Informal Institute for National Security Thinkers and Practitioners

Quotes of the Day:

"The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

– Joseph Campbell

"Four Rules For Life; Show up. Pay attention. Tell the truth. Don't be attached to the results."

– Angeles Arrien

The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more light you pour upon it, the more it will contract."

– Oliver Wendell Holmes

1. US Navy Seal unit that killed Osama bin Laden trains for China invasion of Taiwan

2. Biden administration split over Ukraine’s use of US weapons inside Russia

3. Government Wins Appeal of Special Forces Contract Decision

4.The Afghanistan Papers: Lies, Damn Lies, and Strategy: In Honor of The Fallen of 9/11 And The Aftermath

5. China to train thousands of overseas law enforcement officers to create ‘more fair’ world order

6. Ukraine Pressed to Think About a Plan B for War With Russia

7. U.S. Troops Are Involved in Combat, Despite Harris’s Debate Claims

8. North Korean Missiles Rain Down on Ukraine Despite Sanctions

9. North Korean missiles produced in 2024 used in Ukraine

10. The war on terror never ended

11. What have we learned about fighting terrorism since 9/11?

12. Bill Burns and Richard Moore: Intelligence partnership helps the US and UK stay ahead in an uncertain world

13. America’s most secret spy agency now has a podcast

14. Opinion TikTok back in court as government does the ‘national security’ dance

15. How the US Army is rethinking howitzers

16. Professional Military Writing Special Edition of Military Review: newest “must have” for modern Soldier’s kit

17. America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific by John Bolton

18. Another US military chief makes public gesture for ally Philippines

19. The War on Terror Was Not a Morality Tale

20. Top Chinese general to visit US as militaries step up engagement

21. The Kursk Offensive: How Ukraine’s Operational-Level Guerrilla Warfare Is Bringing Maneuver Back

22. Autonomous Ghosts are Reshaping Irregular Warfare and Maritime Security

23. America Is Fighting the Wrong Trade War

24. US, Italian ships drill in South China Sea with Australian aircraft

25. Tariff Myths, Debunked

1. US Navy Seal unit that killed Osama bin Laden trains for China invasion of Taiwan

I am reminded of the late LTG Sam WIlson and his "20 Characteristics of Special Operations."

11. Special Operations Forces have a limited number of DIRECT roles:

Special Operations Forces are trained for specific missions. They are the most highly trained and proficient forces that the US possess but they are not the answer for every small contingency mission that comes along. Many conventional forces are more proficient at conventional type missions than the SOF. Even more specialized units exist and they should not be used outside their primary mission. Just because a select force is in being, does not automatically mean that it is the BEST to use. Politics will play in this decision, the HIGH RISK/HIGH GAIN nature of the specific operation may cause the political leaders to make this choice, even if better alternatives are available, i.e., such as have SEAL TEAM SIX do a routine beach recon.

https://maxoki161.blogspot.com/2014/03/20-characteristics-of-special.html

US Navy Seal unit that killed Osama bin Laden trains for China invasion of Taiwan

Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · September 12, 2024

Seal Team 6, the clandestine US Navy commando unit that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, has been training for missions to help Taiwan if it is invaded by China, according to people familiar with the preparations.

The elite Navy special forces team, which is tasked with some of the military’s most sensitive and difficult missions, has been planning and training for a Taiwan conflict for more than a year at Dam Neck, its headquarters at Virginia Beach about 250km south-east of Washington.

The secret training underlines the increased US focus on deterring China from attacking Taiwan, while stepping up preparations for such an event.

The preparations have only grown since Phil Davidson, the US Indo-Pacific commander at the time, warned in 2021 that China could attack Taiwan within six years.

While US officials stress that conflict with China is “neither imminent nor inevitable”, the US military has accelerated contingency preparations as the People’s Liberation Army rapidly modernises to meet President Xi Jinping’s order that it have the capability to take Taiwan by force by 2027.

Seal Team 6 is a “tier one” force — the most elite in the US military — alongside the Army’s storied Delta Force. It reports to Joint Special Operations Command, which is part of Special Operations Command.

The unit rescued Richard Phillips, the captain of the Maersk Alabama container ship that was taken hostage by Somali pirates in 2009, in another mission that has helped cement its place in military history.

The Pentagon has in recent years sent more regular special forces to Taiwan for missions that include providing training for the Taiwanese military.

The Seal Team 6 activities are far more sensitive because its covert missions are highly classified. The people familiar with the team’s planning did not provide details about the missions.

Special Operations Command, which rarely discusses Seal Team 6, referred questions about its Taiwan planning to the Pentagon, which did not comment on specific details. A spokesperson said the defence department and its forces “prepare and train for a wide range of contingencies”.

As the threat from terror groups has receded, special operations forces have joined the rest of the US military and the intelligence community in intensifying their focus on China.

CIA director Bill Burns told the Financial Times last week that 20 per cent of his budget was devoted to China, a 200 per cent rise over three years.

“That Seal Team 6 is planning for possible Taiwan-related missions should come as no surprise,” said Sean Naylor, author of Relentless Strike, a book on Joint Special Operations Command who runs an online national security publication, The High Side.

“With the Pentagon’s reorientation over the past few years to focus on great power competition, it was inevitable that even the nation’s most elite counterterrorism units would seek out roles in that arena, for that path leads to relevance, missions and money,” Naylor added.

Taiwan is the most sensitive issue in US-China relations, and tensions over the island have been a critical part of backchannel discussions between US national security adviser Jake Sullivan and Wang Yi, China’s top foreign policy official, over the past year, according to US and Chinese officials who described the talks to the FT.

China says it remains committed to peaceful “reunification” with Taiwan but has not ruled out the use of force. Xi last year told a European official that he believed Washington was trying to goad China into war.

Washington is obliged to help Taiwan provide for its own defence under the Taiwan Relations Act. The US has long had a policy of “strategic ambiguity” in which it does not say if it would come to Taiwan’s defence. But President Joe Biden has on several occasions said US forces would defend Taiwan in the face of an unprovoked attack from China.

Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific command, recently warned that the US military would turn the Taiwan Strait, which separates Taiwan from China, into an “unmanned hellscape” if Beijing were about to attack. He said doing so would involve unmanned submarines, ships and drones to make it much harder for the PLA to launch an invasion.

The Pentagon said the US was committed to the “one China policy” under which it recognises Beijing as the sole government of China while acknowledging — without accepting — the Chinese position that Taiwan is part of China.

The Chinese embassy in Washington said Taiwan was “the very core of China’s core interests and the first red line that must not be crossed in the China-US relationship”.

Liu Pengyu, the embassy spokesperson, said the US should “stop enhancing military contact with the Taiwan region or arming it” and “stop creating factors that could heighten tensions in the Taiwan Strait”.

Financial Times · by Demetri Sevastopulo · September 12, 2024

2. Biden administration split over Ukraine’s use of US weapons inside Russia

We should think about this. I am reminded of the late Secretary Albirght's statement to the late General Colin Powell who said something along the lines of : "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

This might apply to our superb military equipment and capabilities.

Excerpts:

The UK has urged the US to grant Ukraine permission to use long-range weapons provided by its western allies deep inside Russia and believes Kyiv should be able to target Russian sites and assets. US sign-off is needed in order for Ukraine to use the Storm Shadow missiles provided by the UK for long-range strikes inside Russia.

While the US state department is more receptive to arguments from Ukraine and many of its western allies, the Pentagon and US intelligence community have cautioned against the use of the long-range weapons deep inside Russia.

Biden administration split over Ukraine’s use of US weapons inside Russia

Financial Times · by Felicia Schwartz · September 11, 2024

US President Joe Biden has said he is considering a request by Ukraine to use weapons provided by the US to strike deep inside Russian territory.

Biden’s admission on Tuesday comes as his government is split over whether to allow the use of US weapons, with the state department, which is more open to Kyiv’s request, pitted against the Pentagon and the US intelligence community.

“We’re working that out right now,” Biden said when asked by reporters whether he would allow Ukraine to use American long-range Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to target sites inside Russia.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has repeatedly called for restrictions on western-supplied, long-range weapons to be lifted so his military can strike Russian airfields and missile launchers, as well as the ammunition depots, fuel storage and command and control centres that are critical to Moscow’s war.

Washington in recent months has shifted away from a blanket ban on the use of US-supplied weapons to attack Russian territory, allowing Ukraine to deploy them for defensive strikes.

But Zelenskyy is pressing the US and other western countries to permit the use of long-range weaponry deep inside Russia as part of his strategy of increasing the cost of the invasion for President Vladimir Putin.

Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, is travelling to Ukraine this week with UK foreign secretary David Lammy to meet Zelenskyy and discuss his request and show support for their ally.

Ahead of the visit, Blinken told a press conference in London “we’ll be listening intently to our Ukrainian partners. We’ll both be reporting back to the [British] prime minister, to President Biden in the coming days.” He added that Biden would discuss the matter with Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, when he visits Washington on Friday.

The UK has urged the US to grant Ukraine permission to use long-range weapons provided by its western allies deep inside Russia and believes Kyiv should be able to target Russian sites and assets. US sign-off is needed in order for Ukraine to use the Storm Shadow missiles provided by the UK for long-range strikes inside Russia.

While the US state department is more receptive to arguments from Ukraine and many of its western allies, the Pentagon and US intelligence community have cautioned against the use of the long-range weapons deep inside Russia.

The latter recently assessed that 90 per cent of Russian aircraft have been relocated to airfields at least 300km away from Ukrainian-controlled territory, outside of the range of ATACMS.

“I don’t believe one specific capability will be decisive . . . we know that the Russians have actually moved their aircraft that are using the glide bombers beyond the range of ATACMS,” US defence secretary Lloyd Austin said at a meeting of the Ukraine contact group at Ramstein Air Base in Germany last week.

He added that Ukraine could target strategic targets inside Russia with drones and other domestically produced weapons.

US defence officials say Kyiv should prioritise using western weapons to defend eastern and northern regions of Ukraine, as well as to retain access to the Black Sea and to pressure Russian forces in Crimea — the peninsula annexed by Putin in 2014.

Financial Times · by Felicia Schwartz · September 11, 2024

3. Government Wins Appeal of Special Forces Contract Decision

I have not found any other reporting on this short excerpt (the remainder is behind the paywall).

Government Wins Appeal of Special Forces Contract Decision (1)

news.bloomberglaw.com · by Daniel Seiden

The US government partially won its challenge to a lower court ruling that halted performance of a special operations training contract, the Federal Circuit said Wednesday.

The US Court of Federal Claims claims ruled in August 2021 that the Army must halt F3EA performance of a maximum value $245 million Special Operations training contract because the agency improperly concluded that the awardee’s bid complied with a mandatory teaming arrangement requirement.

But the contract award wasn’t arbitrary and capricious, and the Army reasonably found that F3EA’s proposal was acceptable, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said, remanding the ...

4. The Afghanistan Papers: Lies, Damn Lies, and Strategy: In Honor of The Fallen of 9/11 And The Aftermath

Excerpts:

Epilogue

There are many parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan (and Iraq), but there was a chance for the U.S. to get it right in Afghanistan. The 2001 mission was justified, and Al Qaeda an enemy to be vanquished. In Vietnam, President Johnson fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident (the second one) and then prosecuted a campaign against communist North Vietnam while propping up a succession of corrupt leaders in the South that the public did not support. By 1972, Vietnamization meant the transfer of combat responsibilities to the Army of South Vietnam. They at least lasted until May of 1975 before collapsing against the more capable North Vietnamese Army.

In both wars, the government consistently and methodically lied and obfuscated the truth about how badly these wars were going. In both cases, a lack of clear and achievable objectives created strategic drift and the need to conceal this truth. In both wars, well-intentioned Americans committed years of their life to make the best of these bad situations. They deserved better from our government and did not get it. One man who wanted to avoid another Vietnam was Colin Powell. Late in his career, he worked with the Secretary of Defense to develop a set of questions to answer truthfully when contemplating the use of force against another nation. Derived from Powell’s study of Clausewitz, the questions remain valid.

The Afghanistan Papers: Lies, Damn Lies, and Strategy

In Honor of The Fallen of 9/11 And The Aftermath

By Practitioners, For Practitioners

By Monte Erfourth, September 11, 2024

https://www.strategycentral.io/post/the-afghanistan-papers-lies-damn-lies-and-strategy?postId=54502d79-3f0b-4e8a-a6fa-7763c30f1659&utm

Editorial Note

We published an article last week reviewing the “Pentagon Papers.” This week, we are following up with the “Afghanistan Papers.” Conducting research and writing these articles left our staff pretty disgusted with the incredible similarity between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Each war demonstrated a remarkable degree of government deception and chronically bad strategic directives. It is generally public knowledge, but being reminded of the details was unpleasant. Our staff either served a tour or had some military service-connected experience with Afghanistan (and Iraq). Friends died there or came back wounded. We knew this would not be a “feel-good” piece; it is a journalistic take on Craig Whitlock’s book, plus some related facts.

However honest and accurate the article is, it was hard not to feel “snarky” about depicting what happened. The AI-generated poster above is a somewhat satiric approach to explaining these wars’ similarities. No offense is intended towards the men and women who served bravely in either mission. However, some less-than-warm feelings are directed at our political and military leadership, many of which actively misled and allowed poor strategic decisions to pass to cover their posterior. Unlike Vietnam, our nation had been attacked, and a decisive strategy was called for. With the civilized world in support, our leadership, spanning four presidents, led us on an odyssey that ended almost as tragically as it had begun and, in many ways, left us worse off. There is much we should not forget about Afghanistan, especially those who gave their all to a doomed cause. In honor of those who fell on 9/11 and after, we offer this look into our war in Afghanistan.

Introduction

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States launched Operation Enduring Freedom, targeting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan for harboring al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the attacks. What began as a swift mission to dismantle al-Qaeda and oust the Taliban spiraled into a prolonged and costly twenty-year effort to reshape Afghanistan’s political and social landscape. Drawing from "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War" (2021) by Craig Whitlock, along with additional analyses and firsthand accounts, this article examines the rationale behind U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan, the evolution of its mission, and the factors that led to the ultimate failure of U.S. efforts there. It also explores the consequences of the American withdrawal in 2021 and reflects on the broader strategic implications of two decades of flawed policies, lack of strategy, and poor management.

The Initial Rationale for U.S. Military Intervention

The initial objective of the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan was clear: to destroy al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power for providing a safe haven to the terrorist group. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there was widespread international support for U.S. actions, and the mission seemed straightforward. However, as outlined in "The Afghanistan Papers," internal government documents obtained through freedom of information requests reveal a different narrative. From the outset, the U.S. mission had significant ambiguities and contradictions. President George W. Bush’s administration did not clarify whether the goal was solely to punish the Taliban or to eliminate them, nor was there a cohesive strategy for what would follow once these initial objectives were achieved.

The confusion about the Taliban was due to the US failure to capture Osama Bin Laden during the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001. This failure resulted from tactical missteps, reliance on unreliable local forces, and inadequate resources. US military leaders prioritized a light-footprint approach, relying on Special Forces and airpower and delegating ground fighting to Afghan militia leaders, who were often corrupt or lacked commitment. Despite credible intelligence pinpointing Bin Laden's location, US forces did not deploy sufficient troops to capture him in the mountainous terrain along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, allowing him to slip away into Pakistan.

The strategic consequences of this failure were profound. Bin Laden's escape prolonged the war on terror, allowing Al-Qaeda to regroup and spread its influence across the region. His continued evasion symbolized a missed opportunity to deal a decisive blow to global terrorism. The failure also strained U.S.-Pakistan relations, as American officials suspected that elements within Pakistan provided safe harbor for Bin Laden and, later, Taliban fighters. With Bin Laden out of Afghanistan, the United States would focus much of the military effort on removing the Taliban, and when that failed, countering their growing resurgence that led to the fall of the U.S.-backed government.

Mission Creep: From Counterterrorism to Nation-Building

As early as 2002, the mission expanded from counterterrorism to nation-building utilizing Counterinsurgency doctrine. This transition marked the beginning of a series of strategic errors. Instead of focusing narrowly on counterterrorism objectives, the U.S. embarked on an ambitious project to establish a democratic government, build infrastructure, and create security forces capable of defending the new Afghan state. "The Afghanistan Papers" highlights how this shift occurred without a clear understanding of Afghan society or the necessary commitment of resources to achieve such transformative goals.

The complexity of Afghan society, especially its tribal dynamics and resistance to centralized authority, was ignored by U.S. leadership as it essentially imposed democracy on the fledgling nation. This led to flawed policies that didn't gain local support. Implementing Western-style democracy in a country with deep tribal and ethnic divisions was unrealistic and ultimately unworkable. National security policy and strategy experts should have recognized this flaw. Confusing a counterterror strategy (mow the grass) with a counterinsurgency strategy (hearts & minds) was a direct result of wanting to purge Al Qaeda and prevent the return of Taliban rule. You can do both simultaneously, but each must be applied within the limit of resources. COIN at scale with a population that entirely rejects central authority is foolish.

Chronic Deception and Fabrications

One of the most troubling revelations from "The Afghanistan Papers" is how U.S. officials misled the public about the war’s progress and prospects. Successive administrations, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Donald Trump, maintained a facade of inevitable victory and downplayed the challenges facing U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. Internally, however, these same officials expressed doubts about their strategies and recognized the dysfunctionality of the mission. This consistent pattern of deception recalls the misinformation spread during the Vietnam War and underscores a recurring theme in U.S. military engagements: the gap between public optimism and private pessimism.

According to Whitlock, internal assessments frequently contradicted the upbeat narratives given to the public. For instance, U.S. military leaders regularly inflated metrics of success, such as the number of Taliban fighters killed, the number of Afghan security forces trained, and the extent of territory controlled by the Afghan government. These fabrications were designed to create an illusion of progress, suggesting that victory was achievable and within reach.

The U.S. government fabricated information to boost morale among troops and support among allies and to prevent the Taliban from gaining psychological and political victories. Maintaining a positive public narrative was crucial for sustaining domestic support and preventing the erosion of public backing. Thus, successive administrations prioritized crafting a narrative that minimized the complexities and challenges faced in Afghanistan, emphasizing instead the potential for success through continued commitment.

Economically, the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan was also justified by misleading claims about reconstruction efforts and economic development. Whitlock’s investigation highlights how U.S. officials often portrayed Afghanistan as a success story of nation-building, with new schools, hospitals, and infrastructure projects. However, behind the scenes, there were admissions that these projects were frequently ineffective, plagued by corruption, or incomplete. The flow of billions of dollars into Afghanistan led to widespread graft and fraud, with much of the aid money ending up in the hands of warlords and corrupt officials or wasted on poorly planned projects. Yet, the public narrative emphasized development successes as a justification for sustained economic investment and military presence.

The deception extended to strategic goals and objectives as well. Whitlock’s investigation uncovers that from the very beginning of the war, there was confusion and ambiguity over the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. Initially, the primary objective was to dismantle al-Qaeda and remove the Taliban from power for harboring terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. However, as the mission evolved, it expanded into an ambitious and poorly defined project of nation-building and establishing a stable democracy. This shift in objectives was never clearly communicated to the American public, who were instead led to believe that the mission’s focus remained on counterterrorism. The lack of clarity and shifting goals contributed to the protracted nature of the conflict. Still, officials were reluctant to admit these strategic missteps, fearing a loss of public and international support.

Another critical element of Whitlock’s findings is using manipulated data to support the government's narrative. The so-called "Lessons Learned" documents from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) included candid interviews with hundreds of military and civilian officials who admitted that the U.S. war strategy was failing. Yet, these honest assessments were rarely, if ever, shared with the public. Instead, U.S. leaders cherry-picked data to present a more favorable picture. For example, metrics that showed increased trained Afghan security forces were often cited. Still, the equally important information about their high desertion rates and lack of combat readiness was omitted. This selective presentation of data helped maintain a false narrative of steady progress and justifiable commitment.

Whitlock’s investigation also reveals that U.S. officials were aware early on that the Afghan government, propped up by the U.S., was seen as illegitimate by much of the Afghan population. Corruption was rampant, and the government failed to gain the trust of its people. Despite this, the U.S. continued to publicly express confidence in the Afghan government’s ability to lead and unify the country, ignoring warnings from diplomats, intelligence officials, and military commanders that the strategy was doomed to fail. This sustained support, based on false premises, only prolonged the conflict and deepened the U.S. entanglement in Afghanistan.

"The Afghanistan Papers" exposes a disturbing narrative of deception and fabrication by the U.S. government in its military, political, and economic efforts in Afghanistan. Whitlock’s findings highlight the lengths to which officials went to maintain public support and avoid accountability, often at the expense of a coherent and effective strategy. The revelations from these papers serve as a cautionary tale, emphasizing the importance of honesty, transparency, and clear objectives in military engagements. As the U.S. reflects on its two-decade involvement in Afghanistan, these lessons are crucial for future foreign policy and military decision-making, especially since they are a near mirror image of what occurred in Vietnam. Vietnam and Afghanistan have deeply eroded the trust and confidence in the American government, which acts as fuel for the partisan divide infecting our country.

A Deeper Look at COIN and CT Efforts

The U.S. military initially focused on counterterrorism but later shifted to a counterinsurgency strategy as the main effort during the Obama administration. This strategy aimed to protect the population and strengthen Afghan security forces, but it had limited success. The strategy overlooked the resilience of the Taliban and the lack of support for the U.S.-backed Afghan government, which faced corruption and legitimacy issues.

The U.S. CT efforts in Afghanistan focused on dismantling al-Qaeda and preventing the country from becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups. Despite some successes in eliminating key al-Qaeda leaders, the overall goals set by the US government were not fully achieved due to flawed strategies, misaligned objectives, and the resilient nature of the insurgency movements in Afghanistan.

The United States' counterterrorism strategy in Afghanistan was primarily focused on addressing the threat posed by al-Qaeda, associated groups, and ISIS-K. The strategic aim was to "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future." Special operations forces conducted these operations and relied on advanced technology, such as drones, to conduct surveillance and execute precision strikes. While these efforts successfully eliminated several senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, in 2011, they did not significantly degrade the group’s operational capabilities in the region. Al-Qaeda’s decentralized structure allowed it to adapt and survive despite losing key leaders. Moreover, the focus on high-value targets often overlooked the broader network of fighters, facilitators, and support structures that sustained al-Qaeda’s presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The impact of the U.S. counterterrorism effort in Afghanistan was complicated by al-Qaeda’s evolving strategy. Al-Qaeda shifted from a direct operational role in Afghanistan to a more advisory and supportive role, fostering relationships with local insurgent groups like the Taliban. This allowed al-Qaeda to maintain a low profile and avoid direct confrontation with U.S. forces while continuing to exert influence in the region. Additionally, the porous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan provided a sanctuary for al-Qaeda and the Taliban, allowing them to regroup and plan attacks with relative impunity. Despite years of efforts and billions of dollars spent, the U.S. failed to sever these cross-border insurgent networks, which continued to threaten Afghan stability.

One of the primary reasons U.S. counterterrorism efforts were not as effective as desired was the shifting nature of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. What began as a focused counterterrorism campaign evolved into a broader counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy that aimed to defeat the Taliban, stabilize the country, and build a democratic Afghan state. This shift diluted the focus on al-Qaeda and diverted resources to a mission that required a fundamentally different approach. Counterinsurgency efforts involved large-scale military operations, civilian protection initiatives, and efforts to win “hearts and minds,” but they often lacked coherence and failed to achieve their intended outcomes.

The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan did not weaken the Taliban, who re-emerged as a formidable insurgent force after being ousted from power in 2001. The Taliban’s resilience was fueled by a combination of factors, including their deep-rooted connections with local communities, support from regional actors such as Pakistan, and the Afghan government’s inability to establish legitimacy and effective governance. The U.S. COIN strategy, which sought to establish a strong central government and build an effective Afghan security force, was undermined by widespread corruption, poor planning, and a lack of understanding of the local political and cultural dynamics. Consequently, the Taliban capitalized on these weaknesses, gradually regaining control over large swathes of the country.

The U.S. faced challenges in Afghanistan due to shifting objectives, strategic miscalculations, and an underestimation of al-Qaeda and the Taliban's resilience. While some progress was made in eliminating terrorist leaders, it was insufficient to dismantle the broader insurgent and terrorist networks. The prolonged conflict, coupled with evolving enemy strategies, ultimately limited U.S. effectiveness and led to the collapse of the U.S.-backed Afghan government in 2021.

The experience underscores the difficulties of conducting operations in complex and hostile environments, where local dynamics and regional geopolitics play a critical role. Furthermore, the U.S. fell short in combating terrorism in Afghanistan, as al-Qaeda and other militant groups remained active. The conflation of the Taliban with al-Qaeda was a strategic error that hindered negotiation and de-escalation. Ambiguous objectives for counterterrorism operations exacerbated the mission's protracted nature.

The Collapse of Afghan Security Forces

One of the most significant failures of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan was the collapse of Afghan security forces. Despite over 90 billion dollars invested in training and equipping the Afghan military, these forces were unable to withstand the Taliban’s advance following the U.S. withdrawal in 2021. Several factors contributed to this failure, including inadequate training, corruption, and poor leadership. Afghan soldiers often lacked motivation and were more loyal to local warlords than the central government, undermining their effectiveness.

The withdrawal of U.S. military forces significantly impacted the morale and effectiveness of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces (ANDSF), which had long relied on U.S. support. The U.S. military had built the ANDSF to resemble its structure. Still, developing enlisted leadership, a professional officer corps, technical skills, and advanced tactics was unfamiliar and challenging for the Afghans. The addition of the Afghan Air Force (AAF) further exacerbated their struggles. The AAF, not expected to be self-sufficient until 2030, faced critical setbacks when U.S. maintenance support was withdrawn in 2021, leading to operational inefficiencies and supply shortages that left ANDSF units ill-equipped to combat the Taliban. The U.S. logistics system was often used to supply the ANDSF, and like their ground combat and air force counterparts, ANDSF logisticians could not replace their exiting American counterparts. The 2020 U.S.-Taliban agreement, signed under the Trump administration, marked a turning point by reducing U.S. military involvement, including crucial airstrikes, leaving the ANDSF vulnerable against the Taliban.

The rapid collapse of the Afghan military in the face of the Taliban’s offensive highlighted the weaknesses in U.S. strategy and the lack of sustainable progress over two decades. This collapse also exposed the extent to which the U.S. had overestimated the capabilities of the forces it had built, leading to a disastrous withdrawal that further damaged U.S. credibility.

The Botched Withdrawal and Negotiations with the Taliban

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 was marked by chaos and disarray, drawing stark comparisons to the fall of Saigon in 1975. Scenes of desperate Afghans clinging to aircraft at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport as they attempted to flee the Taliban’s rapid advance shocked the world. They highlighted the chaotic nature of the U.S. exit. This disorderly withdrawal was the culmination of a series of missteps, strategic miscalculations, and an underestimation of the Taliban's strength. The root causes of this debacle can be traced back to the agreement negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban, which set the stage for the U.S. departure but failed to account for the fragile state of the Afghan government and its security forces.

The agreement, signed in February 2020, committed the U.S. to a full military withdrawal from Afghanistan by May 2021 in exchange for a Taliban pledge to prevent terrorist groups from using Afghan soil to threaten the United States and its allies. However, this deal was made without the participation of the Afghan government, which weakened its legitimacy and emboldened the Taliban. The agreement effectively gave the Taliban a clear timetable for when U.S. forces would leave, allowing them to strategically prepare for a swift offensive to reclaim power as soon as American troops exited. It also led to a significant reduction in U.S. military presence, which weakened the support available to Afghan forces in their fight against the Taliban.

When President Joe Biden took office in January 2021, he faced a difficult decision: honor the agreement or extend the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, risking further conflict with the Taliban. Biden ultimately decided to proceed with the withdrawal, albeit with a slight extension to August 31, 2021, to allow for a more orderly exit. However, the rapid collapse of the Afghan government and security forces took U.S. officials by surprise. Despite intelligence warnings that the Afghan military might struggle to hold ground against the Taliban, the speed of the Taliban's advance—capturing key cities and Kabul in a matter of days—was unexpected, leading to a rushed and chaotic evacuation process.

Several factors, including poor planning, insufficient coordination with Afghan forces, and a lack of contingency measures, exacerbated the withdrawal’s disarray. The U.S. had overestimated the capabilities and resolve of the Afghan security forces, who, despite years of training and billions of dollars in support, crumbled rapidly in the face of the Taliban offensive. The U.S. military was caught off guard by the speed of the Taliban’s advance, forcing a hasty evacuation that left thousands of Afghan allies, including interpreters, embassy staff, and their families, stranded. The images of chaos at Kabul airport, with people desperate to escape, evoked memories of the fall of Saigon, where similar scenes of desperation played out as North Vietnamese forces closed in on the city in 1975.

Compounding the situation, the U.S. withdrawal plan did not adequately account for the need to secure Kabul until all American citizens and vulnerable Afghans had been evacuated. The lack of a secure perimeter around the airport and the decision to abandon Bagram Air Base—considered a more defensible location—contributed to the chaotic scenes. The U.S. military had to rely on ad hoc arrangements with the Taliban to facilitate safe passage to the airport, further complicating the situation. The suddenness of the evacuation also meant that much of the U.S. military equipment and classified materials could not be adequately secured or destroyed, raising concerns about them falling into Taliban hands. The former USCENTCOM Commander, Gen. Frank McKenzie, recently published an excellent account of the government’s withdrawal decisions called “The Melting Point.” An upcoming review of this book will go into this topic further.

No matter how much planning went into the U.S. withdrawal, the chaos surrounding the exit from Afghanistan has had significant implications for U.S. foreign policy and its standing on the global stage. It has sparked a debate about the execution of the exit strategy, the intelligence failures leading up to the withdrawal, and the broader strategic rationale for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. The hasty exit also raised questions about America’s commitment to its allies and partners, especially those left behind. For many, the disorderly departure from Kabul marked a painful end to a 20-year engagement and a sobering reflection on the limits of American military power in achieving long-term political objectives in complex environments.

Strategic Implications and Lessons Learned

The United States' lessons from the Afghanistan war, spanning two decades, reflect critical insights into military strategy, counterinsurgency, nation-building, and diplomatic engagement. Here are some of the key lessons:

1. Limitations of Military Power

The U.S. learned that military superiority alone could not guarantee success in a conflict involving a complex mix of insurgency, tribal politics, and external influences. Despite technological and firepower advantages, the insurgency persisted, highlighting the limits of military power in achieving political objectives.

2. Nation-Building Challenges

Efforts to establish a functioning government and institutions in Afghanistan faced deep-rooted challenges, such as corruption, ethnic divisions, and lack of infrastructure. The failure of nation-building initiatives demonstrated that external forces cannot impose governance structures without local buy-in and cultural sensitivity.

3. Counterinsurgency Complexities

The Afghanistan war emphasized the difficulty of counterinsurgency operations. Winning the “hearts and minds” of the local population proved elusive, and civilian casualties and mistrust of foreign troops often undermined efforts. The U.S. also underestimated the Taliban’s resilience and ability to regroup.

4. Overextension and Mission Creep

The U.S. initially entered Afghanistan with the clear goal of dismantling Al-Qaeda. However, over time, the counterterror mission expanded to broader objectives like nation-building and creating a stable democracy, which diluted focus and led to overextension. This "mission creep" was seen as a contributing factor to the protracted nature of the war.

5. Dependency on External Support

Afghan security forces became overly dependent on U.S. support, which weakened their ability to stand independently. When the U.S. withdrew, the collapse of the Afghan government and military revealed that long-term dependency was unsustainable.

6. Diplomacy and Political Solutions

The U.S. experience in Afghanistan underscored the necessity of political and diplomatic solutions in conflict zones. Military efforts were not matched by sufficient diplomatic engagement, particularly with regional actors like Pakistan, Iran, and Russia. The eventual negotiations with the Taliban reflected a recognition that the war could not be won militarily.

7. Cost of War

The financial and human costs of the war were staggering. Trillions of dollars were spent, with significant loss of life, both military and civilian. This raised questions about the long-term value of such extended military engagements and their impact on U.S. foreign policy.

8. Importance of Exit Strategies

One of the critical lessons from Afghanistan was the need for a well-defined exit strategy from the outset. The chaotic U.S. withdrawal in 2021 highlighted the consequences of not planning an orderly transition, leading to humanitarian crises and loss of credibility among allies and adversaries alike.

9. Civil-Military Relations

The war exposed tensions between civilian leadership and military commanders over the war's strategy and objectives. This highlighted the importance of clear communication and alignment between political goals and military tactics.

10. Long-Term Impact on U.S. Policy

The Afghanistan war has made the U.S. more cautious about engaging in similar interventions. The focus has shifted towards avoiding large-scale ground wars and emphasizing diplomacy, alliances, and counterterrorism from a distance, such as through drone warfare and special operations.

The Afghanistan war reminds us of the complexities of modern conflicts and the limits of military solutions, reinforcing the need for achievable integrated strategies that combine military, diplomatic, economic, and cultural tools. The Afghanistan experience also demonstrates the risks associated with deceptive narratives and the manipulation of information. The consistent dishonesty and lack of transparency eroded public trust and prevented necessary strategic adjustments. Effective military engagements require honest communication, accountability, and a willingness to adapt strategies based on ground realities.

Conclusion

The United States’ involvement in Afghanistan represents a tragic chapter in American foreign policy, marked by strategic missteps, overconfidence, and a profound disconnect between public narratives and ground realities. Using thousands of pages of internal government documents, Craig Whitlock's "The Afghanistan Papers" critically examines the many layers of deception and mismanagement that characterized the conflict. As the U.S. reflects on its longest war, it must confront the uncomfortable truths revealed by this experience and learn from its mistakes to avoid repeating them in future conflicts.

Applying Clausewitz's "remarkable trinity" provides a focused lens to analyze the United States’ counterterrorism and counterinsurgency strategies in Afghanistan. The trinity consists of three interrelated elements: the government, the military, and the people, each playing a crucial role in the conduct of war.

Government: The U.S. government's strategic objectives in Afghanistan were multifaceted, aiming to dismantle terrorist networks while fostering a stable political environment. However, as Clausewitz would argue, the lack of a clear, unified political aim led to strategic ambiguity. This is reminiscent of the Vietnam War, where conflicting objectives diluted the strategic focus.
Military: The military's role in executing these strategies often emphasized operational success without a coherent strategic framework. Clausewitz might critique this as a failure to align military operations with political objectives, leading to what he would describe as "grand tactics" rather than actual strategy.
People: The support of the populace, domestically and in Afghanistan, was crucial. Clausewitz would likely point out that the erosion of public support over time due to prolonged conflict and unclear outcomes undermined the war effort. This reflects his notion that the will of the people is a critical component of war's success.

Clausewitz would likely view the U.S. efforts in Afghanistan as a misalignment of the trinity. Strategic objectives were not clearly defined or communicated, the local populace did not support the central government backed by the United States, and the military effort was diluted by pursuing CT and COIN simultaneously without applying the necessary resources for each strategy to achieve the specified military objectives. Given his emphasis on the importance of generalship, Clausewitz would not likely recommend rotating military commanders every year. This led to a disjointed approach that unsurprisingly failed to achieve its long-term goals.

The lessons from Afghanistan are clear: military interventions must have clear and achievable goals, respect local contexts, and prioritize transparency and honesty. Only by embracing these principles can the United States hope to achieve more successful outcomes in future engagements and rebuild its credibility on the international stage.

Epilogue

There are many parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan (and Iraq), but there was a chance for the U.S. to get it right in Afghanistan. The 2001 mission was justified, and Al Qaeda an enemy to be vanquished. In Vietnam, President Johnson fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident (the second one) and then prosecuted a campaign against communist North Vietnam while propping up a succession of corrupt leaders in the South that the public did not support. By 1972, Vietnamization meant the transfer of combat responsibilities to the Army of South Vietnam. They at least lasted until May of 1975 before collapsing against the more capable North Vietnamese Army.

In both wars, the government consistently and methodically lied and obfuscated the truth about how badly these wars were going. In both cases, a lack of clear and achievable objectives created strategic drift and the need to conceal this truth. In both wars, well-intentioned Americans committed years of their life to make the best of these bad situations. They deserved better from our government and did not get it. One man who wanted to avoid another Vietnam was Colin Powell. Late in his career, he worked with the Secretary of Defense to develop a set of questions to answer truthfully when contemplating the use of force against another nation. Derived from Powell’s study of Clausewitz, the questions remain valid.

Future leaders should consider these words before considering a third Vietnam-styled foreign adventure:

References:

Whitlock, Craig. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. Simon & Schuster, 2021.

Brister, Thomas. "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." Lessons Learned. 2024.

Nicole, Jean-Thomas. "What The Afghanistan Papers Tell Us About War and Truth." Foreign Affairs, 2024.

Borger, Julian. "The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War." The Guardian, 2024.

Gary Berntsen, “Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda” (New York: Crown, 2005), 123-130.

Steve Coll, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden” (New York: Penguin, 2004), 423-435.

Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction Report. February 2023.

Why the Afghan Security Forces Collapsed.

5. China to train thousands of overseas law enforcement officers to create ‘more fair’ world order

A "global security leader?"

This is another indicator that seems to me to support this thesis: China seeks to export its authoritarian political system around the world in order to dominate regions directly and/or indirectly through proxies, co-opt or coerce international organizations, create economic conditions favorable to China alone, while displacing democratic institutions.

China to train thousands of overseas law enforcement officers to create ‘more fair’ world order | China | The Guardian

amp.theguardian.com

Minister for public security made comments at forum that is part of efforts by ruling Communist party to position itself as a global security leader

Helen Davidson in Taipei

Wed 11 Sep 2024 01.45 EDT

Serbian and Chinese police officers carry out a joint patrol in Sanya, south China's Hainan province, on 7 September. China plans to train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers. Photograph: Xinhua/REX/Shutterstock

China

China to train thousands of overseas law enforcement officers to create ‘more fair’ world order

Minister for public security made comments at forum that is part of efforts by ruling Communist party to position itself as a global security leader

Helen Davidson in Taipei

Wed 11 Sep 2024 01.45 EDT

China will train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers so as to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction”, its minister for public security has said.

“We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” minister Wang Xiaohong told an annual global security forum.

Wang Xiaohong made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organisations such as Interpol.

A ‘patriotic education’: Hong Kong schools begin rollout of Xi Jinping ThoughtThe forum is part of ongoing efforts by China’s ruling Communist party to position itself as a global security leader. In 2022 China’s leader, Xi Jinping, launched the Global Security Initiative (GSI), which centres China as a facilitator to “improve global security governance … and promote durable peace”.

Some human rights groups have raised concerns that recent training programs for African police officers introduce Communist party-style authoritarian tactics, and are heavily focused on protecting Chinese commercial interests in those countries – often connected to China’s state-run foreign investment program, the belt and road initiative.

Public reports of Monday’s speech did not provide details on the officers or countries to receive the training, or where the training would occur.

Beijing has linked the GSI to its brokering of agreements between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the development of its peace proposal for the Ukraine war. It is seen by analysts as a vehicle to reshape the current US-dominated world order.

The GSI concept appears to include a run of bilateral security and policing agreements made with developing nations in recent years, particularly in Africa and the Indo-Pacific.

Last year, Beijing said the GSI sought to encourage greater cooperation between tertiary-level military and police academies, and was “willing to provide other developing countries with 5,000 training opportunities in the next five years to train professionals for addressing global security issues”.

Monday’s announcement suggests that number is increasing, with Wang noting that China has already trained 2,700 foreign law enforcement officers in the past year.

Last week after a China-Africa forum, Beijing announced it will train 1,000 more police enforcement officers for the African continent “and jointly ensure the safety of cooperation projects and personnel”. It was not immediately clear if those 1,000 officers are included in the 3,000 cited by Wang on Monday.

On Tuesday, Wang addressed the China-central Asia summit on public security and met senior officials from the five attendant nations. He said they had agreed to strengthen ties including efforts to “deepen law enforcement and security cooperation”, and to “focus on the vision of universal security and enhance the ability of joint operations against terrorism and transnational crime”.

In July, the president of Timor Leste, Jose Ramos Horta, visited Beijing and signed a new partnership agreement with Xi, including to “enhance exchanges at all levels between the military and police forces, strengthen cooperation in such areas as personnel training, equipment technology, the conduct of joint exercises and training, police affairs and law enforcement”.

In 2022 an agreement with the Solomon Islands to boost cooperation with China on “law enforcement and security matters” sparked alarm among the US and other western allies, including other Pacific nations. In the wake of the Solomons agreement the then foreign minister Wang Yi attempted to create a regional agreement with around a dozen Pacific nations but was rebuffed.

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report.

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6. Ukraine Pressed to Think About a Plan B for War With Russia

I would hope Ukraine is thinking about (and working on) a plan B and even a Plan C.

Ukraine Pressed to Think About a Plan B for War With Russia

As Russia advances, Western officials want Kyiv to spell out realistic war goals

https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-pressed-to-think-about-a-plan-b-for-war-with-russia-d65112fe?mod=Searchresults_pos8&page=1

By Max Colchester

Follow in London and Laurence Norman

Follow in Berlin

Updated Sept. 11, 2024 12:03 am ET

A Ukrainian service member fires toward Russian troops in the Kharkiv region. Photo: valentyn ogirenko/Reuters

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukraine’s leaders have insisted that Russia needs to be driven out of all Ukrainian territory before any peace talks could begin.

Now, with Russia continuing to make slow gains on the battlefield and Western support for Ukraine showing signs of fatigue, Ukraine may need to come up with a more realistic plan, at least for the next year of the war, according to European diplomats.

The West still backs Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s long-term stated aim of taking back control of its territory. But some European diplomats say Ukraine needs to be more pragmatic in its wartime aims and strategy. That could help Western officials advocate to their respective voters the need to funnel arms and aid to the country.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.K. Foreign Secretary David Lammy will travel to Ukraine on Wednesday to meet with Ukrainian officials in part to discuss how best to define a Ukrainian victory and what aid it will need to achieve that, according to officials. Several other senior U.S. and European officials have been in Kyiv in the past two weeks.

The talks point to a recurring source of tension between Kyiv and the West: reconciling the desire to evict Russian President Vladimir Putin’s forces from Ukraine with the military reality on the ground. Senior European officials say Kyiv has been told that a full Ukrainian victory would require the West to provide hundreds of billions of dollars worth of support, something neither Washington nor Europe can realistically do.

Blinken said Tuesday that his trip was in part to see “exactly how the Ukrainians see their needs in this moment, toward what objectives and what we can do to support those needs.” Blinken said he and Lammy would report back to President Biden and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who would then discuss the matter when they meet on Friday. That could be the prelude to the U.S. and U.K. signing off on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to hit targets inside Russia, but officials caution no final decision has been made.

In Washington, White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said the trip to Kyiv wasn’t about arm twisting Ukraine into talks. “Certainly a negotiated end is the most likely outcome here, but when that happens, and under what conditions and circumstances, that’s going to be up to President Zelensky.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky Photo: Alessandro Bremec/Zuma Press

Both Russia and Ukraine have said they are open to cease fire or peace talks, though both sides seem far apart from any such meeting. Ukraine has insisted that Russian troops must exit Ukraine before going to the negotiating table. In June, the Kremlin demanded Ukraine cede the territory it had lost and give up additional land, and drop its ambitions to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Western officials say that while Putin claims he wants to start peace negotiations, it isn’t in good faith and Putin continues to believe he can make the military gains needed to crush Ukraine’s independence, adding that continued Western military support is vital.

The diplomatic push comes ahead of what could be a critical trip to the U.S. for Zelensky. He has pledged to set out what he calls a victory plan during his visit to the U.S. for the United Nations General Assembly this month. Zelensky has said he wants to meet with presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris to win their backing. It isn’t clear if those meetings will happen.

“I hope that I will have an opportunity to show this plan to Biden and potential U.S. presidential candidates Harris and Trump and get feedback,” Zelensky said in Italy recently.

Western diplomats continue to say the U.S. presidential election remains critical in terms of how much U.S. assistance Ukraine can expect in the short term. Yet few think Western support can continue at current levels for years to come.

Zelensky’s planned new peace proposal is the latest sign that he is adapting his public posture, which until now has been focused on winning back all of Ukraine’s territory before any peace talks start. Over the summer, Ukraine considered talks with Russia on limiting attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure, Ukrainian, Russian and Western officials have said.

An electrical substation that was hit by a strike in Ukraine’s Dnipropetrovsk region. Photo: Alex Babenko/Associated Press

Recent polls have shown an incremental increase in the number of Ukrainians ready for peace negotiations, but that just over half the population remains in favor of fighting until Ukraine has taken back all its territory. Acknowledging that the fighting could stop with Russia holding swaths of Ukrainian territory would be an impossible political risk for Zelensky, says Oleksiy Kovzhun, a political analyst and host of a popular online talk show.

“It’s political suicide and it cannot happen,“ Kovzhun said.

Jonathan Eyal, an associate director at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think tank, said it is good to talk privately to Ukraine about its challenges and the shape of what victory means.

“But we are nowhere near there and we must be careful that this discussion is not interpreted as pulling the plug on Ukraine,” he said.

Some of Ukraine’s closest allies, such as Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis, have warned for some time that Western determination to help Ukraine win back its territories has been slipping. He has added his voice to Ukrainian calls for speedier military deliveries and a relaxation of rules restricting the use of Western weapons to target Russia.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken Photo: mandel ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Blinken’s visit to Kyiv comes at a delicate time for Ukraine, amid slackening support for continued funding for the war in the West and the onset of the Ukrainian winter. It also comes as Russian forces continue to make slow but costly gains across the front.

Since the beginning of the year, Russia has bombarded Ukraine’s electricity grid, raising the prospect of a mass migration of Ukrainians fleeing their unheated homes in the coming months, said Eric Green, a nonresident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who until last year served as Biden’s top Russia adviser on the National Security Council.

Although the surprise move by Ukraine to enter Russian territory in the Kursk region has been celebrated inside Ukraine as a humiliation for Putin, concerns are growing in the West that it could be a drain on Kyiv’s ability to defend itself in the long run, said Green.

Ukrainian officials had hoped that the offensive would force Russia to withdraw troops critical to the offensive inside Ukraine. But indications are growing that Moscow hasn’t taken the bait, and the Russian offensive is continuing to take strategic territory inside eastern Ukraine.

The offensive was “helpful to Ukraine because it showed that Ukraine can still fight and spring surprises,” said Green. But in the West, some officials “are just raising a lot of concerns that it’s just like a sugar high that’s going to be regretted in six to eight weeks.”

U.S. Troops Are Involved in Combat, Despite Harris’s Debate Claims

https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/harris-trump-presidential-debate-election-2024/card/u-s-troops-are-involved-in-combat-despite-harris-s-debate-claims-j5b3ST4WCoIish5ScTPg?mod=Searchresults_pos5&page=1

Nancy A. Youssef

and

Alexander Ward

U.S. forces patrolling oil fields near Syria's northeastern border with Turkey this month. (Delil Souleiman/AFP/Getty Images)

Vice President Kamala Harris claimed in the debate Tuesday night that there are no U.S. troops in active war zones, a statement that obscures how thousands of American service members fight in conflicts around the world.

U.S. sailors and Marines have been defending ships and regional partners from constant attacks by Yemen’s Houthis since last fall. There are at least 3,400 U.S. troops tasked to assist and train local forces to defeat Islamic State in Iraq and Syria—where they have come under repeated attacks. The Biden administration also is quietly moving aircraft and commandos into Western Africa to combat terrorists.

And yet Harris boasted during the debate that “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century.”

Congress is the only branch with the authority to declare war, a power it hasn’t exercised since 1942, which means the U.S. hasn’t officially been at war since the end of World War II. But the U.S. has been in combat plenty of times over the decades—from Korea to Vietnam and most recently Iraq and Afghanistan—and there is no question U.S. forces today are in harm’s way. Just last month, the U.S. and Iraq launched a joint raid against Islamic State that saw seven American troops get injured.

The Pentagon awarded troops who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan at the height of the wars a Global War on Terrorism service medal. Former President George W. Bush approved the medal.

The Harris campaign declined to comment. A Pentagon official in a statement said: “Just because a service member is in one of these locations does not mean they are engaged in war. The U.S. is not currently engaged in a war and does not have troops fighting in active war zones anywhere in the world.”

This isn’t the first time the Biden administration has made this sort of claim. “I’m the only president this century that doesn’t have any—this decade—doesn’t have any troops dying anywhere in the world,” President Biden said during the June debate against former President Donald Trump, though several U.S. troops had been killed in an attack earlier that year.

In January, an Iranian proxy killed three U.S. soldiers stationed in Jordan. And during the 2021 military withdrawal from Afghanistan, 13 service members were killed outside the Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Biden and Vice President Harris, our nation is not currently at war for the first time in decades,” Harris campaign spokeswoman Morgan Finkelstein said in a statement.

8. North Korean Missiles Rain Down on Ukraine Despite Sanctions

Two members of the Dark Quad* colluding and conspiring to bring death and destruction to innocent people.

(* credit Christopher Ford for coining “Dark Quad.” https://www.newparadigmsforum.com/four-warnings-about-the-dark-quad?utm )

The marks to be decoded were likely Hangul letters.

Excerpts:

That team decoded production markings on several parts from each missile collected by Ukrainian authorities

North Korean Missiles Rain Down on Ukraine Despite Sanctions

Russia has received new shipments of Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missiles, according to a new report.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/russia-north-korea-missiles-ukraine.html?utm

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Part of the tail section of a North Korean Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile examined by weapons investigators in Kyiv on Jan. 11.Credit...Courtesy of Conflict Armament Research

By John Ismay

Reporting from Washington

Sept. 11, 2024

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North Korea has continued to supply advanced short-range ballistic missiles to Russia in defiance of sanctions meant to prevent Pyongyang from developing such weapons and Moscow from importing them, according to a report by a weapons research group.

Remnants of four of the missiles, which are called Hwasong-11, were examined in Kyiv by investigators from Conflict Armament Research, an independent group based in Britain that identifies and tracks weapons and ammunition used in wars around the world.

That team decoded production markings on several parts from each missile collected by Ukrainian authorities.

A Hwasong-11 missile used in an Aug. 18 attack on Kyiv had markings showing that it was made this year. Internal parts from three others, which were used in attacks in July and August, lacked markings that would indicate when they were manufactured.

The researchers released those findings in a report on Wednesday.

In early January, the White House accused North Korea of providing ballistic missiles to Russia, but subsequent shipments had not been previously reported.

The Hwasong-11 missile has a range of about 430 miles and can be fitted with nuclear or conventional warheads, according to a U.S. Army report. It is visually similar to the Russian Iskander short-range ballistic missile and may have been made with foreign assistance, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

Image

Remnants of a motor used to guide a North Korean Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile used in an attack on Ukraine on Aug. 6. Credit...Courtesy of Conflict Armament Research

“The determination of the production year that we were able to make in the field by looking at those remnants shows a very tight window between production, transfer and use,” Damien Spleeters, who leads Conflict Armament Research’s operations in Ukraine, said in an interview. “And I think that’s quite significant because we are talking about North Korea, a country that has been under sanction for almost two decades.”

“It also shows, because this is at least a second shipment, continued violation of the sanctions because they continue to produce those missiles, to transfer them and then those missiles are being used in Ukraine,” he said.

“It wasn’t a one-off in January,” Mr. Spleeters added.

In March, Russia used its veto power on the U.N. Security Council to end monitoring of North Korea’s efforts to evade sanctions on its nuclear program. The termination of monitors, Mr. Spleeters said, was a major reason the country has been able to continue building and transferring ordnance to Russia.

Weapons like the Russian Iskander and the North Korean Hwasong, which are fired from truck-based mobile launchers, are difficult to defend against because they fly much faster than other incoming threats like cruise missiles and can maneuver just before impact.

The United States and its allies have provided Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine to help the country fend off Russian attacks. But President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said he needs more.

“Ukraine has limited air defense options to shoot down ballistic missiles like the Hwasong, and Patriots are the key weapon system for that,” Rob Lee, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said in an interview. “They only have a limited number of Patriot batteries and missiles, so Ukraine can only defend a few key areas, and the Russians can put cities at risk as well as targets on the front lines.”

North Korea is not the only country sending such weapons to Russia.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken accused Iran of shipping short-range ballistic missiles to Russia for use in Ukraine. As a result, Mr. Blinken said, the Biden administration was imposing more sanctions against Tehran.

In August, the investigators reported that Russian forces were launching Kh-101 cruise missiles into Ukraine sometimes just weeks or months after the weapons left the factory.

The Hwasong missiles that were examined used common commercially available electronic components made by Western nations as recently as last year that ranged from the unsophisticated to fairly advanced, Mr. Spleeters said. They were similar to the components found in many Russian weapons examined by the group months into the 2022 invasion.

The finding should not be a surprise, Mr. Spleeters said, given that Russia has also been able to build advanced weapons while under international sanctions aimed at slowing their production.

“North Korea doesn’t have a domestic semiconductor industry,” he said. “So it makes sense that they would also take advantage of the global market to get access to those components.”

“This means that we also can trace them and identify the entities responsible for their diversion,” he added.

John Ismay is a reporter covering the Pentagon for The Times. He served as an explosive ordnance disposal officer in the U.S. Navy. More about John Ismay

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 12, 2024, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Russia Wields North Korean Arms. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

9. North Korean missiles produced in 2024 used in Ukraine

Please go to the link to see the interactive report and the details and photos.

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/15ae6ca767bc46a1b536ac7e2d962b66

North Korean missiles produced in 2024 used in Ukraine

Ukraine Field Dispatch, September 2024

Conflict Armament Research

Conflict Armament Research (CAR) has confirmed the continuing use of ballistic missiles manufactured by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) in the conflict in Ukraine. A CAR field investigation team documented the remnants of four different North Korean missiles following a series of attacks reported on 30 July, 5 August, 6 August, and 18 August 2024. On one of these missiles, CAR documented a mark indicating missile production in 2024. This is the first public evidence that missiles produced this year in North Korea are being used in Ukraine.

Documenting continued sanctions violations

In June 2024, CAR briefed the United Nations Security Council on the use of North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine. CAR’s latest field documentation highlights three key observations:

First, it confirms the continued use of recently manufactured North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine.
Second, the presence of components produced in 2023 and 2024 among missile remnants illustrates North Korea’s robust acquisition network for its ballistic missiles programme, capable of evading multilateral sanctions regimes that have been in place for nearly two decades.
Third, the discovery of a 2024 production mark on one of the missiles reveals a short period between the production of these ballistic missiles and their use in Ukraine. CAR’s findings highlight once again the importance of field documentation and monitoring. With the recent expiry of the mandate of the UN Panel of Experts to monitor and report on sanctions violations relating to North Korea, such field evidence is now more important than ever in shedding light on the nature of ongoing defence cooperation between North Korea and the Russian Federation.

The use of such missiles continues to erode global non-proliferation regimes. Any exports of ballistic missiles from North Korea carried out following the introduction of UN embargoes on the country in 2006 represent violations of the sanctions regime. UN Security Council resolutions 1718 (2006), 1874 (2009), and 2270 (2016) prohibit all member states from procuring arms or related materiel from North Korea and prohibit North Korea from exporting arms or related materiel. Security Council resolutions also forbid North Korea from developing its ballistic missile programme, meaning that individuals, entities, and networks involved in the facilitation of these transfers may have committed violations.

CAR field investigators will continue to document any further evidence of the use of North Korean ballistic missiles in Ukraine.

Favourite or share this Dispatch: https://conflictarm.org/North-Korean-missile-produced-in-2024

10. The war on terror never ended

Excerpts:

The topic of border security may have become politicized, but 80 percent of Americans agree it has been handled poorly. Most migrants are looking for a better life in America. Yet hundreds of them are affiliated with terror organizations bent on killing Americans. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.

To put this in perspective, the 9/11 hijackers began applying for U.S. visas in April 1999. They used aliases, manipulated passports and forged official documents to enter the country. A porous southern border allows extremists to bypass such sophisticated tradecraft. Alone, each of the above developments should be concerning. Taken together, they are a calamity in waiting.

Both presidential candidates have pledged to secure the border. Such bipartisan harmony only reinforces how serious the problem is. America has no shortage of challenges to address this election season, but honoring the memory of 9/11 involves walking a fine line between alarmism and complacency. In this case, unfortunately, we may have already crossed it.

The war on terror never ended

by Michael P. Ferguson, opinion contributor - 09/11/24 10:30 AM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4872511-the-war-on-terror-never-ended/

Like millions of Americans, I remember that September morning in 2001 vividly. As the towers fell in New York City and the Pentagon smoldered, the nation’s sense of safety also crumbled.

Thousands of young Americans like me were moved to enlist in the armed forces and take the fight to al-Qaida. By Christmas 2005, I was an infantryman in Ramadi, Iraq doing just that. But a lot has changed since then.

The Global War on Terrorism fueled visions of a world in which largescale conventional wars were slipping into irrelevance. By 2006, defense policy in the U.S. had shifted from focusing on hostile nation-states to terrorist organizations.

In 2012, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney became a foreign policy pariah when he said Russia posed a major geopolitical threat to America. President Barack Obama’s initial response to Romney’s comment — that the Cold War was over and the 1980s wanted its foreign policy back — did not age well. The joke did, however, reflect a widely-held opinion, until Russia invaded Ukraine two years later.

Since 2014, the successful targeting of terrorists, Vladimir Putin’s latest incursion into Ukraine and heightened tensions between the U.S. and China have returned American strategy to a focus on interstate competition. Raising the alarm for global terrorism today might draw quips about the early 2000s wanting its foreign policy back. Yet, as the military adage goes, the enemy “gets a vote” in ending the war on terror.

One of these votes comes from Tehran, whose terrorist proxies are attacking U.S. troops abroad with little fear of reprisal. Three service members were killed in Jordan earlier this year and a more recent strike on al-Asad airbase in Iraq injured five Americans. In August, a “suicide” drone hit a small U.S. camp in Syria. The Pentagon implicated Iranian surrogates in each of these attacks, but the threats extend beyond Tehran.

Parts of Central Asia and Africa have also become fertile ground for nurturing terrorism, creating an environment eerily reminiscent of the pre-9/11 era. After the botched 2021 withdrawal of U.S. forces, Afghanistan relapsed into a terrorist safe haven, returning the birthplace of America’s War on Terrorism to its previous form. But before Osama bin Laden took refuge in Afghanistan, he planned and funded attacks on American interests while living in Sudan during the early 1990s.

Now, decades later, terrorism in Africa is once again not contained to the region. Donna Charles of the U.S. Institute of Peace testified before the House Committee on Homeland Security last September that some groups, such as the Somalia-based al-Shabab, have developed the “capability and intent” to strike the U.S.

According to the latest annual threat assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the terrorist “center of gravity” has shifted from the Middle East to Africa. Jihadist groups there are expanding their networks and growing more sophisticated.

This June, the Institute for the Study of War reported that Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen brokered a deal to sell advanced weapons to al-Shabab, including surface-to-air missiles and lethal drones. Michael Morell, a former deputy director of the CIA, sees “echoes of the run-up to 9/11” as the “terrorism warning lights are blinking red again.” One of these signs is a sharp uptick in troubling developments on the U.S.-Mexico border.

A report from the House Committee on Homeland Security found that between 2021 and 2023 Border Patrol encounters with migrants on the terrorist watch list skyrocketed by 2,500 percent. Security officials detained hundreds of them and released dozens, including one man with ties to al-Shabab who was found in Minnesota earlier this year. In June, authorities arrested eight men linked to Islamic State after they entered the country through Mexico.

The topic of border security may have become politicized, but 80 percent of Americans agree it has been handled poorly. Most migrants are looking for a better life in America. Yet hundreds of them are affiliated with terror organizations bent on killing Americans. These two statements are not mutually exclusive.

To put this in perspective, the 9/11 hijackers began applying for U.S. visas in April 1999. They used aliases, manipulated passports and forged official documents to enter the country. A porous southern border allows extremists to bypass such sophisticated tradecraft. Alone, each of the above developments should be concerning. Taken together, they are a calamity in waiting.

Both presidential candidates have pledged to secure the border. Such bipartisan harmony only reinforces how serious the problem is. America has no shortage of challenges to address this election season, but honoring the memory of 9/11 involves walking a fine line between alarmism and complacency. In this case, unfortunately, we may have already crossed it.

Maj. Michael P. Ferguson, U.S. Army, is a Ph.D. student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and coauthor of “The Military Legacy of Alexander the Great: Lessons for the Information Age.” His views as expressed here do not necessarily reflect official policies or positions of the Army or the Department of Defense.

11. What have we learned about fighting terrorism since 9/11?

Conclusion:

For those who argue that leadership decapitation has made us safer, I wonder if their sentiments aren’t perhaps influenced by how desensitized Americans have become to the now normalized changes to our daily lives required to defend against terrorism. But as I’m reminded every time I go to an airport or attend a public event, as Taylor Swift fans are now painfully aware, it sure doesn’t feel any safer.

What have we learned about fighting terrorism since 9/11?

by Douglas London, opinion contributor - 09/11/24 12:00 PM ET

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4872165-terrorism-strategy-leadership-decapitation/?utm

During the Global War on Terror, I often found myself working for either those who relished bringing death to our adversaries or those who struggled to give the command, “release weapons.” Both executed the same “leadership decapitation” strategy the United States still follows, aimed at disrupting or dismantling terrorist organizations by targeting their top leaders for capture or elimination.

There is no consensus among the scholarly examinations as to whether leadership decapitation works. Jenna Jordan’s comprehensive 2019 study concluded that, over the long run, leadership decapitation “has been largely ineffective.” Yet Jordan acknowledged how the lack of agreement on which measures and criteria to include for analysis allows for “a large variation in the conclusions.”

Israel continues to lean into this strategy against Hamas, Lebanese Hezbollah and Iran, as it has for decades. It’s hard to say Israel is safer today, as the world waits to learn whether an all-out regional war will follow Tel Aviv’s presumed responsibility in assassinating Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh last month in Tehran.

The aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel is much like I remember the aftermath of 9/11 in the U.S. The mood was one of desperation, dread and a passion for vengeance. There was little appetite then, or now, for the long game.

After 9/11, the U.S. took years to refine the art and science of “find, fix and finish” and build the tools to deliver what the government refers to as “lawfully, legal targeted killing.” I observed first-hand the transition in U.S. counterterrorism methodology from capture operations to selective kinetic targeting of high-value targets and thereafter a high-intensity, volume-driven killing campaign.

Leadership decapitation champions marveled at the capability, the metrics and the perceived tangible impact. Viewers observed dazzling displays of subsonic missiles that could surgically eliminate a single man through a window while sparing others in an adjoining room. A slight shake of the camera as missiles left the rails and a flash would be followed by a fireball incinerating an individual on foot, riding a motorcycle or under a tree, all without harming nearby civilians owing to the absence of explosives.

The U.S. became extraordinarily adept at manhunting and killing.

The reasoned argument held that although targeted killing might not destroy these groups or extinguish their threats, it didn’t have to. Rather, we could degrade them to near dormancy, achieving “strategic defeat.” Doing so, however, required a constant, high-intensity campaign, producing the popular buzzwords, “sustained counterterrorism pressure.”

Others, myself included, looked at the landscape long-term and from 360 degrees. The capability is an invaluable tool, but just one in a necessarily holistic approach. Its overuse could bring diminishing returns and wreak dangerous, generational consequences akin to those stempping from our support of the Mujahideen against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Destroying rather than degrading terrorist organizations meant changing the conditions facilitating the recruitment, messaging, financing, logistics and training on which terrorist groups depended. Success required insight into terrorist plans and capabilities, informing a more balanced combination of selective kinetic strikes and capture operations, the latter largely done in cooperation with foreign partners. Detainees yielded significant intelligence and source acquisition opportunities. Such hard power also needed complementary counter-messaging, covert influence and constructive public policy.

Renowned counterterrorist expert Colin Clarke, in reviewing the 2019 Jordan study, hits on one of the reasons leadership decapitation won out. “Another problem with decapitation strikes,” Clarke writes, “is the issue of ‘intel gain-loss,’ or the decision over whether the value of collecting information from an enemy target is more worthwhile than destroying the target itself.” What Clarke couldn’t know was the political risk officials feared. They could lose the target, or the group might conduct an attack while he sat in our crosshairs. Either outcome would surely end a once promising career.

From my experience, leadership decapitation yielded short-term tactical gains but long-term complications. The U.S. killed hundreds of bona fide terrorist leaders during my era across al Qaeda, its Sunni extremist partner groups, and the Islamic State. Their removal often disrupted attacks because the dead took their plans and personal relationships with them to the grave, and their successors routinely lacked the same experience, gravitas and networks. Terrorist organizations could replace personnel, but they were forced on the defensive.

However, leadership decapitation also taught terrorist groups to become more resilient and decentralized to ensure survivability. Their threats metastasized globally through loosely connected, self-sufficient and largely autonomous affiliates. Splinter groups like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s in Iraq and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State were more dispersed, and arguably more violent, indiscriminate and unpredictable. Seeding chaos and fear by inspiring indigenous lone wolves rather than directing external operatives became a low-cost, high-impact and decidedly difficult tactic to stop.

U.S. officials are blunt about today’s heightened threat from foreign and domestic terrorism. In June, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell and Graham Allison, the former assistant secretary of Defense for policy and plans, published “The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again.” They express grave concern and caution that such public pronouncements are driven by classified intelligence and should be heeded.

For those who argue that leadership decapitation has made us safer, I wonder if their sentiments aren’t perhaps influenced by how desensitized Americans have become to the now normalized changes to our daily lives required to defend against terrorism. But as I’m reminded every time I go to an airport or attend a public event, as Taylor Swift fans are now painfully aware, it sure doesn’t feel any safer.

Douglas London is the author of “The Recruiter: Spying and the Lost Art of American Intelligence” and served 34 years as a CIA operations officer, including multiple assignments as a chief of station and as the agency’s counterterrorism chief for South and Southwest Asia. He teaches intelligence studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service.

12. Bill Burns and Richard Moore: Intelligence partnership helps the US and UK stay ahead in an uncertain world

Bill Burns and Richard Moore: Intelligence partnership helps the US and UK stay ahead in an uncertain world

Technological advantage is key to ensuring the special relationship maintains its lead

Financial Times · by Bill Burns and Richard Moore September 7 2024 · September 7, 2024

Bill Burns is director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Moore is chief of the UK Secret Intelligence Service

Two years ago, we celebrated 75 years of partnership; 75 years since the CIA was founded in 1947. But the bonds between US and UK intelligence go back even further, closer to the founding of SIS in 1909 when we first witnessed, together, the horror of state-on-state violence in Europe.

Today, after the closest of collaborations through the first world war, second world war and cold war, followed by a shared struggle against international terrorism, that partnership lies at the beating heart of the special relationship between our countries. We have no more trusted or esteemed allies.

But the challenges of the past are being accelerated in the present, and compounded by technological change. Today, we co-operate in a contested international system where our two countries face an unprecedented array of threats.

The CIA and SIS stand together in resisting an assertive Russia and Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. We saw it coming, and were able to warn the international community so we could all rally to Ukraine’s defence. We carefully declassified some of our secrets as a new and effective part of this effort.

Staying the course is more vital than ever. Putin will not succeed in extinguishing Ukraine’s sovereignty and independence. Russia’s actions are a flagrant breach of the UN Charter and global norms. We will continue to aid our brave, resolute Ukrainian intelligence partners. We are proud to do so, and stand in awe of Ukraine’s resilience, innovation and élan.

This conflict has demonstrated that technology, deployed alongside extraordinary bravery and traditional weaponry, can alter the course of war. Ukraine has been the first war of its kind to combine open-source software with cutting-edge battlefield technology, harnessing commercial and military satellite imagery, drone technology, high and low sophistication cyber warfare, social media, open-source intelligence, uncrewed aerial and seaborne vehicles and information operations — as well as human and signals intelligence — at such incredible pace and scale. Most of all, it has underlined the imperative to adapt, experiment and innovate.

Beyond Ukraine, we continue to work together to disrupt the reckless campaign of sabotage across Europe being waged by Russian intelligence, and its cynical use of technology to spread lies and disinformation designed to drive wedges between us.

In the 21st century, crises don’t come sequentially. While significant attention and resources are being deployed against Russia, we are acting together in other places and spaces to counter the risk of global instability.

For both the CIA and SIS, the rise of China is the principal intelligence and geopolitical challenge of the 21st century, and we have reorganised our services to reflect that priority. Meanwhile, counterterrorism remains core to our partnership, and we work closely with others to protect our homelands and thwart the resurgent threat of Isis.

In the Middle East, SIS and the CIA have exploited our intelligence channels to push hard for restraint and de-escalation. Our services are working ceaselessly to achieve a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza, which could end the suffering and appalling loss of life of Palestinian civilians and bring home the hostages after 11 months of hellish confinement by Hamas. Bill has played a hands-on role in bringing the negotiating parties together with help from our Egyptian and Qatari friends. We continue to work together to deescalate tensions in the region.

Maintaining technological advantage is vital to ensuring our shared intelligence advantage. SIS and the CIA cannot do this alone — our partnership is augmented by a network of partnerships with the private sector.

We are now using AI, including generative AI, to enable and improve intelligence activities — from summarisation to ideation to helping identify key information in a sea of data. We are training AI to help protect and “red team” our own operations to ensure we can still stay secret when we need to. We are using cloud technologies so our brilliant data scientists can make the most of our data, and we are partnering with the most innovative companies in the US, UK and around the world.

In all of this work, our outstanding people, the very best exemplars of selfless public service and patriotism, are at the heart of our mission. Our partnership is built on our work together across technology, analysis and clandestine operations overseas — including agent relationships. These are the brave men and women who work with our officers to stop the bombs, end the violence and inform us of our adversaries’ intent.

There is no question that the international world order — the balanced system that has led to relative peace and stability and delivered rising living standards, opportunities and prosperity — is under threat in a way we haven’t seen since the cold war. But successfully combating this risk is at the very foundation of our special relationship. Trust, openness, constructive challenge, friendship. These characteristics can be relied upon into the next century, as can our shared determination to remain champions for global peace and security.

Financial Times · by Bill Burns and Richard Moore September 7 2024 · September 7, 2024

13. America’s most secret spy agency now has a podcast

America’s most secret spy agency now has a podcast

The National Security Agency opens up for the first time about its role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/11/nsa-podcast-bin-laden/?utm

The National Security Agency campus in Fort Meade, Md., in 2020. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)

By Ellen Nakashima

September 11, 2024 at 9:43 a.m. EDT

It used to be known as “No Such Agency” — a play on its initials NSA. It was so secretive, its campus didn’t even have an exit sign on the parkway.

But the National Security Agency is finally emerging from the shadows. The famously circumspect spy service just launched a podcast. And now it’s willing to reveal details of work it once considered so sensitive, officials shared updates only on paper.

In exclusive interviews with The Washington Post, former NSA officers have opened up in detail for the first time about their role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

The broad contours of the pursuit are known from movies, books and countless articles, but while most Americans know about the role played by the CIA and the military’s Special Operations, few have a full picture of the NSA’s key contributions.

“It’s time for NSA to take some credit,” said Jon Darby, a retired NSA official who shortly after 9/11 was put in charge of figuring out new ways to go after al-Qaeda’s communications.

The NSA was the agency responsible for intercepting and analyzing the calls that identified the key bin Laden associate who would eventually lead the CIA to the al-Qaeda chief’s compound. It crucially placed the associate, a courier, in northwest Pakistan. And it determined, after the compound was identified, that he was still actively working for al-Qaeda — with a degree of confidence that bolstered the intelligence community’s resolve to throw more resources at learning who lived in the compound.

With the launch this month of “No Such Podcast,” the NSA is seeking to publicize the role that signals intelligence, or SIGINT — the collection and analysis of electronic communications — plays in keeping America and its allies safe.

The massive scale of NSA collection on foreign targets — some of whom communicate with Americans — has generated tension, with revelations a decade ago by former contractor Edward Snowden prompting debate about whether the surveillance was subject to sufficient privacy guardrails. Officials say such controversies have often obscured the work the agency does to bolster the nation’s security.

The first podcast episode goes back in time, before the Snowden revelations, to highlight the NSA’s role in the hunt for bin Laden, which ended with his killing in May 2011.

Darby told The Post the “nerve center” for the bin Laden hunt “was at CIA, but SIGINT was absolutely essential to finding him.”

Michael Morell, who was deputy director of the CIA at the time, said “finding Osama bin Laden was a team effort.”

Identifying the courier was a particular breakthrough, driven by two years of NSA wiretapping. Beginning in late 2007, the CIA shared with the NSA it suspected that a bin Laden associate known by his nom de guerre, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, might be related to the Ahmad Saeed family in Kuwait.

A top NSA analyst, whom Darby called his bin Laden “hunter in chief,” set his team to work. They pored through transcripts of calls. They tracked foreign numbers associated with those calls, daisy-chained them to other numbers and listened in on hundreds of conversations. Over two years, they built out the circle of individuals they thought might be Ahmad Saeed family members, recalled the now-retired analyst, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect him and his family from potential threats.

One person stood out: Ibrahim Ahmad Saeed, a Kuwaiti-born Pakistani, who spoke in Arabic and Pashto and kept very much to himself.

Almost alone among the spy agencies, the NSA had a roster of top linguists with the talent to understand not only both Arabic and Pashto but also Urdu and the targets’ peculiar verbal tics. “We were looking at how they pronounce different vowels and at little clicks in their speech,” he said.

Ahmad Saeed turned on his phone only sporadically, and mainly in busy urban areas or on highways in northwestern Pakistan, the analyst said. He never seemed to want to speak about himself, or invite any relative to visit — not even during major religious holidays. “It just raised our suspicions,” the analyst recalled.

The NSA ran comparisons of audio clips comparing the individual it knew as Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti with the intercepts of Ahmad Saeed. The lead analyst’s team reanalyzed material predating 9/11 and determined that the individuals known as Ibrahim Ahmad Saeed and al-Kuwaiti were in Afghanistan at the same time.

By late 2009, the hunter in chief was convinced. Ahmad Saeed and al-Kuwaiti were the same individual. “We had our guy,” he recalled thinking. And by then, they had also placed him in northwest Pakistan, but they didn’t know exactly where.

In the summer of 2010, with the NSA tracking al-Kuwaiti’s cellphone, the CIA deployed operatives on the ground to spot him, in part by correlating the phone’s signal strength to his location as he moved. Acting on a lead provided by the NSA, the CIA linked al-Kuwaiti to a white Suzuki Potohar, an SUV with an image of a white rhino on the spare-tire cover.

In August, using NSA cell signal data, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes drone and satellite imagery, identified a compound that stood out for its massive size and 18-foot walls. A CIA operative, working off NSA signals, trailed al-Kuwaiti as he drove from Peshawar, Pakistan, to the compound.

The crucial question now was whether the courier was still actively working for bin Laden. In November that year, a bin Laden team member approached the lead analyst. “I don’t know if this is of interest to you,” the team member said. He described a call between al-Kuwaiti and a friend in Kuwait.

“We’ve missed you,” the friend said. “Where have you been?”

“I’m back with the people I was with before,” came al-Kuwaiti’s cryptic reply.

The NSA had made another breakthrough: The intercept provided the confidence that al-Kuwaiti was an active al-Qaeda member, not a retired terrorist.

“I remember going to my colleagues and saying, ‘This is kind of a big deal,’” the analyst recalled.

On the day of the raid, the NSA’s hunter in chief was in a Joint Special Operations Command center in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, hunched over his laptop, eyes glued to a special chatroom, tracking all communications with the agency in real time.

Back at Fort Meade, Darby was in a makeshift command center at the Ops1 Building with a handful of senior officials.

Darby, who by then was the agency’s counterterrorism chief, was at work all Sunday night. After the raid, he walked to an office where analysts had been working around-the-clock for a couple of weeks and told them: “We got Osama bin Laden.”

He didn’t get home until Monday night.

His wife, who had been in the dark all these years, finally realized what her husband had been involved in. She asked if he wanted a steak dinner.

“All I wanted,” he said, “was a pizza.”

Then he sat down. “I literally cried my eyes out, you know, shoulder shaking, let it all out, just crying my guts out,” he said. “It was just such an emotional release.”

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

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By Ellen Nakashima

Ellen Nakashima is a national security reporter with The Washington Post. She was a member of three Pulitzer Prize-winning teams, in 2022 for an investigation of the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, in 2018 for coverage of Russia's interference in the 2016 election, and in 2014 for reporting on the hidden scope of government surveillance. follow on X @nakashimae

14. Opinion TikTok back in court as government does the ‘national security’ dance

Opinion TikTok back in court as government does the ‘national security’ dance

Declaring TikTok a “national security” threat doesn’t excuse government interference with speech.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/11/bytedance-tiktok-ban-legal-appeal/?utm

The TikTok building in Culver City, Calif. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes, File)

By George F. Will

September 11, 2024 at 7:00 a.m. EDT

Justifying the law to block Americans’ access to TikTok, the government says “national security” is threatened by the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that claims 170 million American users. A bigger threat, however, is the incessant use of that phrase to impart spurious urgency to agendas that are only tangentially, if at all, related to the nation’s safety. Linguistic inflation transforms too many things into “national security” threats.

On Monday, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok will challenge the law banning it from U.S. app stores. TikTok argues in its brief that the law demands a divestiture (from Chinese ownership) that is technologically and commercially impossible — and unprecedented: “Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific speech forum. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.” Last year, TikTok says, U.S. users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos that were viewed worldwide more than 13 trillion times. TikTok argues that the ban violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and the guarantee of equal protection of the laws.

Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ “right to receive” communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary.

TikTok also argues that the law violates the Constitution’s takings clause by taking property without just compensation. And that the law, which is punitive, violates the Constitution’s proscription of bills of attainder: legislative punishments of specifically targeted people or groups, which violate the separation of powers.

Follow George F. Will

No Senate committee held hearings or issued a report on the legislation, and Congress enacted no findings to justify treating TikTok differently than other “foreign adversary controlled” apps. A House committee report expressed concern about “misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda.” But government has no legitimate power to protect Americans from what the report calls “divisive narratives.” Or from conjectural harms related to speech that does not lose constitutional protection because the government deems it untrue or unhelpful.

The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda. Trust the government that tried to suppress as misinformation true criticisms of the government’s pandemic policies? The government that in a 12-month period extending into this election year overstated by 818,000 the number of jobs created during the Biden administration?

Before trusting government’s solemnities about “national security” threats, read Tufts University professor Daniel W. Drezner’s “How Everything Became National Security” in Foreign Affairs. He wrote, “The national security bucket has grown into a trough” capacious enough to contain problems ranging from “food security,” HIV/AIDS, “biologic and genetic dangers,” and “transnational criminal organizations” to “domestic extremism,” “poverty,” “environmental degradation” and certain “supply chains” (e.g., for cobalt and lithium). Drezner warned that “policy entrepreneurs … frame their pet issues as national security concerns” to unlock government resources.

Politicians unleash economic and “national security” nonsense in the service of their demagoguery. The Donald Trump-Kamala Harris consensus encompasses their opposition to allowing a corporation from a close ally (Japan) to purchase U.S. Steel for 40 percent more than its market capitalization, a sale favored by holders of 98 percent of U.S. Steel shares and unopposed by the U.S. military, which uses just 3 percent of domestic steel production.

In the TikTok affair, national security is the excuse for indulging the most dangerous urge: to control speech. In his splendid and alarmingly timely new book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage,” George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley correctly wrote U.S. history demonstrates that “anti-free speech impulses rest in the body politic like a dormant virus.” Today, this virus is far from dormant — and not just in the fever swamps of academia.

The free expression of thought is, as Turley wrote, “the essence of being human.” Opposition to it is the essence of bad presidencies.

President John Adams vigorously wielded the Alien and Sedition Acts. President Woodrow Wilson’s wartime authoritarianism suppressed dissent. Kamala Harris would be the third president expressly hostile to free speech: In 2019, she told CNN that speech on social media without “oversight and regulation” by government “has to stop.” Her running mate seems obedient: Tim Walz falsely declares that there is no First Amendment protection for “misinformation.” Presumably, he and she will tell us what this is, in due time.

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Opinion by George F. Will

George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Post in 1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977. His latest book, "American Happiness and Discontents," was released in September 2021.follow on X @georgewill

15. How the US Army is rethinking howitzers

I received these comments from a career artillery officer. He makes a very compelling argument.

David – here is the crux of the debate, which ironically the Marines figured out and the US Army has yet to get the memo on: “The Marine command decided that a few missile systems would produce, through precision, better fire support than the 96 artillery tubes that were jettisoned.” The math is the math. And we are still having trouble counting. Two DSAR / DFST pods can provide a “Battalion 3 round” (three volleys from 18 cannons) and do so in far less time and with greater accuracy. Direct support rockets are the wave of the future. Cannons are becoming obsolete. And when we finally transition to launched effects (LE), meaning smart munitions, then it’s all but over for tube artillery. The Army needs to get off the silly LE euphemism and just call it what it is – a smart munition / drone. This would go a long way in shifting the paradigm from cannons to rocket artillery no matter how badly some artillerymen want to desperately hold onto cannons. War is no respecter of sentimentality. Modernize we must or lose future wars.

How the US Army is rethinking howitzers

Six months after scrapping one proposed Paladin replacement, Army leaders are casting about for longer-range alternatives.

defenseone.com · by Shaun McDougall

U.S. Army soldiers conduct maneuvers in a Paladin howitzer before artillery certifications in Torun, Poland. Army Sgt. Jeremiah Woods

September 11, 2024 09:00 AM ET

Army
Arms

The U.S. Army’s search for its next howitzer remains in motion, six months after service leaders scrapped efforts to upgun its current M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer.

Even as the Army was terminating the ERCA program in March, the service was reinvigorating its search for a longer-ranged Paladin replacement to serve until 2040 and beyond. Its fiscal 2025 budget request included $8 million for initial next-generation howitzer studies.

Meanwhile, service leaders are surveying the existing field. An industry day was held in April, attended by representatives from American Rheinmetall, AM General, BAE Systems, Elbit, Hanwha, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann. This group builds a mix of wheeled and tracked options: Rheinmetall and KMW jointly produce the tracked PzH-2000; KMW also has the wheeled RCH 155; AM General makes the Brutus system that can be equipped on a truck; incumbent BAE Systems has tested the Paladin with a Rheinmetall L52 cannon, and the company also manufactures the wheeled Archer howitzer; Elbit makes the wheeled M454; and Hanwha produces the tracked K9 Thunder.

In August, the Army released an request for information; a competitive evaluation is scheduled for fiscal 2025. This evaluation may result in a production contract award if any of the systems meet the Army’s requirements. The service anticipates beginning domestic production of a system within two years of a contract award, and it could start fielding new howitzers as soon as 2030.

The service will also continue investing in developing new munitions intended for the original ERCA that could help increase the range of the next-generation howitzer, as well as existing systems.

No more towed artillery?

All this follows the Army's 2021 examination of options for wheeled 155mm howitzers to replace some of its towed M777 howitzers. A shoot-off took place that September involving systems from BAE Systems Archer, Elbit ATMOS/Iron Sabre, Nexter CAESAR, AM General Brutus, and Yugo/Global Ordnance NORA. At the AUSA conference, General Dynamics presented a Stryker equipped with a 155mm cannon as a potential option, and South Korea’s Hanwha and Japan’s Mitsubishi were seen as potential contenders as well. But the Army eventually abandoned that tack, saying it wanted to field a mobile howitzer that can more easily keep up with highly mobile Stryker formations and that provides more survivability than existing towed systems in near-peer conflicts.

In early 2024, Army officials said the study called for more autonomous artillery systems with greater range and mobility, while shying away from towed artillery. Speaking at the AUSA Global Force conference, U.S. Army Futures Command head Gen. James Rainey said, “The future is not bright for towed artillery.” Future systems must be mobile to reposition quickly on the battlefield and away from potential enemy fire. Rainey also expressed interest in capabilities like an autonomous robotic cannon. The statements paint a bleak future for towed artillery, but opens the door to potential procurement of new self-propelled howitzers.

Despite the position on towed artillery, BAE Systems was tasked with building new M777 lightweight towed howitzer structures for the Army to replace systems donated to Ukraine, according to a January 2024 announcement from the company. The deal was valued at up to $50 million.

A recently completed tactical fires study will help inform the direction of Army howitzer development.

16. Professional Military Writing Special Edition of Military Review: newest “must have” for modern Soldier’s kit

We need an advertising campaign: "Do more writing" (like "eat mor' chikin")

For the Army, there is CSA and SMA emphasis on writing so there should be no excuse for officers and NCOs not to write - about their experience and about their ideas for the future, about anything relating to the profession of arms and national security. (and fiction is also important)

I wish they had included a reference to the late Warlord Colonel John Collins (it may have been referenced in one of the articles, so I will have to dig deeper). His guidance on writing has had a very positive influence on me.

Sharp Pens Sharpen Swords: Writing for Professional Publications Colonel John M. Collins, U.S. Army, Retired A much-published writer on military issues presents a how-to guide for the thinking Soldier who wants to contribute to the professional literature.

https://nps.edu/documents/104100045/104161899/Sharp_Pens_Sharpen_Swords_Writing_For_Professional_Publication.pdf/9989bdff-60d0-47da-8817-f1ff76a31f0a?t=1375372590000

John Collins, Army colonel who launched influential online Warlord Loop, dies at 97

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/john-collins-army-colonel-who-launched-influential-online-warlord-loop-dies-at-97/2018/11/23/5d4e575a-ef37-11e8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html

Professional Military Writing Special Edition of Military Review: newest “must have” for modern Soldier’s kit

https://www.army.mil/article-amp/279558/professional_military_writing_special_edition_of_military_review_newest_must_have_for_modern_soldiers_kit

By The Army University Public Affairs OfficeSeptember 11, 2024

The chief of staff of the Army’s Harding Project's “Professional Military Writing” Special ... READ MORE

THE ARMY UNIVERSITY, FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kansas – There’s a field manual, standard operating procedure, or Army regulation for every Soldier task and mission.

The chief of staff of the Army’s Harding Project is now no different with the release of the “Professional Military Writing” Special Edition Military Review that is available now.

The special edition is a deliberate guide for individuals and units on how to steward the Army profession through professional writing and discourse.

The publication comes one year from the CSA Gen. Randy George’s initial introduction of the Harding Project and its mission to renew professional writing and discourse.

“If your idea can improve our Army, write it down,” George said in the foreword for the special edition. “The articles in this special issue can help you hone your idea in your unit and then submit it for publication through our journals.”

The edition features articles on why professional writing is important, how to write well, how to write for professional publications, how to run a unit writing program, and an enlisted perspective of professional writing.

It provides clear guides for individuals wanting to start professional writing, for units looking to start programs to encourage meaningful and impactful professional discourse, and for those navigating the publishing process.

Articles within this special edition are written by those with experience writing articles, leading unit writing programs, or editing our Army’s outlets. The collection of articles makes professional writing and discourse accessible to all ranks and echelons of the Army.

“None of our NCOs should have a problem telling another Soldier when they need to check their azimuth,” Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael R. Weimer said. “We should have the same resolve when stewarding the profession. Discuss, research, write, debate, articulate, and present your ideas. This special edition is designed to help you get started.”

In total, 18,000 copies of the special edition will be shipped to units across the Army in all three compos.

It is also available online on Army University Press’ website: https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/Professional-Military-Writing/.

17. America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific by John Bolton

Excerpts:

With China pressing all along the First Island Chain, existing U.S. bilateral cooperation with affected states like Japan and Taiwan has plainly become insufficient. Finding seams in the intelligence or defense capabilities across the chain is far easier for Beijing when such efforts among the targets are absent. If China breaks through the First Island Chain at one place, other states in the chain and the Pacific would be at greater risk. Washington should recognize that the integrity of each nation’s air and maritime spaces requires multilateral cooperation, especially among air and naval forces and the intelligence communities of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Given the high stakes, involving other Asian and Pacific states, along with key European allies like Britain, could be critical.

Such cooperation doesn’t require creating an East Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization or accepting a decision to contain China—at least not yet. More-robust multistate activities are nevertheless urgently needed across the island chain. Several areas of multilateral cooperation are already under way, but if much more isn’t done, Beijing will play one nation against another, calibrating belligerent activities along its periphery to advance its interests. If the affected nations don’t hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, China may well hang them all separately.

A possible model is George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative against trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. A British diplomat described PSI as “an activity, not an organization,” almost entirely operational and not overtly political. Its success rested on military and intelligence exchanges and exercises, only rarely involving diplomatic palavering among foreign ministries. What worked for PSI on a global basis can work in Asia and the Pacific.

America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific

China is trying to break the First Island Chain, and its strategy is to divide and conquer.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/americas-crucial-first-line-of-defense-in-pacific-china-tries-to-break-first-island-chain-d3b4c23c?mod=Searchresults_pos10&page=1

By John Bolton

Sept. 10, 2024 12:48 pm ET

A Chinese coast guard vessel sails close to a Japanese coast guard vessel near one of the Senkaku Islands, April 27. Photo: kyodo/Reuters

China’s recent incursions into Japan’s airspace and territorial waters materially escalate Beijing’s efforts to intimidate and dominate nations in the Indo-Pacific. Tokyo responded by announcing a multibillion-dollar satellite program to bolster detection capabilities against such intrusions.

Chinese “fishing vessels” have in the past periodically sailed near the Senkaku islands, which are claimed by Japan, Taiwan and China. Chinese coast guard ships and military vessels later began to appear, ratcheting up Beijing’s aggressiveness. Washington doesn’t explicitly recognize Tokyo’s sovereignty over the Senkakus but has committed to defend the islands under the U.S.-Japan mutual cooperation and security treaty.

These escalating forays follow Chinese interference in Taiwan’s airspace and waters, and its efforts to assert sovereignty over most of the South China Sea. Chinese naval encounters with the Philippines over disputed islands, shoals and reefs have made headlines. Vietnam and others have often faced Chinese challenges.

None of this is coincidental. Beijing is unmistakably contesting control of the First Island Chain. This variously described topography extends from the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Kuril islands, through Japan and the Senkakus to Taiwan, on to the Philippines and then Borneo and the Malay Peninsula.

America’s next president will have to face the strategic consequences of this belligerence. Climate-change negotiations with Beijing should no longer top Washington’s East Asia agenda. Tweets suggesting China consult Google Maps won’t suffice, though they at least show someone on Team Biden understands the problem.

With China pressing all along the First Island Chain, existing U.S. bilateral cooperation with affected states like Japan and Taiwan has plainly become insufficient. Finding seams in the intelligence or defense capabilities across the chain is far easier for Beijing when such efforts among the targets are absent. If China breaks through the First Island Chain at one place, other states in the chain and the Pacific would be at greater risk. Washington should recognize that the integrity of each nation’s air and maritime spaces requires multilateral cooperation, especially among air and naval forces and the intelligence communities of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand. Given the high stakes, involving other Asian and Pacific states, along with key European allies like Britain, could be critical.

Such cooperation doesn’t require creating an East Asian North Atlantic Treaty Organization or accepting a decision to contain China—at least not yet. More-robust multistate activities are nevertheless urgently needed across the island chain. Several areas of multilateral cooperation are already under way, but if much more isn’t done, Beijing will play one nation against another, calibrating belligerent activities along its periphery to advance its interests. If the affected nations don’t hang together, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, China may well hang them all separately.

A possible model is George W. Bush’s Proliferation Security Initiative against trafficking in weapons of mass destruction. A British diplomat described PSI as “an activity, not an organization,” almost entirely operational and not overtly political. Its success rested on military and intelligence exchanges and exercises, only rarely involving diplomatic palavering among foreign ministries. What worked for PSI on a global basis can work in Asia and the Pacific.

The elephant in the room is Taiwan. Without it, there is little chance other concerned countries can effectively thwart China’s destabilizing efforts. This time it isn’t Taipei asking for help, but other regional capitals that need help as much as Taipei. Losing effective control over what Douglas MacArthur labeled an “unsinkable aircraft carrier”—much less actual Chinese annexation—would fatally breach the First Island Chain. There are ways around the Taiwan dilemma that would irritate Beijing. But that need not precipitate a political crisis unless China is resolved to have one, which in itself would reveal Beijing’s hostile intent.

Long before the Abraham Accords established full diplomatic relations among Israel and several Arab states, they were working together. Wide-ranging intelligence cooperation, especially over the common threat of Iran, stimulated creative, mutually advantageous ways to do business. In another context, West Germany’s somewhat anomalous status didn’t prevent its full integration into NATO. Instead of hypothesizing about obstacles to closer cooperation with Taiwan, Asian and U.S. diplomats should emulate their predecessors and include Taiwan in collective security.

More Chinese air and sea incursions are coming, along with increased influence operations in Asian and Pacific countries and more intelligence-gathering efforts. Beijing is dictating the pace and scope of its intrusions, underscoring the need for closer cooperation among its targets. That alone would augment deterrence, but we haven’t got time to waste.

Mr. Bolton served as White House national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06. He is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.”

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To China's frustration, the Aukus partnership between the U.S., U.K. and Australia to deliver Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines is gaining ground, despite funding challenges to the U.S. submarine industrial base. Images: U.S. Navy/Zuma Press/AP Composite: Mark Kelly

Appeared in the September 11, 2024, print edition as 'America’s Crucial First Line of Defense in the Pacific'.

18. Another US military chief makes public gesture for ally Philippines

Strategic reassurance. Strategic resolve.

Another US military chief makes public gesture for ally Philippines

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · September 11, 2024

Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Eric Smith receives a briefing aboard the amphibious assault ship USS America in the Korea Strait on Sept. 7, 2024. (Juan Maldonado/U.S. Marine Corps)

America’s top Marine pledged this week to help the Philippine military develop capabilities to monitor its sea territory amid ongoing coast guard clashes with China, according to a state-run media report.

Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith, during a trip to the island nation, promised the Philippines’ vice chief of staff, air force Lt. Gen. Arthur Cordura, that the Marines will help Manila boost its maritime surveillance capabilities, the state-run Philippine News Agency reported Tuesday.

The Philippines has limited resources, and the Marines are the lightest U.S. service branch, so the commandant is likely talking about drones and electronic warfare, Paul Buchanan, a U.S. security expert based in New Zealand, said by email Tuesday.

Real-time intelligence, analysis, target designation and communication will be a priority, so any assistance would likely involve electronic warfare specialists, intelligence Marines and drone operators, he said.

Smith made the pledge during a visit to Camp Aguinaldo, the Philippine military’s headquarters in Quezon City, according to the news agency report.

During the meeting, Smith committed to helping the Philippine military develop its ability to detect intrusions within its territorial waters so it can work more closely with U.S. counterparts, according to the report.

The generals also discussed an upcoming naval drill involving forces from both countries in the islands — Samasama, Tagalog for “together.”

Marine Rotational Force — Southeast Asia, formed in 2022, participated in Samasama in the Philippines last year.

Smith’s remarks are the latest by U.S. military officers pledging support on behalf of the Philippines, which the United States is bound by treaty to defend in the event of an attack.

The head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Adm. Samuel Paparo, told reporters in Manila on Aug. 27 that the U.S. military is open to consultations about escorting Philippine ships in disputed waters of the South China Sea, where Philippine and Chinese coast guards clash routinely.

Most recently, the two sides collided Aug. 31 at Sabina Shoal, where Philippine authorities allege a Chinese vessel rammed a Philippine vessel three times. China lays claim to nearly the entire sea, including features inside the Philippine exclusive economic zone.

The two countries had agreed to ease mounting tensions at another flashpoint, Second Thomas Shoal, where Filipino marines man an outpost on a grounded, rusting warship.

Beijing has reclaimed land and built military facilities in disputed territory. Its claims are challenged by neighboring countries, including Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam.

A combined U.S. Navy and Marine Corps amphibious ready group and Marine expeditionary unit can surveil a large portion of Philippine maritime territory and extend into the South China Sea, said retired Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior researcher with the Japan Forum for Strategic Studies in Tokyo.

“If it’s just Marines, they have the capability to ‘cover’ from land a stretch of ocean extending out into the Philippines EEZ for some distance,” he told Stars and Stripes by email Tuesday.

New Marine surveillance and missile detachments use radars, drones and even piloted aircraft to surveil sea territory, he wrote.

“Anything the Philippines can do to defend itself is something the Americans don’t have to do,” Newsham said. “But even better, the more capable the Philippine military, the more effective a combined US-Philippine defense is.”

Stars and Stripes · by Seth Robson · September 11, 2024

19. The War on Terror Was Not a Morality Tale

Wow: “escalating the conflict at every opportunity”

I am not sure I could stomach reading this book but I suppose I should just to understand this "argument."

Excerpts:

Beck’s conclusions are stark. He sees the United States as “an empire … that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs in order to stay there.” He arbitrarily calls for the halving of U.S. defense spending. Even in cases like Ukraine, he faults the United States “escalating the conflict at every opportunity” and using diplomacy “almost exclusively to expand the ranks of those countries fueling the war.” More morality tales, with the United States as the eternal villain.

While it would be unfair to describe Homeland as representative of restrainers’ views, it highlights two problems with how they use recent history. First, they exhibit a “magic key” syndrome, or a tendency to pinpoint one variable as the driving, essential cause of U.S. behavior. Their magic keys include strategic primacy, liberal or capitalist hegemony, racial hierarchy, or American consumerism. These factors are all at play in this history, but mono-causal arguments do not capture how the attitudes, emotions, calculations, and justifications of policymakers shifted as contexts changed. Grand narratives are useful for recommending policy reforms, but that does not mean they are good history.

Second, Homeland presents a radical version of the restrainers’ habit of proposing major changes that policymakers may be unable to enact. It is hardly useful, for example, to tell the next president-elect that they should transform the foundational assumptions of U.S. grand strategy. That would not help the 47th president deal with the many active crises of the world today, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine, or the simmering challenge of China, not to mention the political and bureaucratic obstacles to change. Homeland exemplifies this shortcoming. For instance, it fails to consider how Obama, when he inherited the War on Terror, also had to balance a desire for long-term strategic change with the demands of the moment: a still-unstable Iraq, a declining situation in Afghanistan, and a significant terrorist threat. Strategic restraint could minimize the number of situations that the United States sees as its responsibility, but it cannot wish this problem away. Beck simply pays no heed to these issues, but other restrainers should if they hope to persuade policymakers.

What, then is the role of the historian this conversation? Politicians, strategists, and public intellectuals use history to justify their preferred set of actions. This will always be so. But historians should not create usable pasts to support those agendas. We exist, in part, to poke holes in the way these actors use history. We should seek to inform but also inconvenience them by sinking them into the complexities, contingencies, and evolving contexts of the past.

In this task, Homeland falls short. It is a one-dimensional book that serves the needs of the present rather than illuminating the past. It is fueled by moral outrage, but its fire consumes more than it clarifies. The real history of the War on Terror will be much harder to squeeze into such convenient packages.

The War on Terror Was Not a Morality Tale - War on the Rocks

warontherocks.com · by Joseph Stieb · September 12, 2024

Richard Beck, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (Penguin, 2024).

Almost a quarter-century after 9/11, the War on Terror no longer dominates U.S. foreign policy and is less central to our politics and culture. While this conflict has few defenders today, the questions of why it was fought, how it went awry, and what this history means for the future of U.S. policy are still up in the air.

For the restraint movement, associated with organizations like the Quincy Institute, the Cato Institute, and Defense Priorities, the War on Terror was a string of unmitigated disasters. It caused geopolitical destabilization and unnecessary deaths, overextended U.S. resources, and eroded democracy and the rule of law. But while many might agree with this, restrainers go further. deeper faultiness of the idea that the United States can act as the fulcrum of world order. For them, the lessons of this conflict are that U.S. leaders should be more skeptical of military interventions, reduce the country’s defense spending and overseas presence, and limit commitments outside of vital strategic zones. The restrainers have formed an uneasy coalition of left-wing, realist, libertarian, and nationalist conservatives.

Enter journalist Richard Beck’s new book, Homeland, which depicts the War on Terror as a massive, counterproductive atrocity driven by the desire to preserve U.S. economic hegemony and maintained by racism. It has received effusive praise from Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich, a conservative realist, and Greg Grandin, a left-wing historian also associated with Quincy.

Despite some fascinating cultural history, Beck gives a flawed account of U.S. foreign policy in this period, flattening the War on Terror into a morality tale. He rarely bases his claims about U.S. policy in hard evidence and seems unaware of much recent scholarly work. He makes little effort to understand decisionmakers’ motives and perspectives, preferring to fold them into his overarching framework.

Homeland is what historians call a “usable past,” which refers to a “retrospective reconstruction” of history designed “to serve the needs of the present.” Beck is open about this, asserting that “the writing of history is not only an attempt to make the past intelligible to the present; it is an effort to turn the present into something the future can use.” He issues strident calls for social justice, accountability for U.S. leaders, and a reduction of our global role. These may be worthy goals; the problem is that they guide Beck’s selective presentation of evidence, leading to tendentious arguments. The result is a politically useful book for restrainers but not a reliable history.

This review focuses on two core problems with Homeland that reflect deeper issues in how pro-restraint writers approach the War on Terror. The first is the superimposing of motives, often without strong documentary evidence, onto U.S. leaders, which creates oversimplified explanations of their behavior. The second is a preference for moralizing about history in ways that serve present-day agendas but capture neither the complexities of this conflict nor the challenges of leadership.

This essay also raises a larger question: Can we make good policy changes on the basis of flawed history? The short answer is no, and that we don’t have to. The restrainers are right in many ways about recent overseas disasters. The Iraq War was an unforced fiasco reflecting unrealistic ideas about the U.S. global role, Afghanistan dragged on without clear objectives, and detention and torture policies eroded the nation’s reputation. As a result, critics do not need to rely on biased, overheated histories to make their case. Moreover, if they fall back on morality tales disguised as history, they will be more likely to dismiss the many problems that leaders faced in the War on Terror and continue to face today, making their recommendations less persuasive to those they must sway if they ever hope to change policy.

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Why Did We Fight the War on Terror?

Homeland would have been stronger if it had focused more on the subtitle: The War on Terror in American Life. Beck begins with an excellent account of the surreal horror of 9/11 itself. He then analyzes how this conflict altered culture and daily life, ranging from superhero movies to parenting habits to the nature of public space. He shows how movies like American Sniper or the Batman and Iron Man series helped sustain Americans’ consent for tough security policies and expansive wars without prompting much self-reflection from viewers.

For instance, in , one of the most popular films of the 21st century, Batman and his allies combat the Joker (essentially a nihilistic terrorist) by creating a computer program that can make any cell phone in Gotham a surveillance device. Once the threat is neutralized, he destroys this program. This is portrayed as a hard but justified choice by a responsible hero to defeat an existential threat. The underlying message, as Beck argues, is to trust the people using similar tools on behalf of U.S. security. This book should prompt reflection about the security culture that has distorted American life for the past two decades.

But Homeland runs into serious issues when it pivots to foreign policy. Beck devises an omni-explanation for U.S. strategic decisions: it was all about capitalism. He eschews the crude “blood-for-oil” hypothesis in favor of the grander argument that the War on Terror was an attempt to preserve U.S. economic dominance by prying recalcitrant economies. The Iraq War, he contends, was “an attempt to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economics of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership.”

Beck roots U.S. hegemony in “its ability to superintend the global economy as a whole,” extending capitalism and America’s favorable place in the economic order. But the capitalist machine, he contends, sputtered in the 1970s, leading to a slowdown of growth that sapped the foundations of U.S. power. 9/11 offered a pretext for replacing regimes that defied assimilation into this system. This is Beck’s explanation for the War on Terror’s sprawling nature: “At its foundation, that’s what the war on terror is: a potential solution to the problem of slowing global growth and America’s declining power.”

This is argument by insinuation: the United States seeks to defend an open capitalist order that serves its interests (an uncontroversial statement), therefore the Iraq War must be a product of this goal. Never mind that Iraq, the world’s 51st largest economy, and Afghanistan, now featuring a gross domestic product smaller than any U.S. state, were unlikely to change the course of economic history.

The bigger problem is that Beck provides no evidence that this was an actual motive for the Iraq War. Steve Coll, Melvyn Leffler, Robert Draper, Michael Mazarr, and others have scoured the available archival record, conducted hundreds of interviews, and found virtually nothing supporting this thesis. Beck seems unaware of this scholarship, failing to cite these and other prominent works on the War on Terror. This is not an academic book, but Beck does not even address the questions these scholars raise.

For example, in his section on other proposed reasons for the Iraq War, he cites unsubstantiated ideas like George W. Bush invading to finish his daddy’s business or to distract from domestic failures. This misrepresents an extensive literature on the war, which focuses on two primary motivations: security and hegemony. Unlike Beck’s hypothesis, there is documentary evidence to support both claims. The war’s architects were deeply concerned about national security in the post-9/11 atmosphere, and their fears were crucial in their drive to war. They were also strategic primacists who believed that U.S. power was the fundamental pillar of global order. They sought to remove what they perceived as a security threat and intimidate challengers to U.S. power by making an example of Iraq. Understanding the war’s origins requires synthesizing these motives. Moreover, that the United States imposed neoliberal reforms on Iraq during the occupation, as Beck relates, does not prove this was the war’s cause.

Beck dodges this complexity by dismissing Bush’s case for war out of hand as “laughably weak, ridiculous on its face” and based in “lies.”Indeed, Bush’s case was flawed and dishonest: He and his supporters exaggerated evidence about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s support of al-Qaeda and conjured evidence from dubious sources. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe it.

Furthermore, Beck’s dismissal overlooks the context in which the Iraq War debate occurred. U.S. intelligence agencies and those of many allies as well as weapons inspections chiefs believed that Saddam had retained some capacity to build weapons of mass destruction or was reviving such programs. There were varying levels of perception, and allies like France and Germany correctly challenged the Bush administration’s claims.

But there were also numerous unanswered questions about what had happened to Saddam’s non-conventional weapons, and inspectors had left Iraq in 1998. Thanks to rigorous scholarship from Steve Coll and others, we know now that Saddam had unilaterally destroyed the vast majority of these weapons in 1991 but failed to document this in a way that could demonstrate his disarmament to inspectors. His regime then, for a variety of reasons, obstructed inspections for nearly a decade, creating the impression that he had somethingto hide. As Robert Jervis argues, the “inferences” that intelligence analysts made about the Iraq’s behavior “were very plausible, much more so than the alternatives,” even if we now understand the alternatives were true.

Beck shows no signs that he has engaged with this literature. Indeed, doing so would be inconvenient for his argument. Dismissing the idea that widely held concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction motivated the war bolsters his claim that it was really about capitalism. But it does not capture a messier truth.

Homeland’s all-consuming framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy also leads it to a dubious analysis of the nation’s foes, including al-Qaeda. If the War on Terror was driven by capitalist hegemony, then U.S. enemies must be foes of that order. Beck argues that “al-Qaeda hoped to strike at the America-led global economic order,” symbolized by the Twin Towers. Like everything bad in this story, terrorism is a product of capitalism, or of the “surplus population” suffering under the world’s imbalanced distribution of economic power and the regimes that uphold this system. Generalizing wildly about a complex phenomenon, he asserts terrorism is “a demand that all of this be made to stop,” committed by “people who are stuck” in dysfunctional societies.

Once again, Beck flattens a complex story into something convenient for his argument. Al-Qaeda of course objected to the neoliberal order; it objected to almost every facet of the modern world, including democracy. It protested specific U.S. foreign policies, but it was not seeking mere adjustments to the status quo, economic or otherwise. It sought a global revolution that would eradicate Western power in the Islamic world, topple apostate regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and impose its belief systems. In an old-school Marxist turn, Beck treats the religious motives of transnational jihadists as something epiphenomenal to economics. These terrorists may couch their actions in a religious idiom, he asserts, but the roots of their behavior are economic. Again, this is useful for his argument, but it does not appreciate the true radicalism of al-Qaeda or the wide variety of Islamist terrorist groups.

Morality Tales

Homeland is a moral critique as well as a history. Those lines blur throughout the book, to its detriment. Beck is obviously right about the objectionable moral nature of much of the War on Terror. But this book is morally as well as historically simplistic. Beck portrays a binary of rapacious American imperialists oppressing Muslims at home and abroad, declaring: “Wars are sustained by rage and that rage seeks an object. In the War on Terror, that object was Muslims.” He contends that in the American imagination, Muslims were either “victims to be saved or barbarians to be eliminated.”

A true moral reckoning, however, requires wrestling with complexity and contradiction. There were successes in this conflict, albeit ones that could have been achieved without disasters like Iraq. There were no major, externally directed attacks on U.S. soil, al-Qaeda has been severely degraded as an operational organization, and, in Afghanistan at least, there were improvements to quality of life, women’s rights, and representative government. These were tenuous gains, as Beck argues elsewhere, but they are dead now with the Taliban’s victory.

As writers like Anand Gopal, Elliot Ackerman, and Carter Malkasian have demonstrated, these conflicts featured a bewildering array of behavior that defies simple moral boxes. Muslims played many roles: brutal Islamist extremists seeking domination, religious parties contesting for power, women, activists, and civic leaders for whom these wars meant both destabilization and opportunities for a better life. Literally millions of Muslims backed, if not led, efforts to prevent groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Islamic State from seizing power. Americans also ran the gamut from sincere believers in helping Muslims build free, stable societies to outright racists. Such ambiguity is nowhere in this book.

Moreover, in his moralizing argument, Beck rarely considers the uncertainty, pressures, and imperfect options that beset policymakers. This is most evident in his critique of President Barack Obama. Like other critics, Beck faults Obama for continuing the War on Terror and even expanding it, as in the 2009 Afghan surge. He excoriates Obama’s drone strike program, calling for the criminal prosecution of those who conducted this campaign.

Beck, however, makes little effort to consider the scale of the global terrorist threat when Obama took office. International terrorism had metastasized into groups ranging from the Afghan-Pakistani border to Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, and Iraq. Figures like Faisal Shahzad and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab received training in Pakistan and Yemen before attempting mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil. The propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki was influencing dozens of jihadists while acting as a de facto member of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was still at large. For Obama to ignore these threats would have been not only strategically irresponsible but also politically disastrous in the event of a successful attack.

Drone and special operations forces provided a way to pursue these morphing threats at less cost to U.S. troops and civilians than conventional operations. This approach kept al-Qaeda and other groups off-balance and was reasonably accurate in terms of civilian versus combatant casualties. Obama’s use of drones also declined significantly in his second term, which Beck ignores. Moreover, the idea that this program’s personnel should be prosecuted for killing civilians effectively criminalizes any use of force that might hurt civilians.

Simply put, there was no clean way to fight this war, and Obama developed a more restrained and sustainable approach than Bush’s regime change strategy. He also had to react to events, as in his re-surging of U.S. forces to combat the Islamic State, a threat to security and human rights if there ever was one. Obama deserves criticism for much of his foreign policy, especially in Libya, but Beck’s critique is unmeasured.

The War on Terror and the Future of U.S. Grand Strategy

Beck’s conclusions are stark. He sees the United States as “an empire … that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs in order to stay there.” He arbitrarily calls for the halving of U.S. defense spending. Even in cases like Ukraine, he faults the United States “escalating the conflict at every opportunity” and using diplomacy “almost exclusively to expand the ranks of those countries fueling the war.” More morality tales, with the United States as the eternal villain.

While it would be unfair to describe Homeland as representative of restrainers’ views, it highlights two problems with how they use recent history. First, they exhibit a “magic key” syndrome, or a tendency to pinpoint one variable as the driving, essential cause of U.S. behavior. Their magic keys include strategic primacy, liberal or capitalist hegemony, racial hierarchy, or American consumerism. These factors are all at play in this history, but mono-causal arguments do not capture how the attitudes, emotions, calculations, and justifications of policymakers shifted as contexts changed. Grand narratives are useful for recommending policy reforms, but that does not mean they are good history.

Second, Homeland presents a radical version of the restrainers’ habit of proposing major changes that policymakers may be unable to enact. It is hardly useful, for example, to tell the next president-elect that they should transform the foundational assumptions of U.S. grand strategy. That would not help the 47th president deal with the many active crises of the world today, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine, or the simmering challenge of China, not to mention the political and bureaucratic obstacles to change. Homeland exemplifies this shortcoming. For instance, it fails to consider how Obama, when he inherited the War on Terror, also had to balance a desire for long-term strategic change with the demands of the moment: a still-unstable Iraq, a declining situation in Afghanistan, and a significant terrorist threat. Strategic restraint could minimize the number of situations that the United States sees as its responsibility, but it cannot wish this problem away. Beck simply pays no heed to these issues, but other restrainers should if they hope to persuade policymakers.

What, then is the role of the historian this conversation? Politicians, strategists, and public intellectuals use history to justify their preferred set of actions. This will always be so. But historians should not create usable pasts to support those agendas. We exist, in part, to poke holes in the way these actors use history. We should seek to inform but also inconvenience them by sinking them into the complexities, contingencies, and evolving contexts of the past.

In this task, Homeland falls short. It is a one-dimensional book that serves the needs of the present rather than illuminating the past. It is fueled by moral outrage, but its fire consumes more than it clarifies. The real history of the War on Terror will be much harder to squeeze into such convenient packages.

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Joseph Stieb is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990–2003.

The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

Image: Eric Draper via Wikimedia Commons

Book Reviews

warontherocks.com · by Joseph Stieb · September 12, 2024

20. Top Chinese general to visit US as militaries step up engagement

He will likely tour US ships. But when I accompanied 15 students from the National War College to China in 2011 we were not allowed inside the Naval base at Qingdao much less allowed to visit ships (although we did get to see quite a bit of the 5th Armored Brigade northwest of Beijing).

Top Chinese general to visit US as militaries step up engagement

Move marks latest effort to defuse tensions over Taiwan and South China Sea

September 11, 2024

FINANCIAL TIMES

https://www.ft.com/content/52adec25-51a6-4634-8439-50f1cc13792f

A top Chinese military commander will visit US Indo-Pacific Command in Hawaii next week as the two militaries step up engagement amid regional concerns about tensions over Taiwan and the South China Sea.

General Wu Yanan, the People’s Liberation Army Southern Theater commander, will attend a defence conference hosted by Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, according to people familiar with the plans.

Wu’s attendance at the annual Indo-Pacific chiefs of defence conference marks an important step in reopening communications between the US and Chinese militaries. It will come a week after he and Paparo spoke in a video call that marked the first formal engagement between the two commands.

The Pentagon has been pushing for more engagement with the Southern Theater Command for years, as the PLA has increased its assertive activity near Taiwan and other parts of the South China Sea.

President Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, agreed in San Francisco last November that the militaries needed to reopen communication lines as part of an effort to stabilise US-China relations.

In 2022, China shut down a number of communication channels between the two militaries in protest after Nancy Pelosi became the first Speaker of the US House of Representatives to visit Taiwan in 25 years.

Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the German Marshall Fund think-tank, said it was a “good sign” that the PLA was participating in the conference, which brings together defence chiefs to discuss security challenges and co-operation.

“His visit will provide an opportunity for Admiral Paparo to further push for establishing a sustained communication channel between Indo-Pacific Command and China’s Southern Command (and potentially Eastern Command) as well as for an in-depth discussion of issues such as the South China Sea and the Pacific with senior regional military leaders,” Glaser added.

Indo-Pacific command described last week’s video call as a “constructive and respectful” discussion but said Paparo had told Wu that the PLA should “reconsider its use of dangerous, coercive and potentially escalatory tactics in the South China Sea and beyond”.

While the US is concerned about Chinese military activity around Taiwan, the Pentagon has more recently become anxious about China’s coastguard activity against the Philippines, the oldest US defence ally in Asia.

China has harassed Philippine military and coastguard vessels with rising levels of violence since early last year, including an incident where Chinese coastguard ships rammed Philippine vessels near Second Thomas Shoal, a reef inside Manila’s exclusive economic zone.

In another sign of renewed military engagement between the two countries, Michael Chase, the top Pentagon official for China policy, is currently in Beijing for defence policy co-ordination talks with his Chinese counterparts. It is his first visit to China since assuming the position in 2021.

21. The Kursk Offensive: How Ukraine’s Operational-Level Guerrilla Warfare Is Bringing Maneuver Back

An important paragraph in this excellent essay. I think exhaustion is the most important concept if we cannot rapidly win through annihilation. As an aside I think the ultimate (or optimal) exhaustion strategy is Giap's Dau Tranh which I think should be studied and appropriately employed (with US characteristics).

Excerpt:

These terms—attrition and maneuver, along with exhaustion and annihilation—are often muddled, but if properly understood, they can offer clarity about the war in Ukraine and its shifting operational contexts. Hans Delbrück explained that a strategy of exhaustion seeks to wear down an enemy across military, political, and economic fronts until they lose the will to continue a war. He contrasted it with a strategy of annihilation, which tries to concentrate a country’s power into a single, decisive victory. While exhaustion and annihilation are best seen as opposing strategies, maneuver and attrition are best seen as differing approaches to employing military forces at the operational level of war.

Conclusion:

If Russia does establish a force density in Kursk that precludes maneuver, Ukraine should not get too attached to the land it seized. Like some Viking marauders raiding undefended towns and abbeys, or like the English chevauchées of the Hundred Years’ War that eschewed prolonged sieges to raid deep into France and bypass its castles to exhaust it politically, Ukraine should maintain its forces’ flexibility to conduct operational-level raids elsewhere. This approach will play to its advantages and, combined with Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure and military industrial base, will support an overall strategy of exhaustion.

Maneuver is often associated with a strategy of annihilation, and I have argued that the US Army should pursue annihilation through maneuver in the expected context of a future war. However, in its current situation, Ukraine cannot use maneuver to achieve a decisive victory over Russia. What it can do is use maneuver to exploit vulnerabilities, force Russia to overextend, create chaos, encircle Russian forces, and capture Russian equipment. By attacking as operational-level guerrillas, Ukraine will return initiative to Ukraine and not allow Russia to dictate the war’s tempo. By continuously hitting the Russians as quickly as they can, as hard as they can, where it hurts Russia the most, and when Russia ain’t looking, the Ukrainians stand a chance of exhausting Russian forces. The Kursk offensive’s successes make that clear.

The Kursk Offensive: How Ukraine’s Operational-Level Guerrilla Warfare Is Bringing Maneuver Back - Modern War Institute

mwi.westpoint.edu · by Robert G. Rose · September 12, 2024

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There is only one principle of war and that’s this. Hit the other fellow, as quick as you can, as hard as you can, where it hurts him most, when he ain’t lookin’.

Last year, I argued that Ukraine was correct in pursuing an attritional approach against Russia. I had not foreseen, as Russian General Valery Gerasimov also apparently had not, Ukraine’s General Oleksandr Syrskyi launching the surprise Kursk offensive and opening a new front in the war. Without having to face the prepared, continuous, defense in depth that characterized the Russian positions on the war’s increasingly static front lines, Syrskyi created a new context, which has allowed Ukraine to pursue maneuver as an operational approach.

Bringing back maneuver may be the most important aspect of the Kursk offensive. Many writers have already discussed the strategic-level implications of the offensive—changing the narrative of the war, embarrassing Vladimir Putin, or providing Ukraine with bargaining chips in negotiations. But by finding an alternative to having to break through prepared Russian defenses, this offensive could fundamentally change Ukraine’s approach to fighting. By launching surprise offensives across the thinly defended border, Ukraine can pursue operational-level guerrilla warfare to support an overall strategy of exhaustion.

These terms—attrition and maneuver, along with exhaustion and annihilation—are often muddled, but if properly understood, they can offer clarity about the war in Ukraine and its shifting operational contexts. Hans Delbrück explained that a strategy of exhaustion seeks to wear down an enemy across military, political, and economic fronts until they lose the will to continue a war. He contrasted it with a strategy of annihilation, which tries to concentrate a country’s power into a single, decisive victory. While exhaustion and annihilation are best seen as opposing strategies, maneuver and attrition are best seen as differing approaches to employing military forces at the operational level of war.

As an operational approach, maneuver uses tempo and surprise to exploit vulnerabilities and prevent enemies from reforming their defenses, repositioning their forces, conducting logistics, and synchronizing their efforts. Their combat systems fall apart, their forces are bypassed or encircled, and they cease to be able to provide effective resistance.

On the opposite end of a sliding scale from maneuver, attrition seeks the material wearing down of an enemy through the efficient and synchronized use of combat power that results in favorable loss ratios. Attrition focuses on cumulative destruction and allows operational simplicity, provides relative predictability, and minimizes vulnerabilities. While attritional approaches prioritize synchronizing friendly forces to minimize the effects of the fog, friction, and chaos of war, maneuver tries to desynchronize an opponent and exploit the resulting disorder.

Not Quite Dead Yet

Some authors have discussed the death of maneuver. Often such commentators channel Carl von Clausewitz and discuss the changing the character of war, but they myopically focus on technological change. However, Clausewitz discussed his contemporary character of war in political terms and never mentioned Gribeauval cannons or any other technological change. Authors with a technocentric lens miss all the other contexts that influence war: political objectives, societies, economics, mobilization rates, geography, density of forces, and time.

In 2023, once Russia had the time and force density to establish a continuous defense in depth, maneuver became infeasible for Ukraine. Maneuver requires vulnerabilities to exploit and when Russia had time to emplace minefields hundreds of meters deep, overwatched by thousands of drones, and covered by an overwhelming superiority in artillery, Ukraine did not have any opportunities to pursue maneuver.

Some commentators have argued that Ukraine could overcome this problem if it just properly synchronized (or converged) its capabilities. There is a deep-rooted misunderstanding of maneuver being tied to a combined arms, mechanized breach, mostly stemming from the myth of blitzkrieg. Instead of trying to pursue Germany’s World War II approach to maneuver, which relied on surprise and speed, such commentators are arguing for an approach similar to the Soviet Union’s interwar doctrine of Deep Battle to achieve a breakthrough using overwhelming, concentrated combat power across the depth of a defense. However, Ukraine will not be able to achieve the correlation of forces considered a requirement by Deep Battle theorists like Vladimir Triandafillov and Georgii Isserson. Even if Ukraine did have such advantages, it is hard to find historical examples of armies successfully pursuing a maneuver approach, led by mechanized forces, against a prepared defense in depth backed by operational reserves.

The best example of an army successfully pursuing Deep Battle against a prepared defense was Operation Bagration. However, the Soviet Union succeeded in this case due to deception, surprise, a thinned German line in Army Group Center, and an overwhelming Soviet combat power advantage. Even then, it was not a combined arms breach that created the breakthrough. It was infantry infiltration that identified a gap in the German lines and initiated a breakthrough, which mechanized forces exploited.

During the Battle of France, the most cited case of maneuver, the Germans exploited the thinly defended French center as France concentrated its forces in a rapid advance into Belgium. German infantry created a breach at Sedan and then passed the Panzers into the open fields beyond.

Ukraine pursued a similar approach in Kursk. It conducted small raids to probe for Russian vulnerabilities with the 80th and 82nd Air Assault Brigades and then exploited them with mechanized forces. Ukraine has once again shown that maneuver requires identifying a vulnerability and exploiting it with a speed that prevents the enemy from addressing that vulnerability.

How Maneuver Works

Ukraine has demonstrated how maneuver works as an operational approach. Maneuver has often become a confused, overly theoretical concept going back to the writings of J. F. C. Fuller, who aimed for cognitive paralysis. More recently, Shimon Naveh tried to tie it to “shock.” Such thinking makes maneuver overly conceptual. In desynchronizing an enemy, maneuver works in many ways, but it primarily acts through time and physical dislocation. The father of the concepts that led to Germany’s doctrine in World War II, Hans von Seeckt, saw it in simple terms: continuously attack at a rate that prevents opposing forces from effectively reforming their defenses.

One of the best examples of how this plays out is with the fate of the French 2nd Armored Division. Armed with some of the world’s finest tanks in 1940, it was tasked with counterattacking the vulnerable flank of the XIX Panzerkorps. If it had conducted a successful counterattack, it could have enveloped the overextended German tanks and saved France. Instead, it disintegrated as it received conflicting orders to move to new locations to try to keep pace with the Germans even while its tanks were already moving on rail cars. The division arrived to battle piecemeal, without coherence or a rehearsed plan.

In Kursk, we have seen similar friction among Russian forces. The forces thrown against the Ukrainian attack did not have prepared defenses to occupy, they did not have rehearsed plans, they did not have clearly delineated areas of operations to prevent fratricide, they had not tied into their adjacent units, and they often did not have time to deploy into fighting formations.

This chaos resulted in embarrassing outcomes. The Ukrainians overran command posts, capturing commanders from the elite 810th Naval Infantry Brigade and hundreds of troops. Ukraine has encircled Russian forces and pinned a couple thousand against the Seym River. Ukrainian drones easily identified and targeted convoys full of troops trying to reposition to the front. Russian social media even bragged about strafing Ukrainian convoys, which ended up consisting of Russia’s own artillery. In the chaos, Ukraine began capturing Russian vehicles again. Russia has been the largest provider of tanks to the Ukrainian army, but that generosity had tapered off during the attritional phase of the war. The Kursk offensive brought back the memories of Ukraine’s successes in 2022.

Maneuver is enabled by fluid, open battlefields found in Kursk and previously in the defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv counteroffensive. In those situations, both sides had not been able to solidify their lines and minimize their vulnerabilities. Such contexts play to Ukraine’s advantage in maneuver warfare.

Ukraine has an advantage over Russia in maneuver warfare due to the relative initiative of its soldiers and social tendency toward decentralized, self-organization. These traits enable high-tempo operations through rapid, flexible decision-making similar to what the US Army calls mission command. A century ago, Aleksandr Svechin explained that “initiative in the army can only exist on the basis of extensive initiative in civilian society.” He noted that during the Soviet invasion of Ukraine, the Red Army factored in “its Cossacks . . . and its characteristic national, autonomic, anti-state, and anarchist tendencies.” Contemporary Ukrainians have increasingly used the legend of the self-organizing Cossacks, who inhabited the lawless lands between great powers and fought with elected military leaders, as a constituent point of their society to provide inspiration.

Svechin further wrote that “when a revolution starts, there is no need to worry about private initiative because it is everywhere.” While Ukraine has centuries of bottom-up resistance to Russian imperialism, during the Maidan Revolution decentralized, grassroots activism truly flourished. Volunteer units grafted onto the professional army helped force changes to old, Soviet, centralized leadership. These volunteers provided initiative, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a willingness to take independent action and reject impracticable tasks.

Ukraine’s leadership reinforces this culture. Syrskyi emphasizes deception, surprise, and decentralized action, which he displayed previously in the defense of Kyiv and the Kharkiv counteroffensive. Ukraine also enables rapid action by decentralizing its assets. For example, artillery provides direct support to battalions and companies. Ukrainian forces employ an Android application, an “Uber for artillery,” that flattens fires requests and enables them to be filled by any artillery in range. Like Ukraine, Germany in 1940 also decentralized artillery. Infantry units used accompanying batteries to provide responsive fires during a fluid fight to enable maneuver.

Playing to Ukraine’s Strengths

Since 2023, Ukraine has had to accept the attritional context of the war, which played to Russia’s strengths. With its overwhelming advantage in fires and expendable soldiers, Russia could focus on creating deep, defensive lines to shore up its vulnerabilities, and then conduct slow, grinding attacks at a pace that prevents is culmination and does not put its leaders or high-value assets at risk. In Pokrovsk, the Russians gradually advanced with a four-to-one advantage in troops and a ten-to-one advantage in shells. Ukraine may have stripped forces from defending Pokrovsk for the Kursk offensive, but like the Germans learned in World War I, placing forces forward in a defense against an enemy with an overwhelming artillery advantage just risks more casualties.

Ukraine has found itself in a position like Finland after the initial period of the Winter War. After some initial spectacular Finnish victories against strung-out Soviet columns that had attempted a quick victory, the Soviet Union transitioned to a methodical, attritional approach that minimized its vulnerabilities for Finland to exploit.

With the Kursk offensive, Ukraine has discovered a way to not suffer Finland’s fate. Ukraine can continue to exploit vulnerabilities along its border with Russia. Syrskyi claimed that Russia repositioned thirty thousand soldiers to Kursk. With twice as much frontage to defend, Russia cannot achieve the same force densities it has in Ukraine without a massive, politically unpopular mobilization. Desperate for new recruits, it is already paying soldiers three times the median wage. Russia cannot effectively defend everywhere.

If Russia does establish a force density in Kursk that precludes maneuver, Ukraine should not get too attached to the land it seized. Like some Viking marauders raiding undefended towns and abbeys, or like the English chevauchées of the Hundred Years’ War that eschewed prolonged sieges to raid deep into France and bypass its castles to exhaust it politically, Ukraine should maintain its forces’ flexibility to conduct operational-level raids elsewhere. This approach will play to its advantages and, combined with Ukraine’s attacks on Russia’s oil infrastructure and military industrial base, will support an overall strategy of exhaustion.

Maneuver is often associated with a strategy of annihilation, and I have argued that the US Army should pursue annihilation through maneuver in the expected context of a future war. However, in its current situation, Ukraine cannot use maneuver to achieve a decisive victory over Russia. What it can do is use maneuver to exploit vulnerabilities, force Russia to overextend, create chaos, encircle Russian forces, and capture Russian equipment. By attacking as operational-level guerrillas, Ukraine will return initiative to Ukraine and not allow Russia to dictate the war’s tempo. By continuously hitting the Russians as quickly as they can, as hard as they can, where it hurts Russia the most, and when Russia ain’t looking, the Ukrainians stand a chance of exhausting Russian forces. The Kursk offensive’s successes make that clear.

Major. Robert G. Rose, US Army, is a Lt. Gen. (Ret.) James M. Dubik writing fellow and serves as the commander for Alpine Troop, 3rd Squadron, 4th Security Force Assistance Brigade. He holds an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy and graduate degrees from Harvard University and, as a Gates Scholar, from Cambridge University.

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

Image credit: Mil.gov.ua

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mwi.westpoint.edu · by Robert G. Rose · September 12, 2024

22. Autonomous Ghosts are Reshaping Irregular Warfare and Maritime Security

Essay topics:

Autonomous Ghosts are Reshaping Irregular Warfare and Maritime Security

Ghost in the (Sea)Shell

A Specter Swims in No-Man’s-Land

Creeping the Deep

To Chase or Embrace

Rising Tides

Conclusion:

Critical infrastructure interference is one of a plethora of irregular UMV opportunities. Because cable damage fundamentally constitutes a communications crisis, actors may prey on weak repair resources, capitalize on ambiguous intent, or exploit ineffectual enforcement of maritime law to distort information. Irregular maritime activity counter-initiatives are therefore imperative. Adversaries are already enthusiastic about UMV integration, meaning the US Navy and other Western maritime forces should expect to defend against and acquire their own hybrid fleets. Doing so merits background domestic and multinational regulatory reform around both UMVs and the cable protection regime. As sure offenders and potential guardians, UMVs will not replace traditional vessels anytime soon. However, their clandestine weaponization will compound by virtue of their obscurity, versatility, and multiplicity. These are the new poltergeists of the sea.

Autonomous Ghosts are Reshaping Irregular Warfare and Maritime Security - Irregular Warfare Initiative

irregularwarfare.org · by Laurel Baker · September 12, 2024

This article is part of Project Maritime, which explores modern challenges and opportunities in the maritime dimension at the intersection of irregular warfare and strategic competition. We warmly invite your participation and engagement as we embark on this project. Please send submissions with the subject line “Project Maritime Submission” and follow us on X (formerly Twitter) @proj_maritime.

Unmanned aerial vehicles may be the talk of the town, but aquatic drone developments of equal strategic magnitude are underway. This swell of seafaring phantoms, enhanced by other emerging disruptive technologies, will challenge traditional maritime force composition, subvert long-practiced naval missions and maneuvers, and complicate existing problems around attribution of maritime aggression. As facilitators and force multipliers, they will introduce yet-unseen asymmetries to the world of irregular warfare and might well redefine the rules of engagement at sea.

Commercial or military, no domain is sacred––and the proof is only accumulating. A pan-Nordic investigation in 2023 uncovered that Russian vessels were mapping critical underwater infrastructure across the North and Baltic Seas using unmanned maritime vehicles (UMVs). Nearby, UMVs surged in visibility when the Ukrainian Armed Forces launched high-profile autonomous strikes against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Further south, Yemen’s Houthis deployed a variety of UMVs against ships transiting the Red Sea. In raising UMVs’ profiles, these incidents introduced fears of dual-use proliferation and adversaries equipping clients with autonomous proxy fleets. Together, they represent a lowered barrier to entry into military conflict.

Autonomous Ghosts are Reshaping Irregular Warfare and Maritime Security – Insider: Short of War

UMVs’ proposed advantages––cheap, long-lasting, low-profile, low-human-risk––also diversify their applications to irregular warfare, which play off both unique and complementary missions to traditional vessels. Their spread amounts to an unfortunate marriage of legal, political, and operational problems, the core issue being how to simultaneously allow for desired advances in autonomous fleet integration at home while expecting and discouraging challengers’ parallel action. Gaps in maritime law and the ocean’s physical encumbrance, in particular, render UMV irregularity difficult to address, demanding technical and doctrinal innovation from the US Navy and bureaucratic and regulatory reform around targets and perpetrators at home and abroad.

Ghost in the (Sea)Shell

Both state and non-state actors may covet surface and underwater UMVs due to their favorable cost-to-chaos ratio. According to RAND naval technology expert, Scott Savitz, UMVs offer the potential to deploy numerous non-lethal “intermediate force capabilities,” like entangling propellers, ramming sonar domes, and creating obstacles.

One insidious opportunity for irregular UMV activity surrounds critical underwater infrastructure, a fundamental pillar supporting everyday life and national security. UMVs can surveil or interfere with it. Though UMVs threaten to disturb all types of port and offshore critical underwater infrastructure, zeroing in on fiber-optic cable sabotage exposes significant legal and operational problems. A coordinated UMV attack on exposed landing sites or underwater lines could stress a country’s intelligence apparatus, financial flows, and communications, as these cables carry up to 95% of global internet traffic. Cable sabotage imperils the very presence of a digital information ecosystem, meaning that efficiently determining the who, what, where, when, why, and how of a cable attack is essential. Unfortunately, investigations are muddled as much by UMVs’ obscurity as they are by the flawed critical infrastructure legal regime.

A Specter Swims in No-Man’s-Land

The foremost complication regarding cable governance and interference is ownership. 99% of cables are privately owned, either by tech behemoths like Google and Microsoft, or by consortiums of private or state-owned entities. Companies harboring information on cables’ construction and maintenance may obscure their intermittent and uncoordinated policing; even worse, they sometimes lack detailed knowledge of the cables they use or how cables support their services. The US government administers cables in an equally decentralized manner, with over twenty government bodies overseeing various elements of cable infrastructure. This disaggregation easily creates confusion during a natural disaster or military emergency. In the case of a serious outage, incomplete status data and scattered responsibilities make it hard to reroute essential traffic or organize repairs. Both the private and public sectors are therefore complicit in perpetuating a deficient protective regime.

Stealthy UMVs are poised to exploit these vulnerabilities at the domestic and supranational echelons. International law has no agreed-upon definition of cables, meaning that multilateral institutions operating under a patchwork architecture of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and regional maritime agreements have few avenues to hold a malicious party accountable in international waters and contested territory.

Insufficient response mechanisms become egregious given the range of where critical underwater infrastructure damage may fall on the kinetic spectrum, risking escalation to conventional conflict. That is, can anything less than a penetrating blow to a military asset be considered an act of war? Currently, maritime law does not bar states from viewing undersea cables as legitimate military wartime targets. This issue is aggravated by UNCLOS’ provisional deficit regarding covert damage and theft––punitive thresholds are too high for risky commercial activities. It also poorly defines which proactive policy prescriptions adhere to international law.

As long as a malicious actor targets nodes in the high seas, or even its own exclusive economic zone, injured states are unable to bring those responsible to justice. While Article 113 offers criminal sanctions for willful or negligent injury of underwater cables, a state may actualize these punishments only after passing legislation implementing said Article, which few nations have accomplished. Willful is the operative word here, and UMVs could affect plausible deniability and causal ambiguity––i.e., obscure “whodunit.” Outright repudiations of obvious interference constitute what Savitz terms implausible deniability, but frequent accidental damage, usually created by commercial vessels’ nets and wayward anchors, is increasingly employed as a legal disguise when circumstantial evidence points to a culprit. It is not hard to imagine how a well-executed operation using nimble UMVs may render identification impossible.

Creeping the Deep

These governance gaps give even short-term reasons to worry; intentional attacks against American partners and allies are already occurring. For example, in 2023, a Chinese fishing vessel and a cargo ship cut two cables connecting Taiwan to the Matsu Islands, which virtually terminated internet access and stalled the islands’ online economy for almost two months. Taiwan’s lack of cable-repair resources exacerbated the damage, leaving the islands to rely on in-demand international restorative ships. As of early 2023, similar cuts had occurred over two dozen times in the preceding several years. It is a near-certainty that Beijing could use UMVs to execute a larger, coordinated attack to cut most or all of Taiwan’s international cables in the event of A2/AD, a strategy that limits an opponent’s operations in a given area. Similarly, Russia has also been suspected of several cable-cutting and other infrastructure sabotage incidents around the Shetland Islands, Norway, and, though thrown into fresh debate, the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Reports suggest that select Russian espionage ships already carry small unmanned underwater vessels (UUVs) to sever or tap cables, often focusing on remote but critical cables that are difficult to maintain.

There is also some evidence of Sino-Russian coordination. The two states’ cable activity collided in 2023, when a Chinese cargo ship and accompanying Russian vessel were tied to both pipeline and cable damage in the Baltic Sea. A flagrant example of critical underwater infrastructure abuse, the awkward legal chase that followed demonstrated that intercepting manned vessels is already difficult––UMVs could be even trickier. Moscow and Beijing are far from the only actors interested in wedding autonomy and sabotage, but these alleged interferences and consequent know-how imply that they may seek to exploit irregular UMV applications with purpose.

To Chase or Embrace

UMVs exemplify the occasional imperative to fight fire with fire. That is, develop a robust domestic unmanned capability to expose and fend off adversarial UMVs––providing a conventional deterrent effect, a blockade in the case of attack, or an amplification of traditional assets’ surveillance matrix. In the case of critical underwater infrastructure, this might mean deploying UMVs as coastal or chokepoint surveyors, to say nothing of the myriad missions offered independent of defense. But developing UMVs to prevent, react to, and perform critical underwater infrastructure sabotage is rife with technical challenges, especially surrounding reliable autonomy. UMVs must address many contingencies, from underwater terrain to marine life and other collision avoidance. According to Savitz, better autonomy requires large test sites, enhanced communication methods beyond low-bandwidth acoustics, and more prolific data provided by rapidly improving sensors. But meager funding and specialized applications hinder progress compared to many commercial autonomous vehicles. While hacking a UUV can be difficult due to escaping the electromagnetic spectrum when submerged, electronic warfare can disrupt or manipulate data and algorithms when surfaced. These hazards demand that operators protect the physical integrity, trust the navigational acuity, and correctly assess the data accuracy of UMVs. Without human confidence in a vessel’s total autonomy or remote controls, UMVs can’t execute delicate defensive or offensive missions. So, while critical underwater infrastructure interference is inevitable, we remain far from replacing divers or meandering anchors with robots.

Despite these hurdles, adversaries nonetheless understand that these nimble, adaptable machines can outsource interventionist, resource-sapping missions from precious conventional vessels. Likewise, the US Navy could compartmentalize the capabilities it wants from huge, survivable assets like attack submarines or carriers and redistribute the remaining capabilities between numerous UMVs. Complementary autonomy won’t require reinventing the wheel; per Savitz, UMV mechanics are subject to the “same operational and physical phenomena that apply to any other vessel.” Significant technical and procedural continuity in acquisition and operation is essential to convincing military figures that UMVs are a worthwhile investment. Gradual progress in this regard is also valuable for both effective expenditure and scientific development; avoiding buying all the most advanced iterations of a vehicle’s parts at once, for example, can reduce obsolescence later and better tune tactics and procedures. The bottom line is that the United States must keep offensive and defensive pace by leaning on autonomy where feasible.

Moreover, amid competing priorities and naval industrial base struggles, Washington should provide cheap, scalable UMVs to partners like Taiwan to engage in and defend against irregular instruments (and vice versa), in addition to expensive, limited, and slow-to-produce assets. UMVs can protect allies’ cables by searching for evidence of manipulation and even hardwiring sensors, though it remains to be seen if they can manage cascading failures from multi-cable damage. Even so, insufficient legal provisions over increasing state and private UMVs and the impossibility of policing every open-sea cable mean authorities are likely to focus on responses over prevention.

Cooperation and exchange should also be as prevalent at home as abroad. Within the military, the Navy is far more advanced in UMV development and deployment in comparison to the Coast Guard, for instance, which suffers from lean funding and depends on hand-me-downs. Given how adversarial UMVs may proliferate around the United States’ shorelines and ports, this should raise eyebrows among those occupied with coastal security. This isn’t only a Pentagon effort, either. While recomposing forces will keep military leaders occupied for decades to come, diplomats and lawyers have just as urgent a call: reduce risk through more robust permitting and other regulations around UMVs, response vessels, and likely perpetrating vessels, advocate for less fragmented maritime legal architectures, discourage dual-use component proliferation through export controls, facilitate multilateral preemptive training, and help fortify the fleets and processes undergirding domestic and supranational response and repair mechanisms. In other words, this mess requires a whole-of-government cleanup.

Rising Tides

Critical infrastructure interference is one of a plethora of irregular UMV opportunities. Because cable damage fundamentally constitutes a communications crisis, actors may prey on weak repair resources, capitalize on ambiguous intent, or exploit ineffectual enforcement of maritime law to distort information. Irregular maritime activity counter-initiatives are therefore imperative. Adversaries are already enthusiastic about UMV integration, meaning the US Navy and other Western maritime forces should expect to defend against and acquire their own hybrid fleets. Doing so merits background domestic and multinational regulatory reform around both UMVs and the cable protection regime. As sure offenders and potential guardians, UMVs will not replace traditional vessels anytime soon. However, their clandestine weaponization will compound by virtue of their obscurity, versatility, and multiplicity. These are the new poltergeists of the sea.

Laurel Baker is the 2024 Rising Expert on Geostrategy in the Rising Experts Program at Young Professionals in Foreign Policy. Currently working for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) as a National Nuclear Security Administration Graduate Fellow, she previously conducted research at a variety of think tanks and NGOs, including the Hoover Institution, Institute for the Study of War, The Arctic Institute, the Wilson Center, and the National Academy of Sciences. Laurel holds an MA in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from Stanford University. Laurel’s views are her own and do not represent those of PNNL or the US Government.

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

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23. America Is Fighting the Wrong Trade War

Excerpts:

None of this means that Biden, Harris, or Trump are wrong to worry about the struggles of U.S. workers and firms. Yet ultimately, the United States’ challenges lie not in globalization itself but in the fact that its benefits disproportionately flow to the well off. Instead of withdrawing from the global economy, Washington should prioritize equipping its workforce with the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world. They should pay particular attention to the training of non-college-educated workers, who often have more trouble finding employment. For example, the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act—the $280 billion bill passed in 2022 to boost American research and manufacturing—wisely expanded support for community colleges, vocational programs, and research institutions. Such policies are essential to equipping workers with jobs that allow them to be competitive in the global economy. At the same time, employers should emphasize hiring based on skills rather than pedigree. A college degree is not the only way to gain valuable skills. In fact, 51 percent of all workers in the United States have developed skills through alternative routes, such as training programs, the military and community colleges

Reactionary protectionism, by contrast, offers only temporary relief to struggling regions and industries. To build a resilient economy, Washington should instead pass more workforce and skills development measures like those found in the CHIPS and Science act. Doing so is the best way to upskill the U.S. workforce, promote the country’s economic interdependence, and position the United States for long-term success.

America Is Fighting the Wrong Trade War

The China Shock Is Over—and More Tariffs Will Not Help Workers

By Niccolò W. Bonifai, Nita Rudra, Rodney Ludema, and J. Bradford Jensen

September 12, 2024

Foreign Affairs · by Niccolò W. Bonifai, Nita Rudra, Rodney Ludema, and J. Bradford Jensen · September 12, 2024

Kamala Harris and Donald Trump have profoundly different visions for the future of the United States. They wildly diverge when it comes to social issues, such as abortion. They do not agree on whether to raise or cut taxes. And they could take U.S. foreign policy in opposing directions, especially when it comes to the country’s alliance with Europe.

Yet there is one issue on which the Democratic and Republican nominees are in sync: protectionism. Trump has proposed sweeping tariffs of 10–20 percent on the vast majority of goods. Harris has been more critical of across-the-board tariffs, but according to a campaign spokesperson, she would nonetheless “employ targeted and strategic tariffs to support American workers, strengthen our economy, and hold our adversaries accountable.”

This concurrence is not surprising. Over the past decade, protectionism has gained bipartisan support. During his four years in office, Trump slapped tariffs on imports from both allies and adversaries. President Joe Biden promised to usher in a different trade era, pledging a return to multilateralism. Yet the Biden administration maintained almost all of Trump’s tariffs, added new ones, and expanded “Buy American” provisions that mandate federal agencies purchase domestic products.

According to Biden, Harris, and Trump, such restrictions protect American industries from foreign competition. They argue that tariffs can promote national security, foster economic growth, and restore blue-collar jobs, which, they claim, have disappeared due to import competition. “I’m going to renegotiate our disastrous trade deals,” Trump said during his 2016 campaign. “We will only make great trade deals that put the American worker first. And we are going to put our miners and our steelworkers back to work.”

It is true that import competition, specifically from China, cost the United States manufacturing jobs. But politicians are wrong to suggest that protectionism will help generate employment. A new study we conducted using recent trade and employment data shows that Chinese import competition is no longer a factor driving U.S. manufacturing employment. The United States stopped shedding manufacturing jobs after the first decade of the twenty-first century—long before Washington began slapping levies on Chinese products. The share of American jobs in manufacturing remained steady even as Chinese imports to the United States continued to grow between 2011 and 2018. It has remained constant since, even as Trump applied tariffs and Chinese exports to America fell.

The United States, in other words, is fighting the last trade war. Its current policies are designed for a period that has long since passed, and they are not expanding the labor market. In fact, they may be suppressing employment. According to our research, trade with developing economies helps U.S. manufacturers hire more workers, largely by making it easier for these companies to import components.

Washington should, therefore, adopt a different strategy. Rather than pursuing protectionist policies, it should focus on reducing barriers and strengthening global economic ties. More importantly, it should prioritize finding ways to ensure that all Americans can benefit from globalization. Doing so is the best way to help U.S. workers—and across the world.

MISSING THE BOAT

Beginning in the 1990s, the U.S. manufacturing sector experienced substantial competition from China. The country’s spectacular investment in export-led economic growth and comparatively low wages made it much harder for low-skill U.S. manufacturing industries to compete in global and domestic markets. As a result, many companies shuttered factories and laid off workers.

These job losses were significant. According to research by the economists Robert Feenstra, Hong Ma, and Yuan Xu, the fast growth of Chinese imports resulted in about 1.5 million job losses in the United States between 1991 and 2011. In the regions with high concentrations of affected workers, poverty levels spiked, as did rates of addiction. Marriage and fertility rates went down. Many of these workers and their relatives turned to Trump, who promised to curtail trade with other countries and bring back employment. Their support helped him win the traditionally Democratic states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—and with them, the White House.

As president, Trump tried to make good on his promise. He slapped tariffs on China and Mexico. He began tolling imports from Canada and the European Union. The tariffs reduced imports, but U.S. exports also fell. More importantly, as a jobs-creation agenda, his tariffs failed. The “China shock,” it turns out, ended before Trump took office. Since then, imports from China have had no significant effect on U.S. employment. Trade with other countries, according to our research, never damaged the U.S. job market, either. The share of American jobs in manufacturing did not grow under Trump. Nor did it grow under his successor.

BOUNCING BACK

Tariffs have not resurrected American manufacturing. But they could suppress it. China contributes only 16.5 percent of total U.S. imports. The rest comes from a combination of other countries, including several emerging economies—namely, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. When our team looked at U.S. trade with these emerging markets, we found that imports have contributed positively to U.S. manufacturing employment. Between 2011 and 2019, imports from these economies created almost 500,000 American jobs, concentrated in many of the same regions that had lost jobs to China a decade prior. The reason for this growth is simple: the largest and most productive U.S. manufacturers tend to produce complex goods that have inputs sourced from other parts of the world. As a result, they have an easier time growing and hiring when imports are affordable.

Beyond creating a risk that U.S. exporters might face retaliatory duties, Washington’s fixation with tariffs diverts attention from the country’s strength in services. Business-services industries—such as software, engineering, R & D, and financial services—employ more than twice as many U.S. workers as the manufacturing sector at higher average wages. They provide millions of jobs to non-college educated workers. Many of these industries are exporters, and American firms within them are global leaders. Yet many countries have high barriers to services trade, curtailing opportunities for Americans. Instead of raising tariffs on goods, U.S. policymakers should focus on reducing impediments to the services trade—which would help create more employment in the business service sector.

That trade helps create American jobs is good news for both U.S. workers and workers abroad who produce goods exported to the country. It means that everyone gains when the United States engages in global commerce. But it also means that proposals to apply tariffs, especially sweeping ones, as Trump announced, on U.S. imports could easily hurt both American and foreign workers.

Some scholars and officials who accept that tariffs have economic drawbacks still believe they are necessary for national security purposes. They argue that Washington must cut trade with China in particular, to avoid fueling Beijing’s rise and to make sure U.S. industries are never dependent on Chinese imports. But tariffs, like any other protectionist measure, are blunt instruments with which to address national security concerns. To reduce risks in supply chains critical to national security, American officials should instead pursue alternative policies clearly targeted at protecting national security while minimizing the economic costs.

The United States’ challenges lie not in globalization itself.

In fact, sweeping tariffs could make the United States less secure. If Washington applies broad and indiscriminate protectionist measures, countries might respond in kind. Such a trade war would be destabilizing. As many political scientists have shown, trade in goods and services helps foster peace by binding economies to one another, requiring that states adopt shared standards and practices, and necessitating cooperation between officials. Severing or weakening those ties would thus raise the risk of conflict.

None of this means that Biden, Harris, or Trump are wrong to worry about the struggles of U.S. workers and firms. Yet ultimately, the United States’ challenges lie not in globalization itself but in the fact that its benefits disproportionately flow to the well off. Instead of withdrawing from the global economy, Washington should prioritize equipping its workforce with the skills needed to succeed in an increasingly interconnected world. They should pay particular attention to the training of non-college-educated workers, who often have more trouble finding employment. For example, the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act—the $280 billion bill passed in 2022 to boost American research and manufacturing—wisely expanded support for community colleges, vocational programs, and research institutions. Such policies are essential to equipping workers with jobs that allow them to be competitive in the global economy. At the same time, employers should emphasize hiring based on skills rather than pedigree. A college degree is not the only way to gain valuable skills. In fact, 51 percent of all workers in the United States have developed skills through alternative routes, such as training programs, the military and community colleges

Reactionary protectionism, by contrast, offers only temporary relief to struggling regions and industries. To build a resilient economy, Washington should instead pass more workforce and skills development measures like those found in the CHIPS and Science act. Doing so is the best way to upskill the U.S. workforce, promote the country’s economic interdependence, and position the United States for long-term success.

NICCOLÒ W. BONIFAI is a Ph.D. candidate in Government and a Researcher at the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity at Georgetown University.
NITA RUDRA is a Professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Government, School of Foreign Service, and McDonough School of Business, and Director of the Lab for Globalization and Shared Prosperity.
RODNEY LUDEMA is a Professor in the Department of Economics and School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and former Chief Economist of the United States Department of State.
J. BRADFORD JENSEN is McCrane/Shaker Chair of International Business at the McDonough School of Business and Director of the Dikran Izmirlian Program in Business and Global Affairs at Georgetown University.

Foreign Affairs · by Niccolò W. Bonifai, Nita Rudra, Rodney Ludema, and J. Bradford Jensen · September 12, 2024

24. US, Italian ships drill in South China Sea with Australian aircraft

The "lattice work" of friends, partners, and alliances? Lattice is too weak for me (as a structure and an analogy. I like the silk web as a better analogy because of its strength and flexibility and with the right spider it can be deadly.

US, Italian ships drill in South China Sea with Australian aircraft

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · September 12, 2024

The guided-missile destroyer USS Russell, left, sails past the Italian frigate ITS Alpino, center, and aircraft carrier ITS Cavour in the South China Sea, Sept. 9, 2024. (John Miller/U.S. Navy)

The U.S. Navy drilled alongside Italian warships this week in the South China Sea, the third time the two allies have worked together in the Indo-Pacific this year, the service announced Thursday

An Australian P-8 Poseidon aircraft also took part in the four-day maneuvers, according to the Navy.

The unnamed drill ran Sunday through Wednesday and included the U.S. guided-missile destroyer USS Russell, an Australian P-8A Poseidon aircraft and the Italian navy’s aircraft carrier ITS Cavour, frigate ITS Alpino and multipurpose combat ship ITS Raimondo Montecuccoli, according to a U.S. 7th Fleet news release Thursday.

The Cavour and Alpino on Aug. 9 joined the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln for a drill somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, a first for the U.S. and Italian navies, although the two regularly train together elsewhere in the world.

The two ships drilled together again Aug. 18 through 21 on similar scenarios with the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey in the Philippine Sea, according to an Aug. 22 release from 7th Fleet.

“These multilateral exercises are a concrete demonstration of the advances we are making alongside our allies and partners in the region,” 7th Fleet commander Vice Adm. Fred Kacher said in the Thursday release. “They present dynamic opportunities to hone our skills in one of the most complex maritime regions in the world.”

The South China Sea is almost entirely claimed by China, which sometimes aggressively asserts its claims over those of other nations in the region, including the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Besides an international hotspot, it is also a critical world trade route.

In 2023, among other commerce, 10 billion barrels of petroleum and petroleum products and 6.7 trillion cubic feet of liquefied natural gas passed through the South China Sea, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

This week’s exercise was meant to improve cooperation and readiness between the three countries and “reassure regional allies and partners of continued U.S. commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” 7th Fleet spokeswoman Lt. Cmdr. Jamie Moroney told Stars and Stripes by email Thursday.

She did not provide a precise location for the exercise other than the South China Sea.

A spokesperson for the Italian carrier strike group did not immediately respond to Stars and Stripes’ email request Thursday afternoon.

During the exercise, the ships and aircraft practiced fixed-wing air defense, anti-submarine warfare, general tactics, surface warfare and command and control scenarios, according to the news release. They also exchanged subject matter experts between the ships.

“This multilateral exercise has been another great opportunity to highlight the professionalism of our crews and the ability to join, train and be ready to operate together, projecting our forces for months, away from home,” Rear Adm. Giancarlo Ciappina, the Italian carrier strike group commander, said in the release.

The Italian strike group is amid an “operational campaign in the region,” Ciappina said in the Aug. 22 news release. The campaign goals are to regularly train with allies while “ensuring security at sea and promoting economic prosperity through the Indo-Pacific region,” he said.

The U.S. and its European allies have steadily pivoted manpower, resources and attention to the Indo-Pacific over the past decade, primarily due to concerns over China, North Korea and Russia.

Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson covers the U.S. Navy and other services from Yokosuka Naval Base, Japan. Originally from Knoxville, Tenn., he holds a journalism degree from the University of North Florida. He previously covered crime and the military in Key West, Fla., and business in Jacksonville, Fla.

Stars and Stripes · by Alex Wilson · September 12, 2024

25. Tariff Myths, Debunked

Very helpful and educational. Please go to the link to view the charts and graphs. https://thedispatch.com/newsletter/capitolism/tariff-myths-debunked/?utm

Myth 1: Foreigners Pay Protective Tariffs

Myth 2: Protective Tariffs Don’t Increase U.S. Prices

Myth 3: Tariffs Made America Great

Myth 4: Tariffs Can Reduce the Trade Deficit

Myth 5: U.S. Tariffs Can Boost the U.S. Economy on Net

Myth 6: American Manufacturing Needs Tariffs to Compete

Myth 7: America Has No Tariffs, While Every Other Country Has Tons

Myth 8: Tariffs Are Good and Effective Negotiating Leverage to Achieve Real Free Trade (and That’s All Trump Wants)

Myth 9: Tariffs Can Replace the Income Tax

Tariff Myths, Debunked

Your one-stop shop for breaking through the tariff fog.

thedispatch.com · by Scott Lincicome

With the U.S. presidential election mere weeks away, tariffs have become a frequent topic of discussion and, unfortunately, an even-more-frequent source of misinformation. (See, for example, last night’s debate.) For that reason, I’ve decided this week to dedicate an entire column to busting the most common tariff myths I see repeated online—and by a certain Republican presidential candidate—each day.

For you Capitolism diehards out there, some of this will sound familiar because we’ve dug into these myths piecemeal in previous columns, so please accept my apologies in advance. (Since you’re getting around 3,000 original words more than 45 weeks a year, however, you’re still probably getting your money’s worth.) Nevertheless, it seems worthwhile and (again unfortunately!) necessary to publish this updated, consolidated version for the non-diehards and, ahem, their many misguided friends.

So, away we go.

Myth 1: Foreigners Pay Protective Tariffs

Perhaps the silliest of all tariff myths is the one Donald Trump keeps repeating. By law, a U.S.-based person or company importing a product into the country will be liable for paying any tariff (tax) owed on that product. In theory, however, the ultimate burden of those taxes—who actually pays—will depend on whether a foreign seller wants to stay in the U.S. market so much that he’s willing to lower his price enough to offset any tariff amount being applied to his product. In the case of, say, a 25 percent tariff on a widget that used to be sold for $100, a foreign widget seller could lower his price to $80 to offset the $20 in new tariffs that a U.S. importer paid when it entered the country, thus keeping the widget’s total price at $100. (American consumers rejoice!) However, if the foreign seller doesn’t lower his price, then someone in the United States will ultimately be paying the tariff (so, $25 on a $100 widget), with no exceptions. (The Tax Foundation’s Erica York patiently walks through these choices in a recent Cato Institute essay.)

How tariffs’ “economic incidence” shakes out in the real world will depend on lots of things, such as an exporter’s profit margins, the type of product, and whether there are reasonable alternative markets or products available elsewhere in the world. And it’s not all or nothing—often importers and exporters share a tariff burden.

For Trump and his fellow American protectionists, however, there are two big problems with the “foreigners always pay” argument. First and foremost, a tariff paid by foreigners can’t also protect domestic manufacturers (like Trump says his tariffs did) because the total import price ($100 in the example above) won’t change after the tariff is applied and thus won’t change the purchasing decisions of still-price-conscious Americans. Thus, George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux explains (emphasis mine):

A protective tariff serves its purpose only if the importer passes on at least part of that cost to its customer. The very purpose of tariffs is to increase demand for domestically produced goods by raising the prices that consumers pay for imports. A tariff that doesn’t raise prices paid by consumers doesn’t protect domestic producers.

You can’t have it both ways.

Second, we now have piles of real-world evidence showing that American companies and individuals bore almost all the Trump-era tariffs’ economic burdens, whether as additional import taxes or higher prices of both foreign and domestic goods (more on the latter in a sec). Along with the many first-person accounts of companies and individuals paying these tariffs and often passing them on to U.S. consumers, York summarizes the extensive economic research showing a “near complete pass-through of the 2018–2019 tariffs”—on steel and aluminum, on Chinese imports, on washing machines, on solar panels—to American companies and consumers.

So, yes, in theory foreigners can pay (indirectly) U.S. tariffs, but not if the tariffs protect American manufacturers. And foreigners most definitely haven’t been paying Trump’s tariffs over the last few years. We have (and probably would do so again).

Myth 2: Protective Tariffs Don’t Increase U.S. Prices

It’s similarly misguided to claim, as some misguided souls recently have, that protective tariffs don’t increase U.S. prices. The basic logic and economics here are again straightforward: If tariffs didn’t increase import prices, then they wouldn’t protect U.S. companies from that foreign competition; and if those U.S. companies were already selling at or below the import price, then they wouldn’t need a tariff to change American importers’ and consumers’ behavior. (Nobody—not even me—is “buying foreign” just for the fun of it.) By forcing importing firms to either pay a tariff or switch to more expensive U.S.-made goods, protective tariffs will push the domestic market prices of those goods higher than they’d otherwise be. If they didn’t, then they wouldn’t protect anything.

Furthermore, high or unpredictable tariffs can reduce potential supply and give domestic producers more market power over U.S. consumers who, thanks to the tariff, have fewer alternatives, and this can and often does increase the prices of the American-made goods even higher than they were before the tariff. These kinds of price-boosting effects are precisely why U.S. manufacturers—like this guy—lobby for tariff protection. And we see them all the time in the economic data.

For example, Obama-era tariffs on washing machines, a recent paper showed, didn’t raise U.S. prices because they weren’t protective. (Korean companies simply moved to other countries to avoid the tariffs.) Trump-era tariffs on those same goods, by contrast, were global and did significantly raise U.S. prices of both washers and dryers by about $90 each.

The U.S. International Trade Commission’s 2023 review of those tariffs found similar price effects through 2022 and helpfully added that the Trump administration itself expressly defended the tariffs in 2018 on the grounds that they’d increase both import and U.S. prices. (The ITC’s report also helpfully pointed out that the tariffs didn’t save the incumbent U.S. companies that sought protection and instead boosted new Korean-owned factories elsewhere in the country.)

As recently summarized in this blog post, numerous other studies of the Trump-era tariffs—by academics, think tanks, and U.S. government entities—have found that they increased both import and U.S. prices by significant amounts. I even saw this firsthand as an attorney representing U.S. companies that imported and consumed newly tariffed goods and were suddenly facing not only high tariff bills from U.S. customs but also higher price quotes from American alternatives.

Anyway, here’s the killer chart from Steven Rattner making all of this clear:

As I wrote in 2017, numerous studies of previous U.S. tariffs and other forms of protectionism, such as for Japanese automobiles during the 1980s, have found similar consumer costs:

Some tariff fans have countered these many studies and claimed that Trump’s tariffs didn’t actually increase prices because inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, was modest during Trump’s time in office, but this argument fails for two reasons. First, U.S. tariffs on specific products won’t increase the price of everything here (aka the “general price level”), as York explains:

When businesses and consumers pay more for tariffed goods, they have less to spend elsewhere, which reduces demand for other goods. Combined with currency fluctuations, that means tariffs primarily affect relative prices, as opposed to the overall price level. And further, the goods that faced higher tariffs comprise a relatively small share of the goods measured in price indexes, meaning that while pass-through [to consumers] was complete, it had a small effect on the overall price level in the United States.

Other things, such as monetary and fiscal policy and the general state of the U.S. and global economies, will also affect inflation and the general price level. Simply citing those superficial stats to defend tariffs’ lack of price effects is thus misleading or misguided. We have rigorous studies of these things for a reason, folks.

Second, whether end-consumers like you and me will see increased prices of tariffed goods depends on whether U.S. companies—importers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, etc.—pass on the higher prices they’ve paid. In some cases, they don’t. (Maybe, for example, they prefer to maintain market share and thus decide to just eat the tariffs’ cost and accept lower profits.) This can spare American consumers, but—just like corporate taxes—it doesn’t mean the tariffs are costless because the companies paying have less money for hiring, investment, and so on. And none of this changes the simple, basic, and obvious fact that someone in the United States paid more because of a protective tariff. Again, that’s the whole point.

Myth 3: Tariffs Made America Great

This one also continues to get tons of attention even though it, too, has been repeatedly debunked. In short, the actual research on how tariffs affected the 19th century U.S. economy show the issue to be a classic case of correlation versus causation: Because tariffs were high during a period of rapid American growth and industrialization, so the argument goes, the former caused the latter. As economic historian Phil Magness explains in a recent Cato essay, however, such a conclusion is mistaken:

National conservatives often point to the high economic growth of the late 19th-century tariff era as “proof” of the American System’s success; however, this position relies on a misreading of evidence. As economist Douglas Irwin notes, “tariffs coincid[ing] with rapid growth in the late nineteenth century does not imply a causal relationship.” American System proponents failed to articulate the mechanism whereby tariffs contributed to this pattern, amid other complications. For example, many “infant” U.S. manufacturing industries they credit to tariffs began in the comparatively low tariff late antebellum era. Nontraded economic sectors such as utilities also saw faster growth rates and capital accumulation than import-competing manufactured goods in the late 19th century, defying the pattern that the protectionists would predict. Irwin summarily notes that hypothesized “links between tariffs and productivity are elusive.” The claimed correlation with growth is both exaggerated and likely spurious. There’s also evidence that the harms of late 19th-century protectionism outweighed the isolated benefits to selected industries on net. Economist Bradford DeLong identifies two such harms: (1) the loss of agricultural exports to Europe through symmetry effects, effectively harming farmers in order to prop up northeastern industries and (2) higher prices on imported machinery and other capital goods, which likely impaired the pace at which America industrialized.

Economist Vincent Geloso recently echoed Magnus’ conclusion, adding that the U.S. economy was already pretty great by the time its 19th century protectionist experiment began and noting some rather conspicuous cherry-picking by tariff defenders. Other research supports Magness’ and Geloso’s conclusions (findings and research summary at the link). In sum, U.S. tariffs imposed after the Civil War likely helped some American manufacturers and harmed others, but they were generally neither a major driver of nor drag on the sector’s and economy’s growth, which was instead driven by other, bigger factors, such as increasing productivity and an expanding labor force. Leaving aside the many reasons why the 19th century doesn’t tell us much about today’s global economy, the research gives us little other reason to try to repeat tariff history.

In reality, however, no one should expect tariffs—whether back then or today—to drive the U.S. economy, given all the other, bigger factors at play and the fact that trade just is a relatively small share of economic output. That’s why you’ll find few fans of trade liberalization claiming that it caused the rapid growth of U.S. economy and wages since the early 1900s, even though the former coincided with the latter:

This is, as we’ve discussed, what real economics is for—to look through the fog of superficial correlation and see a policy’s actual effects. It’d be nice if protectionists tried that out sometime.

Myth 4: Tariffs Can Reduce the Trade Deficit

This idea, another Trump favorite, also seems superficially plausible but again withers under scrutiny. York again starts us off with the economic theory:

Almost all [economists] understand that a nation’s overall balance of trade is driven not by trade policy measures like tariffs or free trade agreements but by deeper macroeconomic factors, including national saving, national investment, currency values, fiscal policy, demographics, and international capital flows. Given US and global savings and investment patterns, along with the status of the US dollar as the global reserve currency, the United States has run trade deficits for decades, regardless of tariff levels or other trade policy changes (which do not fundamentally alter the macroeconomic factors within or outside the United States).

In practice, research shows that tariffs can reduce both imports and exports, reducing a nation’s overall level of trade but leaving its trade balance unchanged in the long run. This occurs through four channels: 1) U.S. importers substitute to other countries not subject to tariffs, thus leaving import levels basically unchanged; 2) foreign countries retaliate in response to tariffs, thus reducing U.S. exports; 3) U.S. manufacturers pay more for tariffed inputs that make their products less globally competitive, thus reducing exports; 4) the U.S. dollar appreciates as fewer dollars are on the global market, thus reducing exports (which are now more expensive in foreign currencies). These effects depend on several factors, but in no case would tariffs substantially reduce imports and boost exports, thus trimming the trade deficit.

Even many protectionists agree with this conclusion, and the real-world data support them: Economists have looked at dozens of countries and found no strong, clear connection between tariff levels and trade balances; and, despite all the new U.S. tariffs imposed since 2018, our overall trade balance has barely budged.

Myth 5: U.S. Tariffs Can Boost the U.S. Economy on Net

This is a strange one, but I keep seeing it pop up online. Again, the theory here is clear: Applying a tariff to imported goods would raise its domestic price above the world market price, which helps domestic producers (boosting “producer surplus”) and hurts domestic consumers (reducing “consumer surplus”) while also generating some revenue for the government. However, the standard theory—shown in the graph below—is that the reduction in consumer surplus would exceed the increases in producer surplus and tariff revenue, producing a net loss in economic welfare (aka “deadweight loss”):

The empirical literature from dozens of countries over many decades again confirms the theory: In case after case after case—and regardless of the model used—economists have found that tariffs reduce national economic output and make a nation worse off on net, while tariff liberalization generally does the opposite. (One of the more popular trade models, if anything, understates the output gains from trade liberalization.) A recent economy-wide analysis of U.S.-China trade shows these diverging outcomes and explains why, even after the “China Shock,” economists remain tariff skeptics:

One can plausibly argue that tariffs’ modest economic costs are worth the even more modest gains they generate for certain workers and communities or for national security. (I disagree, of course, in part because small differences in growth really add up over time.) But arguing that the tariffs are themselves net economic winners is a nonsense take peddled by charlatans and overwhelmingly rejected by serious economists on the left, right, and center:

Myth 6: American Manufacturing Needs Tariffs to Compete

Another common claim is that—thanks to subsidies, lax regulations, cheap labor costs, and more—U.S. manufacturers simply can’t survive without tariffs, yet this too is absurd on its face. For starters, even after the Trump/Biden tariffs, average U.S. tariff rates remain relatively low (see below), and yet the U.S. manufacturing sector remains the second largest in the world and is today enjoying record-high industrial capacity. If low tariffs were somehow destroying the U.S. industrial base, they have a funny way of showing it.

In reality, many factors—such as our legal system and geography and a fairly reasonable tax and regulatory climate—support the manufacturing sector’s continued global competitiveness, but two warrant attention. First, relatively high U.S. manufacturing productivity (i.e., American workers produce much more stuff per capita than their overseas counterparts) means American factories can pay more and still beat out lower-wage competitors abroad without the need for tariffs, especially in higher-tech, capital-intensive industries like aerospace:

The U.S. economy’s other big strength here is its continued openness to trade, investment, and people (though this could certainly be further improved!). As we’ve discussed, U.S. policy generally allows American manufacturers to leverage global goods, services, investment, and talent in ways that many foreign manufacturers can’t. Foreign direct investment into the U.S. manufacturing sector is huge and beneficial; our inviting capital markets are the best in the world; and even the dreaded “outsourcing” can help American manufacturers expand their domestic operations and stay at the cutting edge. The United States can’t make everything on its own and can’t be No. 1 in all areas, but we’re doing pretty darn well overall—and we have an open policy environment to thank for much of that.

This also gets to the other reason why tariffs can’t make American manufacturing great today: Around half of everything imported into the United States is stuff used by other U.S. manufacturers to make their products at globally competitive prices. Tax the former, and you hurt the latter—an outcome we just saw with steel and aluminum tariffs, which may have helped some steelmakers (via higher prices, of course) but ended up harming other industries and the manufacturing sector on net.

As indicated above, moreover, tariffs hurt U.S. manufacturers looking to sell abroad—via higher input costs, currency appreciation, and foreign retaliation. A 2020 Federal Reserve paper thus shows that “new U.S. import tariffs in 2018-2019 significantly dampened U.S. export growth” because American companies had higher input costs, and a brand new study finds that Trump’s proposed global tariffs wouldn’t help U.S. manufacturers on net for similar reasons (i.e., “across-the-board tariffs do not protect manufacturing jobs because the cost of imported intermediate goods increases, raising costs in manufacturing production”).

Finally, as economist Scott Sumner recently noted, tariffs would not only decrease imports and exports but “also tilt consumption away from goods and toward services,” thus causing the U.S. economy to eventually shift away from manufacturing to services. Overall, “the goods sector of the economy would be taxed at a much higher rate than the service sector, which would reduce goods as a share of GDP” (i.e., a smaller U.S. manufacturing sector overall).

Free lunches, it turns out, still don’t exist.

Myth 7: America Has No Tariffs, While Every Other Country Has Tons

Even some tariff skeptics say this one, but it’s a half-truth at best. First, as the WTO’s tariff database shows, the United States has relatively low average tariffs but still applies high ones on lots of products, including certain foods, textiles and apparel, footwear, and other manufactured goods. In many cases, U.S. tariffs on these “sensitive” items are higher than those applied on the same U.S. goods in foreign markets. The WTO data also show that U.S. manufactured goods exports to our top five trading partners (Europe, Canada, Mexico, China, and the U.K.) in several cases face average tariffs at or below the average tariff rates (2.1 percent weighted average or 3.1 percent simple average) that the United States applies on imports. In the rest, the differentials just aren’t really big enough to get all worked up about.

Graphic by Joe Schueller.

Overall, World Bank data show that dozens of countries—developed and developing, big and small—have lower average tariffs (simple or weighted) than the United States does. We’re simply not some “free trade fundamentalist” outlier.

Even this benign comparison, however, overstates the “unfair” situation the United States supposedly faces because Washington uses many “non-tariff” measures to impede foreign competition. This includes subsidies, quotas, “Buy American” restrictions, the Jones Act (drink!), and regulatory protectionism like the FDA’s blockade on baby formula. We’re also one of the biggest users of “trade remedy” measures (anti-dumping, especially) and today apply more than 700 special duties on mainly manufactured goods like steel and chemicals.

It’d be great if foreign countries eliminated their trade restrictions, and U.S. trade agreements have been pretty effective in this regard. But given economic harms that U.S. tariffs impose upon Americans, there’s little good reason to wait around for other nations to do what we should be doing regardless.

Myth 8: Tariffs Are Good and Effective Negotiating Leverage to Achieve Real Free Trade (and That’s All Trump Wants)

And this brings us to the penultimate tariff myth of the day, that the United States can effectively use tariffs to create a world of “true” free trade (or something). Start with the most obvious three facts: 1) Trump-era tariffs are mostly still here (in original form or as still-restrictive “tariff rate quotas”); 2) no countries lowered their tariffs in response to new U.S. tariffs; and 3) several countries—China, Russia, the EU, India, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, etc.—actually retaliated with even higher tariffs on U.S. exports. (Some, such as Canada and Mexico, later removed their retaliation in response to the U.S. removing its steel and aluminum tariffs, but tensions persist.) As the National Taxpayer Union’s Bryan Riley notes, analysis of this retaliation shows that “a one percentage point increase in foreign tariffs was associated with a 3.9 percent reduction in U.S. exports.” So, Trump’s last tariff experiment got us less trade, not more, and we’re still paying for it.

These results are typical and just what I and others—ones not named Peter Navarro—predicted before the Trump-era tariffs were implemented. As I wrote years ago, history shows that U.S. tariffs and other protectionist measures have proven to be poor tools for opening foreign markets, doing so just 17 percent of the time they were used between 1975 and 1994. That’s because very few countries are dependent on the U.S. market (or the U.S. security umbrella) and because all of them are run by government officials who will prioritize their own domestic interests—economic and political—when new U.S. tariffs arrive. A failure to respond to those tariffs in-kind risks not only more tariffs but the appearance of geopolitical weakness before their own voters (and thus potential defeat at the ballot box). As one Canadian official just warned regarding Trump’s new tariffs, “Inevitably our government will be under enormous pressure to reciprocate. … So then we have a 10 per cent tariff on that volume of trade on American goods coming into our country, which is not particularly constructive.” Or as EU trade commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis put it, “We defended our interests with tariffs and we stand ready to defend our interests again if necessary.”

Yes, retaliation will hurt foreign officials’ economies and not everyone will retaliate, but many will because the political and strategic benefits of doing so will be viewed as far outweighing the economic and geopolitical costs.

Myth 9: Tariffs Can Replace the Income Tax

Nope.

Summing It All Up

An intellectually honest pro-tariff case would go something like this: Yes, U.S. tariffs have real and significant economic and geopolitical costs on net, but those costs are a necessary price Americans must pay to achieve a core federal government objective (typically national security). I do occasionally see this argument when it comes to China, but in general it’s most definitely not what most American protectionists are offering today. Instead, tariffs are a magical policy that’s all benefits and no costs. They protect American jobs and security, boost industry and innovation, and advance our strategic interests abroad with both enemies and allies alike. We can use them to solve any problem—even child care and the national debt!—and, perhaps best of all, foreigners will foot the bill.

You don’t need a Ph.D. to see some of the flaws in these claims. Think about this stuff for more than a second, and problems emerge: If tariffs make us money and boost the economy, why stop at 10 or even 20 percent? If tariffs don’t raise prices here, then how do they protect American workers from “predatory dumping” or “cheap labor” (or whatever)? If tariffs achieve Real Free Trade, then why do we still have so many in place, some for literally centuries? And on and on. Most of the myths shrivel in the dimmest of sunlight, yet they persist if not flourish. We thus shouldn’t expect that today’s dose of sanity will put an end to the nonsense—where demand exists, supply will follow—but hopefully it’ll make responding a little easier.

Chart(s) of the Week

Seriously, folks, just build more housing:

Well, technically, they are working

No links this week, folks. Sorry.

thedispatch.com · by Scott Lincicome

26.

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

Phone: 202-573-8647

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

De Oppresso Liber,

David Maxwell

Vice President, Center for Asia Pacific Strategy

Senior Fellow, Global Peace Foundation

Editor, Small Wars Journal

Twitter: @davidmaxwell161

email: david.maxwell161@gmail.com

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

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

Access NSS HERE

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