force in military history.

From left to right, Russian President Vladimir Putin, President Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Getty Images)

Here are the top three actions the Pentagon and the national security apparatus must take in order to deter wars or start winning them.

Understand your adversary

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle." This guidance comes from the renowned ancient Chinese strategist and general Sun Tzu. In his seminal work, "The Art of War," the earliest known treatise on war and military science dating back to the fifth century B.C., Sun Tzu stressed the paramount importance of knowing your opponent when engaging in warfare.

To this day, contemporary Chinese and Russian military planners religiously adhere to Sun Tzu’s precepts. Their entire warfare philosophy centers on the elements of deception and surprise. To win means to deceive your enemy. But to outplay your opponent, you must first understand how he thinks and how he fights.

The Pentagon is seen from Air Force One as it flies over Washington, March 2, 2022. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

It's my view that our military and intelligence lacks such understanding. Instead, the Pentagon relies on a one-size-fits-all approach, erroneously believing that superior weapons, advanced technology and masterful tactics will prevail in any war over any opposing force. Nowhere was this misguided belief more vividly disproven than in the U.S. failure in Afghanistan.

In December 2019, the so-called Afghanistan Papers, a trove of confidential government documents containing two thousand pages of impressions by four hundred direct participants in the war, ranging from generals to diplomats, revealed stunning facts. The Pentagon did not have the faintest idea about Afghanistan before invading it 2001 -- the culture, mindset, and warfighting style of its adversary. And that is the simple reason for Washington’s abysmal performance in Afghanistan. "We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan—we didn’t know what we were doing," Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015, "What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."

UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters fly during a military parade to mark the third anniversary of the withdrawal of U.S.-led troops from Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base in the Parwan Province of Afghanistan on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Siddiqullah Alizai)

After 20 years, the result of this was more than 2 trillion dollars spent on the war, and 7,000 deaths of American and allied servicemen and women. The Biden administration withdrew our forces and the same murderous regime, the Taliban, is ruling the country. Except now, these barbarians have billions of dollars worth of our top secret military hardware.

Close gaps and minimize vulnerabilities

Because our military is the best in the world in conventional warfare, no foreign power would dare challenge it in a head-to-head kinetic fight. Instead, our adversaries have developed asymmetric strategies to win a war against our military. These strategies seek to exploit vulnerabilities, such as over-reliance on technology. Indeed, we are dependent on satellites and access to the internet for every aspect of war-fighting and in our civilian life. Satellites are used for global navigation, water management, power grid monitoring, weather forecasting, broadband access and telecommunications for applications ranging from banking to education to telemedicine, among other things.

U.S. Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade walk towards helicopter transport as part of Operation Khanjar at Camp Dwyer in Helmand Province in Afghanistan on July 2, 2009. (Manpreet Romana/AFP via Getty Images)

Russia and China’s military strategies include cyber strikes and anti-satellite attacks targeting our critical infrastructure, government networks and military systems. The Pentagon has known about the possibility of attacks on U.S. space systems since January 2001, when a commission led by the then Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld issued a report warning about a space Pearl Harbor.

Similarly, the Pentagon has been aware of gaps in our cybersecurity since 1999, when the Russians breached multiple U.S. government and military agencies, including weapons labs, and exfiltrated massive amounts of sensitive data.

Yet, our satellites remain unprotected. Even our weapons arsenal, including major advanced systems such as the Patriot missile system, are vulnerable to cyberattacks, according to a recent U.S. Government Accountability Office audit.

Consequently, winning against China or Russia, both of whom have plans to inflict a Cyber Armageddon or a Space Pearl Harbor on our homeland, if we deploy forces into the theater to defend Taiwan or a former Soviet nation like Ukraine, would be highly problematic.

Have a war plan on the books and a clear definition of victory

Taiwanese soldiers are deployed during a war and disaster drill as part of the annual Wan-An Air Raid Drill at a seaport in New Taipei, Taiwan, on July 23, 2024. The drill, which coincides with the annual Han Kuang Exercise, is joined by nearly 2,000 individuals from government agencies including the military, fire fighting and rescue services. It is held to simulate emergency responses to huge disasters and attacks by China, as Beijing has increased its military presence in the Taiwan Strait. (Photo by Daniel Ceng/Anadolu via Getty Images)

"No plan survives contact with the enemy" is one of the most misquoted military wisdoms, which belongs to Prussian Chief of General Staff Helmut von Moltke the Elder. He is known for serving as the architect of Prussian military supremacy in mid-19th century Europe.

What von Moltke actually said was far more nuanced. "No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength." A diligent and skillful planner, he stressed the importance of having an adaptable plan, which can be modified in rapidly-changing conditions. The proper plan, in his view, must include multiple options, factoring in various possible outcomes. And that can only be achieved through thorough preparation.

Regretfully, I don't believe such preparation exists in the Defense Department. In 2001, prior to the invasion of Afghanistan, the Pentagon had no pre-existing plan. Operation Enduring Freedom, seeking to destroy al Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power, was therefore, based on reused elements of the CIA’s previous contingency plans for collaboration with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and some options hastily prepared by the U.S. military, including the Joint Special Operations Command.

A Chinese PLA J-16 fighter jet flies in an undisclosed location. China’s military sent 71 planes, including J16 fighter jets and seven ships toward Taiwan in a 24-hour display of force directed at the island, Taiwan’s defense ministry said Monday, Dec. 26, 2022. (Taiwan Ministry of Defense via AP)

The Pentagon’s lack of preparation and culturally ignorant approach to war has resulted in the failure to anticipate how the insurgents in Afghanistan (and subsequently in Iraq) would adapt, fight and stymie the world’s most sophisticated and technologically advanced military. The insurgents’ employment of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) enabled them, the weaker side, to gain advantage over U.S. forces. IEDs - which were responsible for 60% of all American fatalities and half of American casualties in Afghanistan - mitigated U.S. advantages in resources, technology, and ground combat. These homemade gadgets mangled our military hardware and maimed our service members.

To defeat even low-tech adversaries, U.S. planners must learn to out-improvise them, rather than count on the technological crutch of advanced weaponry. Outsmarting your opponent requires doing your homework on him prior to deploying onto the battlefield.

Defining ahead of time what victory looks like will help avoid defaulting to nation-building, senseless fighting and loss of U.S. lives for twenty years in a country like Afghanistan. It is called "the graveyard of empires" for a reason.

Rebekah Koffler is a strategic military intelligence analyst and a freelance editorial writer. She is the author of Putin’s Playbook; Regnery 2021, and the host of a podcast "Censored But Not Silenced." Rebekah also is the Author of American Bolsheviks: The Persecution of Donald Trump and the Sovietization of America; Post Hill Press, November 12, 2024. Twitter: @rebekah0132

foxnews.com · by Rebekah Koffler Fox News

22. Hawks want a new Cold War but are cagey about the cost. So we did the math.

Excerpts:

What remains unclear is why the commission assumes that Pentagon spending should grow as the U.S. economy does. Americans’ economic output does not determine the level of defense spending necessary to protect national interests or deter attacks against the U.S. or its allies.

Imagine a billionaire who insists on spending at least 5 percent of his net worth on housing. But just because he can spend $50 million on a house doesn’t mean he must — or should. A rental, or a much cheaper house, will shelter him from the rain. There are a range of options under the $50 million price tag that will fill the billionaire’s housing needs.

The same principle applies to national defense. The 2022 commission report argues for a new Cold War without telling the American people how much it would cost, despite acknowledging that drastic increases to defense spending would require public support. The least they can do is be honest about the price tag — somewhere between $5 to $10 trillion in additional Pentagon spending. That should give anyone sticker shock.

The U.S. is better off prioritizing its national interests and investing in non-military tools of statecraft. The future requires smarter defense spending, not more.

Hawks want a new Cold War but are cagey about the cost. So we did the math.

by Christopher Preble and Julia Gledhill, opinion contributors - 09/06/24 12:00 PM ET

The Commission on the National Defense Strategy proposed in a recent report significant entitlement cuts and tax increases to drastically increase military spending. But they refuse to say by how much.

The report complains that the American people “have been inadequately informed” about the threats the country faces. But if they wish to be taken seriously, the commissioners will need to spell out what Americans will be expected to pay to sustain the sprawling force they claim is necessary.

Congress established the commission to review the 2022 National Defense Strategy, its implementation and the state of the global strategic environment. Lawmakers probably knew the conclusion before a single word was written. Half of the members of the 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission participated in a previous iteration back in 2018, including Amb. Eric Edelman, whom Republicans selected to serve as vice chair. Democrats chose former Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) as chair.

Given its makeup, the 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission largely echoes the sentiments expressed in 2018. That panel argued that the U.S. was unprepared for “great power competition” and recommended that lawmakers increase defense spending by 3 to 5 percent above inflation annually. The 2022 National Defense Strategy Commission advocates for more spending in fiscal year 2027 and beyond, even while noting that real growth in defense spending in 2023 exceeded 6 percent. Apparently, 5 percent isn’t enough for the commissioners after all.

Commissioners call for spending to put the country on a “glide path to support efforts commensurate with the U.S. national effort seen during the Cold War.” The commission neglects to explain what this means, pointing instead to a graph of Pentagon spending as a percentage of gross domestic product from 1952 to 2028. For reference, defense spending ranged from 4.9 to 16.9 percent of GDP during the Cold War.

Nowhere in their 132-page report do the commissioners explicitly state what level of Pentagon spending as a percentage of GDP is appropriate. They do not explain how quickly the U.S. should reach such a target. They are similarly reluctant to put the costs in terms understandable to normal human beings: dollars and cents.

So we did the math.

From 1951 to 1990, defense spending (“budget authority,” to nerds) averaged 7.3 percent of GDP. In 2023, Pentagon spending as a portion of GDP was 3.2 percent. Assuming lawmakers gradually increase the Department of Defense’s budget to reach 7.3 percent of GDP by 2034, they would add about $10 trillion in additional spending over that period.

A more conservative effort to bring Pentagon spending to about 5 percent of GDP — the lower end of Cold War spending — would still cost taxpayers around $5 trillion more between now and 2034, on top of the more than $9.3 trillion that the Pentagon is already projected to spend over that period.

The commission justifies significantly higher defense spending by making the case for an “all elements of national power” approach to integrated deterrence, which involves greater integration throughout the government and military, as well as with American allies and partners. Commissioners write that integrated deterrence relies on better coordinating military power with “diplomacy, economic investment, cybersecurity, trade, education, industrial capacity, technical innovation, civic engagement, and international cooperation.” However, the commission never spells out the relative importance of different elements of national power to integrated deterrence.

A fair-minded reading of their report would have you believe that annual Pentagon spending could exceed $3 trillion by 2034. They also call for higher budgets for Departments of State, Commerce and Treasury. The Department of Homeland Security would also get more. How much will be left for everything else? They don’t say, but they do acknowledge that the “ballooning U.S. deficit also poses national security risks.”

So, how much will taxes need to increase and other spending be cut? They don’t say. The report is more explicit about what a military posture for integrated deterrence would look like, proposing a “multi-theater force construct” to preserve influence worldwide. Such an approach reflects an unwillingness to prioritize among competing U.S. national interests. But prioritization is the essence of strategy; a larger military footprint would render the U.S. strategically insolvent and thus less secure.

However you interpret the commission’s report, its authors advocate for increasing defense spending by trillions of dollars in the next decade. Their argument is that “deterring war by projecting [military] strength” is “far preferable to and less costly than war.”

What remains unclear is why the commission assumes that Pentagon spending should grow as the U.S. economy does. Americans’ economic output does not determine the level of defense spending necessary to protect national interests or deter attacks against the U.S. or its allies.

Imagine a billionaire who insists on spending at least 5 percent of his net worth on housing. But just because he can spend $50 million on a house doesn’t mean he must — or should. A rental, or a much cheaper house, will shelter him from the rain. There are a range of options under the $50 million price tag that will fill the billionaire’s housing needs.

The same principle applies to national defense. The 2022 commission report argues for a new Cold War without telling the American people how much it would cost, despite acknowledging that drastic increases to defense spending would require public support. The least they can do is be honest about the price tag — somewhere between $5 to $10 trillion in additional Pentagon spending. That should give anyone sticker shock.

The U.S. is better off prioritizing its national interests and investing in non-military tools of statecraft. The future requires smarter defense spending, not more.

Christopher Preble is senior fellow and director of the Reimagining U.S. Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. Julia Gledhill is a research associate for the National Security Reform Program at the Stimson Center.

23. Sen. Tuberville blocks promotion of Lloyd Austin’s top military aide

Sen. Tuberville blocks promotion of Lloyd Austin’s top military aide

Lt. Gen. Ronald Clark was among the defense secretary’s senior staff who, upon learning of his hospitalization, did not immediately notify the White House or Congress.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/09/tommy-tuberville-ronald-clark-lloyd-austin/

Lt. Gen. Ronald Clark speaks with reporters at the Pentagon in 2022. (Lisa Ferdinando/Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs)

By Dan Lamothe

September 9, 2024 at 7:54 p.m. EDT

Sen. Tommy Tuberville has blocked the promotion of an Army general who is a senior aide to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, people familiar with the matter said, threatening a confrontation between the Republican firebrand and the Pentagon just weeks before the presidential election while reviving a months-old furor over the military chief’s medical secrecy.

Tuberville (Ala.) has frozen the nomination of Lt. Gen. Ronald P. Clark to become the four-star commander of all U.S. Army forces in the Pacific, according to the senator’s spokeswoman, Mallory Jaspers, and two other officials familiar with the emerging standoff. The maneuver, which has not been previously reported, restricts Clark’s nomination from coming up for a vote in the Senate and could mark the beginning of the end of his 36-year military career.

Clark, 58, was serving in his role as Austin’s senior military assistant when the defense secretary underwent surgery on Dec. 22 to treat prostate cancer and a week later was admitted to intensive care in crisis, having developed severe complications from the procedure.

Austin, who turned 71 in August, spent about two weeks in the hospital and eventually was diagnosed with infections in his urinary tract and bladder.

The incident caused an uproar in Washington after it emerged that Clark and other senior members of Austin’s staff did not know about his cancer diagnosis and surgery until he was in intensive care on Jan. 2, and then withheld that information from President Joe Biden and senior White House officials for two more days once they were made aware.

Eventually, the Pentagon disclosed Austin’s hospitalization to Congress and the American public on Jan. 5, three days after his top aides learned about it. The secrecy angered lawmakers from both political parties, who said the defense secretary’s decision showed a stunning lack of judgment.

Jaspers, in a statement, linked the hold on Clark’s promotion directly to the political imbroglio over Austin’s health crisis.

“Sen. Tuberville has concerns about Lt. Gen. Clark’s actions during Secretary Austin’s hospitalization,” Jaspers told The Washington Post in a statement. “Lt. Gen. Clark knew that Sec. Austin was incapacitated and did not tell the Commander in Chief. As a senior commissioned officer, Lt. Gen. Clark’s oath requires him to notify POTUS when the chain of command is compromised.” POTUS is shorthand for president of the United States.

Jaspers added that Tuberville is awaiting the results of a forthcoming Defense Department inspector general review of the incident, potentially leaving an off-ramp in the dispute.

Another Senate aide familiar with the issue said that if Tuberville had not placed a hold on Clark’s nomination, another Republican may have done so. Some Democrats also have concerns about how Austin’s hospitalization was handled, the aide added, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue remains sensitive.

A Pentagon spokesman, James Adams, said in a statement that Clark has served in several positions of leadership in recent military conflicts and previously led troops in the Pacific. The job for which he has been nominated would place him at the forefront of the Pentagon’s efforts to contain China and defend Taiwan.

“Lt. Gen. Clark is highly qualified and was nominated for this critical position because of his experience and strategic expertise,” the statement said. “We urge the Senate to confirm all of our qualified nominees. These holds undermine our military readiness.”

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill last year. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

The situation has echoes of an extended hold that Tuberville placed on hundreds of military promotions last year, in a dispute over the Pentagon’s travel-reimbursement policy for personnel who seek an abortion outside the state where they are stationed. Tuberville’s showdown with the Defense Department then gummed up the military personnel system for months. Eventually, his Republican colleagues decried the gambit as damaging and he backed down.

In the case of Austin’s hospitalization, Pentagon officials have said that at no point was command and control of the U.S. military in doubt. Yet they have struggled to explain why they waited days to notify the White House. Austin’s chief of staff at the time, Kelly Magsamen, was sick with the flu, defense officials said, but other senior aides — including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr. — also knew about Austin’s condition and did not communicate it.

Magsamen resigned from her role in June. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Sabrina Singh, told reporters then that Magsamen has “earned some well-deserved time off,” and that her departure had nothing to do with forthcoming findings by the inspector general.

Austin apologized to the nation during a news conference on Feb. 1, saying the cancer diagnosis was a “gut punch” that he did not handle well.

“I want to be crystal clear: We did not handle this right. I did not handle this right,” Austin told reporters then. “I should have told the president about my cancer diagnosis. I should have also told my team and the American public, and I take full responsibility.”

The matter has been under review by Robert Storch, the Defense Department inspector general, since January, with the independent watchdog promising then “to examine the roles, processes, procedures, and actions” surrounding Austin’s surgery and subsequent hospitalization. Mollie Halpern, a spokeswoman for Storch, said in an email Monday that she was unable to disclose when the review may be completed. The inspector general’s office, she said, does not provide timelines about ongoing work “to protect the integrity of the investigative process.”

Another Pentagon review commissioned by Magsamen found in February that there was “no attempt to obfuscate” Austin’s cancer diagnosis, and that Austin’s aides felt constrained by medical privacy laws. That review, conducted by career civil servants, was dismissed by Republicans as an incomplete examination of the facts by Austin’s subordinates.

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By Dan Lamothe

Dan Lamothe joined The Washington Post in 2014 to cover the U.S. military. He has written about the Armed Forces for more than 15 years, traveling extensively, embedding with five branches of service and covering combat in Afghanistan.follow on X @danlamothe

24. Watchdog challenges SOCOM’s plan to buy new armed aircraft to watch over special ops troops

Watchdog challenges SOCOM’s plan to buy new armed aircraft to watch over special ops troops

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · September 9, 2024

Air Force Special Operations Command received two AT-802U trainer aircraft at Hurlburt Field, Fla., on June 28, 2024. These aircraft will be used to train test pilots in preparation for the new Armed Overwatch (OA-1K) variant. (Ty Pilgrim/U.S. Air Force)

The Pentagon should further analyze the capabilities of the new aircraft that defense officials have selected to watch over special operators working in austere environments and consider slowing its purchase of the planes, a federal watchdog warned in a new report.

The Government Accountability Office — an independent federal auditing agency — warned in a report published last week that U.S. Special Operations Command had yet to complete an analysis justifying its plans to purchase dozens of the new planes, dubbed OA-1K armed overwatch aircraft. The warning follows a similar assessment completed by GAO in December when the watchdog urged SOCOM and the Defense Department to slow the $2 billion armed overwatch program until they could determine precisely how many of the new aircraft are needed.

In its latest report — based on new findings including a classified assessment of SOCOM’s armed overwatch program — GAO suggested the Pentagon reevaluate the number of OA-1Ks needed, limit the purchases to testing aircraft for now, and study the risks and challenges special operators could face when supported by the planes. GAO officials wrote questions remained about how to use the new aircraft and the logistics programs needed to deploy them into the austere locations where they are believed to be most useful.

“It is essential that the Department of Defense act quickly to fully address GAO’s open recommendations,” the report reads. “Otherwise, it risks buying more aircraft than it needs. In addition, it may not be able to fully utilize the aircraft because it has not addressed identified challenges.”

The GAO report did not elaborate on most of the challenges that it found with the OA-1K aircraft, which officials said are detailed in the classified report on the program. The OA-1K is a single-engine, turboprop aircraft manufactured by L3 Harris and Air Tractor. It is based on the manufacturers’ AT-802U Sky Warden, a heavily modified crop dusting-style plane that can be outfitted to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations and can carry 500-pound to 1,000-pound bombs and guns from .50-caliber machine guns to 20mm cannons.

SOCOM earlier this year trimmed the OA-1K program from a planned 75-plane fleet down to 62 planes. The command said the cuts were based on budgeting issues and not based on the GAO’s recommendations in December.

The command has continued to support the armed overwatch program, which it aims to use to replace two Air Force Special Operations Command aircraft — the U-28 Draco and MC-12 manned intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance planes.

The GAO report warns more analysis is needed to ensure the OA-1K can perform all the missions the older Air Force aircraft have been used for in recent years. But it also recommended the Pentagon evaluate whether the program makes sense as the military turns its attention from counterterrorism operations in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq toward global power conflicts with near-peer militaries such as those of Russia and China.

Even in the austere locations that special operators will likely continue to work in locations such as Africa and Middle East, the GAO questioned whether the OA-1K aircraft would prove able to provide overwatch capabilities, citing concerns from some in the program.

“Special operations commands identified logistical and operational challenges that could inhibit SOCOM’s ability to effectively deploy and operate the aircraft as intended,” the GAO wrote. “Users said that the Armed Overwatch aircraft may not meet their mission needs because of these challenges.”

GAO said the Pentagon agreed to reevaluate the number of OA-1K aircraft that it should purchase. Pentagon officials partially agreed with other GAO recommendations, including on further risk assessments of the program, further study of unspecified challenges in deploying the aircraft and an assessment of “whether the acquisition program remains an affordable priority.”

The Pentagon received its first two OA-1K aircraft in June. In July, the two planes were sent to Will Rogers Air National Guard Base in Oklahoma where pilots began testing them. The Air Force plans to build its OA-1K training at Will Rogers and was in the process of establishing the Total Force Integration OA-1K Formal Training Unit there, base officials said last month.

Stars and Stripes · by Corey Dickstein · September 9, 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

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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