Quotes of the Day:

"One of the worst days in America's history saw some of the bravest acts in Americans' history. We'll always honor the heroes of 9/11. And here at this hallowed place, we pledge that we will never forget their sacrifice." 

– President George W. Bush

“What separates us from the animals, what separates us from the chaos, is our ability to mourn people we’ve never met.”

– Author David Levithan

"It's the nature of the world that most people have moved on, but the people directly involved with 9/11, for them, twice a day it's 9/11." 

– Robert Reeg, former FDNY firefighter

1. Here’s how Biden and the 2024 candidates will commemorate 9/11 and 2 other 9-11 articles.

2. U.S. Forces Try to Regroup as al Qaeda, Islamic State Sow Terror in West Africa

3. Congress bestows its highest honor on the 13 troops killed during Afghanistan withdrawal

4. Ukraine’s fire-dropping drones can find, shock Russian troops: experts

5. Ukraine braces for hardest winter due to intensified Russian attacks on energy infrastructure

6. Army units able to communicate more dispersed in recent exercise

7. Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence

8. Our Moonshot Moment Is Here (Fusion)

9. Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War

10. Staff shortages and training faults hamper Navy ship upkeep at sea, sailors tell GAO

11. First AC-130J at Kirtland Marks New Chapter for Gunship Training

12. The War Crimes That the Military Buried

13. Ukraine’s western-trained ‘navy seals’ unleash wave of destruction

14. World’s Largest Shipbuilder! Chinese Firm Set To Dominate Global Shipping Industry, Eyes $17B In Annual Sales

15. "NATO's inaction leads to escalation." An interview with a Lithuanian colonel about the course of the war and the threat from the Russian Federation to the Baltic countries and Poland

16. The US Navy is about to launch a submarine built for a mixed-gender crew, the first of its kind

17. AUKUS, other agreements likely having 'galvanizing effect' in Beijing: Aussie ambassador

18. U.S. and Chinese military commanders hold rare phone call

19. Russia Is on a Slow Path to Bankruptcy, But How Slow?

20. How Corruption Fuels Inequality in China

21. A Less Lethal Latin America

22. America’s ‘kryptonite’(Gray or Grey Zone)

23. The Vandenberg Coalition Honors and Remembers the Victims and Heroes of the September 11th Attacks

1. Here’s how Biden and the 2024 candidates will commemorate 9/11 and 2 other 9-11 articles.

Sadly, I only found a few news articles about the 23d Anniversary of 9-11. Here are ons from CNN, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. 

An excerpt from the WSJ OpEd:

As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 passes by, Harry’s resilience reminds us that we must fight to be human. “Never forget,” he urged, “but remember that every life matters. Never give up hope for decency.” That was a wish as much as a promise. But we did run out of pages in his retirement memory book. A good start.

Here’s how Biden and the 2024 candidates will commemorate 9/11 | CNN Politics

CNN · by Michael Williams · September 11, 2024

President Joe Biden participates in a wreath-laying ceremony commemorating the 21st anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon during the September 11th terrorist attacks at the National 9/11 Pentagon Memorial on September 11, 2022 in Arlington, Virginia.

Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

CNN —

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the September 11 attacks on Wednesday with visits to each of three sites of the terror attacks.

Harris will join Biden, who arrived in New York on Tuesday afternoon, for a commemoration event at Ground Zero in Manhattan Wednesday morning. The duo will then travel to Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to participate in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Flight 93 memorial, according to a White House schedule.

Later in the afternoon, they will both travel to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, for another wreath laying ceremony.

Former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, are scheduled to appear at Ground Zero too. Trump will also travel to Shanksville on Wednesday, according to a source familiar with his plans. It’s unclear whether the two parties will cross paths.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the Democratic nominee for vice president, will also attend an event to commemorate the anniversary. His office did not say where the event will take place.

Trump and Harris will be hours past their first in-person meeting at the presidential debate Tuesday night.

While candidates in active campaigning in past years have traditionally avoided politics on the anniversary of the attacks, this campaign cycle is notable for its toxicity and it remains to be seen how and whether each campaign will engage in politics on Wednesday.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed when Islamist terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners on September 11, 2001. Two planes were crashed into each of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Another plane was crashed into the Pentagon, and the fourth crashed in a field in rural Pennsylvania after passengers tried to thwart the hijacking.

Last year, Biden marked the 22nd anniversary with a ceremony involving American service members in Alaska. During that ceremony, the president falsely claimed he visited Ground Zero “the next day” after the attacks. He actually went nine days later.

The president visited the Pentagon during the anniversary in 2022. In 2021, he and first lady Jill Biden also traveled to each of the three sites of the terror attack. They were joined by former President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama at the New York remembrance.

1. CNN · by Michael Williams · September 11, 2024
2. 
   

Cantor Fitzgerald Bids Adieu to a 9/11 Survivor

Harry Waizer retires, 23 years after barely escaping the attack that killed 658 of the firm’s employees.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/cantor-fitzgerald-bids-adieu-to-a-9-11-survivor-50de961e?mod=Searchresults_pos3&page=1

By Caroline Aiken Koster

Sept. 10, 2024 5:38 pm ET

The Tribute in Light in remembrance of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Sept. 5. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Retirements are rare at Cantor Fitzgerald. I’ve clinked plastic champagne flutes only a few times in 22 years at the New York financial-services firm. On Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda wiped out a generation of our employees, 658 souls, in its attack on the World Trade Center. It’s therefore rarer still to have a colleague like Harry Waizer, who has retired after 27 years.

Harry, 50, was heading to his office on the North Tower’s 104th floor when the first plane hit. Jet fuel poured down the elevator shaft, and a fireball struck him. When the doors miraculously opened on floor 78, Harry trudged down the emergency stairs, scorched skin hanging off him, as horrified workers gave way. An ascending firefighter soon brought him to street level. Arriving at the hospital, Harry uttered his name and wife’s phone number before falling into a medically induced coma for roughly seven weeks.

Harry Waizer Photo: Caroline Aiken Koster

New York’s medical workers had lined up waiting for the wounded, few of whom ever came. I didn’t know Harry then, but I cheered along at reports of the survivors’ recovery. They inspired a city, which like them had been ravaged, burned and shaken by those who sought to defeat us. Harry endured multiple surgeries during five months of hospitalization and two years of rehab.

Then, miraculously in 2004, he returned to work. His face, arms and legs were scarred, his gait slowed, and his voice singed by jet fuel. But his delightful soul was intact, as was his humor, patience and wit, which I’d cherish for the next 20 years.

I joined Cantor’s legal department in July 2002, a firm precarious in the aftermath. “That job will be like working in a graveyard,” a former colleague warned when I received the offer. A friend of ours had perished at Cantor on 9/11. I’d hesitated taking the role, worried it would feel like I was replacing her. But everything in New York was strange then—mourning, shell-shocked, inexplicable. My son still painted burning Twin Towers in portraits, scrawling network-television logos in the corners, relics from running home from kindergarten that day. I’d stupidly let him watch the news with me.

I thought maybe I could help. By the first anniversary memorial service, I was reading aloud the names of the dead. Even now, at the firm’s service deep underground by the tower’s slurry wall, it takes 48 minutes to hear all the names, visages frozen in photos wearing 2001’s finery.

Time has trudged on, and after 27 years at the firm, Harry has decided to hang up his cap. Could we have asked for anything more? He was lucky to survive, and we are fortunate to have learned from his example. Harry is a fine tax lawyer. Ask about income allocations and he’ll patiently amble to his whiteboard, fervently diagramming like the professor he might have been in a softer world.

But I’ll mostly miss Harry’s kindness and humor. He offers the calm wisdom of a man who has seen the worst and knows that work isn’t everything. “It’s only money, not life,” he once responded to some quandary, hands open like a judge, grinning.

He’s generous too, quick to chip in for food drives or charity runs. When we scotched office birthday cakes, he funded them himself, anonymously. Mirthful, quicker to laugh than many who have survived much less, he’s open for chat—but never midafternoon, when he’d sneak to the deli for a black-and-white cookie. “Don’t tell my wife,” he’d wink. “She worries about my health.”

Despite losing two-thirds of our New York office, Cantor has thrived since 2001. That September, it pledged 25% of the firm’s profits over five years to support the families of the 658 lost, plus 10 years of healthcare coverage. Today, our global charity day imbues Sept. 11 with purpose, as celebrities join our traders and employees to raise funds for disaster victims, wounded service members and charities worldwide.

Harry’s voice remains ragged, but it still carries. He never wrote a book, preferring quiet reflection with family and in his synagogue in Westchester. But he spoke powerfully in 2003 when he testified before the Sept. 11 Commission. Never vengeful, he urged elected officials to stop tyrants and ward off complacency. He spoke for those who no longer had voices to “build a safer, more secure tomorrow” and to “help bring peace for us and our children.” His words echo, prescient and wise.

I recently asked Harry if his testimony still resonates. “I still believe in hope,” he said softly, “Did I tell you my daughter’s getting married?” Proof, he thought. His children, and mine, are thriving. Good citizens, workers, travelers. New Yorkers who no longer etch tragedy in sketchbooks.

It’s supposed to be that way, and I’m glad for it. But I regret that many new colleagues won’t know Harry. Most won’t recall our darkest days or recognize the names of men and women—parents, brothers, sisters—who died that day. Some will, as Cantor often hires children of perished colleagues.

Harry recently retired. Simple, modest to the last, he insisted on a humble fête. I covered our filing cabinets with grocery crudités, brie, 12-pack cupcakes and plastic flutes. Management gifted him a replica Rodin sculpture, a reminder of beauty lost on Sept. 11. Hoping to speak for a city, I presented a crimson Big Apple cookie jar, stuffed with black-and-whites.

As the 23rd anniversary of 9/11 passes by, Harry’s resilience reminds us that we must fight to be human. “Never forget,” he urged, “but remember that every life matters. Never give up hope for decency.” That was a wish as much as a promise. But we did run out of pages in his retirement memory book. A good start.

Ms. Koster is a managing director and associate general counsel at Cantor Fitzgerald and general counsel of the Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund.

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

Appeared in the September 11, 2024, print edition as 'Cantor Fitzgerald Bids Adieu to a 9/11 Survivor'.

US commemorates 9/11 attacks with victims in focus, but politics in view

The U.S. is remembering lives taken and others reshaped by 9/11

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/11/911-attacks-anniversary-2024/8f25d6ca-6ff3-11ef-ad92-518728118b4a_story.html

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Flags and flowers are placed by the names of those killed during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks at the reflecting pools at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Donald King)

By Jennifer Peltz | AP

September 11, 2024 at 12:34 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK — The U.S. is remembering the lives taken and those reshaped by 9/11 , marking an anniversary laced this year with presidential campaign politics.

Sept. 11 — the date when hijacked plane attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001 — falls in the thick of the presidential election season every four years, and it comes at an especially pointed moment this time.

Cut through the 2024 election noise. Get The Campaign Moment newsletter.

Fresh off their first-ever debate Tuesday night, Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are both expected to attend 9/11 observances at the World Trade Center in New York and the Flight 93 National Memorial in Pennsylvania.

Then-senators and presidential campaign rivals John McCain and Barack Obama made a visible effort to put politics aside on the 2008 anniversary. They visited ground zero together to pay their respects and lay flowers in a reflecting pool at what was then still a pit.

It’s not yet clear whether Harris and Trump even will cross paths. If they do, it would be an extraordinary encounter at a somber ceremony hours after they faced off on the debate stage.

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Regardless of the campaign calendar, organizers of anniversary ceremonies have long taken pains to try to keep the focus on victims. For years, politicians have been only observers at ground zero observances, with the microphone going instead to relatives who read victims’ names aloud.

“You’re around the people that are feeling the grief, feeling proud or sad — what it’s all about that day, and what these loved ones meant to you. It’s not political,” said Melissa Tarasiewicz, who lost her father, New York City firefighter Allan Tarasiewicz.

President Joe Biden , on the last Sept. 11 of his term and likely his half-century political career, is headed with Harris to the ceremonies in New York, in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon, the three sites where commercial jets crashed after al-Qaida operatives took them over on Sept. 11, 2001.

Officials later concluded that the aircraft that crashed near rural Shanksville, Pennsylvania, was headed toward Washington. It went down after crew members and passengers tried to wrest control from the hijackers.

The attacks killed 2,977 people and left thousands of bereaved relatives and scarred survivors. The planes carved a gash in the Pentagon, the U.S. military headquarters, and brought down the trade center’s twin towers, which were among the world’s tallest buildings.

The catastrophe also altered U.S. foreign policy, domestic security practices and the mindset of many Americans who had not previously felt vulnerable to attacks by foreign extremists.

Effects rippled around the world and through generations as the U.S. responded by leading a “ Global War on Terrorism ,” which included invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq . Those operations killed hundreds of thousands of Afghans and Iraqis and thousands of American troops, and Afghanistan became the site of the United States' longest war .

As the complex legacy of 9/11 continues to evolve, communities around the country have developed remembrance traditions that range from laying wreaths to displaying flags, from marches to police radio messages. Volunteer projects also mark the anniversary, which Congress has titled both Patriot Day and a National Day of Service and Remembrance.

At ground zero, presidents and other officeholders read poems, parts of the Declaration of Independence and other texts during the first several anniversaries.

But that ended after the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum decided in 2012 to limit the ceremony to relatives reading victims’ names. Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was board chairman at the time and still is.

Politicians and candidates still have been able to attend the event. Many do, especially New Yorkers who held office during the attacks, such as former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who was then a U.S. senator.

She and Trump overlapped at the ground zero 9/11 remembrance in 2016, and it became a fraught chapter in the narrative of that year’s presidential campaign.

Clinton, then the Democratic nominee, abruptly left the ceremony , stumbled while awaiting her motorcade and later disclosed that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of days earlier. The episode stirred fresh attention to her health, which Trump had been questioning for months. 

To be sure, victims’ family members occasionally send their own political messages at the ceremony, where readers generally make brief remarks after finishing their assigned set of names.

Some relatives have used the forum to bemoan Americans' divisions , exhort leaders to prioritize national security, acknowledge the casualties of the war on terror, complain that officials are politicizing 9/11 and even criticize individual officeholders .

But most readers stick to tributes and personal reflections. Increasingly they come from children and young adults who were born after the attacks killed a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle.

“Even though I never got to meet you, I feel like I’ve known you forever,” Annabella Sanchez said last year of her grandfather, Edward Joseph Papa. “We will always remember and honor you, every day.

“We love you, Grandpa Eddie.”

2. U.S. Forces Try to Regroup as al Qaeda, Islamic State Sow Terror in West Africa

Excerpts:

Several countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea sense the looming danger from the north and hope for the protection offered by an expanded U.S. military presence.

The U.S. has a Special Forces team stationed in Cotonou, Benin’s biggest city, and expects those commandos to advise Beninese troops on counterterrorism missions.

The U.S. is spending $4 million to refurbish taxiways and install aircraft shelters at airports near the central Beninese city of Parakou. The Pentagon has positioned three contracted helicopters and medics in Parakou to evacuate wounded from battlegrounds along the Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigerian borders.

“We’ve moved the leading edge of assets here,” said Ekman. “That’s just the start.”

In July, U.S. aircraft rescued 29 Beninese soldiers suddenly beset by floodwaters inside Pendjari National Park, a thoroughfare for militants infiltrating Benin from Burkina Faso.  

“This aid is very important for the armed forces of Benin, and we are waiting for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support, which should not be long in coming,” said a senior Beninese army officer.

The U.S. has positioned a Green Beret team in Ivory Coast to train local forces. Two U.S.-contracted surveillance planes fly out of the biggest city, Abidjan, and provide overhead surveillance video to a military-intelligence center, which passes it along to Ivorian troops operating along the Burkina Faso border, Ekman said.

An Ivorian military spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Ekman has also begun negotiations with Chad, whose troops are fighting Boko Haram and Islamic State militants around Lake Chad. U.S.-Chad relations had been strained, in part because the country’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, came to power in an extra-constitutional maneuver after the battlefield death of his father, longtime strongman Idriss Déby, in 2021.

U.S. Forces Try to Regroup as al Qaeda, Islamic State Sow Terror in West Africa

After eviction from counterterrorism stronghold Niger, U.S. is adopting a smaller military footprint

https://www.wsj.com/world/africa/u-s-moves-aircraft-commandos-into-west-africa-in-fight-against-islamist-militants-0b15c41b?mod=latest_headlines

By Michael M. PhillipsFollow in Nairobi, Kenya and Benoit FauconFollow in London

Updated Sept. 11, 2024 12:03 am ET

The U.S. is gradually moving aircraft and commandos into coastal West Africa in an urgent effort to try to stop the march of al Qaeda and Islamic State militants across one of the world’s most volatile regions.

American forces were evicted this summer from their regional stronghold in Niger, further inland, and now the Pentagon is patching together a backup counterinsurgency plan in neighboring countries—refurbishing an airfield in Benin to accommodate American helicopters, stationing Green Berets and surveillance planes in Ivory Coast, and negotiating the return of U.S. commandos to a base they used to occupy in Chad.

“Losing Niger means that we’ve lost our ability to directly influence counterterrorism and counterinsurgency in the Sahel,” said retired Maj. Gen. Mark Hicks, former commander of U.S. special-operations forces in Africa, referring to the vast, semidesert band just south of the Sahara.

Islamist militants are wreaking havoc across the core of the Sahel—Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger—attacking police and military, stirring local grievances, imposing their harsh version of Islam in occupied villages and causing some 38,000 deaths since 2017, according to the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies, which analyzed figures collected by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a U.S.-based, nonprofit monitoring service.

Some 200 people were killed in Burkina Faso in a single day in late August, according to the United Nations. The U.N. said suspected members of an al Qaeda umbrella group, Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin, fired on civilians digging trenches in a failed effort to protect their town from such attacks.

Commandos from Niger trained with U.S. soldiers in Ouallam, Niger, in 2022. Photo: Michael M. Phillips/WSJ

In the past couple of years, militants have emerged from the Sahel and launched probing attacks into the more prosperous and stable nations along the Gulf of Guinea.

Moving U.S. forces to such coastal countries as Ivory Coast and Benin is “strategically the only game left for us,” said Hicks.

The Pentagon’s Africa Command has assigned a 10-person team under Maj. Gen. Kenneth Ekman to figure out how to redistribute some of the 1,100 U.S. troops ejected from Niger after that country’s military overthrew a pro-U.S. civilian government last year. The American withdrawal included vacating three Special Forces outposts and pulling surveillance drones out of a $110 million base the Pentagon put into operation five years ago in the desert town of Agadez.

“We’re shifting forces, but the greater problem is that while our security objectives have not changed, they have become harder to obtain,” Ekman said in an interview.

The spread of Islamist violence undermined the already fragile legitimacy of governments in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, prompting a spate of military coups in those countries since 2020. The U.S. criticized the military revolts and, in keeping with American law, slashed security assistance to the new juntas.

In response, the military rulers ousted U.S., French and other Western counterterrorism forces, and turned to Russia for security aid. Mali’s junta hired Moscow-aligned mercenaries from the Wagner Group to provide regime security and fight militants, driving a further wedge in its relations with the West. Burkina Faso and Niger have hired smaller contingents of Russian fighters to train their troops.

Western governments have accused the Kremlin-backed mercenaries of committing atrocities while pillaging African resources. The West, said Hicks, “has been replaced by a really vile actor that will make the situation worse for the Sahel.”

Wagner atrocities, including the killing of hundreds in the Malian village of Moura in 2022, perversely benefited the militants. “Their actions helped recruit fighters,” said Ibrahim Cisse, a community leader in the region where the village is located.

A U.S. Special Forces soldier with Beninese troops during a training exercise in 2023. Photo: Adrienne Surprenant/MYOP for WSJ

France, the former colonial power in much of western Africa and leader of the international military response to the Islamist insurgency there, is conducting a similar rethink of its military posture in the region since juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger ordered French troops to leave.

High-profile French garrisons in western Africa have become the target of pro-Russian protesters who claim France is carrying out a neocolonial ploy to revive Western influence. In response, Paris is in the process of moving instructors to local army bases in Gabon, Senegal, Ivory Coast and Chad, according to a French official.

But France will retain thousands of troops at home, ready to intervene in Africa at short notice, the official said. “France will remain involved in Africa, just in a less visible way,” the official said.

Several countries bordering the Gulf of Guinea sense the looming danger from the north and hope for the protection offered by an expanded U.S. military presence.

The U.S. has a Special Forces team stationed in Cotonou, Benin’s biggest city, and expects those commandos to advise Beninese troops on counterterrorism missions.

The U.S. is spending $4 million to refurbish taxiways and install aircraft shelters at airports near the central Beninese city of Parakou. The Pentagon has positioned three contracted helicopters and medics in Parakou to evacuate wounded from battlegrounds along the Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigerian borders.

“We’ve moved the leading edge of assets here,” said Ekman. “That’s just the start.”

Ivory Coast special forces on a rifle range in Jacqueville, Ivory Coast, in 2022. Photo: Michael M. Phillips

In July, U.S. aircraft rescued 29 Beninese soldiers suddenly beset by floodwaters inside Pendjari National Park, a thoroughfare for militants infiltrating Benin from Burkina Faso.  

“This aid is very important for the armed forces of Benin, and we are waiting for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance support, which should not be long in coming,” said a senior Beninese army officer.

The U.S. has positioned a Green Beret team in Ivory Coast to train local forces. Two U.S.-contracted surveillance planes fly out of the biggest city, Abidjan, and provide overhead surveillance video to a military-intelligence center, which passes it along to Ivorian troops operating along the Burkina Faso border, Ekman said.

An Ivorian military spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Ekman has also begun negotiations with Chad, whose troops are fighting Boko Haram and Islamic State militants around Lake Chad. U.S.-Chad relations had been strained, in part because the country’s president, Mahamat Idriss Déby, came to power in an extra-constitutional maneuver after the battlefield death of his father, longtime strongman Idriss Déby, in 2021.

Earlier this year, a Chadian air force general ordered a small contingent of American troops to leave his base, another blow to U.S. strategy in the region.

Since then, however, Déby won an election that, despite objections from international and local rights groups, the U.S. considers sufficiently democratic to open up the possibility of warmer security ties.

Ghanaian special forces soldiers conducting an exercise in northern Ghana, following training by Western special forces. Photo: Diana Zeyneb Alhindawi for WSJ

Now Ekman is seeking a possible return of a U.S. regional headquarters to Chad and perhaps deployment of Green Berets to resume the training of Chad’s 11,000-strong antiterrorism force, which the U.S. had formerly supplied with pickup trucks and body armor.

Ghana, a regional powerhouse that has yet to report any terrorist attacks, has hosted extensive military exercises with U.S. Special Forces. But a Ghanaian government official said: “We don’t intend and have not agreed to increase any U.S. presence in Ghana.”

Likewise, Nigeria, the biggest military power in the region, would like to acquire U.S. helicopters, armored vehicles and other gear, but shows no inclination to welcome an enduring deployment of American troops, Ekman said.

“Even a small American footprint is large for many African countries,” said a Western official in the Sahel.

Ekman acknowledged that the U.S. is unlikely to reconstitute the kind of counterterrorism force spanning Chad, Benin and Ivory Coast which it once maintained in Niger. “We’re doing what we can, not necessarily doing all that we could or should,” he said. 

Write to Michael M. Phillips at Michael.Phillips@wsj.com and Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com

3. Congress bestows its highest honor on the 13 troops killed during Afghanistan withdrawal

Excerpts:

He also acknowledged that during the evacuation “not everything went according to plan. Nothing ever does.”

“We hold ourselves all accountable for that,” he said of the deaths.

Top military and White House officials attended the ceremony Tuesday, including Secretary of Veterans Affairs Denis McDonough and Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Jr. the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Pentagon reviews have concluded that the suicide bombing was not preventable, and that suggestions troops may have seen the would-be bomber were not true.

Congress bestows its highest honor on the 13 troops killed during Afghanistan withdrawal

AP · by STEPHEN GROVES · September 10, 2024

STEPHEN GROVES

Groves covers Congress for The Associated Press.

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ELLEN KNICKMEYER

Foreign policy, national security, foreign policy & climate

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AP · by STEPHEN GROVES · September 10, 2024

4. Ukraine’s fire-dropping drones can find, shock Russian troops: experts

Ukraine’s fire-dropping drones can find, shock Russian troops: experts

Defense News · by Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo · September 10, 2024

MILAN — The Ukrainian military has begun utilizing first-person-view drones with a thermite spray capability over forested areas where Russian troops and equipment are hiding, a tactic that experts say can be a legitimate weapon of war, but only under strict circumstances.

On Sept. 2, footage emerged online showing what appeared to be a Ukrainian low-cost first-person-view drone, or FPV, carrying an incendiary burning mixture that it sprayed along a dense line of trees where Russian troops were suspected.

It was later reported by Ukrainian media outlet Militarnyi that the Ukrainian Mountain Infantry had received thermite munitions – which include a powdered mix of aluminum and iron oxide capable of burning at temperatures exceeding 2,200 degrees Celsius – that were mounted on drones and dropped on Russian positions.

Experts believe that the use of such weapons is two-fold, acting as both a cheap way to expose enemy locations and to cause fear among the invading troops.

“The primary use of these thermite FPV drones is as a defoliant to remove the tree and foliage cover that Russian troops and vehicles are using for concealment in tree lines; and secondarily likely intended as a psychological weapon due to the nature of the effects thermite would produce in contact with skin,” Justin Bronk, senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said.

In addition, the high-temperatures of the blend can damage or destroy caches of equipment and ammunition in a single sortie, Federico Borsari, resident fellow at the U.S. Center for European Policy Analysis, noted.

“They can be employed for specific purposes for which explosive effects are not ideal, and be useful to burn abandoned vehicles, for instance, saving explosive warheads for missions requiring kinetic effects,” he said.

The two experts said FPVs are suitable drone variants to deliver the burning mixture at slow speed because of their low cost and precise maneuverability.

As incendiary weapons have become more common in the war, analysts have been flagging concerns over harm to civilians. For example, in 2023, Russia reportedly used thermite bombs in eastern Ukraine over residential neighborhoods, according to a video on social media that was picked up by the Youtube channel of The Telegraph newspaper.

Dangers in using thermite include the possibility of causing out-of-control fires that risk burning down civilian infrastructure and non-military targets.

The use of thermite munitions is not banned per say, but neither is it straightforward, experts say.

“It would be legitimate and legal to use them as defoliants to remove cover, and this holds unless they would a) hit civilians or b) there was a significant risk the subsequent fire would endanger civilians – contrast this with Russian use of thermite last year in an indiscriminate manner,” Matthew Savill, director of military science at RUSI, wrote in an email to Defense News.

Under the Geneva Conventions, deliberately targeting civilian areas with incendiary weapons constitutes a war crime, yet Moscow has paid little consideration to adhering to international norms during the course of the war.

Russian forces have used other fire-inducing weapons such as the 9M22S incendiary cluster rocket, used for the 122mm caliber Grad rocket artillery system, Bronk said.

Savill notes that throughout the war, Ukraine has largely been able to contrast its adherence to international conflict laws against Russian behavior, an important appearance he presumes Kyiv will strive to maintain.

“I would expect that however they choose to use thermite, they would want to keep that distinction,” he said.

Elisabeth Gosselin-Malo is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. She covers a wide range of topics related to military procurement and international security, and specializes in reporting on the aviation sector. She is based in Milan, Italy.

5. Ukraine braces for hardest winter due to intensified Russian attacks on energy infrastructure

How can the international community help the Ukrainian people through the winter?

Ukraine braces for hardest winter due to intensified Russian attacks on energy infrastructure

AP · September 10, 2024

KYIV, Ukraine (AP) — Ukraine’s prime minister warned Tuesday that the country could be facing its toughest winter since the full-scale Russian invasion began, as airstrikes against the country’s beleaguered energy infrastructure intensify.

Russian attacks continue to hammer Ukraine’s energy generation capacity, leaving the country heavily reliant on its three functioning nuclear power stations and electricity imports from European Union countries.

“Energy resilience is one of our greatest challenges this year,” Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal told a news conference in Kyiv.

“We successfully got through what was essentially two and a half winters. We will get through three, with this upcoming heating season likely being just as difficult, if not the hardest,” he said.

Shmyhal said Ukraine’s government, helped by European countries, was urgently developing initiatives to decentralize its power generation, to make it less vulnerable to attacks. That includes expanding renewable power capacity — a development applauded by environmental groups.

Greenpeace has argued that a decentralized solar power network — which would be harder to damage with Russian missile and drone strikes — could rapidly help repair domestic capacity, and is urging the government to make a bolder expansion into green energy.

The group is calling for internationally backed investments worth nearly 4.5 billion euros ($4.9 billion) through 2030, focusing on renewable projects dominated by the solar photovoltaic sector.

“(Our) research says that the current targets, which the Ukrainian government set for reaching solar energy by 2027, could be increased at least fivefold. This is a very conservative evaluation,” Natalia Gozak, head of Greenpeace in Ukraine, told The Associated Press after the group opened an office in Kyiv on Tuesday.

According to the United Nations and the World Bank, Ukraine lost more than half of its power-generating capacity in the first 14 months of the war, with the situation continuing to deteriorate. Much of the country’s solar power generation was also lost because areas in the south of the country with more abundant sunlight came under Russian occupation.

The pre-war power mix in Ukraine was heavily dominated by traditional sources of energy, with coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear making up nearly 95% of the total, according to the two bodies.

Alexander Egit, an executive director at Greenpeace for Central and Eastern Europe, urged Western donor nations to back projects focused on renewable energy during and after the war.

“We expect billions of euros to be invested in Ukraine’s reconstruction by the European Union and beyond,” he said. “Greenpeace’s role is to advocate for decentralized renewable energy to ensure Ukraine is rebuilt as a modern, green, and independent nation.” ___

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

AP · September 10, 2024

6. Army units able to communicate more dispersed in recent exercise

Communications are key. (a BFO I know)

Army units able to communicate more dispersed in recent exercise

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · September 10, 2024

This is the first part of a two-part series exploring communications upgrades and fixes the Army is pursing while using experimentation to modernize.

FORT JOHNSON, La. — Networking capability upgrades are allowing Army units to fight in a more dispersed manner and at lower levels of classification.

A key tenet of future combat will be the need to move faster and scatter on the battlefield to avoid being targeted. Lessons from both Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014 and Moscow’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022, have indicated conflicts will be much faster paced and the large static command posts that were used by the U.S. military during its recent counterinsurgency fights won’t be suitable. American forces must be more nimble to prevent adversaries from locating and attacking them.

The Army’s network team has been on a multiyear journey to modernize tactical communications and make units lighter, faster, smaller and able to pass and share more information. Those efforts were ahead of their time in many instances as they employed the rapid feedback loop that the so-called “transforming-in-contact” concept is striving for, with one official saying they are “very comfortable” with this tight linkage and feedback mechanism.

Capabilities for command, control and communication have allowed units to operate in much smaller command posts and even split their staff sections by function rather than all having to be in one command center that could be targeted and take them all out.

This was the case for both 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division and 1st Battalion, 509th Infantry Regiment during a recent rotation at the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana. The later unit is known as “Geronimo” and serves as a highly capable opponent for units rotating into these centers.

“It’s the ability to do this app-based and a true common operating picture, because you can seamlessly move between applications,” Col. Matthew Hardman, commander of the operations group at JRTC that runs the opposing force, said during a recent visit to the base to observe 2nd Brigade’s rotation, a key unit as part of the Army’s transforming-in-contact concept. That vision calls for using deployments and troop rotations to test new equipment — mainly commercial off-the-shelf gear — that could allow units to be more responsive on a dynamic battlefield.

Hardman noted that the footprint of Geronimo’s command post is very small, using the Integrated Tactical Network to build out capabilities and applications.

Throughout the Army’s years-long process to upgrade its network, modernized equipment has significantly shrunk the size of command posts. Smaller, more mobile command posts pose more challenging targeting problems for adversaries.

One of the innovations that allows for that shrinkage — just a couple of trucks instead of instead of large, sprawling, and often relatively static outposts — and reduced electronic emissions, is what the Army is dubbing antenna farms. During the recent exercise at Fort Johnson, those so-called farms produced all the communications for the brigade command post, which was dispersed physically from the main command post, whereas before it was co-located.

While the farm did have a signature, communications capabilities such as directional radios and proliferated low-Earth orbit satellites made it difficult for the adversary to discover it in the spectrum, unlike other capabilities such as WiFi or high-frequency systems.

During the exercise, the opposing force wasn’t able to distinguish if this was a brigade command post or a lower echelon given the small footprint and lower electromagnetic signature. Now, the enemy has to be more discretionary in terms of deciding what to hit because they don’t want to waste artillery or give away their position to attack a smaller echelon. They’re looking for bigger payoffs like a brigade or division command post.

The antenna farm is much quicker to set up and take down than previous communications setups. Officials at JRTC noted that in the past it could take 30 to 45 minutes with no troubleshooting issues to establish the network. Now, it takes close to 10 minutes, with officials saying they are waiting on the brigade command post to plug their network in or drive away, a huge distinction from the past.

Officials also explained that command, control and communications capabilities have allowed the staff sections within the brigade to disperse even more. Historically, staff for current operations, intelligence, fires and many other functions, would all be housed within the sprawling command post to run operations for the fight. This contributed to the large size.

Now, those staff sections can be separated, resulting in smaller command posts that might resemble something like a company or battalion.

Crosstalk within the command post “was very human-based, very human-centric, using our various warfighting function capabilities and bringing those together,” Maj. Gen. Brett Sylvia, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, said. “Instead of that massive humanity and all those computers … it’s a much more simple setup and a simple system, though just as capable as the one that it had, as we are integrating many of our network systems.”

While the technology is allowing that disaggregation, network officials have explained that it’s creating human problems because commanders now have to get used to communicating to all their staff sections dispersed on the battlefield as opposed to just walking up to them in the command post.

Moreover, as part of its rotation at JRTC, 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne conducted a roughly 500-mile air assault from its home at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to Fort Johnson in Louisiana to start the exercise.

During that effort, it had upgraded communications equipment that is part of the integrated tactical network, to include putting HMS manpack radios — the same that are used by dismounted soldiers — into helicopters, providing MUOS beyond-line-of-sight satellite comms. Previously, those aircraft only had chat functions and could only send position location information.

Those capabilities provided continuous and more robust communications tools to the unit for the entire 500-mile journey and entry into JRTC.

“If you were at JRTC, you would have seen for the first time both voice and data integration between our aerial platforms and our ground formations. And it was powerful. No more having to pick up a handset and say, ‘This is where I’m at,’” Lt. Gen. John Morrison, deputy chief of staff, G6, said at the Defense News Conference Sept. 4. “Everybody having common [situational awareness] of what is happening, whether you’re in the air or on the ground.”

Network officials noted that with the commercialization and intuitiveness of tools now, there is less time needed to get equipment to units to become familiar with and train. Previously, with new capabilities or upgrades, the program office would have to give the technology to the unit ahead of exercises or events to allow them to familiarize themselves. That timeline is becoming shorter and shorter.

One of the other major changes for this exercise rotation was that most of the data used was unclassified. The Army has been on a push to lower the classification of communications and data on the battlefield to increase speed. Classification is often a barrier to sharing with international partners and slows down operations. But, by developing an unclassified-encrypted capability, or SBU-E, where perishable data can be lowered, network complexity is reduced.

The Army is simultaneously pursing a dual effort to provide improved capabilities to help soldiers be ready to “fight tonight” in the near term, while looking toward a future permanent solution. Those projects have been dubbed C2 Fix and C2 Next, respectively.

“One of the key tenets of both C2 Fix and next-gen C2 is this notion of using commercial encryption to provide sensitive but unclassified-encrypted communications. I will submit, as we fully implement that, that will be a game-changer for coalition interoperability, especially at the edge,” Morrison said. “The days of having to send a radio telephone operator over to an allied partner’s command post so that they can use your radio to talk back to you, will be a thing in the past. We are aggressively implementing that as a part of C2 Fix.”

Part two of this series will delve deeper into the C2 Fix and C2 Next initiatives.

Written by Mark Pomerleau

Mark Pomerleau is a reporter for DefenseScoop, covering information warfare and cyberspace.

In This Story

• Army
• C2
• integrated tactical network

defensescoop.com · by Mark Pomerleau · September 10, 2024

7. Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence

Download the 11 page report here: https://nipp.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/IS-598.pdf

The lessons:

Lesson 1: Deterrence Problems are More Readily Identified than Resolved

Lesson 2: Don’t Neglect Allied Assurance

Lesson 3: Integrated Deterrence Should be Additive, not Substitutive

Conclusion:

“Integrated deterrence” may have outlived its usefulness as a policy rubric. Like the more than 60-year-old concept of “Flexible Response,” however, the phrase speaks to the need to deter and compete with adversaries who threaten U.S. interests through an ever-evolving combination of domains, methods, and means. Contemporary policymakers will do well to revisit the successes and failures of their forebears as they contemplate the challenges ahead.

Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence

.

By Christopher J. Griffin

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/10/cold_war_lessons_for_revitalizing_deterrence_1057240.html?mc_cid=3e5257cbc5&mc_eid=70bf478f36

Select Language

Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence

.By Christopher J. Griffin

Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing DeterrenceU.S. Air Force

Christopher J. Griffin, Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence, No. 598, September 9, 2024

Download PDF

Cold War Lessons for Revitalizing Deterrence

Christopher J. Griffin

Christopher J. Griffin, senior program officer at the Smith Richardson Foundation; former executive director of the Foreign Policy Initiative and legislative director in the office of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman (ID-CT).

In the three years since Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin first described the Biden Administration’s commitment to “integrated deterrence,”[1] America’s authoritarian adversaries have seized the initiative. The hallmarks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Iran’s proxy war against Israel have been both the atrocities committed by the aggressors and the emergence of an entente of revisionist powers, including China and North Korea, that has enabled their aggression.[2] Combined, these powers are on track to deploy a nuclear force that more than doubles that of the United States by this decade’s end.[3] A recent joint patrol by Russian and Chinese strategic bombers underscored the dangers that lie beyond that threshold.[4] In the meantime, both Russia[5] and Iran[6] carry out terror campaigns against the West while China dials up its threats against Taiwan and the Philippines.[7] From the gray zone to the strategic nuclear balance, the U.S. deterrence posture is eroding.

Given this stark reality, the “integrated deterrence” concept, once highlighted in both the National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy, may be unsalvageable.[8] The administration’s critics have long warned that integrated deterrence was just an attempt to substitute “non-military tools” for military power,[0] or simply decried the rubric as a meaningless “platitude.”[10] More sympathetic observers have faintly praised the idea as “not so bad.”[11] In recent reports, the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States found “little evidenc of [the concept’s] implementation across the interagency,”[12] while the Commission on the National Defense Strategy “found few indications that it is being consistently pursued.”[13] Despite these critical assessments, both bodies emphasized the need to integrate what the latter called “all elements of national power” in order to restore deterrence or prevail in the event of conflict.[14] In other words: integrated deterrence is dead, long live integrated deterrence.

As today’s policymakers contemplate how to better integrate the elements of national power and restore deterrence, they can learn much from their Cold War predecessors. They also grappled with the emergence of new warfighting domains, the sudden loss of U.S. military advantages, and the dilemma of integrating the instruments of national power without diluting their potency. Their hard-learned lessons about the difficulty of solving deterrence problems, the importance of preserving allied assurance, and the value of integrating through addition rather than substitution may usefully inform these efforts going forward.

8. Our Moonshot Moment Is Here (Fusion)

Excerpts:

In the 19th century, the great powers scrambled to develop technology and secure petroleum supplies around the globe to ensure a secure foothold in the energy future. Today, a similar scramble is unfolding. Electrification for economic growth coupled with the new energy requirements of generative AI – which are immense – together will have critical geostrategic consequences. Beijing recognizes that fusion is a source of near-unlimited energy and that achieving it at scale will not only give China the energy independence it craves but also a leading position as supplier of these new sources of energy around the world.

Fusion is a moonshot opportunity. We can’t afford to miss it.   

Our Moonshot Moment Is Here

By Nadia Schadlow & Craig Mundie

September 10, 2024

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2024/09/10/our_moonshot_moment_is_here_1057254.html?mc_cid=3e5257cbc5&mc_eid=70bf478f36

American policymakers have spent years decrying the loss or impending loss of key competitive sectors to China, including 5G telecommunications networks, solar panels, advanced manufacturing, and quantum computing. Recently, it was reported that China was outspending the United States on fusion energy and that it could surpass U.S. fusion capabilities in three to four years. The United States can’t let this happen.

Fusion will provide reliable, carbon-free electricity for an expanding global economy. That will have profound geopolitical consequences. If we allow China to dominate fusion technology and to deploy it at scale at home and abroad, Beijing will hold a central position in the geopolitics of energy going forward.

Fusion occurs when two atoms combine into one, releasing astronomical amounts of energy. Some new fusion designs produce superheated plasma that can reach temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius, producing energy with minimal radiation risks.

For generations, fusion has been the stuff of science fiction because of the challenge of recreating the physics of the sun in a controlled environment on earth. But in the last few years, scientists and engineers, working on competing models for producing fusion, have made transformational progress on several classes of daunting problems, faster than the public perceives. And faster than U.S. policy is reflecting.

Just as important as the physics behind these milestones are the advances in key “adjacent technologies” that help to manage the hot plasma at the heart of all fusion reactions. Advances in fiber optics, semiconductors, and computing, including AI, have been critical to progress. Power semiconductors have allowed the introduction of different fusion architectures, creating more opportunities and faster progress. Advanced fiber optics mean we don’t have to worry about electromagnetic interference. Powerful computers allow this intricate atomic ballet to be choreographed and repeated thousands of times per second.

Thanks to American innovation and determination, the fusion moment is here. When matched with private sector investment, it’s a potent force. But we could lose this moment to China unless the U.S. government takes steps now to accelerate manufacturing at scale and deployment.

First, fusion must be considered a considered a key part of the shift to clean energy. The focus for years has been almost exclusively on renewable solar and wind – which cannot solve the problem of intermittent energy. A Department of Energy report in 2022 advanced a U.S. strategy to secure supply chains for “Robust Clean Energy Transition” without mentioning fusion. The Biden Administration’s “Decadal Vision” for commercial fusion was a corrective, but fusion will need wider acceptance to take its place in the world’s energy mix.

Second, the U.S. government must create a regulatory environment that differentiates modern fusion technology from 20^th century nuclear energy and that allows for scaled deployment. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission – which controls matters related to fission and fusion energy – has taken some important first steps. In April 2023, for example, it acknowledged that fusion energy should be treated as a technology separate from nuclear fission. Notably, the U.K. government also ruled on the “fundamental differences between nuclear fission and fusion” and that it would be “unnecessary to incorporate fusion energy facilities into nuclear regulation.” These are key steps toward a regulatory structure that would allow U.S. companies to produce fusion generators at scale. We can’t afford to wait 10 years to plan for power plants to come on-line. Just as our airline industry produces scores of airplane designs without having to separately approve each plane, U.S. fusion companies need to be able to manufacture generators in a repeatable way in large-scale factories to be effective.

Deploying fusion generators at scale will have the added benefit of catalyzing American manufacturing. But to achieve this, the U.S. needs to make the needed components. Most attention in the CHIPS Act is focused on leading-edge microchips for computing – the kinds that are now primarily made in Taiwan. But it’s critical that the United States and its allies produce the kind of other semiconductors that enable the sophisticated physics synthesis required by fusion. Currently, a large majority of high-power semiconductor production and innovation takes place outside the United States.

Third, loan programs and tax incentives that apply to renewables need to be opened up to fusion. Currently for example, the production tax credit for manufacturing is geared towards renewables and does not include fusion. These programs and various Department of Energy efforts, while well-funded, need to prioritize fusion.

In the 19^th century, the great powers scrambled to develop technology and secure petroleum supplies around the globe to ensure a secure foothold in the energy future. Today, a similar scramble is unfolding. Electrification for economic growth coupled with the new energy requirements of generative AI – which are immense – together will have critical geostrategic consequences. Beijing recognizes that fusion is a source of near-unlimited energy and that achieving it at scale will not only give China the energy independence it craves but also a leading position as supplier of these new sources of energy around the world.

Fusion is a moonshot opportunity. We can’t afford to miss it.    

Nadia Schadlow is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. Craig Mundie was formerly the Chief Research and Strategy Officer at Microsoft.

Both are strategic advisors to Helion Energy, a U.S. based fusion energy company.

9. Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War

Excerpts:

Boot’s essay is therefore designed to persuade policymakers that any effort to emulate Reagan’s hardline first-term policies toward the Soviet Union in our current relations with China will not defeat China and may “make the world a more dangerous place.” The U.S., according to Boot, should not attempt political–economic warfare against the Chinese Communist regime. “Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences,” he writes, “risks a repeat of the war scares” of Reagan’s first term.

One might have a little more confidence in Boot’s advice had he not been so horribly wrong about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader global war on terror, for which he was one of our country’s leading cheerleaders. His reticence about applying pressure on the Chinese Communist Party is at odds with his hawkish views about the necessity of a U.S.-backed Ukrainian victory in the war against Russia. Apparently, the risks of a wider war between NATO and Russia don’t concern him as much as an American hardline policy toward China does.

Back to Reagan and the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, perhaps the best historian of that conflict, summed up Reagan’s role best in his Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War: “Reagan saw Soviet weaknesses sooner than most of his contemporaries did; … he understood the extent to which detente was perpetuating the Cold War rather than hastening its end; … his hard line strained the Soviet system at the moment of its maximum weakness; … he combined reassurance, persuasion, and pressure in dealing with [Gorbachev].” Gaddis characterized Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War as “critical.”

Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War - The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator | USA News and Politics

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · September 9, 2024

Yes, Ronald Reagan Did Win the Cold War

His policies put the Soviet Union and its empire on the defensive for the first time.

by

September 9, 2024, 10:05 PM

Ronald Reagan answers questions during a press conference in Chicago (mark reinstein/Shutterstock)

Neoconservative writer Max Boot provides a preview of his new biography of Ronald Reagan by claiming in a Foreign Affairs essay that Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. Boot characterizes as “myth” the notion that Reagan had a plan to defeat the Soviet empire and that Reagan’s policies led to the collapse of that empire. Boot instead writes that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev deserves the credit for ending the Cold War, even if he did not intend to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union. Reagan, Boot writes, only deserves credit for recognizing that Gorbachev was a communist leader who he could negotiate an end to what Boot describes as a “40-year conflict.”

Initially, one wonders why Boot describes the Cold War as lasting 40 years. Most historians would date the beginning of the Cold War at the year 1945. James Burnham, one of the greatest analysts of the Cold War, dated its beginning to the spring of 1944. It is generally agreed that the Cold War ended in the 1989–1991 time period. That is at least 44 years, if not 45. Does Boot believe the Cold War began in 1949–1950? Or does he believe that it ended in 1985 — as soon as Gorbachev took power in the Kremlin? It is not clear from his essay.

Boot’s error as to the length of the Cold War, however, is a minor point considering the major error of his main argument, i.e., that Ronald Reagan did not win the Cold War. To arrive at this conclusion, Boot dismisses the importance of Reagan’s remark to Richard Allen in 1977 that his theory of the Cold War is “we win, they lose.” He further dismisses the importance of Reagan’s defense buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative, aid to anti-communist forces in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, Reagan’s speeches predicting that communism would end up on the “ash heap of history,” and two national security directives that called for undermining Soviet economic and political power throughout its empire and within the Soviet Union itself. Boot also dismisses Paul Kengor’s compelling evidence that Reagan brought down the Soviet empire in his book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism. And Boot doesn’t even mention the evidence of Reagan’s strategy to defeat the Soviet Union set forth in Peter Schweizer’s books Victory: The Reagan Administration’s Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union and Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism. Nor does Boot mention the verdict of John Patrick Diggins, who called Reagan one of the three great “liberating” presidents in U.S. history for his Cold War victory (Lincoln and FDR were the others, according to Diggins).

Nor does Boot mention Reagan’s invasion of Grenada, which forcibly liberated territory from communist rule. Although Grenada was a small island, its liberation was symbolic of the Reagan administration’s willingness to reverse the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine. Reagan’s policies put the Soviet Union and its empire on the defensive for the first time in the Cold War. Until Reagan, it was the Soviet Union and its allies that launched politico-military offensives in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Angola, South Yemen, and other parts of the world. U.S. policy, as practiced by every administration prior to Reagan’s, was “containment.” Reagan shifted U.S. policy to “liberation” or “rollback.”

Boot will have none of this. Gorbachev ended the Cold War, he writes, not because of any U.S. pressure by the Reagan administration, but because of Gorbachev’s “humane instincts.” Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika, Boot writes, were not reactions to U.S. pressure — both economic and military — but rather stemmed from Gorbachev’s concerns about nuclear war, his opposition to the Soviet military-industrial complex, and his realization that the Soviet Union was “morally bankrupt.” Boot, in fact, judges Reagan’s military buildup, economic coercion, and other anti-Soviet policies as first-term failures. “[M]any conservatives,” Boot claims, “conflate Reagan’s second-term success with his first-term failures,” and he worries that they will apply the “wrong lessons to relations with communist China today.”

Boot’s essay is therefore designed to persuade policymakers that any effort to emulate Reagan’s hardline first-term policies toward the Soviet Union in our current relations with China will not defeat China and may “make the world a more dangerous place.” The U.S., according to Boot, should not attempt political–economic warfare against the Chinese Communist regime. “Ramping up confrontation with Beijing regardless of the consequences,” he writes, “risks a repeat of the war scares” of Reagan’s first term.

One might have a little more confidence in Boot’s advice had he not been so horribly wrong about the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader global war on terror, for which he was one of our country’s leading cheerleaders. His reticence about applying pressure on the Chinese Communist Party is at odds with his hawkish views about the necessity of a U.S.-backed Ukrainian victory in the war against Russia. Apparently, the risks of a wider war between NATO and Russia don’t concern him as much as an American hardline policy toward China does.

Back to Reagan and the Cold War. John Lewis Gaddis, perhaps the best historian of that conflict, summed up Reagan’s role best in his Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War: “Reagan saw Soviet weaknesses sooner than most of his contemporaries did; … he understood the extent to which detente was perpetuating the Cold War rather than hastening its end; … his hard line strained the Soviet system at the moment of its maximum weakness; … he combined reassurance, persuasion, and pressure in dealing with [Gorbachev].” Gaddis characterized Reagan’s role in ending the Cold War as “critical.”

spectator.org · by Francis P. Sempa · September 9, 2024

10. Staff shortages and training faults hamper Navy ship upkeep at sea, sailors tell GAO

Excerpts:

The Navy needs 84,379 enlisted sailors to adequately man its fleet, the report stated. However, just 70,705 enlisted sailors, or about 16% less than required, were serving aboard its ships and submarines as of November 2023, the GAO found.

That manpower shortage is made worse because sailors who are assigned to a ship may not be available for duty due to factors such as illness or temporary assignment elsewhere.

That makes completing repairs while underway “moderately to extremely difficult,” 63% of executive officers surveyed by the GAO said. The agency noted that the Navy doesn’t track how many sailors are assigned to a ship but unavailable for duty.

The study also found widespread concerns that personnel weren’t prepared for their jobs, with those assigned to maintenance-heavy positions often less equipped than other crew members.

For example, the engineering departments of 19 of the 25 ships reviewed had some of the least experienced and skilled sailors.

Staff shortages and training faults hamper Navy ship upkeep at sea, sailors tell GAO

Stars and Stripes · by Alison Bath · September 10, 2024

Seaman Keenan Williams, an aviation boatswain’s mate airman, does preventive maintenance on the flight deck of USS Carl Vinson Aug. 21, 2024. A government watchdog agency found that the Navy’s staffing and training are inadequate for routine maintenance and repairs on ships at sea. (Kenneth Ostas/U.S. Navy)

The Navy doesn’t have enough manpower and training to keep its ships in shape for combat, a government watchdog agency said after interviewing sailors across the fleet.

Most of the service’s surface ships, aircraft carriers and submarines are so short-staffed that they can’t complete regular routine maintenance and repairs at sea, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Monday.

That critical labor shortage is exacerbated by a lack of “in-depth and hands-on training for sailors in maintenance and repair techniques,” the GAO said.

“Sailor-led maintenance and repairs (are) the first defense against allowing small defects to become major material problems, which could affect ship operations and mission capability,” the report stated.

The review was conducted from January 2023 to September 2024 and included a survey of executive officers serving aboard more than 230 Navy ships and submarines.

Leadership interviews, discussions with sailors and analysis of the Navy’s personnel and maintenance requirements and other data also were part of the analysis.

The Navy uses sailors for many of the repairs and maintenance tasks needed while a ship is underway. More intensive or highly skilled work is completed at its homeport on return or at a centralized repair facility using a combination of sailors and contractors.

Sailors make repairs aboard the destroyer USS Halsey in the Arabian Sea in 2021. A government watchdog agency report found that the Navy's fleet is hamstrung by a shortage of manpower and training on ship maintenance and repair. (U.S. Navy)

The Navy needs 84,379 enlisted sailors to adequately man its fleet, the report stated. However, just 70,705 enlisted sailors, or about 16% less than required, were serving aboard its ships and submarines as of November 2023, the GAO found.

That manpower shortage is made worse because sailors who are assigned to a ship may not be available for duty due to factors such as illness or temporary assignment elsewhere.

That makes completing repairs while underway “moderately to extremely difficult,” 63% of executive officers surveyed by the GAO said. The agency noted that the Navy doesn’t track how many sailors are assigned to a ship but unavailable for duty.

The study also found widespread concerns that personnel weren’t prepared for their jobs, with those assigned to maintenance-heavy positions often less equipped than other crew members.

For example, the engineering departments of 19 of the 25 ships reviewed had some of the least experienced and skilled sailors.

As a consequence, “more capable sailors that perform a lot of maintenance get burned out and tired of taking up the slack for other sailors and leave the Navy to do the same work for better pay and working conditions,” one respondent said.

Sailors also expressed frustration that their training left them unprepared, especially when it came to troubleshooting problems.

“Sailors need hands-on maintenance training at schoolhouses working on live systems for maintenance and repairs,” one respondent told researchers. “Online or on-demand systems are not reliable, and bandwidth is constrained underway.”

The report also noted problems with the Navy’s use of outdated computer systems to plan, manage and order parts for needed work, further hindering repairs and maintenance.

The GAO made seven recommendations to address its findings, including that the Navy evaluate and optimize the balance between classroom and on-the-job training for junior sailors as the service implements a new instruction program.

The Navy also should periodically gather and report data specific to the number of sailors available for duty as it relates to maintenance and better track the experience and skill level of personnel across departments.

The Navy concurred with all recommendations, the GAO said.

Staff shortages for selected ship classes, according to a GAO analysis of U.S. Navy data. (Government Accountability Office)

Stars and Stripes · by Alison Bath · September 10, 2024

11. First AC-130J at Kirtland Marks New Chapter for Gunship Training

Another example of the versatility of the venerable C-130.

First AC-130J at Kirtland Marks New Chapter for Gunship Training

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · September 9, 2024

Sept. 9, 2024 | By David Roza

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Late last month, Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico welcomed a new resident: an AC-130J Ghostrider flying in from its old home at Hurlburt Field, Fla.

The arrival, celebrated with an official ceremony Sept. 5, marks a new chapter for Air Force gunship aircrew training, which is currently split between the two locations. By bringing AC-130J training under one roof, planners hope to make the training pipeline faster and more efficient.

“The training quality has been outstanding,” Lt. Col. John Barringer, commander of the 73rd Special Operations Squadron at Kirtland, told Air & Space Forces Magazine. “We’re focused on being able to reduce the timeline, get that standard of training that the AC-130 community has established, and then get them [aircrew] to the operational unit faster.”

Under the status quo, AC-130J student pilots complete their initial qualification training at Kirtland for about four to six months. That’s where students learn to fly the C-130J, the four-engine transport plane of which the AC-130J is a variant.

Once they complete initial qualification training, students move to Hurlburt to start mission qualification training, which is where they learn to fly the AC-130J, a ground attack platform with two cannons sticking out the left side of the fuselage, the ability to drop a range of bombs and missiles, and a crew in back who operate the aircraft’s weapons and sensors.

Mission qualification training “really familiarizes them with how we employ the AC-130J Ghostrider,” said Lt. Col. Joshua Martin, operations officer for the 73rd SOS. “That is more like the mission sets that we accomplish, how to integrate with the crew for the mission.”

An AC-130J arrives at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M. after departing its previous home at Hurlburt Field, Fla. on Aug. 27, 2024. Photo via Facebook/58th Special Operations WingThe problem with the current arrangement is the transit to Hurlburt: paperwork, finding lodging in Florida, and travel itself stretches the pipeline by about a month.

“It’s a break in training for at least a month, if not more,” Barringer said. “We reduce that month gap immediately by moving them right to the flightline as soon as they’re done with the initial qual.”

The move will also benefit the rest of the crew, as the 73rd will conduct all initial and upgrade training for pilots, combat system officers, weapons system operators, aerial gunners, and other positions, Martin said. The current arrangement for those other crew members is more disparate, with some Airmen training at the 19th Special Operations Squadron at Hurlburt.

The journey back to Kirtland also streamlines things on the organizational side of the house. Under the status quo, AC-130J crew training takes place under both Air Education and Training Command (AETC), which oversees the 58th Special Operations Wing at Kirtland, and Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC), which oversees Hurlburt Field.

Putting all training activities under AETC helps centralize training resources and expertise, which lets AFSOC focus on operations, Barringer and Martin explained. The 73rd SOS used to be an operational squadron stationed at Hurlburt Field, but it was deactivated in May and then reactivated a month later as a training squadron under AETC.

“They [AETC] are the experts on educating and training Airmen,” the squadron commander said. “So moving the training of all AC-130J aircrew into this major command—to me, that’s probably the biggest thing I’m excited about. This entire office, this entire organization is focused on training, and that’s it.”

“That allows AFSOC to focus on deployments, preparation for deployments, and readiness, while we focus on those training objectives,” Martin added.

The 58th Special Operations Wing trains about 10,000 aircrew every year for special operations, rescue, VIP airlift, missile site support, and other missions on a range of helicopter, fixed-wing, and tilt-rotor aircraft.

During an aircraft arrival ceremony, Col. Joshua Jackson, 58th Special Operations Wing deputy commander, and Patricia Knighten, Team Kirtland Wingman, cut the ribbon to the first AC-130J aircraft at Kirtland Air Force Base, N.M., Sept. 5. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Karissa DickThe Road Ahead

The plan to consolidate AC-130J training at Kirtland was first announced in 2020, with the first aircraft and Airmen scheduled to arrive in fiscal y2023. As it turned out, the first AC-130J did not arrive until Aug. 27, near the end of fiscal 2024.

When asked what caused the delay, Barringer and Martin said the answer was above their pay grade, but they acknowledged that military basing decisions are complicated processes involving a lengthy environmental study and other factors. It was not until May 2023 that Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall formally signed off on the basing decision.

The squadron will eventually host six aircraft and 299 people including aircrew, maintainers, and support staff. The goal is to be ready for student training by April 1, 2025, and right now the squadron is on pace to meet that goal, Berringer asked. Some temporary facilities will have to be built and other buildings updated to handle the new mission, but most of those projects are nearing completion, he added.

Coming to Kirtland also marks a new base for the AC-130 community, which previously was limited to Hurlburt and Cannon Air Force Base, N.M.

“Now we have three bases that folks could potentially rotate to,” Martin said. “It provides new opportunities for our folks to crossflow and to get some new experiences with formal training schoolhouses in AETC. So more opportunities there and a new community we can be involved with.”

Air

Warfighter Training

airandspaceforces.com · by David Roza · September 9, 2024

12. The War Crimes That the Military Buried

To see this in proper format please go to the link. https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-war-crimes-that-the-military-buried?utm

The data for 781 possible war crimes is here: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/dhwrquexmbsweraltsn8k/AGdtwQxBhw2ArVwXxuah000?rlkey=fz0hiytk6e3xbrfjsgocqyas0&e=5&st=t20okqta&dl=0

My question is will this reporting drive Congress to conduct investigations?

Excerpts:

We began by filing requests with the military under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 1974, following the massacre of hundreds of civilians in My Lai, Vietnam, and the failed prosecutions of some two dozen Army service members for the killings, the Department of Defense began requiring each branch of the military to maintain a “central collection of reports and investigations” of allegations of war crimes by its members. However, when we filed public-records requests for the contents of each branch’s collection, we got little in return. The Department of the Navy, which includes the Marine Corps, sent us a letter saying that it had located its “depository” but that “the depository did not contain any records.”

With no other option, we started combing through archived news articles, human-rights reports, legal and medical journals, and a staggering repository of records about torture and detainee abuse that the A.C.L.U. had obtained during fourteen years of litigation. We looked for incidents such as the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, the killing or torturing of wounded enemies, and the abuse or willful neglect of detainees, all textbook examples of war crimes. We limited our search to events that were broadly comparable to Haditha: allegations of violence perpetrated by U.S. service members or deaths in U.S. custody that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. We excluded nonviolent incidents, such as thefts of artifacts, and killings by drone strikes, which aren’t typically treated as crimes.

As we unearthed information about new incidents, we filed FOIA requests for related records. In response, we were often told that, unless we could provide names, especially those of the perpetrators, agencies couldn’t carry out searches for documents. When we provided names, some departments refused to release records, citing the privacy rights of the people we had identified. We learned that many cases were handled nonjudicially—essentially as personnel matters—and that those records were exempt from FOIA. Cases that ended in acquittal or dismissal were also exempt from FOIA, and the files often destroyed. Many of the most basic records that would be easily obtained in any civilian courthouse in America are beyond reach in the military-justice system.

With the assistance of an experienced FOIA litigation team, we repeatedly sued the military. Over four years, the agencies released enough documentation to us that, assisted by other source materials, we were able to put together a collection of seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes, perpetrated against more than eighteen hundred alleged victims, that the U.S. military took seriously enough to investigate.

The War Crimes That

the Military Buried

The largest known database of possible American war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan shows that the military-justice system rarely punishes perpetrators.

By Parker Yesko

September 10, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-war-crimes-that-the-military-buried?utm

This article is a companion piece to Season 3 of In the Dark, an investigative podcast series that asks what happened in Haditha and why no one was held accountable.

Listen to the podcast

War entails unspeakable violence, much of it entirely legal. And yet some violence is so abhorrent that it falls outside the bounds of law. When the perpetrators are U.S. service members, the American military is supposed to hold them to account. It is also supposed to keep records of wrongdoing in a systematic manner. But the military has failed to do so, leaving the public unable to determine whether the military brings its members to justice for the atrocities they have committed. To remedy this failing, the reporting team of the In the Dark podcast has assembled the largest known collection of investigations of possible war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11—nearly eight hundred incidents in all. Much of the time, the reporting concluded, the military delivers neither transparency nor justice.

The database makes it possible, for the first time, to see hundreds of allegations of war crimes—the kinds that stain a nation—in one place, along with the findings of investigations and the results of prosecutions. The picture that emerges is disheartening. The majority of allegations listed in the database were simply dismissed by investigators. Those which weren’t were usually dealt with later, by commanders, in a justice system that can be deferential to defendants and disbelieving of victims.

This project is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

The database began with In the Dark’s reporting on the killings of civilians in Haditha, Iraq, on November 19, 2005. That morning, a squad of Marines, led by Sergeant Frank Wuterich, was hit by an improvised explosive device, which killed a beloved lance corporal. In the hours that followed, Marines killed men, women, and children on the street and in nearby houses. Four of those Marines, including Wuterich, were charged with murder. Three of their cases were later thrown out, and, when Wuterich went to trial, he was allowed to plead guilty to a single count of negligent dereliction of duty. A judge demoted Wuterich in rank. “Essentially a parking ticket,” Wuterich’s lawyer, Haytham Faraj, said of the sentence. “It’s meaningless.” We wanted to understand how such a large and well-publicized war-crimes prosecution had reached a conclusion of such little consequence. Was this an anomaly or was it typical of the military-justice system?

We began by filing requests with the military under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In 1974, following the massacre of hundreds of civilians in My Lai, Vietnam, and the failed prosecutions of some two dozen Army service members for the killings, the Department of Defense began requiring each branch of the military to maintain a “central collection of reports and investigations” of allegations of war crimes by its members. However, when we filed public-records requests for the contents of each branch’s collection, we got little in return. The Department of the Navy, which includes the Marine Corps, sent us a letter saying that it had located its “depository” but that “the depository did not contain any records.”

With no other option, we started combing through archived news articles, human-rights reports, legal and medical journals, and a staggering repository of records about torture and detainee abuse that the A.C.L.U. had obtained during fourteen years of litigation. We looked for incidents such as the indiscriminate shooting of civilians, the killing or torturing of wounded enemies, and the abuse or willful neglect of detainees, all textbook examples of war crimes. We limited our search to events that were broadly comparable to Haditha: allegations of violence perpetrated by U.S. service members or deaths in U.S. custody that happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after September 11, 2001. We excluded nonviolent incidents, such as thefts of artifacts, and killings by drone strikes, which aren’t typically treated as crimes.

As we unearthed information about new incidents, we filed FOIA requests for related records. In response, we were often told that, unless we could provide names, especially those of the perpetrators, agencies couldn’t carry out searches for documents. When we provided names, some departments refused to release records, citing the privacy rights of the people we had identified. We learned that many cases were handled nonjudicially—essentially as personnel matters—and that those records were exempt from FOIA. Cases that ended in acquittal or dismissal were also exempt from FOIA, and the files often destroyed. Many of the most basic records that would be easily obtained in any civilian courthouse in America are beyond reach in the military-justice system.

With the assistance of an experienced FOIA litigation team, we repeatedly sued the military. Over four years, the agencies released enough documentation to us that, assisted by other source materials, we were able to put together a collection of seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes, perpetrated against more than eighteen hundred alleged victims, that the U.S. military took seriously enough to investigate.

To analyze the database, we consulted John Roman, a researcher at NORC at the University of Chicago, who specializes in quantitative analysis of the civilian criminal-justice system. He was dismayed by the results. “It’s to the point where you have to question a little bit whether justice is a priority here or if something else is a bigger priority than justice,” Roman said.

Of the seven hundred and eighty-one cases we found, at least sixty-five per cent had been dismissed by investigators who didn’t believe that a crime had even taken place. Soldiers would return to the United States and confess—to women, health-care workers, job interviewers—that they’d murdered civilians or prisoners, but military investigators would find that the allegations couldn’t be substantiated. Detainees at Abu Ghraib prison reported abuse by their guards, but investigators did not find sufficient evidence to confirm that it had happened. Civilians driving distractedly or too fast were shot dead approaching traffic checkpoints, and investigators deemed these killings acceptable escalations of force. Young men were found unresponsive at Camp Bucca prison, and their deaths were attributed to natural causes.

In a hundred and fifty-one cases, however, investigators did find probable cause to believe that a crime had occurred, that the rules of engagement had been violated, or that a use of force hadn’t been justified. These include the case of soldiers raping a fourteen-year-old girl and subsequently murdering her and her family; the alleged killing of a man by a Green Beret who cut off his victim’s ear and kept it; and cruelty toward detainees at Abu Ghraib prison and at the Bagram Air Base detention facility. They were offenses that even a military-justice system vexed by the difficulty of collecting evidence in war zones and forgiving of deadly errors in judgment had identified as warranting prosecution or punishment. Yet, even in these cases, meaningful accountability was rare.

We identified five hundred and seventy-two alleged perpetrators associated with these hundred and fifty-one criminal cases. Only a hundred and thirty of them were convicted. The records show that they rarely received lengthy prison terms. Much more often, their cases were dealt with by commanders, who have broad discretion to punish their troops with extra duty, demotions, or reprimands, circumventing formal prosecution altogether. (The commanders themselves almost never seemed to face consequences for the misdeeds of their subordinates.) Fewer than one in five alleged perpetrators appear to have been sentenced to any type of confinement, and the median sentence was just eight months. “The conviction rates and the rate of sentencing for these kinds of very serious person crimes is just far below what you would see in the civilian system,” Roman said.

We sent summaries of our findings to the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and the Air Force, and requested an opportunity to present their leaders with the details of our analysis. None took us up on the offer. The Army replied that it “holds Soldiers and Army Civilians to the highest standards of personal conduct.” The Marine Corps didn’t respond.

What we’re publishing is not a complete record of the atrocities committed by the military since 9/11; it would be impossible to know them all. This is a repository of the seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes investigated by the U.S. military that we were able to identify. You can explore an index of information about the incidents, investigative findings, adjudicative outcomes, and our source materials.

Below, we’ve displayed detailed accounts of the hundred and fifty-one cases that investigators determined to be criminal. Each has its own story, but many start and end the same way: with a horrific act perpetrated by members of the military which was then punished lightly or not at all.

151 Cases

572 Alleged perpetrators

130 Convicted

Nature of incident

Assault56

Homicide39

Abuse30

Multiple homicide17

Robbery6

Kidnapping2

Sexual assault1

Location

Iraq119

Afghanistan30

Unknown2

Service

Army125

Marines19

Navy6

Unknown1

Date

Location

Service

Killing of Mohamed Sayari at roadblockOn August 28, 2002, an Army Special Forces team allegedly killed Mohamed Sayari, an Afghan civilian, at a roadblock they’d set up near a firebase in Lwara. According to investigation records, the soldiers lured Sayari, whom they suspected of following convoys leaving their base, into an ambush, captured him, and then shot him to death. Afterward, they allegedly destroyed photos that they had taken of his body. The Army C.I.D. found probable cause to believe that four soldiers had committed murder and that a fifth was an accessory after the fact. One received a written reprimand. The others faced no punishment. According to an Afghan witness interviewed by investigators, Sayari had been working as a taxi-driver, which is why he had been travelling on the road near the firebase.

8/28/2002

Afghanistan

Firebase Lwara, Paktika Province

Army

Killings of Habibullah and Dilawar and abuse at BagramIn late 2002, two Afghan detainees died at Bagram Air Base. The first, identified as Mullah Habibullah, was found unresponsive in his cell on December 3rd, hanging limp from arm shackles connected to the ceiling. A week later, on December 10th, a twenty-two-year-old taxi-driver, known only as Dilawar, was found the same way. Autopsies later determined that both men had died as a result of blunt-force injuries to their legs and that their deaths were homicides. Army C.I.D. investigators discovered that service members in the 377th Military Police Company and 519th Military Intelligence Battalion had subjected both men, and other Bagram detainees, to a variety of forms of abuse. They had kept detainees in isolation cells and subjected them to sensory deprivation, making them wear hoods, dark goggles, and earmuffs. Guards had denied detainees sleep, made them stand for long periods of time, and twisted their wrists in chains. As a matter of standard operating practice, guards told investigators, they repeatedly used a type of disabling blow, called a peroneal strike, on detainees they found to be noncompliant. The maneuver, which involved kneeing detainees forcefully in the thigh, proved fatal in the cases of Habibullah and Dilawar. A forensic pathologist would later testify that Dilawar’s legs had been essentially “pulpified.” The Army C.I.D. appears to have found probable cause to believe that at least twenty-seven service members had committed crimes including assault, cruelty and maltreatment, and dereliction of duty. Six appear to have been convicted, only four of whom were sentenced to time in prison. The longest sentence was just five months.

11/30/2002 – 12/10/2002

Afghanistan

Bagram Air Base

Army

Threatening of child with loaded pistolIn April, 2003, a captain allegedly pointed a loaded pistol at an Iraqi child and wondered aloud, in front of witnesses, whether he should kill the child to “send a message” to other Iraqis. In a separate incident, according to a summary of an investigation, one of the captain’s men was approached by a detainee who asked for medical treatment for his arm. The captain allegedly responded by asking the detainee “if he wanted to have the other arm cut off.” According to records, the captain had been charged with crimes as of April 2, 2004. The outcome of his prosecution is unknown.

4/1/2003 – 4/30/2003

Iraq

Army

Stripping and humiliation of detainees at amusement parkIn late April, 2003, two journalists from Dagbladet, a Norwegian newspaper, witnessed and photographed American soldiers who appeared to be escorting four Iraqi men, all of them naked, to a building in Zawraa Amusement Park. The men, alleged looters, were then released, without their clothes, onto a street, and fled. According to investigation records, the journalists interviewed an officer at the scene, who told them that he and his subordinates had instructed the men to disrobe, written “Ali Baba Haram” on their bodies, and had then burned their clothes. The phrase “Ali Baba Haram,” an apparent reference to “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,” meant “sinful thief,” according to the Army C.I.D. According to a news report, the officer said that he intended to continue the practice. “A little public shaming; no physical damage and everything will be fine tomorrow,” he said. “Hopefully they will be embarrassed enough not to come back.” The Army C.I.D. found that there was sufficient evidence to prove that the captain had committed cruelty and maltreatment. He received a letter of reprimand.

4/24/2003 – 4/25/2003

Iraq

Zawraa Amusement Park, Baghdad

Army

Armed carjacking of sheikh’s sonOn April 26, 2003, Sergeant First Class James Williams and Staff Sergeant Alberto Lozano chased down an S.U.V. in Mosul and, when the driver stopped, stole his car at gunpoint. Soldiers removed the license plate and deliberately damaged the car to alter its appearance. The driver of the S.U.V. happened to be the son of a sheikh. According to news reports, the military eventually paid the sheikh or his son thirty-two thousand dollars. Williams’s lawyers later argued that he had commandeered the vehicle in keeping with the rules of engagement, but he was convicted of armed robbery. Lozano pleaded guilty to robbery and making a false official statement. Second Lieutenant Bradley Pavlik was also convicted for lying about the incident.

4/26/2003

Iraq

Mosul

Army

Armed robbery of two Baghdad familiesOn May 13, 2003, a private first class and a specialist allegedly abandoned their post, forcibly entered two local homes, and robbed the families inside. In one house, according to a victim’s statement, one soldier held the family at gunpoint while the other broke open two wardrobe lockers and stole more than two thousand dollars, coins, two briefcases, and a camera, among other items. In a neighboring house, according to another victim’s statement, one soldier held the family at gunpoint while the other stole a diamond ring and a gold necklace. At some point, the soldiers allegedly fired two shots to scare nearby civilians. Army C.I.D. investigators found some of the stolen property in the possession of the two soldiers and determined that there was sufficient evidence to believe they had committed burglary, robbery, and conspiracy. According to an investigation by the Dayton Daily News, one of the victims said the soldiers had claimed to be Marines searching for weapons. He described being held at gunpoint while his eight-year-old daughter cried. The article says that the soldiers were charged but their cases were dismissed in exchange for their resignations from the military.

5/13/2003

Iraq

Baghdad

Army

Abuse of detainee near KarbalaOn May 15, 2003, six Marines allegedly participated in the abuse of a detainee being held at the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marines logistics base, west of Karbala. According to investigators, Lance Corporal Ryan Roberts forced the detainee to kneel with his hands flex-cuffed behind his back, pointed a 9-millimetre pistol at his head, and poured water on him to humiliate him. Two other Marines allegedly staged a mock torture scene in front of the detainee. Another Marine draped an American flag over the detainee and took a picture. The Marines’ commanding officer recommended that four of the Marines stand trial at court-martial for cruelty and maltreatment and dereliction of duty, and that the other two Marines face nonjudicial punishment. At least three of the Marines, including Roberts, were convicted.

5/15/2003

Iraq

West of Karbala

Marine Corps

Robbery and malingering near TuzeOn May 29, 2003, service members in C Company, 1st Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment allegedly stole a hundred and eighty thousand Iraqi dinar from two homes they searched on the outskirts of Tuze, during a raid on suspected Fedayeen residences. The victims of the robberies are described in investigation records as “a mother” and an “unidentified male.” A private first class’s body armor was searched, and two separate wads of money were found. When he learned that he would be recommended for disciplinary action, he allegedly shot himself in the foot. An Army C.I.D. investigation found probable cause to believe that the private first class had committed the crimes of robbery and malingering. He received an administrative discharge. Five other soldiers were punished nonjudicially.

5/29/2003

Iraq

Tuze

Army

Mock execution and maltreatment of Iraqi juvenilesIn several incidents that took place in June and early July, 2003, Marines in Al Diwaniyah mistreated detainees who they alleged were looters. In the first, the Marines allegedly locked two detainees in an abandoned T-55 battle tank. In the second, a Marine allegedly sprayed a detainee in the face with a fire extinguisher. In the third, Marines ordered four juvenile detainees to kneel near two shallow holes, then fired a pistol near them to simulate an execution. Four Marines were investigated in connection with the incidents. Three were later convicted at court-martial.

6/1/2003 – 7/6/2003

Iraq

Al Diwaniyah

Marine Corps

Abuse of looters around Camp MarlboroAround the beginning of summer in 2003, soldiers with the Army’s 84th Engineer Company participated in the abuse of detainees in and around Camp Marlboro, in Baghdad. The abuse took place on multiple occasions: the first in mid-June, the second several days later, and the third on July 3rd. The detainees, who had all allegedly been trying to steal copper wire, were yelled at, hit, pelted with a soccer ball, and shocked with M34 blasting devices. In two instances, detainees were stripped of their clothing and released naked. An administrative investigation noted that “continued performance like this could result in an uprising of the citizens of Iraq against U.S. forces.” At least one soldier, a staff sergeant, was found guilty of assault and maltreatment at court-martial. A second soldier, who allegedly ordered some of the abuse, pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty.

6/15/2003 – 7/3/2003

Iraq

Baghdad

Army

Strip search of detaineesOn June 23, 2003, an officer allegedly ordered Marines under his supervision to search four detainees, strip them down to their underwear and shoes, confiscate their money, and release them. Six days later, the same officer allegedly ordered his Marines to burn clothing and seat cushions found inside a truck. They’d shot at the truck and damaged it at a checkpoint the previous night, injuring its driver and a passenger, who’d been sent to a hospital for treatment. At a nonjudicial punishment proceeding, the officer was found guilty of failing to report and turn over captured property and conduct unbecoming an officer, and was given an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps.

6/23/2003

Iraq

Al Kut

Marine Corps

Armed robbery in BaqubahOn June 30, 2003, a private first class in C Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Infantry Regiment allegedly stole about seven hundred and fifty dollars and several thousand Iraqi dinar from a local man at a traffic control point in Baqubah. When the man, whose name is unknown, refused to leave without his money, the soldier allegedly threatened to shoot him with a rifle. Another soldier saw the private first class stuff the money into a meal-ready-to-eat box, and notified a superior. The Army C.I.D. found probable cause to believe that the private first class had committed robbery; the disposition of his case is unknown.

6/30/2003

Iraq

Traffic Control Point 12, Baqubah

Army

Abuse of detainees at Camp CropperIn June, 2004, the Army C.I.D. was notified that several soldiers in the 443rd Military Police Company alleged that detainees had been abused. The abuse had taken place in and around Camp Cropper, in Baghdad, the previous summer. The soldiers reported that M.P.s in their unit had forced shackled detainees to hold concrete blocks for long periods, without adequate water supply, and that M.P.s had physically abused detainees for hours. According to Army C.I.D. records, one M.P. admitted to investigators that he’d hog-tied six detainees and put them in the sun for periods of fifteen to twenty minutes; he told investigators that doing so was standard practice. Another M.P. said that she’d seen a service member urinate on a detainee. A third M.P. told investigators that he’d thrown dirt on detainees and urinated next to them. “I initially thought about urinating on them, but when [I] started to urinate, I thought about the moral issues, and changed my mind,” he said. The Army C.I.D. found probable cause to believe that ten M.P.s had committed the crime of cruelty and maltreatment. No action was taken against any of them.

7/1/2003 – 7/31/2003

Iraq

Camp Cropper, Baghdad

Army

Burning of detainee in transport vehicleOn July 2, 2003, an Iraqi civilian who was being detained received severe burns. He said that the burns had come from “hot gases” in the back of a transport vehicle in which he had been face-down, hooded, and restrained with his hands behind his back. He later required multiple skin grafts and the amputation of a finger. An Army C.I.D. investigation found sufficient evidence to believe that the man, whose name is redacted from records, had been the victim of assault as well as cruelty and maltreatment, but the investigation was unable to determine the soldiers involved, and no one was punished.

7/2/2003

Iraq

Baghdad

Army

Choking of detainees and throwing of rocks at childrenIn late July, 2003, an Army captain allegedly committed a series of assaults in Iraq. On July 25th, the captain allegedly pointed a 9-millimetre weapon at two handcuffed detainees and struck a detainee on the head with the weapon. On July 26th, he allegedly handcuffed two Iraqi children and threw rocks at them. On July 28th, he allegedly threatened and choked blindfolded detainees. The captain was criminally charged, but he submitted his resignation before going to court-martial.

7/25/2003 – 7/28/2003

Iraq

Army

Pointing of gun at detainee in safe houseIn May, 2004, the wife of a New York-based private in C Company, 2nd Battalion 14th Infantry Regiment gave the police a photograph of her husband pointing a pistol at the head of a detainee who was hooded, handcuffed, and lying on the ground. According to investigation records, the photo had been taken during the private’s deployment to Iraq, at a safe house where Special Forces soldiers held detainees. When the private was questioned, he alleged that he had been following orders and that the pistol was in fact a BB gun. Investigators found probable cause to believe that the private had committed aggravated assault. He was disciplined administratively.

8/1/2003 – 3/31/2004

Iraq

Al-Qaim or Al-Asad

Army

Interrogation of detainees at gunpoint and shooting of detainee’s tiresLittle is known about this incident, which was listed in an “information paper” about detainee abuse that the A.C.L.U. obtained from the Army. It states that on October 1, 2003, a captain interrogated several detainees at gunpoint, and then used the gun to shoot six times at a detainee’s car, deflating its tires. After an administrative investigation, the captain was required to forfeit a month of pay and was relieved of duty.

10/1/2003

Iraq or Afghanistan

Army

Hitting of detainee in stomach and threatening him with hat rackOn October 15, 2003, a staff sergeant and a specialist allegedly threw a water bottle at a detainee, hit him in the stomach, and threatened him with a hat rack. The detainee had allegedly tried to squeeze between the bars of his cell. A commander’s inquiry determined that the soldiers had exceeded the authorized level of force needed to restrain the detainee from escaping. The soldiers, along with a third who witnessed the assault and failed to report it, received nonjudicial punishment.

10/15/2003

Iraq

Gunner Holding Area, Unknown

Army

Throwing of rocks at woman and childSometime between October, 2003, and October, 2004, a warrant officer in the 3rd Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment allegedly threw rocks at an Iraqi woman and child in an attempt to deter people from throwing rocks at his aircraft. An Army C.I.D. investigation determined that there was probable cause to believe that the warrant officer had committed the offenses of reckless endangerment, failure to obey a general order, and making a false official statement. He received a letter of concern.

10/22/2003 – 10/22/2004

Iraq

Army

Pointing of pistols and M4s at bound and hooded detaineesIn June, 2004, Army C.I.D. agents obtained a CD with images that appeared to show detainees being mistreated. The photos showed soldiers pointing pistols and assault rifles at the heads of bound and hooded detainees. Investigators determined that the photos had been taken the previous winter at Fire Base Tycz in Deh Rawood. Although investigators couldn’t find evidence “to indicate the bound detainees were in fear for their lives, or of grievous bodily harm,” which might have supported aggravated assault charges, they found probable cause to believe that eight soldiers had committed dereliction of duty, and one specialist had committed assault consummated by battery for punching a bound detainee in the head. A soldier told investigators that the platoon was tight-knit, and on celebratory occasions they’d sometimes take similar pictures of each other bound up like detainees, also known as “persons under control.” They referred to the activity as “PUCing.”

12/5/2003 – 2/28/2004

Afghanistan

Fire Base Tycz, Deh Rawood

Army

Breaking of detainee’s jaw and forced exerciseOn or about December 11, 2003, an Iraqi high-school student sustained a bloodied and fractured jaw while being detained at a holding facility at Area of Operations Glory in Mosul. According to the student’s statement in the investigation file, he was arrested with his family members during a raid of their apartment. He said that, after he was taken to the base, he was kicked in the face while there was a bag on his head; several of his teeth were broken. An administrative investigation found that the student and other detainees had been harassed and forced to exercise for hours while flex-cuffed and wearing bags on their heads. It found that the noise level at the detention facility was “tremendous”: guards yelled, used bullhorns, and blasted music from “three-foot floor speakers.” The investigation identified three guards who were present when the student’s jaw was injured; two denied seeing what happened, and the third said that the student had fallen. The investigation determined that the cause of the student’s broken jaw was blunt trauma, and that it was the result of intentional acts. However, the investigation could not determine who, if anyone, had struck the student, or whether the student had instead collapsed from exhaustion. The officer in charge of the holding area was reprimanded, apparently for “allowing detainee abuse as standard operating procedure.” The investigation also found that the student had not been the intended target of the raid.

12/11/2003

Iraq

2nd B.C.T. Holding Area, A.O. Glory, Mosul

Army

Placing of detainees in stress positions and photographing themIn May, 2004, the Army C.I.D. opened a criminal investigation after being notified by the Office of the Secretary of Defense that a photo depicting detainee abuse had been found on a government computer. The photo showed three Iraqi detainees with sandbags on their heads, zip-tied to bars in stress positions, and three soldiers posed in the background. One of the soldiers, a sergeant in military intelligence, poked a broomstick toward the rectum of one of the detainees while the other two soldiers egged her on. The sergeant told investigators that the photo had been taken just before Christmas in 2003, at a time when there weren’t many detainees at the 82nd Airborne Division’s interrogation facility in Fallujah. “I did not have a lot of work to do for a couple of days,” she told investigators. “Myself and several other MPs . . . were fooling around in the prison.” She said they’d kept the detainees in stress positions for “a couple of hours.” The Army C.I.D. found probable cause to believe that four soldiers had committed cruelty and maltreatment. All were later punished.

12/21/2003

Iraq

F.O.B. St. Mere, Fallujah

Army

Abuse of man robbed of millions of dinarA man was arrested at a security checkpoint on January 12, 2004, for travelling with more than twenty-five million Iraqi dinar, and transported to a detention facility in Balad. The man, a goatherd whose name is redacted in investigation records, alleged that he was beaten and threatened while in detention, and that most of his money was stolen. The man said that he’d received the money—30.3 million dinar—from selling his village’s livestock, and that he feared retribution from his tribe if he returned home without it. Only eight million dinar were returned to the man upon his release. When he refused to accept only eight million, the man remained at the detention facility for roughly two more weeks. The Army C.I.D. couldn’t develop enough evidence to substantiate the man’s claims of having been assaulted and maltreated but did find probable cause that he’d been the victim of larceny. Investigators couldn’t determine which soldier or soldiers had stolen the money but found sufficient evidence to believe that three soldiers who’d handled the money had committed dereliction of duty.

1/12/2004 – 2/2/2004

Iraq

F.O.B. Eagle, Balad

Army

Humiliation of detainee in shower at Abu GhraibIn June, 2004, an Iraqi man reported that he’d been sexually humiliated, assaulted, and burned with a cigarette six months earlier, while he was being held at Abu Ghraib prison. The man, whose name is redacted from records, showed Army C.I.D. investigators a scar consistent with a cigarette burn, and said that a sergeant had punched him, stepped on his hand and broken it, and brought him to a shower, where he’d been stripped naked in front of female service members and sprayed with cold water. An Abu Ghraib interrogator told investigators that the man had told her about the shower the day after it happened. The Army C.I.D. dismissed the man’s allegations of violence but found that there was probable cause to believe that the shower incident had occurred, constituting cruelty and maltreatment. Investigators were unable to determine which female guards had taken part in the abuse.

1/13/2004 – 1/15/2004

Iraq

Abu Ghraib prison

Army

Threatening of detainee and religious disrespectOn February 10, 2004, an Army specialist at Camp Bucca allegedly physically threatened a detainee and disrespected the detainee in a way that “insulted the Arabs that were present.” According to a report from a counselling session following the incident, one of the specialist’s superiors alleged that the specialist became upset with a detainee who ignored his instruction to get dressed in an orange jumpsuit. The specialist threatened the detainee and pulled out the Star of David attached to his necklace. The superior worried that the specialist’s actions could incite a riot. The specialist faced nonjudicial punishment for failing to obey a lawful order—the order in question being “to treat all Internees with respect.”

2/10/2004

Iraq

Compound 11, Camp Bucca

Army

Incidents per page

25

50

100

All

1-25 of 151

The cases displayed above are the hundred and fifty-one that investigators determined to be criminal. To explore the set of seven hundred and eighty-one possible war crimes that were investigated, view the full repository.

Notes about the data

• The details of many of these incidents are scant, contradictory, and often heavily redacted in records. We’ve done our best to disambiguate incidents, perpetrators, and victims, and to provide as much detail as possible on each.
• When known from government records, we’ve published the names of perpetrators who were convicted or who are public figures. In the data table above, we’ve withheld the names of alleged perpetrators, some widely published, whose cases did not end in convictions. We have not redacted names in the government records linked to cases.
• When known, we’ve published the names of victims who died. In the data table above, we’ve withheld the names of victims who survived to protect their privacy. We have not redacted names in the government records linked to cases, except in one instance. In the vast majority of cases, the records don’t provide the names, or any distinguishing detail, about the victims.
• Some of the cases in the database represent single incidents. Others represent multiple incidents of a similar kind perpetrated by roughly the same people in a relatively condensed time period. Such spree-type crimes were often bundled into a single investigation; when this was the case, we preserved that grouping.
• Where possible, we’ve included the precise date of an incident. When the date is unknown, or the case includes multiple incidents or ongoing abuse, we’ve listed the date as a range.
• The “Initial Recommended Charges” column represents the violations that investigators appeared to substantiate against each alleged perpetrator. It is not necessarily a record of the actual offenses that alleged perpetrators were charged with. In the military, charging is a multi-step process, and the records documenting actual charges, and their sometimes multiple iterations, can be nearly impossible to obtain. Some alleged perpetrators were never charged.
• The disposition data include some terms that will be unfamiliar to civilians. Nonjudicial punishment results from a formal proceeding under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. A finding of guilt at a nonjudicial punishment proceeding or at a summary court-martial may become part of a service member’s permanent record, but it does not result in a criminal conviction. Other forms of administrative discipline, theoretically reserved for the least serious offenses, can be imposed outside of any formal proceeding. Some of them are simply oral reprimands. Some dispositions are listed in the database as “unknown.” It is unlikely that a significant number of these unknown values represents convictions. When a service member is convicted, the military-justice system retains records about the member’s case for longer and releases the records more freely. If a service member was convicted, we are likely to know about it.

CREDITS

Lead Reporter Parker Yesko Editors Catherine Winter, Julia Rothchild, Madeleine Baran, Willing Davidson Additional Reporting Natalie Jablonski, Rehman Tungekar, Samara Freemark, Meg Martin, Will Craft Fact-Checking Hannah Wilentz, Cameron Foos, Jasper Lo Engineers Tim Klimowicz, Lily Healey, David Kofahl Designers Annette Cheung, Steven Striegel, Aviva Michaelov Illustration Nicholas Konrad Data Analysis John Roman Legal Review Fabio Bertoni Copy Editing The New Yorker’s Department of Copy and Production FOIA Litigation Matt Topic, Josh Loevy, Stephen Stich Match, Merrick Wayne, Rachel Eun, Blake Bunting, Meagan Shinker, Beki Shertok Special Thanks A.C.L.U. Torture Database, Iraq Body Count, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library

This project is supported by the Pulitzer Center.

13. Ukraine’s western-trained ‘navy seals’ unleash wave of destruction

Ukraine’s western-trained ‘navy seals’ unleash wave of destruction

thetimes.com · by Maxim Tucker, southern Ukraine

https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ukraines-western-trained-navy-seals-unleash-wave-of-destruction-q6n96llhw?utm

Captain “Judy” is one of only a few women known to have trained on the gruelling special forces “Q” course

MAXIM TUCKER FOR THE TIMES

“Our divers conduct covert infiltration into enemy areas by boat, dive, approach the coast, conduct reconnaissance, clear mines, land and perform special operations,” the young commander of one of the diving teams, “Alex”, said as he drilled his unit for its next mission. While the Ukrainian military’s land grab in Kursk has focused attention hundreds of miles to the north, the more strategic battle is being fought in the Black Sea — and it is one that Ukraine is winning, against all odds, with British help.

When special forces drove the Russians from Snake Island on June 30, 2022, four months after the invasion, they secured a corridor for the country to export grain from the port of Odesa. Last September Ukraine established control over a number of oil rigs, which today serve as a launchpad for attacks on Russian targets in Crimea.

Now, clearing the Russians from the Kinburn Spit and Tendra Spit is vital for unblocking Ukraine’s second-largest port, Mykolaiv. These two streaks of land jut across the estuary of the Southern Buh river, allowing the Russians to sever the port from the sea.

Ukrainian sea drones and Storm Shadow missiles supplied by Britain have destroyed 26 vessels of the Russian Black Sea fleet, according to the Ukrainian navy. The rest have retreated closer to the Russian coast, allowing units such as the 73rd Naval Special Operations Centre to attack. Its divers can swim for miles under water to arrive undetected, or reconnoitre 30 miles of coastline over a two-week period.

The divers face dangerous missions where the environment is as much a hazard as the enemy

MAXIM TUCKER FOR THE TIMES

Things do not always go according to plan. When the first pair of divers on one mission reached the Russian-controlled coast, they soon realised they were alone. A technical malfunction had forced the second pair to turn back. Alex, their commander, was watching through a feed from a drone hovering overhead but had no means of communicating with them without alerting the enemy.

The mission had been weeks in preparation. The team had been through a gruelling training regime.

“In preparing for our missions, we always go through all the ‘what if’ scenarios,” said Alex, who is in his twenties. “What if the boat breaks down? What if the weapon fails? What if the explosives fail or half are lost? We talk through whatever we can imagine will go wrong. If we can, we continue the mission.”

Despite being down to two men, facing a battalion of enemy troops stationed in the area, the team leader decided to pursue his target. He found a gap in the barbed wire coastal defences that would save them precious time, and pushed on.

The elite amphibious unit is targeting two spits of land held by Russia

MAXIM TUCKER FOR THE TIMES

“There were at least 500 soldiers in different locations. If the alarm sounds, they take up positions, start defending and start looking for the divers,” Alex said. “That’s why it’s so important to complete the task as stealthily as possible, without any signs, signals, communication or thermal signatures, without losing the element of surprise. Two soldiers, no matter how well trained they are, can’t stand up to two tanks, one armoured personnel carrier and one squad.”

The two divers had been ordered to take out an armoured Russian ZSU-23-4 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft system. They had watched the Russians use it to ferry troops and supplies to a forward position, always taking the same route. Hiding their diving equipment and moving inland undetected, the pair reached the road used by the Russians and planted their explosives. Then they waited. When the anti-aircraft vehicle rumbled down the road under cover of darkness, the divers pressed the detonator.

“We saw the vehicle blow up, as well as the ammunition that was inside. There was a crew in that vehicle, and they were transporting a shift that was supposed to rotate troops into their positions. We probably killed eight to ten Russians,” Alex said.

The Russians were stunned. So far from the front line, they could not imagine they had been attacked by Ukrainian forces. “We were listening to their radio interceptions. They were screaming, blaming each other for the fact that the new rotation were not given maps with their mines or their positions. They thought they had hit their own mine,” he said with a smile. The divers escaped unnoticed, swimming back to their boat under cover of darkness.

Judy was the first woman petty officer in her military academy

MAXIM TUCKER FOR THE TIMES

Among the operators of the 73rd Naval Special Operations Centre is Captain “Judy”, also in her twenties and one of only a few women to have undergone a Nato special forces qualification, or “Q” course.

“In the history of my military academy, I was the first woman petty officer of our course. The first girl who could command men. I love the water and realised that this was my calling, so I decided to join the 73rd centre,” Judy said.

“When I got there, I found out about the Q course. I trained the same as everyone else. There’s a preparatory phase, a 30km march with a 20kg backpack. Then there’s selection, the hardest part. Constant physical activity without sleep, malnutrition, to see if you give up, ring the bell, like on the Navy Seal course.”

Judy has since fought in some of the war’s most intense engagements, including the Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive, and helped to forge a path for Ukrainian marines to land at Krynky, a bridgehead across the Dnipro they held for months before being driven out, a Pyrrhic victory for the Russians. On her most recent mission she commanded a team that ambushed a Russian quick-reaction force on the Kinburn Spit, the details of which are still classified.

Because the troops operate in small units, the centre’s losses were particularly hard to bear, she said. “We’ve been fighting for two and a half years together, living together, eating together. The unit becomes like a second family, so when we suffer losses, it is the hardest thing that can happen.”

The harsh training regime helps the elite fighters survive even the most difficult conditions.

On one night-time reconnaissance operation, Alex and his diving partner were swimming toward Russian territory when he became trapped in a defensive net. Fighting the urge to panic, he needed to regulate his breathing to avoid oxygen poisoning, and slowly and methodically cut himself free. Once out of the net, they swam on — only to become caught in a second net. After again freeing himself with his knife, Alex realised they would no longer have time to complete the mission and decided to return, swimming towards the surface to avoid any further nets. Yet as he did so, they encountered a third net.

“We realised that if we couldn’t get to the surface in 500 metres, we wouldn’t have enough oxygen. I was already thinking that the Russians would pull out two carp from the net, big ones,” Alex said, laughing.

“This is not the death I would want. Just to get tangled up and lie there until you run out of oxygen, looking at the pressure gauge, and drown. It’s a slow death. I don’t want to go out like that.”

thetimes.com · by Maxim Tucker, southern Ukraine

14. World’s Largest Shipbuilder! Chinese Firm Set To Dominate Global Shipping Industry, Eyes $17B In Annual Sales

I heard a troubling statistic at the 10th Annual Future Security Forum (New America, Arizona State University, Security & Defence Plus) from Senator Mark Kelly this week.

He said at the end of WWII we had 10,000 US flagged merchant ships. At the First Gulf War we had 400 US flagged merchant ships. Today we only have 80 US flagged merchant chips. He said he is going to introduce legislation in the coming weeks to fix this.

World’s Largest Shipbuilder! Chinese Firm Set To Dominate Global Shipping Industry, Eyes $17B In Annual Sales

eurasiantimes.com · by Ritu Sharma · September 9, 2024

At a time when the US shipyards are struggling to build new ships or even fully maintain or repair the ones they hold in inventory, two of the Chinese listed shipbuilders will merge to end the competition between them and serve the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) better. Their merger will create the world’s largest shipbuilder.

The impending merger will create a shipyard with combined annual sales of 122 billion yuan (US$17.1 billion/HK$133.1 billion), almost double the size of South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries.

The merged entity would be capable of building various vessels, from warships like aircraft carriers to commercial ships like container carriers, huge crude carriers, and even passenger liners.

Two Chinese firms, China CSSC Holdings and China Shipbuilding Industry (CSICL), filed an intent to merge with the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Trading of their shares was suspended Tuesday to avoid irregular movements while they arrange the deal, with the halt expected to last no more than 10 trading days.

Both listed shipyards are subsidiaries of China State Shipbuilding Corp, and together, they have control over one-third of the global market shipbuilding orders.

China has been restructuring its shipbuilding industries. Earlier Beijing had consolidated the two state-controlled shipbuilders in 2019. Earlier these two shipbuilders were covering separate geographical regions.

They built hundreds of military vessels to modernize the Chinese Navy and built aircraft carriers, Type 055 destroyers, Type 076 amphibious assault ships, and Type 094A nuclear submarines.

“A consolidation will help optimize their business structure with strengthened capability to take orders for more advanced vessels,” Man Zaipeng, an analyst at Sinolink Securities, said in a note to clients. China’s increasing share of the global shipbuilding market “bodes well for earnings of the new entity,” he added.

The restructuring of the China State Shipbuilding Corps is to drive new growth. Presently, China is the world’s largest builder of merchant ships.

The Office of Naval Intelligence assessment noted that China has “dozens” of commercial shipyards larger and more productive than the largest U.S. shipyards, and an unclassified US Navy briefing slide suggested that China has 230 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.

Besides the raw numerical superiority, the PLA-Navy will surpass the US Navy in another critical measure of naval power: the total number of vertical launch system (VLS) cells and advanced missile launchers that determine a navy’s firepower. The US Navy currently has about 9,900 VLS cells on its surface combatants and submarines, while the PLAN only has about 4,200.

But the Chinese Navy is catching up fast. In 2004, the US warships had 222 times as many launchers as the Chinese Navy, and now it has fewer than three times. If the current progress continues, China will have more launchers than the US Navy by 2027.

Contrary to this, the US shipyard capacity is floundering. Given the current shipyard capacity, the US Navy is estimated to be 20 years behind in maintenance work.

American shipbuilding production has been at a historic low. US shipbuilding output has decreased by more than 85 percent since the 1950s, while the number of American shipyards capable of building large vessels has fallen by more than 80 percent.

American shipyards are suffering from a labor shortage. The US has gone from building 5 percent of the world’s ocean-going commercial ships in the 1970s to building about 0.2 percent today, as measured by gross tonnage. On the other hand, China, Japan, and South Korea now combine for more than 90 percent of global commercial shipbuilding.

The US Navy, the principal customer of the American shipyards, has increased its shipbuilding budget by 12.5 percent per year from fiscal year 2020 to fiscal year 2024. And its most recent 30-year plan calls for the construction of 290 to 340 new ships by 2053.

Beyond the domestic demand, the shipbuilders have to meet the needs of the AUKUS nuclear submarine partnership among the Australian, US, and UK defense agencies.

To meet this target, the US needs to revitalize its shipbuilding industry.

China’s other advantage is the relative age of the Chinese and the US warships. About 70 percent of Chinese warships were launched after 2010, whereas only about 25 percent of the US Navy’s were.

File Image: China Navy Warship

Reviving The US Shipbuilding Capability

China has the largest maritime fighting force, operating 234 warships to the US Navy’s 219. The vessel count of the Chinese Navy doesn’t include 80 missile-armed small patrol craft in the Chinese Coast Guard but is operated by the PLA-Navy.

History suggests that numerical superiority led to victories in war. More numbers suggest that China can absorb more losses than the US.

In one recent set of wargames, China lost 52 major surface warships in the invasion of Taiwan. Even after such catastrophic losses, China still had more surface warships than the United States and was able to continue the naval battle.

Unless the US takes immediate corrective measures to arrest its declining shipbuilding capabilities, the advantage China gains in the maritime domain will be irreversible. The US can invest in smaller surface vessels like corvettes, frigates, and unmanned naval systems. Experts suggest that the US needs to deepen its partnerships with Pacific countries like Japan and South Korea and invest in its domestic shipbuilding industry—particularly the highly specialized submarine industrial base.

The other route is to go into the war along with allies. If the Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, along with its 4 cruisers, 34 destroyers, 10 frigates, and 4 helicopter carriers, and the South Korean Navy with its 3 cruisers, 6 destroyers, 16 frigates, and 5 corvettes join the US Navy, the PLA-Navy will lose its numerical advantage.

• Ritu Sharma has written on defense and foreign affairs for over a decade. She holds a Master’s Degree in Conflict Studies and Management of Peace from the University of Erfurt, Germany. Her areas of interest include Asia-Pacific, the South China Sea, and Aviation history.
• She can be reached at ritu.sharma (at) mail.com

eurasiantimes.com · by Ritu Sharma · September 9, 2024

15. "NATO's inaction leads to escalation." An interview with a Lithuanian colonel about the course of the war and the threat from the Russian Federation to the Baltic countries and Poland

This except is something we need to understand:

A Lithuanian Reserve colonel said “we think that if we give in, if we don't draw red lines, it will be de-escalation. No, it's an escalation, and it's been proven many times over.”

This is a Google translation from Ukrainian.

https://nv.ua/ukr/world/geopolitics/malinionis-pro-bezdiyalnist-nato-yake-robit-pomilku-i-provokaciji-bilorusi-novini-ukrajini-50449814.html

"NATO's inaction leads to escalation." An interview with a Lithuanian colonel about the course of the war and the threat from the Russian Federation to the Baltic countries and Poland

September 11, 06:53

 1442

NV PremiumReserve colonel, member of the Association of Colonels from Lithuania Vaidotas Malinionis (Photo: Vaidotas Malinionis/Facebook)

Author: Pavlo Novikov

Reserve colonel, member of the Association of Colonels from Lithuania, Vaidotas Malinionis, in an interview with Radio NV  - about NATO's response to Russian drones flying into the territory of the countries of the Alliance, the threat from the Russian Federation and Belarus, and the West's reaction to the Kursk operation.

 — The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Lithuania, Gabrielus Landsbergis, said that the drones of the Russian Federation began to fall on the territory of NATO countries due to the inaction of the member countries of the Alliance. Then he added: "Nothing can fall on Ukraine or Latvia, or anywhere on the territory of NATO. But this is a new reality, to which our inaction has led." And he also said that Lithuania will support the decisive response of the allies. What kind of answer can that be, as you see it? And how resonant did this event become, when Russian attack drones began to appear not only on the territory of Poland, Romania, but also on the territory of the Baltic countries?

- It doesn't matter if it was launched on purpose or if it flew accidentally, it shouldn't be like that. Because you can unintentionally demolish the house and cause damage. I agree with our minister Gabrielus Landsbergis that inaction is a mistake in some Western NATO countries that are very influential, such as the USA, Germany. They think that if they don't react, they will bypass the escalation. But just the opposite happens, if we do not draw red lines as NATO countries, this escalation still happens.

It has already been proven that our inaction only leads to escalation. For example, Poland has stated that it is seriously thinking about shooting down flying targets, not when they are already over Poland, but approaching it, for example, over Ukrainian territory. This position is strongly supported by the Baltic countries. But, unfortunately, the NATO spokeswoman said that such decisions could lead to a catastrophe, the Third World War. It's the same mistake as before: we think that if we give in, if we don't draw red lines, it will be de-escalation. No, it's an escalation, and it's been proven many times over.

I think, I hope, that one day it will reach our main partners and we will be tougher.

— If we are talking about Belarus, which borders both Lithuania and Poland, then there have been border problems there. And assaults by some refugees, and other provocations at the border. Now large-scale training of the Belarusian armed forces is starting there. This is happening in the Grodno and Brest regions, which border Lithuania and Poland. How do they react to this in particular in Lithuania?

- This is not the first time that such exercises are taking place, but according to my data, I gather them from open sources, there are not such large exercises. For all I know, there could be up to a battalion. They involve territorial troops, call in someone from the reservists. The magnitude is not large, so there is no direct threat... I don't think there is one.

And provocations are always possible. You already mentioned illegal migrants. These provocations with illegal migrants began as early as 2021, half a year or eight months before the full-scale attack on Ukraine. I think it's all connected, these actions were preparation for what they are doing.

We have strengthened our border, implemented surveillance measures, are strengthening and arming our border troops ( we do not have troops, but border police, border services). And plus, they interact not only with our Lithuanian armed forces, but there are also good interactions between countries, I mean Poland, Latvia, our neighbors.

16. The US Navy is about to launch a submarine built for a mixed-gender crew, the first of its kind

The US Navy is about to launch a submarine built for a mixed-gender crew, the first of its kind

Business Insider · by Mia Jankowicz

Military & Defense

Mia Jankowicz

2024-09-10T12:55:21Z

On board the USS Alaska in 2010, the year that a law barring women from serving aboard submarines was dropped. Image used for illustration purposes. Stephen Morton/AP Photo

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? .

• The USS New Jersey, designed for a co-ed crew, is set to join the US fleet on Saturday.
• A ban on women serving on US submarines was lifted in 2010, leading to hundreds joining the service.
• Future US submarines will be gender-neutral, addressing privacy and space issues for co-ed crews.

A submarine designed to fully integrate male and female sailors is set to join the US fleet on Saturday.

The USS New Jersey "is the first Virginia-class submarine designed and built for a full gender integrated crew," according to Naval Sea Systems Command.

Delivered last April after eight years of construction, it will enter active service on September 14, following a ceremony at Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey.

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

A long-standing ban on women serving aboard US submarines was lifted in 2010, and as of 2023 there were 609 women assigned to submarines in operation, per the US Naval Institute.

"The submarine community is a fully gender-integrated warfighting force," said Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher, commander of Submarine Forces Atlantic, according to Stars and Stripes.

Gaucher added, per the outlet, that all future nuclear-powered attack submarines and all new Columbia-class ballistic missile submarines are to be designed "gender-neutral from the keel up."

For the New Jersey, that meant adjusting many details, from the height of overhead valves to the privacy of washrooms and berths, the outlet reported.

Since admitting women onto submarines, the US Navy has faced the challenge of retrofitting and reorganizing vessels for co-ed use.

Last year, the Navy announced plans to expand the number of submarines taking on co-ed crews from 30 to 40, the Navy Times reported.

Lieutenant Commanders Andrea Howard and Emma McCarthy, who joined the influx of women to the fleet, wrote last year about the adjustments needed — both physical and social — in integrating them on ships designed for all-male crews.

Related stories

Space is tight, and the distribution of bathrooms and berths doesn't always match the crew's needs, they wrote.

"The number of women on board often does not conform to three- or six-man rack configurations," they said.

Similar issues apply to the washrooms, with some crews dividing up the space and others deciding to use them in all-male and all-female blocks.

"Transit to and from these spaces for showering also warrants an unambiguous, uniform standard for decency," they said.

But the physical arrangement of a submarine was only part of the issue — the workplace culture also needed to adapt, they said.

"Crew reactions ranged from treating the women the same, to making the experience awkward (knowingly or unwittingly), to showing disinterest in helping or—at worst—actively subverting," they wrote.

The first influx of female junior officers also drew sometimes awkward curiosity from male crew members, they said.

"A fishbowl effect developed any time one of the first female junior officers did something for the first time," they wrote.

The USS New Jersey is the 23rd Virginia-class submarine and the third Navy vessel to be named after the state. In 1900, New Jersey was the site of the construction of the first-ever US submarine.

Business Insider · by Mia Jankowicz

17. AUKUS, other agreements likely having 'galvanizing effect' in Beijing: Aussie ambassador

The silk web (versus lattice work) of the friends, partners, and allies (AUKUS, QUAD, ASEAN, treaty alliances, mini-laterals, and multilaterals, trilateral ROK-Japan -US cooperation) is having an effect on the "Dark Quad" (thank you Christopher Ford) of China, Russia, Irna, and north Korea. The Dark Quad is fearful, weak, desperate, and envious.

Excerpts:

Rudd added that the United States’ alliances with 43 other countries around the world is a “remarkable strategic advantage” that China lacks.

“The People’s Republic of China has a relationship with North Korea. It has a relationship with, now with Russia, and has a relationship with Pakistan. And beyond that, they do not have the range of geographies which the United States has within its possession,” he said.

AUKUS, other agreements likely having 'galvanizing effect' in Beijing: Aussie ambassador - Breaking Defense

AUKUS, a rekindled relationship between the US, Japan and South Korea, as well as the Quad have "presented a much more complex picture" for China, the ambassador said.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · September 10, 2024

Ambassador Kevin Rudd, Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, gives an address on The Honorable Stanley Legro to guests at the Naval Academy Foreign Affairs Conference (NAFAC) in Mahan Hall. (US Navy photo by Stacy Godfrey)

WASHINGTON — The plethora of recent regional geopolitical agreements involving the United States and its allies in the Indo-Pacific is likely having a “galvanizing effect” in Beijing, where military planners have long sought “absolute clarity” about the world’s actors and their intentions, according to Kevin Rudd, Australia’s top diplomat to the United States.

Rudd, who in addition to his diplomatic post is also a former prime minister and respected scholar on China, cited the emergence of AUKUS, a rekindled bilateral relationship between the US and the Philippines, an expanded trilateral relationship between the US, Japan and South Korea and activities by the Quad (the security dialogue between the US, India, Japan and Australia) as some examples of those agreements.

“Put all that together if you’re sitting in Beijing … then suddenly, the correlation of forces is looking more complex than it used to only five years ago, frankly,” he said today while speaking at an event hosted by Arizona State University and the non-partisan DC thinktank New America.

Rudd noted that his conclusions were personal and not a formal assessment of the Australian government.

The ambassador said that historically, Chinese military planners have taken solace in their ability to predict how any actor on the world stage might act in response to a given scenario. But the various agreements that have all emerged in the past few years have “spontaneously combusted from countries across the region and beyond, in the case of the United Kingdom.”

It has “therefore presented a much more complex picture” for Beijing to assess, he added.

Rudd’s remarks at the event focused on AUKUS and its progress since its inception in late 2021. The White House and other administration officials, with mixed success, have tried to publicly present the security agreement as focused on stabilizing the Indo-Pacific, rather than explicitly deterring China. But the implications of the United States and United Kingdom sharing its most sensitive military technologies with Australia — at a time when the Pentagon is incessantly warning the public about China’s intentions — has left little doubt in the mind of outside observers about the message Washington, London and Canberra are sending to Beijing.

Rudd added that the United States’ alliances with 43 other countries around the world is a “remarkable strategic advantage” that China lacks.

“The People’s Republic of China has a relationship with North Korea. It has a relationship with, now with Russia, and has a relationship with Pakistan. And beyond that, they do not have the range of geographies which the United States has within its possession,” he said.

breakingdefense.com · by Justin Katz · September 10, 2024

18. U.S. and Chinese military commanders hold rare phone call

CBS News

U.S. and Chinese military commanders hold rare phone call

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-china-military-commanders-phone-call-taiwan/

Story by Eleanor Watson • September 10, 2024 • 2 min read

The head of all U.S. forces in the Indo-Pacific spoke to a Chinese counterpart for the first time in years, according to a statement from the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command.

The video call between the head of U.S. Indo-Pacific command Admiral Samuel Paparo and Gen. Wu Yanan, the commander of the People's Liberation Army's Southern Theater Command, on Monday was the first call between leaders in that position for several years. 

Paparo, according to the readout, spoke of how the importance of communication "between senior leaders serve to clarify intent and reduce the risk of misperception or miscalculation."

Paparo only took over as commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command in May 2024, but his predecessor Admiral John Aquilino has said he tried for three years to get a meeting with his counterpart so that the two militaries could work to avoid any miscalculations in the region. 

U.S. Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Samuel Paparo speaks during the International Military Law and Operations Conference (MILOPS), in Manila, Philippines, August 27, 2024. / Credit: Lisa Marie David / REUTERS

Military-to-military communications broke down significantly between the U.S. and China after Nancy Pelosi, then the House Speaker, visited to Taiwan in August 2022 and continued through the Chinese spy balloon incident in February 2023, when Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin tried to reach his Chinese counterpart over the phone but couldn't get him on the line. 

Resuming military to military communications was a key goal President Biden and President Xi Jinping agreed to work toward following their November 2023 summit in San Francisco. 

Since then, Austin has spoken over the phone and met in person with his Chinese counterpart, and the top U.S. military officer Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown has spoken to his counterpart. 

But the concern over miscalculation stems from activities in the Indo-Pacific. In the call Monday, according to the readout, Paparo said there should be more discussions in the future between the two leaders to "clarify intent and reduce the risk of misperception or miscalculation." 

He also called out the Chinese military for "several unsafe interactions with U.S. allies" and asked China to abide by international law and to reconsider its "dangerous, coercive, and potentially escalatory tactics in the South China Sea and beyond."

There have recently been several instances between the Philippines and China in the South China sea when Chinese ships fired water cannons at Philippine vessels or collided with them.

The State Department said in a statement at the end of August that multiple times throughout the month, China has "aggressively disrupted lawful Philippine aerial and maritime operations in the South China Sea, including at Sabina Shoal." The State Department said the U.S. "reiterates its call" for China to "comport its claims and actions with international law and to desist from dangerous and destabilizing conduct." 

19. Russia Is on a Slow Path to Bankruptcy, But How Slow?

But what happens when. Russia goes bankrupt? Or what happens before it goes bankrupt and Putin recognizes it is about to happen?

Excerpt:

In a country where more than half the population lives directly off state subsidies, where the poverty rate will exceed 13 percent in 2021 (even though poverty criteria are much lower than in the West), and where 62 percent of Russians have neither savings nor enough to buy more than clothes and food, the long-term risk for Russia is to find itself in an economic situation identical to that which preceded the fall of the Soviet Union.

Russia Is on a Slow Path to Bankruptcy, But How Slow? - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Pierre-Marie Meunier · September 11, 2024

Editor’s Note: This is an adaptation of an article originally published in Le Rubicon, which is affiliated with War on the Rocks.

Russia is faced with an insoluble equation: how to finance a war in the long term, for which expenditure is soaring while budget revenues are falling, against a backdrop of tightened sanctions. Between rising taxes, falling hydrocarbon revenues, inflation, and crises in employment and foreign investment, with a labor market short by 4.8 million workers (about 7 percent of the country’s labor force), and with the value of foreign assets in Russia dropping by almost 20 percent between December 2022 and March 2024, Russia has embarked on a risky gamble from which it will not emerge unscathed. Now spinning at breakneck speed on the momentum of its “war economy,” this Russian spinning top cannot slow down, or it will fall. But it may soon run out of momentum as well as finances. Russia’s economic future after 2024 rests essentially on the price of oil from the Urals and on the quantities exported, two subjects that are all the more uncertain for Russia in the near future. Russia may soon no longer be able to rely on its depleting financial reserves. With no possibility of borrowing on international financial markets, and constrained by a limited domestic financial market (in the context of China’s gradual disengagement), Russia risks nothing less than bankruptcy in the medium term.

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Interpreting the 2023 Budget

The year 2023 is a perfect illustration of how Russia was forced to dip into its savings to balance its budget, and was also the first year of Russia’s “war economy.” According to the Russian Ministry of Finance, in 2022, Russia spent around 31 billion rubles for 27 billion in revenues, resulting in a deficit of roughly 3 billion rubles. However, inflation was estimated at 13.8 percent for the year, with an unsurprisingly high GDP deflator of 15.8 percent. Faced with a large deficit and the prospect of a long war, Russia switched to a “war economy” at the end of 2022.

In 2023, Russia spent 32 billion current rubles (up 4 percent on 2022, which would explain part of Russia’s growth according to the research firm Astérès) for 29 billion in revenues (almost 5 percent up on the previous year), with a stable deficit of around 3 billion rubles. This apparently linear progression of the various indicators between 2022 and 2023 in fact conceals major disparities.

On the spending side, Russia has made no secret of the drastic increase in its defense and security budgets, with military spending in 2023 estimated at over 6 billion rubles or 3.9 percent of GDP, compared with 2.7 percent in 2021. Similarly, in a pre-election year, social spending has been maintained or even increased.

On the revenue side, things are more complex. Russian revenues are budgetarily divided between hydrocarbon revenues (oil and gas) and the remainder, so-called “non-hydrocarbon” revenues (value added tax, income tax, etc.). While oil and gas revenues have collapsed by 24 percent between 2022 and 2023, from 11.5 billion rubles to 8.8 billion, non-hydrocarbon revenues have risen from 16 billion rubles to 20 billion, an increase of 25 percent over one year.

Behind these other revenues are mainly value added tax receipts on domestic production and imports, which account for around 60 percent of this subtotal. These have risen by almost 22 percent year-on-year, a figure which should be seen in the context of Russian growth of 3.5 percent in 2023. The second revenue line, income tax revenues (around 10 percent of total revenues), rose by almost 15 percent, in line with rising wages and very low unemployment. The evolution of these two accounting lines is therefore consistent, at least in terms of trends, with what we know about Russia’s economic situation.

But there’s still around 30 percent of other revenues that aren’t detailed, but which nevertheless rose by 27 percent between 2022 and 2023 without any explanation of where these sums come from or what explains this substantial increase. If it’s not value added tax or income tax, what is it? According to the Regional Economic Service of the French Embassy in Russia, these unknown revenues actually cover several types of non-tax revenues received by the state: dividends from public companies returned to the budget, revenues linked to the management of the assets of the sovereign fund, fines, “ecological” tax on the import and production of automobiles, etc. But what remains unexplained is such an increase in the space of a year.

2023 Trade Balance in Freefall

This increase in Russian revenues in 2023, which remains unclear for the most part, cannot be explained by Russia’s trade balance. In fact, according to the Russian Central Bank’s 2023 data, recently published online, Russia exported fewer goods and services in 2023 than in 2022: in value terms, exports of goods and services fell by 29 and 17 percent respectively between 2022 and 2023, but imports of goods and services rose by 10 and 5 percent respectively.

As a result, Russia’s trade surplus will barely exceed $50 billion in 2023, compared with $238 billion in 2022 and $122 billion in 2021, a drop of almost 80 percent year-on-year. Admittedly, 2022 was a record year for Russian exports, but that was before Western oil sanctions came into force.

While the price of a barrel of crude oil from the Urals only bottomed out significantly in 2020 (the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic), it hardly ever fell below $55 a barrel after that date. Gas prices, on the other hand, fell sharply in 2023 after peaking in 2022. The drop in export revenues in 2023 is therefore probably due to the fall in gas prices, combined with the loss of European customers: 40 percent of European gas came from Russia before 2022, compared with 15 percent at the end of 2023.

The Russian trade balance for 2023 simply confirms what the Ministry of Finance’s figures were already saying: the increase in Russian budget revenues is primarily due to higher taxation in Russia (excluding value added tax and income tax). As of September 2022, the Russian government has decided to tax oil and gas companies, with the avowed aim of recovering 628 billion rubles by 2023. Voted into law in August 2023, an additional 10 percent tax on profits was introduced for companies with sales in excess of $10 million in Russia, including foreign companies. Although this text initially spared companies in the oil and gas sector, a month later the government decided to increase taxes on this sector too. This time, it hopes to raise around $37 billion in taxes from 2023 to 2025. However, it is not clear that this tax target will be met, given, for example, that Gazprom’s revenue collapsed by 40 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, and by 42 percent compared to 2021, another record year before 2022. As a result, the company is paying significantly less tax than before: While it was the biggest contributor to the state budget in 2022, paying just over 5 billion rubles, it is expected to pay “only” 2.5 billion rubles in 2023, despite the increased tax burden.

The increase in Russian revenues in 2023 is therefore largely based on the increase in taxation and catch-ups compared to 2022. Is the effort reproducible on an identical scale in 2024? Nothing is less certain, which does not prevent the Russian government from already thinking about the next tax increase — and it could be a huge one.

National Welfare Fund Cuts

Despite the generalization of tax increases, the Russian government has not managed to prevent the budget from being in deficit in 2023, as in 2022. How does it remedy this situation? In addition to the loans that Russia can still contract on its domestic market (around 2.5 billion rubles in 2023), the unknown share of Russian revenues is also likely to come from substantial withdrawals from Russia’s reserve fund, its major sovereign wealth fund, the National Welfare Fund — the Russian “wool bank” into which oil revenues are normally deposited to finance pensions and infrastructure.

Indeed, in January 2024, a cryptic statement from the Russian Ministry of Finance on the use of the National Welfare Fund read:

Part of the funds of the National Welfare Fund deposited in accounts with the Bank of Russia in the amount of 114,947 million Chinese yuan, 232,584 kg of gold in impersonal form and 573 million euros were sold for 2,900,000 million rubles. The proceeds were credited to a single account in the federal budget to finance its deficit.

Over the whole of 2023, Russia withdrew 2.9 billion rubles from its “savings account.”

This is all the more necessary as Russia no longer has access to international financial markets: Russia has been considered to be in default since 2022. Sanctioned by both the European Union and the United States, it cannot issue debt in dollars or euros. The principle isn’t necessarily embarrassing for Russia, since it has managed to run a budget surplus most of the time. But Russia is now “forbidden to overdraw” by Western countries (bearing in mind that even China is becoming increasingly reluctant to finance Russia): It doesn’t matter whether it has little or no debt, since it can no longer really go into debt as Western states can. The federal budget deficit must therefore be financed in other ways.

In any case, this use of the National Welfare Fund is not exceptional: This had already taken place in 2022, in the amount of 2.4 billion rubles, when the Russian Ministry of Finance sold off its reserves of Japanese yen, dollars, and pounds sterling, currencies deemed “toxic” by the Russian authorities. The 2023 drawdown was not unexpected either: The Russian Ministry of Finance announced it as early as August 2023. In the same press release, it also announced the amount planned for 2024: 1.3 billion rubles, half the size of the previous year’s drawdown. Is 2024 looking better for Russian finances? Nothing is less certain.

Russia’s Economic Context

Russia’s GDP in 2024 is expected to grow at the same rate as in 2023, when it expanded by 3.6 percent, according to Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov. In any case, Russian growth is artificial, “bought on credit.” It’s a sort of Russian Keynesianism, aimed primarily at the military-industrial complex, as explained by Alexandra Prokopenko, a former Russian Central Bank official and now a contributor to the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. At the end of December 2023, the Russian Central Bank warned that the Russian economy was in danger of overheating.

This overheating can be seen first and foremost in the Russian unemployment rate, since below a certain threshold of frictional unemployment (job changes, professional transitions, training, etc.) an unemployment rate equivalent to that currently experienced in Russia reflects above all a labor shortage: At the end of 2023, the Russian media were reporting a labor shortage estimated at 4.8 million jobs. In August 2023, the Russian minister for digital development was already talking about a shortage of 500,000 to 700,000 information technology workers, in addition to 400,000 unfilled positions in the defense industry, whose products are currently in very high demand. According to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch in the metallurgy and mining sector, the fundamental problem is above all one of investment in production structures, with industries that are too poorly automated compared to their Western equivalents, and therefore still highly labor-intensive. Added to this internal Russian constraint is the fall in foreign investment in Russia, given the sale of assets by companies leaving Russia: $27 billion in foreign investment in 2021, compared with $40 billion in withdrawals in 2022 and $8 billion in 2023.

Inflation is Russian Central Bank’s number one concern for the coming years. In November 2023, when presenting its forecasts for 2024, the Russian Central Bank referred to a “risk scenario” in the following terms: If inflation gets “out of control,” the Russian Central Bank could be forced to raise its key rate to 16 or 17 percent in 2024. This was a month before the key rate was raised to 16 percent, with inflation over 2023 estimated at 7.5 percent, far from the 4 to 4.5 percent range the Russian Central Bank was aiming for. Still according to the bank, which chooses its words carefully, the persistence of high inflation is due to “domestic demand far exceeding the estimated growth in production capacity for goods and services.” However, given the labor shortage, the drop in certain investments ($315 billion in foreign direct investment “stocks” in September 2023 versus $442 billion in December 2022, for example) and the Kremlin’s ambitions to further increase military spending in 2024, it is highly unlikely that inflation will fall in 2024. In fact, in 2024, the Russian Central Bank reported inflation as high as ever in all its inflation reports over the year.

Russia’s 2024 Budget

In November 2023, Russian journalist Boris Grozovski summed it up perfectly: “[President Vladimir] Putin is financing his war today with money planned for the future.” But the future may not be what Russia expects. The British Ministry of Defence was among the first to express skepticism about Russia’s budget targets for 2024, in a statement on Feb. 5, 2024 saying it considers the achievement of these targets “unlikely.” Indeed, while the Russian government is forecasting a 26 percent increase in spending in 2024, to 36.6 billion rubles, it is also forecasting revenues of 35 billion rubles, a 22 percent increase, with oil and gas revenues set to rise by 25 percent.

In terms of spending, the 2023 trend continues: Compared with the pre-invasion period in Ukraine, Russia will have tripled its military spending by 2024, with the defense budget now accounting for 40 percent of government expenditure, compared with 14 to 16 percent before 2022.

In terms of revenue, however, Russia’s horizon is far less clear. Russian banks could increase their holdings of state bonds and this would give the government trillions of rubles, which would be enough to fund several years of deficits. But considering the increase in the Russian Central Bank’s main key interest rate (18 percent at present), this would have a very significant cost for the Russian budget. And this would penalize Russian companies that rely largely on domestic banks for financing. So it’s no surprise that, as early as October 2023, Siluanov announced that borrowing on the domestic market would be significantly lower than planned. Moreover, Chinese banks, among the last foreign banks still present on Russian territory, are drastically limiting their exposure in Russia according to Russian media. As far back as January 2024, Bloomberg reported a decline in Chinese financial support for Russian entities following pressure from the U.S. State Department. In June 2024, secondary sanctions were decided on by United States, specifically levelled at Indian and Chinese banks that are believed to be helping Russia evade sanctions.

Despite the planned tax increases, it is not certain that tax revenues will increase in 2024 in the same proportions as in 2023, which is why the Russian government is pinning a large part of its hopes for completing its 2024 budget on increased oil revenues. But there are a number of conditions that must be met for this to happen, the first of which is a Brent crude oil price of around $85 a barrel in 2024 and a Ural crude oil price of at least $60 a barrel. This condition is currently met over the first five months of 2024.

This is the budgetary crest line the Russian government will have to walk in 2024: Russia needs a high Urals barrel (above the Western price cap) and a low ruble (to mechanically generate more rubles from the same amount paid), but not too low either, so as not to create imported inflation on top of the inflation already underway. As Ronald Smith, senior analyst for BCS World of Investments in Moscow, explains, the Russian budget is above all sensitive to the price per barrel, much more so than to production volumes, the latter having remained stable compared with 2021.

Except that revenues from Russian oil exports have not yet increased compared with 2023 (although the Russian budget forecasts a 25 percent increase in these revenues this year). Added to the vagaries of the market are uncertainties about the effects of Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries: in the space of a few days, Ukrainian strikes have damaged three refineries representing 12 percent of Russian refining capacity. While the subject may initially have seemed more symbolic than anything else, Russian export figures for January 2024 show a drop in export volumes. For specific oil products such as gasoline and diesel, Russian exports fell by 37 percent and 23 percent respectively in January 2024. According to Gunvor Group CEO Torbjörn Törnqvist, Russian production was cut by 600,000 barrels a day following the strikes in mid-March 2024. All this is happening against a backdrop of a general decline in Russia’s oil revenues after the February-to-March 2022 peak. In July 2024, Russia’s State Duma passed its first amendments to the 2024 federal budget in order to legalize the drop in revenues, the rise in spending, and therefore the increase in the deficit forecast for 2024. More specifically, the document mentions a drop in oil and gas revenues.

The National Welfare Fund’s Limited Reserves

In the absence of a sufficient increase in oil and tax revenues, Russia could very quickly be forced to dip back into the National Welfare Fund. It should be remembered that the National Welfare Fund is normally topped up by oil revenues. However, these have fallen by 24 percent in 2023. This has not prevented Siluanov from announcing new withdrawals, as he did in October 2023: He announced at the time that the National Welfare Fund would still have 6.7 billion rubles left at the end of 2024, compared with 1.37 billion in September 2023. Is Russia keeping reserves for the future? What the minister announced in October 2023 is therefore the total consumption, or very close to it, of Russia’s financial reserves at the end of 2024, against a backdrop of major uncertainties over tax and oil revenues this year.

To understand this, we need to look at the composition of the National Welfare Fund. It’s actually made up of a multitude of assets and securitized investments, investment accounts, and other bond investments. But 90 percent of its “face value” is actually based on two asset classes: shares in Russian companies and cash (gold and currency reserves). Of all the assets in the National Welfare Fund, only the cash can actually be used to bail out the state budget and finance the war. And this cash is evaporating.

On Jan. 1, 2022, the National Welfare Fund’s total assets stood at 13.5 billion rubles, then 10.4 billion on Jan. 1, 2023, and 11.9 billion on Jan. 1, 2024. Apparently the fund’s face value moves very little, and after a drop in 2022, it finally went up again in 2023. Except that the amount shown for these reserves is fudged, especially if we look at the amount of liquid assets: 8.4 billion rubles in 2022, 6.1 billion in 2023, and 5 billion in 2024. Russia has gone from $113 billion in reserves to $56 billion in two years (taking exchange rates into account). A year ago, the National Welfare Fund still held 10 billion euros, 310 billion yuan, and 554 metric tons of gold. By Jan. 1, 2024, there were no euros left (nor any hard currencies), 227 billion yuan, and 358 metric tons of gold.

By means of an accounting sleight of hand, Russia is disguising the fall in liquidity by adding shares in Russian companies in which the state has a stake. Between January 2022 and August 2023, the share of shares in Russian companies in the National Welfare Fund rose from 26 percent to 33 percent, while its face value remained more or less unchanged. By January 2024, this share had risen to 38 percent. Not only are these assets illiquid, but their real value is totally unverifiable and probably greatly overestimated: It’s hard to imagine, for example, that Aeroflot’s valuation hasn’t changed since 2021, which is what the National Welfare Fund accounts suggest.

Center of Gravity

In terms of strategy, effective action depends on identifying the adversary’s center of gravity, i.e., the point in his system (material or immaterial) on which action will have maximum effect. In addition to underestimating Ukrainian resistance, Russia made the mistake of thinking that Europe’s dependence on Russian gas would be its center of gravity. In the summer of 2022, Russia took the gamble that action in this direction would dissuade Europe from intervening and supporting Ukraine. This was the whole point — and failure — of the Russian gas embargo. On the other hand, even if some have questioned the speed of the process, the West made no mistake in imposing economic and financial sanctions on Russia: Like the Soviet Union before it, Russia may not have the means to achieve its ambitions for long.

While Russia was planning in 2023 to reduce its military spending from 2025 onwards, everything now seems to indicate that it will at least be maintained and probably even increased. After having deprived itself of its main customers and outlets in Europe, Russia is now forced to burn through its financial reserves to continue its war in Ukraine. These reserves are running out. By the end of 2024, if we are to believe the statements of the Russian finance minister and the accounting details of his ministry’s press releases, Russia will have exhausted the National Welfare Fund’s liquidity reserves. In a deteriorating economic context (inflation), with no possibility of raising debt on the financial markets, with less support from the Chinese banks still present in Russia, and with no prospect of sufficient oil and gas revenues, Russia could find itself in a “suspension of payments” in the near future.

“What can affect the future course of the Russian economy? Clearly, the military and economic decisions of the Russian government play a central role. Oil prices are another key factor. Finally, we have the pressure of the global community on Russia 23 to stop its aggression. While the first two forces are beyond the direct control of the Western democracies, the third is certainty within their power,” sum up Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Iikka Korhonen, and Elina Ribakova in their report “Russian economy on war footing: A new reality financed by commodity exports.” While Russia still has the financial capacity to fund all federal budget items by 2024 — including the invasion of Ukraine — thanks to its financial reserves, the situation could change as early as 2025. With federal government revenues (from exports and taxes) insufficient to cover expenditure (and the difference no longer able to be covered by drawing on reserves), Russia could soon be forced to make drastic budgetary choices.

What could happen when Russia runs out of financial reserves? It’s an exercise in foresight, but several scenarios are conceivable. The first is the most unrealistic: For lack of funding, Russia stops its military spending, abandons its “special operation” in Ukraine, acknowledges its defeat, and goes back to “business as usual.” But there is a problem: It is true that the Russian state heavily financed the resurrection of the Soviet military-industrial complex, but who will finance the reversal, and how? The possibility of reversing the transformation of Russian industry, from the production of military equipment to the production of civilian goods, is highly questionable in the specific context of future financial difficulties. The Central Bank of Russia stated in April 2022 that Russia will have to face “reverse industrialization” in the coming years. Russia financed the restarting of weapons factories, some of which had been mothballed for years. This had repercussions for the entire supply chain and subcontractors, but an abrupt halt to production for military purposes will not be without consequences for all sectors directly linked to the supply of weapons components — the military-industrial complex. Factories that used to produce tanks or missiles aren’t going to produce cars or washing machines overnight.

Whatever the case, this scenario would make it possible to envisage a gradual lifting of sanctions, or even the release of aid from international institutions in the medium term, provided that Russia undertakes to finance the reconstruction of Ukraine. While this is the scenario that would probably best avoid economic collapse, it is also the one that presents the greatest political risks for Vladimir Putin. The probability of such a scenario occurring is therefore extremely low, as long as Putin holds the reins of power tightly.

A second scenario could involve massive Chinese intervention (financial loans, supply of equipment, munitions, troops, etc.) in exchange for even greater access to Russia’s natural resources, or even in exchange for territories such as Siberia. This hypothesis would enable Russia to continue its offensive and bolster its economy for years to come. The flaw in this scenario is that it would expose China to massive economic retaliation from the West. Apart from the fact that this would split the world into two major geopolitical blocs, as it did during the Cold War, China’s already shaky economy would have a hard time absorbing the shock, making this scenario highly unlikely beyond current support.

The third scenario is the most likely: change nothing and try to adapt. Considering that the Russian economy is beginning to operate in a closed circuit, once its reserves have been exhausted, Russia could quickly decide to suspend certain social benefits and reduce salaries while continuing to raise taxes. In addition, it could seize all foreign assets still present in Russia (or even gradually sell the Russian Central Bank’s gold reserves on parallel markets). As this is unlikely to be enough in the long run, Russia will have no choice but to turn on the “money printing press,” accentuating the inflationary spiral and further depreciating the ruble. This maximalist strategy would most likely enable Russia to hold out for some years, but with the risk of a cataclysmic economic collapse in the end: This is pretty much the exact description of the Soviet Union’s economic situation between 1989 and 1991.

In a country where more than half the population lives directly off state subsidies, where the poverty rate will exceed 13 percent in 2021 (even though poverty criteria are much lower than in the West), and where 62 percent of Russians have neither savings nor enough to buy more than clothes and food, the long-term risk for Russia is to find itself in an economic situation identical to that which preceded the fall of the Soviet Union.

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Pierre-Marie Meunier served in the French armed forces as an intelligence officer. He is currently operations director of a communications consultancy. Meunier holds a double master’s degree in information/communication and international relations. He is the author of several articles about the industry, economy, and foreign relations of Russia.

Image: The Russian Government via Wikimedia Commons

Commentary

warontherocks.com · by Pierre-Marie Meunier · September 11, 2024

20. How Corruption Fuels Inequality in China

Conclusion:

Observers have found Xi’s anticorruption campaign to be ruthless and often vindictive in its targeting of potential rivals. But overall inequality in China, as measured by the Gini coefficient—which runs from zero, a hypothetical case of full equality in which every person earned the same amount, to 100, another hypothetical case in which a single individual made all the income—has come down in the last decade from a peak of 43.7 in 2010 to 37.1 in 2020, according to World Bank data. Whatever its sins, the anticorruption campaign has sought to strike both symbolically and in real terms at the rampant inequality in the country.

How Corruption Fuels Inequality in China

Graft on a Staggering Scale Warps the Country’s Economy

By Branko Milanovic and Li Yang

September 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Branko Milanovic and Li Yang · September 11, 2024

After Chinese President Xi Jinping rose to power in 2012, his government launched a sweeping anticorruption campaign that attracted worldwide attention for its scope and determination. Powerful figures, long considered untouchable, were found guilty of bribery or of misusing funds and jailed. These punishments initially encouraged the impression among some commentators that Xi might be using the initiative to sideline or persecute his political opponents. But the effort to root out corruption has gone well beyond personal power politics. Conducted by the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party, it has been the largest anticorruption campaign in history anywhere in the world. By May 2021, almost ten years into the campaign, the CCDI had investigated a total of over four million people within the government and CCP apparatus, finding 3.7 million of them guilty.

The public investigation and prosecution of corruption at such a scale occurred against the backdrop of widening inequality within China. This was not a mere coincidental correlation.Inequality in China, especially that within cities, soared after the reforms of the 1980s and then surged even more after the privatization and restructuring of many state-owned enterprises in the early 1990s. Greater productivity and wages in high-tech sectors and the increasing share of income from capital fueled urban inequality from the top; at the bottom of the urban income ladder, the inflow of workers from the countryside—many of whom lack urban residence permits and will accept low wages—fueled inequality from below.

With more wealth sloshing around the Chinese economy, corruption has been on the rise in recent decades. But until now, no one has studied empirically the characteristics of the people whom the CCDI has found guilty of corruption nor tried to establish empirically the extent to which corruption has contributed to inequality. As it turns out, a detailed analysis of CCDI data reveals a pattern: not only was corruption among the people at the top of the Communist Party’s bureaucratic and technocratic hierarchy very high (in terms of average sums of money embezzled); it also contributed significantly to inequality, entrenching the already wealthy in an even more impregnable upper class.

TIGER DON

Thanks to the centralized nature of the anticorruption campaign and the Chinese government’s publication and systematization of relevant data, scholars can now assess the dynamics. Utilizing the data compiled from individual conviction cases, we have constructed a database of senior Chinese officials found guilty of corruption between 2012 and 2021. The data set includes detailed information for 828 criminal cases of corruption and 686 convicted individuals (some individuals were accused and convicted of more than one crime). They are all members of the CCP, high up in the government or party hierarchy or managers in state-owned enterprises; in the language of the anticorruption campaign, they are the so-called “tigers” guilty of the most significant crimes, as opposed to the multitude of “flies” (low-level officials) who have also been caught up in the investigations. Until the advent of Xi’s campaign, many of these figures were considered untouchable.

The CCDI categorized the convicted in order of importance as centrally managed cadres, provincially managed cadres, and central-level cadres. Centrally managed cadres are the most senior officials, such as the provincial ministers. They are appointed or removed by the CCP’s Central Committee. Provincially managed cadres are managed by the provincial branches of the CCP; their ranks include mayors and secretaries of cities. The third group includes somewhat less important officials, such as managers of state-owned enterprises. For the sake of simplicity, we shall refer to these officials respectively as national, provincial, and local nomenklatura.

An analysis of the CCDI data set reveals the scale of the corruption by rank of official. When placed alongside Chinese urban household surveys (tigers tend to live in urban areas), the data set allowed us to estimate the lawful income of those convicted of corruption and their position in urban income distribution, revealing how important they were in ordinary economic and political life and where exactly their corruption took place. By contrasting the defendants’ estimated lawful income with the amounts they were accused of embezzling, we calculated how much corruption increased their income, how much it enabled them to climb up the ladders of Chinese income distribution, and how such corruption affected the levels of inequality in Chinese cities.

Unsurprisingly, the data have shown that the more senior the convicted figure, the more significant the scale of the official’s corrupt activities. Members of the national nomenklatura have been convicted of embezzling more than four and a half times as much money per case as members of the provincial nomenklatura and more than three times as much as those of the local nomenklatura. The most senior officials listed in the data set were accused, on average, of embezzling $14.1 million, provincial nomenklatura of embezzling $2.8 million, and the local nomenklatura of embezzling $4.3 million. (The local figures are higher than the provincial figures because they include many managers of state-owned enterprises for whom corruption appears to be particularly lucrative.) Members of the provincial nomenklatura are accused of the bulk of corruption cases (two-thirds), but since the embezzlement per case of officials in the national nomenklatura is so much greater, two-thirds of the total corruption measured in money terms is related to them.

The convicted officials hail almost entirely from the higher parts of the Chinese urban income distribution. More than half of them would be in the top five percent of the urban income distribution with their legal incomes only; some six percent would be in the top one percent, with annual incomes greater than about $30,000 per person (or $120,000 per household if the household consists of four members).

Through corruption, however, the median defendant made between four to six times as much as their legal earnings. The defendants thus climbed to the very top of China’s urban income distribution. Factoring in their illegal income, 82 percent of those guilty of corruption were among the top one percent of city dwellers, and almost all were in the top five percent.

Corruption itself was heavily concentrated in the upper echelons, with the top ten percent of cases responsible for 58 percent of the total sum embezzled. By contrast, the top ten percent of earners in urban China make 33 percent of total income. The concentrated nature of corruption—and the fact that it benefited people who were already among the wealthiest in China—shows that corruption, in its revealed part, is an important contributor to Chinese urban inequality.

THE PUBLIC PURSUIT OF PRIVATE GAINS

These results demonstrate the enormous extent of corruption at the very top of China’s urban income distribution. Even people with high legal incomes can multiply their incomes, on average, by a factor of four to six—and some, obviously, by even more. The results imply that real income inequality in the country is much greater than recorded levels of inequality. Corrupt incomes, after all, are not reported to the tax authorities, and they are unlikely to be reported in household surveys. Nevertheless, the conspicuous consumption of members of the elite and their way of life make the corruption evident to observers. Xi’s campaign, whatever its political motivation, is likely reducing income inequality and, perhaps more important from the authorities’ point of view, curbing excessively high income and the concurrent flaunting of such wealth.

That outcome might explain the campaign’s popularity. Anticorruption campaigns, especially if they don’t shy away from going after the very rich and powerful, can be useful for autocratic regimes to boost their populist credentials. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent purge of corrupt generals in the midst of a war was unusual, but it follows under-the-radar anticorruption moves that began simultaneously with the invasion of Ukraine. The Angolan government’s case against the businesswoman and former political scion Isabel dos Santos likewise proved very popular. Vietnam recently engaged in a similar “cleansing” campaign at the very top of its Communist Party.

Observers have found Xi’s anticorruption campaign to be ruthless and often vindictive in its targeting of potential rivals. But overall inequality in China, as measured by the Gini coefficient—which runs from zero, a hypothetical case of full equality in which every person earned the same amount, to 100, another hypothetical case in which a single individual made all the income—has come down in the last decade from a peak of 43.7 in 2010 to 37.1 in 2020, according to World Bank data. Whatever its sins, the anticorruption campaign has sought to strike both symbolically and in real terms at the rampant inequality in the country.

• BRANKO MILANOVIC is a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War.
• LI YANG is a researcher at the Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

Foreign Affairs · by Branko Milanovic and Li Yang · September 11, 2024

21. A Less Lethal Latin America

Excerpts:

To curb corruption and thus strengthen its partners’ capacities to distribute their security funding, the United States should ensure that its investments are accompanied by proper oversight bodies in recipient countries, background checks on public officials who benefit from U.S. aid, and human rights protocols as part of a coordinated, whole-of-government approach to security assistance. These investments should be the foundation for traditional security assistance programs such as hardware and technology transfers.

Effective security forces also require regional justice systems that can prosecute lawbreakers and deter illegal activity. The U.S. government should devote commensurate resources via the State Department and Justice Department to help strengthen and reform judiciaries where impunity prevails and crippling case backlogs delay justice.

Finally, Washington must remove its own bureaucratic barriers to deepening security ties. Minimizing delivery timelines, committing to multiyear investments, and synchronizing priorities across U.S. government agencies would enhance the United States’ credibility as a reliable partner. Further, the limitations the U.S. government places on security assistance for high-income countries, because of its belief that wealthier nations should shoulder their own security responsibilities, puts the United States at a disadvantage in Latin America: preferred security partners and regional leaders such as Chile, Guyana, Panama, and Uruguay are less able to participate in U.S.-funded programs, even as their own vulnerability to crime and violence is on the rise. Moreover, U.S. adversaries have no such restrictions on assistance.

To make lasting improvements to its security assistance in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States will need to secure the buy-in of international partners and its own branches of government, especially the U.S. Congress. The long history of U.S. security ties in the region provides a strong foundation for regional enthusiasm for U.S. initiatives. But whether such valuable programs can truly achieve results will depend on whether Washington can learn from past mistakes and overcome the bureaucratic and political limitations that have previously held it back.

A Less Lethal Latin America

Smarter U.S. Security Assistance Can Make the Region Safer

By Paul J. Angelo

September 11, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Paul J. Angelo · September 11, 2024

Now more than ever, Latin America needs help with its security. In 2023, more than 40 of the world’s 50 most murderous cities were in Latin America and the Caribbean. A lethal mix of readily available firearms, illicit commodities such as drugs, weapons, and illegally mined precious metals, and growing government corruption has dramatically strengthened the region’s transnational gangs, cartels, and Mafias. In Ecuador, drug gangs are using extortion and wanton violence to make the country one of the world’s most violent, contributing to an unprecedented exodus of ordinary citizens.

From the beginning, the Biden administration has elevated the importance of the Western Hemisphere, not least in its 2022 National Security Strategy, which asserts that the region’s pressing problems of democratic erosion, mass migration, environmental degradation, and transnational crime are now matters of U.S. national security. To address the crisis, President Joe Biden pledged to “get to work building the future this region deserves” in 2022. But amid other urgent security concerns, like Russia’s war in Ukraine and containing China, Washington’s rhetoric about Latin America has not been matched by decisive action. Recent U.S. strategy has focused more on enhancing economic opportunity—by mobilizing private investment, supporting regional entrepreneurs, and extending climate-conscious development loans––than bolstering local security forces. Although economic initiatives can help address joblessness and the incentives of gang affiliation, even more urgent is the task of giving regional police and military forces the training and resources they need to counter the far-reaching security threats that are preventing normal economic life from taking place.

Providing security assistance has long been a technical and political tool of U.S. statecraft. Indeed, the State Department and the Defense Department deliver financial resources, services, hardware, technology, and training to more than two dozen countries in the Americas, helping to strengthen the capability and credibility of the U.S. government’s partners. Yet over the past few years, U.S. aid has failed to meet the scale of the challenge. The United States needs a new game plan for building security partnerships in Latin America and for ending the region’s cycle of violence and disorder. To start, Washington should again embrace the worldview that it can best protect its own security by helping democratic neighbors advance theirs. It can do so by drawing on the lessons of decades of U.S. security policy in the Americas but also by determining how those policies can be revised and improved.

The Western Hemisphere is crucial to U.S. security, but Washington is unlikely to see progress on the region’s problems unless it steps up its own investments in the region’s law enforcement and defense forces.

GUNBOATS AND GUERRILLAS

The United States’ closest neighbors were not always a policy afterthought. In the first decades of the twentieth century, countries in the Caribbean basin received major U.S. military and police aid. In countries such as Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, Washington provided rifles, mortars, and armored vehicles to autocrats who protected U.S. agribusiness interests in sugar, bananas, and spices. Where security assistance didn’t achieve its intended objectives, Washington invoked the Monroe Doctrine, sending Marines to exact local compliance with U.S. policies and to protect U.S. profits. From the War of 1898 to World War II, the United States intervened in this way at least 30 times in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The rules-based international order that followed World War II tempered Washington's appetite for overt military interventions in Latin America. But during the Cold War, the spread of revolutionary violence in several countries in the region pushed the United States to implement policies designed to contain communist agitation. In the decade following the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the Department of Defense provided $1.7 billion in materiel and counterinsurgency support to sympathetic Latin American armies in an effort to prop up pro-Washington administrations and win local hearts and minds.

Nowhere was security assistance more visible than El Salvador, where the United States invested $6 billion to suppress Marxist insurgents. In 1990, the Salvadoran military was the eighth-largest recipient of U.S. security assistance globally. Although the U.S. aid failed to achieve a battlefield victory and did not end state-sponsored human rights violations, it proved critical in preventing a guerrilla takeover and facilitating a negotiated resolution to more than 12 years of armed conflict. This indirect effort provided a stark contrast to simultaneous U.S. approaches in Haiti, Lebanon, and Panama, where the Pentagon deployed its own peacekeeping and combat troops in a bid to settle volatile political situations. The Salvadoran case showed that the United States could provide a “small footprint” solution to a big geostrategic dilemma and became a reference point for future security aid efforts.

FROM PERIL TO PARTNERSHIP

Two decades after it began its effort in El Salvador, Washington launched Plan Colombia, one of its most ambitious security assistance packages ever. The challenge it set out to address was daunting: in the late 1990s, insurgent, paramilitary, and drug-trafficking groups had rendered Colombia the world’s kidnapping capital and largest cocaine exporter. Plagued by corruption and abuse, the country's security forces routinely surrendered to adversaries wielding superior weapons financed with drug profits.

Although the initiative would end up costing $10 billion over some 15 years, it mostly worked. In the 12 years following Plan Colombia’s launch, Colombian security forces pushed the country's illegal armed groups out of cities and deep into the countryside and jungle, enticed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the country’s largest insurgent group, into historic peace negotiations, reduced the country's drug crop acreage by more than half, and dramatically curbed crime and violence. As a result, the military and police enjoyed broad support among Colombia’s politicians, private sector, and the general public.

During the early years of the U.S. initiative, however, the Colombian military committed serious human rights violations. To address this problem, Washington conditioned continued U.S. aid on the Colombian government holding soldiers and police to account for state-sponsored atrocities, a step that helped reduce extrajudicial murders and arbitrary detentions. Between 2008 and 2019, Colombian courts delivered sentences in more than 1,700 cases of serious military and police abuse. Although drug violence in Colombia persists today, the country’s improvements have helped it achieve a coveted free trade deal with the United States, NATO partner status, and admission to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

But Plan Colombia's success has proved difficult to replicate. From 2007 to 2021, another U.S. security assistance plan in Mexico, known as the Mérida Initiative, provided U.S. hardware and training for Mexican soldiers, police, judges, and prosecutors, amounting to a $3.5 billion investment with bipartisan backing in the U.S. Congress. But during the project’s 15-year duration, Mexico's homicide rate surged from eight per 100,000 inhabitants to 28 per 100,000, and drug-trafficking organizations continued to penetrate Mexican institutions at the highest levels.

Plan Colombia demonstrated that U.S. security assistance can succeed when effectively structured. But it also showed that such efforts depend on partner governments complementing U.S. investments with significant national financing, avoiding politicizing security strategies, and professionalizing the uniformed and civilian bureaucracy responsible for implementing security policies. In Mexico, the absence of these features––and the Mexican government’s historically rooted suspicion of U.S. meddling—prevented the Mérida Initiative from achieving stabilization.

WRONG ASSUMPTIONS

After decades of often failed initiatives, U.S. security assistance has become a matter of global scrutiny. Perhaps most glaringly was the Taliban’s 2021 takeover of Afghanistan, after Washington had spent 20 years and $83 billion building Afghan security forces. Given this and other setbacks, many observers wonder why such U.S. assistance continues to underdeliver.

The short answer is that context matters. Washington has long adopted a one-size-fits-all approach to security assistance, failing to account sufficiently for differences among recipient nations. Policymakers also too often assume that the United States can buy its way out of foreign crises, but the success of security assistance depends on leaders and organizations that the United States can sometimes influence but rarely control.

U.S. strategists trust that the United States and its friends want the same thing: stable, safe, and prosperous societies. But valued partners sometimes have hidden ambitions that may be at odds with those of the United States, such as the involvement of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández––once thought to be a trusted partner––in drug trafficking. U.S. foreign policy often relies on positive reinforcement in the form of financial aid and political support to induce desired behavior in partner institutions, but security assistance fails to do so when the United States and its partners have divergent interests.

Moreover, by giving local security officials resources, firepower, and credibility, the United States also risks fueling more instability. Such was the consequence when Washington rhetorically supported Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry following President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination in 2021. Alternative power blocs rejected Henry and denounced his mandate as treasonous, making it difficult for U.S. policymakers to step up U.S. assistance for stabilizing Haiti amid a crisis in the prime minister’s domestic legitimacy.

Finally, when the United States delivers security assistance to undemocratic partners, as was common during the Cold War, it risks fueling future popular resistance and resentment. The populist left that led Latin America during the early decades of this century corralled regional anti-U.S. sentiment by invoking the bloody history of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Such public antagonism helped drive Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa to expel U.S. troops from a counterdrug air base in Ecuador in 2009 and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to remove diplomatic immunity for U.S. law enforcement officers operating in Mexico in 2020. U.S. support to authoritarian governments in the twentieth century haunts and constrains U.S. policy in the region today.

CHANGE STARTS AT HOME

Although the governments and security agencies on the receiving end provide convenient scapegoats when U.S. security assistance fails, Washington’s own bureaucracy shares the blame. The U.S. government is reactive in authorizing police and military aid to defuse international crises, but security assistance is better at preventing fires than extinguishing them, given that generating institutional change takes time.

Past shortcomings can be partly attributed to the inner workings of the U.S. Congress, which funds security assistance largely through annual appropriations bills. Congress rarely takes a longer generational view, and bureaucratic hurdles frequently postpone the delivery of U.S. aid. Despite allocating $350 million to the Central America Regional Security Initiative from 2008 to 2011, the State Department only deployed some $75 million by 2013 because of congressional delays in passing spending bills.

Coordination among U.S. executive agencies and departments is another challenge. The State Department holds ultimate responsibility for distributing security assistance but lacks the administrative resources to administer such assistance worldwide. Consequently, the Pentagon is routinely given the task of large-scale implementation, which creates interagency inefficiencies because the armed services typically view train-and-equip missions as tangential to their principal tasks of waging war and defending the homeland.

Moreover, the State Department’s diplomatic priorities in a given country or region sometimes run counter to the priorities of the Department of Defense and Drug Enforcement Administration. The botched arrest of former Mexican Secretary of National Defense General Salvador Cienfuegos Zepeda by U.S. authorities in 2020 was a case in point: U.S. federal agents spent years building a case against Cienfuegos for drug trafficking and money laundering only for the Department of Justice to drop the charges within a month of his arrest under pressure from Mexico City.

In many cases, the United States must also push the corrupt security forces of partner governments to reform and embrace democratic values even as it leans on those same forces to deliver operational successes. As a result, U.S. partners may choose the extent to which they comply with U.S. preferences, and the United States will find it increasingly challenging to entice military and police partners into values-based cooperation when Chinese and Russian officials offer them “no-strings-attached procurements.”

DEMOCRACY DEFENDED

National security policy develops out of necessity, and the United States rarely has the luxury of choosing its partners when considering the safety of its citizens and national interest. Policymakers therefore need to manage expectations about what Washington can achieve through security assistance given the often varying economic, political, and social forces at play in recipient countries. When possible, the United States should concentrate its resources in places where conditions are most favorable to building sustained progress in its partner police and military institutions.

Enduring U.S. security assistance can catalyze positive national transformation in friendly countries. As the Pentagon increasingly anchors its strategy for competing with global adversaries by deepening ties with allies, it should encourage and reward partner forces that share its commitments to democracy to strengthen its global network of like-minded governments. For this, Washington should look to the American continent––the second-most democratic region of the world and the most vital for the defense of the U.S. homeland. As U.S. policymakers redouble their efforts to stabilize an increasingly volatile neighborhood, they must prioritize boosting the legitimacy and effectiveness of regional governments so that they can work together to counter shared threats to their security.

Washington can best protect its own security by helping its neighbors advance theirs.

To curb corruption and thus strengthen its partners’ capacities to distribute their security funding, the United States should ensure that its investments are accompanied by proper oversight bodies in recipient countries, background checks on public officials who benefit from U.S. aid, and human rights protocols as part of a coordinated, whole-of-government approach to security assistance. These investments should be the foundation for traditional security assistance programs such as hardware and technology transfers.

Effective security forces also require regional justice systems that can prosecute lawbreakers and deter illegal activity. The U.S. government should devote commensurate resources via the State Department and Justice Department to help strengthen and reform judiciaries where impunity prevails and crippling case backlogs delay justice.

Finally, Washington must remove its own bureaucratic barriers to deepening security ties. Minimizing delivery timelines, committing to multiyear investments, and synchronizing priorities across U.S. government agencies would enhance the United States’ credibility as a reliable partner. Further, the limitations the U.S. government places on security assistance for high-income countries, because of its belief that wealthier nations should shoulder their own security responsibilities, puts the United States at a disadvantage in Latin America: preferred security partners and regional leaders such as Chile, Guyana, Panama, and Uruguay are less able to participate in U.S.-funded programs, even as their own vulnerability to crime and violence is on the rise. Moreover, U.S. adversaries have no such restrictions on assistance.

To make lasting improvements to its security assistance in Latin America and the Caribbean, the United States will need to secure the buy-in of international partners and its own branches of government, especially the U.S. Congress. The long history of U.S. security ties in the region provides a strong foundation for regional enthusiasm for U.S. initiatives. But whether such valuable programs can truly achieve results will depend on whether Washington can learn from past mistakes and overcome the bureaucratic and political limitations that have previously held it back.

• PAUL J. ANGELO is the Director of the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies and a Foreign Area Officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve. He is the author of From Peril to Partnership: U.S. Security Assistance and the Bid to Stabilize Colombia and Mexico. The views expressed here are his own.

Foreign Affairs · by Paul J. Angelo · September 11, 2024

 22. America’s ‘kryptonite’(Gray or Grey Zone)

​Fear of escalation.  

Since this is in the Guardian I guess they are using the British "grey."  

But this article should drive some critical discussion. 

Excerpts:

One wonders. For America’s elite it seems nothing is ever quite worth pushing back over.

It’s the fear of escalation that’s part and parcel of grey zone paralysis. America’s elite can always convince themselves it’s the “adult” or “statesmanlike” approach.

But don’t be surprised if the Chinese keep pushing—and making life miserable for our friends in Japan, the Philippines—and for Americans who lose family members to fentanyl and jobs to Chinese companies built off the theft of American technology.

And it doesn’t get any easier the longer you wait. It gets harder. And when the PRC’s friends—Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba—step up their own “grey zone” activities, encouraged by China’s success, things will get much worse.

Usually paralysis is caused by an external stimulus or something outside one’s control.

But when it comes to grey zone paralysis it’s entirely our choice.

America’s ‘kryptonite’ - The Sunday Guardian Live

sundayguardianlive.com · by Grant Newsham · September 7, 2024

WASHINGTON DC: The U.S. military is still powerful. Maybe the world’s strongest military. But the words ‘grey zone’ seem to cause the entire force and the Commander-in-Chief and his staff to short circuit.

You may have seen the recent headlines like “Philippines and Chinese coast guard ships collide in South China Sea” (NBC news) and “China, Philippines accuse each other of ramming ships in South China Sea” (Reuters). Seeing those headlines, you might think what happened was an incident in which both parties—or no one—was at fault.

What actually happened was Chinese ships entered Philippines waters and deliberately attacked a Filipino ship. Why isn’t the U.S., a defence treaty ally of the Philippines responding to this and the many other attacks by China? It’s that magic incantation that paralyzes Americans: grey zone.

The U.S. military is still powerful. Maybe the world’s strongest military.

But the words “grey zone” seem to cause the entire force and the Commander-in-Chief and his staff to short circuit.

WHAT IS ‘GREY ZONE’?

Grey zone is usually invoked when an adversary does something that harms us, sometimes seriously, but we don’t figure it’s worth going to war over.

It could be Chinese ships and aircraft interfering—brazenly and often dangerously—with US military ships and aircraft going about their business in the South China Sea.

Or, as seen repeatedly over the last 18 months, the Chinese ramming and water-cannoning America’s Filipino allies trying to resupply their own ships in their own territory.

Just call this “grey zone” and the Americans act as if they can’t respond. As if it’s a choice between doing nothing, doing nothing much, or thermonuclear war.

We tell ourselves this is just the Chinese “acting up” rather than what it is: acts of war.

Yes, it’s at the lower end of the conflict spectrum, but the other side doesn’t make such neat distinctions. It’s all “war” to them—even if there’s no shooting involved.

And, if they do these grey zone operations right, “kinetic” warfare is much easier when the time comes, or may not even be necessary.

CHINA’S GREY ZONE WINS

Through these operations China is improving its position and capabilities while weakening its enemies and their allies—not least psychologically. It creates a sense of helplessness, bafflement, inevitable defeat.

And American reliability is being shredded.

For most of the last 30 years, the Americans even convinced themselves that the PRC wasn’t much of a threat if “grey zone” was all they could do. Thus, no need to get America’s own defences in order.

This reflects two different conceptions of war. Americans require gun play and an official statement that we’re at war. Until then, we reckon there’s still a chance to make friends and are inclined to overlook all sorts of unfriendly behaviour.

The Chinese Communists, however, see war as a spectrum involving a range of actions that harm and disadvantage the enemy—setting it up for defeat—and most of those activities don’t involve “kinetic” activity (i.e. shooting).

China’s Coast Guard, People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Navy, maritime militia and fishing fleet are hard power tools it’s used to take de facto control of the South China Sea over the last decade—mostly in actions that have been “threat deflated” by calling them grey zone.

But look at the outcomes: effective control over some of the most strategic and economically important waters in the world, shored up by new artificial islands/military outposts, resulting in a demoralization of our friends, and a questioning of our commitment.

China’s intentions were obvious. But it seemed just not worth doing much to stop them.

One USINDOPACOM commander even condescendingly laughed off the buildup as “the great wall of sand.”

We act as though avoiding anything “escalatory” is the main thing when deciding on a response. That usually means backing off.

Meanwhile, the other side risks lives and just might not care if somebody gets killed. In fact, China might welcome it in some cases.

In the case of Japan, China would like the Japanese to fire just one shot—and the PRC would claim they were provoked into a fierce, kinetic response that involves grabbing territory. The same with the Philippines.

GREY ZONE IN THE U.S.

Grey zone is more than the South China Sea and it doesn’t just involve military and paramilitary operations. Nor is it always directed against military targets.

PRC “grey zone” drug warfare is already killing Americans by the hundreds of thousands.

The fentanyl onslaught killed over 70,000 Americans last year (while injuring far more) and the total Chinese fentanyl “butcher’s bill” is up towards one million Americans over the last decade.

But since it’s grey zone we don’t fight back. Not the Democrats, not the Republicans.

Chinese cyber warfare stole most of the US Office of Personnel Management’s files on 23 million Americans holding security clearances, as well as the blueprints for F35 fighter and C17 transport designs, along with a limitless amounts of US corporate intellectual property destroying entire sectors of the American economy.

 And they are setting up in our key infrastructure, ready to hit us.

The penalties? Next to nothing. It’s “grey zone” after all. Can’t risk nuclear war—or upsetting Wall Street and the US-China Business Council, you know.

This is hurting us badly and weakening our national defences while giving the PRC the advantage.

RESPONDING TO GREY ZONE ACTIONS

What should we do?

First, recognize it for what it is. The Filipinos, who have been under constant attack, have rejected the term grey zone completely and now call the ramming of their ships and attempts to seize their territory what it is: Illegal, coercive, aggressive and deceptive (ICAD) actions.

Put even more clearly, these “grey zone” acts are acts of war.

Our response doesn’t need to directly match the offending behaviour.

Nor need it be proportional or “in kind”.

But it needs to make the other side regret having done what they did and afraid they’ll get hurt even more if they continue.

This requires a willingness to take some risk. If you won’t take risks the aggressor has the advantage.

If Chinese ships are interfering and asking for collision, don’t back off. If they are pumping drugs into the US, hit them hard—even if Wall Street complains or things at Wal-Mart cost a little more.

Perhaps suspend the People’s Bank of China from the US dollar system for a year.

Or maybe a total technology export ban—sudden and enforced.

And to really hit them, expose the CCP top leadership’s personal corruption.

But will we?

One wonders. For America’s elite it seems nothing is ever quite worth pushing back over.

It’s the fear of escalation that’s part and parcel of grey zone paralysis. America’s elite can always convince themselves it’s the “adult” or “statesmanlike” approach.

But don’t be surprised if the Chinese keep pushing—and making life miserable for our friends in Japan, the Philippines—and for Americans who lose family members to fentanyl and jobs to Chinese companies built off the theft of American technology.

And it doesn’t get any easier the longer you wait. It gets harder. And when the PRC’s friends—Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and Cuba—step up their own “grey zone” activities, encouraged by China’s success, things will get much worse.

Usually paralysis is caused by an external stimulus or something outside one’s control.

But when it comes to grey zone paralysis it’s entirely our choice.

Grant Newsham is a retired U.S. Marine officer and former U.S. diplomat. He was the first Marine liaison officer to the Japan Self Defense Force, and is a fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute. He is the author of the book, “When China Attacks: A Warning To America.”

sundayguardianlive.com · by Grant Newsham · September 7, 2024

​23. The Vandenberg Coalition Honors and Remembers the Victims and Heroes of the September 11th Attacks

The Vandenberg Coalition Honors and Remembers the Victims and Heroes of the September 11th AttacksA Message From Our Executive Director Carrie Filipetti:

I will always have a hole in my heart from September 11, 2001. I was 12, and safe in my school in suburban New York when it happened. The significance of the day for me, at least at first, was marked only by the unusual frequency with which peers were being pulled out of school. It wasn't until I got home that I understood what had happened and saw the images almost none of us alive that day can unsee: the low-flying jets, the collapsing buildings, the thousands of pieces of paper fluttering to earth.

For years, I would make up for this delayed understanding by spending every 9/11 rewatching footage and home videos of the attacks, listening to air traffic control recordings, and digging through press clippings. Maybe I was seeking some kind of explanation. Maybe I felt guilty for being so unaware until that evening of how much the world had changed. Maybe I just knew keeping the memory alive was important.

Over the years, my memorial practices have changed. Now, I choose to mark the day not with the trauma of what was done to us, but with the memory of the heroism of what fellow Americans did in response.

There is the bravery of security guard and former soldier Rick Rescorla, a British-American who kept morale up in the South Tower as he grabbed his bullhorn and sang old Cornish folks songs while escorting thousands of people to safety.

There is the rebellion on Flight 93 - Todd Beamer's "Let's roll" - in which Americans stormed the hijackers in the cockpit to save countless others from an attack on our Capitol.

There is the selfless commitment made by our fire, police, and paramedics who put themselves in harm's way to rescue fellow citizens, and the pledge of thousands of young Americans to serve our nation in the aftermath of the attack. I know many of these men and women, and I mark today with gratitude for them. 

However you choose to mark your day, I ask one small thing. Please continue to mark it. Please continue to remember the 2,977 brothers and sisters whose lives were stolen from us, because time does not heal all wounds. Please continue to honor the sacrifices and heroism of our emergency response personnel and the countless Americans who dedicated - and in many cases gave - their lives in service to defend our nation from those who attacked us. Please continue to understand that we must take seriously the threat posed by enemies abroad, because our oceans alone will not protect us. 

Above all, please continue to remember that for all of our many differences, Americans share a bond together that can never be broken, and that for all the darkness that is brought to us, we have a duty to turn on the light.

The Vandenberg CoalitionPO Box 18651, Washington

District of Columbia 20003 United States

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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