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Zagdid
Today at 6:19 AM #53


Is India ready for a bigger war with China? India can dominate the skies and the sea
There is a Chinese saying that to scare away the monkeys, sometimes you need to skin a cat. While the PLA may dominate over land, India can dominate the skies and the sea


jward

Today at 7:05 AM
#54 U.S. bombers spotted near Korean Peninsula amid heightened tensions | Yonhap News Agency
SEOUL, June 19 (Yonhap) -- Two U.S. strategic bombers have been spotted near the Korean Pe...

en.yna.co.kr

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Posted for fair use.....

Iranian proxy in Iraq targets US bases
By Caleb Weiss & Joe Truzman | June 19, 2020 | weiss.caleb2_@gmail.com |


A recent graphic released by the League of the Revolutionaries.

In a recently published video, the Iranian-backed front League of the Revolutionaries (LoR) claimed responsibility for recent attacks including the crash of an American C-130 military cargo plane and several rocket attacks against American-led coalition bases in Iraq.

The LoR publication begins by claiming the group was responsible for a June 8 Camp Taji crash of an American C-130 which led to the injury of 4 aboard including a Wyoming Air National Guard member. A night time recording of the incident shows two rockets being launched towards the Camp Taji runway.

“The bombing of the runway at the Taji base at the time of the landing of a Lockheed C-130 which led to the plane crashing and causing a great loss to the enemy,” the LoR statement read. The Associated Press has quoted US officials as downplaying any link to hostile activity, but added that they were “investigating” the incident.

Furthermore, LoR claims it was able to position a drone over Camp Taji to monitor movements of the “enemy” before the attack occurred. It’s not the first time LoR has claimed to position a drone over an American-led coalition base.

As previously detailed in FDD’s Long War Journal, LoR published several videos of its commercial drones monitoring the American Embassy in Baghdad and Ayn al Asad Airbase.

This is also not the first rocket strike on Camp Taji claimed by LoR. In March, 2 US personnel and one UK soldier were killed in a rocket barrage on the base. Not long after, LoR emerged to take credit for the strike, beginning its campaign against Coalition troops in Iraq.

The publication goes on to claim responsibility for a June 11 attack against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Similar to the previous videos of the Camp Taji attack, a night time recording of a rocket launch adjacent to a road is depicted.

“Targeting of the United States Embassy on June 11,” read the LoR statement in the description of the attack.

Lastly, LoR claimed responsibility for the June 16 rocket attack near the Baghdad Airport. According to local reports, two rockets struck near the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center with no casualties being involved.

“Targeting the place where the American occupier forces are located at the Baghdad Airport 06/16,” read the LoR statement.

It is noteworthy to mention that of the newly emerged Iranian-backed groups, LoR has consistently published material claiming attacks on American-led coalition bases.

The steady rocket attacks against American interests and bases suggest that the group has legitimized itself as an Iranian-backed front against American-led forces in Iraq.

As previously detailed by FDD’s Long War Journal, the League of the Revolutionaries is likely a front group for other, more established Iranian proxies in Iraq. LoR is just one of many purported groups to have emerged this year to claim attacks against US or Coalition personnel.

This influx in supposed militias inside Iraq is likely a propaganda game being played by Iran and its allies to create political cover for anti-American activities in the country for more established groups. It also may serve to create a narrative of a far-reaching movement that is opposed to the presence of American troops.

Posted for fair use.....

An Unlimited Attack on Limited War Draws a Counterattack on Theory

By Patrick Brady
June 20, 2020

A limited or small war, one Iraq War veteran quipped, “is one in which you’re getting shot at, but no one cares." Since colonial days, Americans have fought small wars, but only after World War II, have they called them limited. Donald Stoker, in Why America Loses Wars: Limited War and U.S. Strategy from the Korean War to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2019), tells us that America loses wars because many tenets of limited war are wrong. His book has drawn favorable reviews, with a particularly perceptive one by Adam Wunische; and scattered criticism, with some calling it too theoretical to influence leaders, a put-down that seems at odds with the considerable sway that limited-war theory itself has long held over those same leaders.
Seven Decades of Limited War with Limited Results

Ideas of limited war evolved during the Cold War, as a constrained but ill-defined form of armed conflict meant to avoid triggering a nuclear conflagration. In the global context, the United States defended South Korea and South Vietnam to deter Communist aggression elsewhere. Yet the Cold War setting led the United States to restrain how it fought, lest China or the Soviet Union intervene, as China did in Korea and could have again in Vietnam


To avoid alarming China and the Soviet Union, President Lyndon Johnson’s administration carefully calibrated its airstrikes against the North Vietnamese, under concepts developed by Thomas Schelling, an economist who compared “the management of war” to “the management of markets.” The measured bombing campaign was meant more to signal and bargain than to destroy, and a rational opponent would then negotiate. But with seemingly irrational determination, North Vietnam read gradual escalation as a sign of infirm purpose, and it fought on. “Experience,” Kori Schake reminds us, “has not been particularly kind to those ideas” of rational signaling, ideas not shared by the North Vietnamese.
Stoker’s Theory: What Should Be Done

Various theories of limited war have persisted to the present. In two decades of teaching strategy at the Naval Postgraduate School, Stoker recalls, he found that “Limited war literature is a wreck—to be generous,” and he grew frustrated with “the way we were teaching” it. In Why America Loses Wars, he points out the wreckage left in the wake of what has passed for limited war and points the way toward a better approach, making his case with apt examples from Korea and Vietnam through Iraq and Afghanistan.

Instead of defining limited wars by limited means or force, Stoker defines them by limited political objectives, one of the two categories framed by the Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz: 1) wars with an unlimited political objective (regime change or overthrow of the enemy); and 2) those with a limited political objective (less than regime change).

Identifying the political objective is only the first step, with other pivotal inquiries to follow. How highly do the leaders and people value that objective? The higher they value it, the more blood and treasure they should be willing to sacrifice for it. What strategy is best suited to reach the objective? Political and military leaders should come to grips with these and other questions, a “colossal task” in Clausewitz’s words, before a decision for or against war. Stoker advocates analysis along these lines, instead of along the tangled trails of limited war that leaders have traversed for decades.
A Counterattack on Theory

Some reviewers object not to the retail specifics of Stoker's theory but dismiss it on the wholesale ground that leaders who set strategy scarcely take this sort of thing seriously. Lawrence Freedman, for example, closes a short review: “Stoker’s analysis of the United States’ failures is convincing, but his argument that better thinking would enable political leaders to set clear objectives and pursue them to victory is less so.” And Heather Venable believes that Stoker’s work is “too theoretical” because “real-world strategy is made in” Washington, “where the books get thrown out in bureaucratic infighting and messy compromise…” But strategic theory and bureaucratic infighting are different subjects for different books, and strategic theory should not be shrugged off merely because some bureaucrats and politicians might ignore it. If politicians do not study strategy, some of their advisors do. French philosopher Jean Rostand once remarked that the “biologist passes, the frog remains,” sometimes translated as “Theories pass. The frog remains.” Do strategic theories pass while bureaucrats and politicians remain?

Kori Schake has stressed the primacy of politics in her 2017 reconsideration of H.R. McMaster’s 1997 Dereliction of Duty, a book that probed some of the limited-war issues now examined by Stoker. McMaster faulted the Joint Chiefs of Staff for failing to go public over President Johnson's unsound Vietnam strategy, who viewed the war abroad as secondary to his Great Society at home. But an innocent and inexperienced McMaster, said Schake, was trying “to leach the politics out of policy…a common attitude among military strategists.” Schake invoked the view that in a democracy, “civilians have a right to be wrong.”

Wrong or right, however, civilians are still subject to scrutiny. Though the Joint Chiefs criticized by McMaster are subject to civilian control of the military, most strategists, including Stoker and Antulio Echevarria, are not. If civilians have a right to be wrong, Echevarria reasons, “they should get the wars they ask for, even if they are not the ones they really want.” And they may well get the wars they deserve, even if not the wars those who fight them deserve. If civilians have a right to be wrong, then strategists have a right to say they are wrong, and such criticism should not be written off as a naive effort to leach politics out of policy. Though Clausewitz said that “we can only treat policy as representative of all interests of the community,” he recognized that politics “can err, subserv[ing] the ambitions, private interests, and vanity of those in power.” By implication, we can criticize an errant or bad policy that serves the interests not of the community but of those in power. If Clausewitz’s theories as a strategist left any uncertainty, his actions as a Prussian officer left no doubt that he would repudiate bad policy when he saw it. After French forces defeated and occupied Prussia, its King sent German troops to join Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia. Clausewitz resigned his Prussian commission and served with the tsar’s forces opposing the invasion, earning himself a cameo in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, where a Russian prince scoffed at Clausewitz and a fellow Prussian who “have nothing in their German heads but theories not worth an empty egg-shell.”
Buzzwords and Attitudes

The collapse of the Soviet Union and end of the Cold War eased fears of a nuclear Armageddon, but limited-war thinking outlived its Cold War origins and found its voice in what Stoker calls “weird terms and weird buzzwords,” some old, some new: spectrum of conflict, peacekeeping or stabilization operations, preventive or preemptive wars, wars of choice (as opposed to necessity), asymmetrical wars, new wars, and hybrid wars. Stoker demystifies this argot, deflating war of choice, for example, as a pejorative “used to oppose a war that one doesn’t believe should be fought.” Many of these terms blur the boundary between peace and war, cautions Stoker, who insists that you either are or are not at war; war is “the use of militarized violence…for a political aim,” and peace is not, a binary outlook labeled “incredibly naïve” in a Zachery Tyson tweet. To Stoker, many of these buzzwords suggest that some wars are less real than others, and if some wars are not real, then they hardly call for urgency or victory; leaders might as well support them only “enough to keep from losing face with their allies while avoiding potential domestic criticism.”

Even war for a limited political objective, Stoker argues, should aim at victory, a prospect that can itself motivate soldiers: who in Korea wanted to “die for a tie”? Stoker contends that “post-modern self-loathing” in the “liberal world” has discredited the very idea of victory. These are fighting words, and your opinion of limited war, with its buzzwords and its seeming aversion to victory, is as much a matter of attitude as of theory.

In Stoker’s summary, American leaders have been fighting wars without calling them wars, without understanding them, and without planning how to win or even end them. Repeated entry into such ill-considered conflicts, Stoker chalks up to “short-sightedness,” “incompetence,” “ignorance,” “dishonesty,” and “short-term political purposes.” More fighting words.

Stoker figures that he has “gored seventy years of intellectual and political oxen.” His gored oxen have long been sacred cows, and more than 100,000 Americans have died in wars entered and fought under the prevailing influence of limited-war theory, a theory that had consequences in wars that had unsatisfactory results. Stoker is trying to build a better theory, and it is a tautology to dismiss his effort as too theoretical. If you disagree with him or think him naïve, go right ahead but give me some reasons. Just don’t tell me that theory does not count.


Patrick Brady’s articles and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, The Journal of Military History, Civil War History, The V V A Veteran, law journals, and other publications. A retired attorney, he taught United States History at the University of California, Riverside, and served as an Army Civil Affairs officer in Vietnam.

Posted for fair use.....

News + Intel
Islamic Jihadists ambush Malian Army convoy, heavy casualties

by Steve Balestrieri
9 hours ago

About a dozen military vehicles were ambushed on Sunday at Bouka Were, around 60 miles from the border with Mauritania, the army said. Unnamed Malian military sources confirmed that the ambush on the military convoy in central Mali left 24 soldiers dead and a number missing. Jihadists aligned with al-Qaeda perpetrated the attack.

According to reports by local media, there were 64 soldiers in the convoy. The army confirmed that 20 were dead and eight were later rescued, but that only 20 of the troops were present for duty after the fighting took place. The source stated that a search was underway to find the remainder of the troops.

Those numbers were confirmed later on Monday when Colonel Diarran Kone, a Malian army spokesman told Reuters news that, “Twenty-four Mali army personnel died, eight survivors have been found.”

This is the latest in a string of jihadist attacks. Mali and its neighboring countries in the Sahel region have been plagued by violent jihadism for the past eight years. Islamic jihadists began a revolt in northern Mali in 2012, which has since spread to Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger, and Mauritania despite the presence of thousands of French and U.N. troops.

In related news, on Saturday, two Egyptian soldiers with the United Nations peacekeeping force MINUSMA were killed when their convoy came under attack in northwestern Mali, the U.N. said in a press release.

The French-led coalition has been fighting an uphill battle against the Islamist insurgency, which is comprised of armed groups that have linked themselves to al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. During just the past year the insurgency has claimed four thousand military and civilian lives and forced hundreds of thousands to be displaced from their homes.

The terrorist groups have played upon and benefited by ethnic tensions, poverty, local grievances over scant resources, and the absence of government control in the sparsely populated areas.

An ethnic Fulani group, linked to al-Qaeda, called Katiba Macina and led by a man named Amadou Koufa is recruiting among the Fulani herding community, which has long been at odds with the Bambara and Dogon farming groups.

The Muslim Fulani have been losing their traditional grazing lands due to climate change and have been taking over Bambara and Dogon lands by force. They’ve also targeted the Christian segment of these Bambara and Dogon farming groups for annihilation. These groups, in turn, have created their own “self-defense” organizations, which have targeted Fulani. This only exacerbates the situation.

The violence forced earlier this month, thousands into the streets of Bamako, Mali’s capital, to protest against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and demand his resignation. He has been in power since 2013. The protesters condemned what they described as the government’s mishandling of the many crises plaguing the country.

President Keita, reached out to the protesting coalition and to Mahmoud Dicko, the cleric behind the protests, saying, “My door is open and my hand always extended.”

A few months ago, Keita said that he was seeking a dialogue with rebel leaders. It is doubtful that any al-Qaeda or Islamic State leaders would ever choose to meet with him. Meanwhile, the violence in Mali has increased to a level that is approaching a total loss of governmental control.

About Steve Balestrieri View All Posts


Steve served as a Special Forces NCO and Warrant Officer before injuries forced his early separation. He writes for SOFREP and covers the NFL for PatsFans.com and his work is regularly featured in the Millbury-Sutton Chronicle and Grafton News newspapers

Egyptian president says Libyan city Sirte a 'red line'

SAMY MAGDY and ANDREW WILKS
,
Associated Press•June 20, 2020



FILE - In this June 17, 2020, file photo, Turkey's Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, left, and Muhammed Tahir Siyala, Foreign Minister of Libya's internationally-recognized government, speak at the airport, in Tripoli, Libya. Libya’s eastern-based forces have lost the chance to engage in a political solution to the North African country’s conflict, Turkey's foreign minister said Saturday, June 20, 2020. (Fatih Aktas/Turkish Foreign Ministry via AP, Pool, File)

CAIRO (AP) — Egypt’s president Saturday warned that an attempt by Turkey-backed forces in Libya to attack the strategic city of Sirte would cross a “red line" and trigger a direct Egyptian military intervention into the conflict.
Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, in televised comments, said Egypt could intervene in neighboring Libya with the intention of protecting its western border with the oil-rich country, and to bring stability, including establishing conditions for a cease-fire, to Libya.
El-Sissi warned that any attack on Sirte or the inland Jufra air base by forces loyal to the U.N.-supported but weak government in Tripoli would amount to crossing a “red line.”
“Let’s stop at this (current) front line and start negotiations to reach a political solution to the Libyan crisis,” he said.
Calls seeking comment from a spokesman for the Tripoli-based government went unanswered. But Mohammed Ammry Zayed, a member of the presidential council, an advisory body for the U.N.-supported government, said they reject el-Sissi’s comments as a “continuity of the war against Libya’s people.”

El-Sissi spoke while inspecting Egypt’s air force and commando units stationed in the Sidi Barrani air base in the country’s western region along the porous desert border with Libya.
He said Egypt is ready to provide arms and training for Libyan tribes to “defend their country.” He told tribal representatives attending his speech that if Egypt were to intervene, its forces would advance with tribal leaders at the vanguard.
El-Sissi's strong comments come after Libyan fighters allied with the Tripoli-based government earlier this month advanced toward Sirte, a move that ignored an Egyptian initiative, backed by the east-Libya camp, to stop fighting and embark on peace talks.
Taking Sirte would open the gate for the Tripoli-allied militias to advance even farther eastward, to potentially seize control of vital oil installations, terminals and oil fields that tribes allied with Hifter shut down earlier this year, cutting off Libya’s major source of income.

Libya has been in turmoil since 2011 when a civil war toppled long-time dictator Moammar Gadhafi, who was later killed. The country has since split between rival administrations in the east and the west, each backed by armed groups and foreign governments.
Eastern-based forces under Hifter launched an offensive to try to take Tripoli in April last year. The chaos has steadily worsened as foreign backers have increasingly intervened, despite pledges to the contrary at a high-profile peace summit in Berlin earlier this year.
Hifter’s forces are backed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia, while the Tripoli-allied militias are aided by Qatar, Italy and Turkey.
Tripoli-based forces with Turkish support gained the upper hand in the war earlier this month after retaking the capital’s airport, all main entrance and exit points to the city and a string of key towns near Tripoli. Turkish air support in the form of armed aerial drones in particular proved vital to turning the tide. Turkey has also sent Syrian militias to fight for the Tripoli government.
The withdrawal of Hifter's fighters was painted by his commanders as a tactical measure to give a U.N.-backed peace process a chance.

But Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Saturday that Hifter's forces have lost the chance to engage in a political solution to the conflict because Hifter ignored previous calls for a peaceful solution.
“On the contrary, he increased his aggression,” Cavusoglu said in a televised news conference.
“He’s losing, he’s doomed to lose," he added. “It’s impossible for him to win. He had an opportunity for a political process. He lost that as well.”

Turkey, in addition to providing military support, signed a maritime deal in November with the Tripoli-based government that would give Ankara access to an economic zone across the Mediterranean, despite the objections from Greece, Cyprus and Egypt. Turkey has said it will begin exploring for natural resources there within months.
Last weekend, a summit between Cavusoglu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, which was to have focused on Libya, was postponed at the last minute.
___
Wilks reported from Ankara, Turkey.

posted for fair use

Jerusalem Post Middle East

Could Egypt and Turkey be headed for war in Libya?
Libya’s conflict is complex, but at its most basic it is a proxy war.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
JUNE 21, 2020 09:12





Members of Libya's internationally recognised government flash victory signs after taking control of Watiya airbase, southwest of Tripoli, Libya May 18, 2020.

(photo credit: REUTERS/HAZEM AHMED)


Turkey has increased its military intervention in Libyain recent months, sending ships off the coast, planes to bring weapons, mercenaries and armed drones to the country.

This is ostensibly to support the government in Tripoli which is fighting a civil war against forces in eastern Libya. But it is actually part of Turkey’s desire for a greater role in energy exploration in the Mediterranean and aimed at weakening Egyptian-backed opposition forces. In response Egypt’s president hinted during a tour of a massive military base on Saturday, that Egypt might intervene.


Libya’s conflict is complex, but at its most basic it is a proxy war. It also has ramifications for the whole region, a hinge on which the power of Turkey, Egypt, the UAE, Russia and Qatar all turn.

Iran, Greece, Italy and France are all keenly watching. Egypt, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and perhaps France and even Greece, back Haftar. Turkey and Qatar back Tripoli. They have sent thousands of poor Syrian rebels to fight in Libya. Turkey has also used Libya as a testing ground for its armed drones. Turkey has conducted naval exercises with Italy recently and almost clashed with France at sea in an incident NATO is investigating.

Ankara is showing its muscle. It publishes maps showing its claim to a huge swath of the Mediterranean that cut off Greece and Cyprus. It brags about sending F-16s and cargo aircraft to off the coast of Libya. It has also sought to strongarm NATO and force the US to intervene in Libya.

These are high stakes now. Egypthas been backing General Khalifa Haftar, who Haftar fled Libya’s Qadafi regime decades ago and lived in the US. He returned to Libya to lead an offensive that took Benghazi and the east of the country, vowing to rid it of terrorists. It should be remembered that Libya fell into chaos after the US-led intervention toppled brutal dictator Muammar Gadaffi in 2011.

US Ambassador Christopher Stevens was murdered by jihadists in September 2012. The US walked away and Libya fell into battles between extremists, local militias, tribes, and Qatari and UAE-backed groups. From chaos came two sides: The Government of the National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli, a loose confederation of different groups, some of whom are linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkish backing. Turkey’s ruling party has roots in the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

Egypt, whose current leader General Abdel Fatah al-Sisi pushed the Brotherhood from power in 2013 in Egypt, vowing to bring stability, has backed Haftar.

Haftar would bring to Libya the same kind of military and conservative rule that Egypt and the Gulf monarchies have. Turkey’s rule would bring the kind of instability and extremism it exported to Idlib and other areas it invaded in northern Syria. Both systems seem to ignore the average Libyans who are caught in the middle of almost 10 years of war. Both sides have accused each other of human rights abuses. But Turkey has proven more adept at moving weapons and defense technology to Libya. Its Bayraktar drones have defeated the UAE-supplied Russian Pantsir air defense. It has pushed Haftar back.

Now Egypt’s president is signaling possible red lines in Libya. This line could keep the Turkish-backed GNA from Sirte and a strategic airfield at Jufra. The country would be split down the middle. Egypt has a massive army, but it is also an army mostly untested on foreign battlefields.

Egypt has been fighting terrorists in Sinai for years and has not defeated them. Turkey however has been sending its army into Syria for years, mostly to fight the Kurdistan Workers Party. But in February Turkish forces clashed with the Syrian regime and destroyed their armored vehicles and air defense. Turkey has recently invaded northern Iraq as well, in a new operation. Turkey’s navy has been more aggressive dealing with the French, who are alleged to support Haftar, and the Greeks, who work with Egypt. Turkey’s F-16s and NATO warplanes have also been more aggressive. When is the last time Egypt had to face off with another real air force? Not for decades.

On paper Turkey’s armed forces and Egypt’s are well matched. Both have F-16s and hundreds of fighter aircraft. Egypt’s army is the 9th strongest in the world on paper with thousands of tanks. Turkey’s armed forces are thought to be the 11th strongest in the world. Both countries use western weapons systems linked to the US or NATO. Turkey’s work with NATO likely makes it more effective than Egypt.

Both countries are bogged down in counter-insurgency campaigns. Egypt is close to Libya and can easily move an armored brigade or troops to the frontline. Turkey would have to fly them in and it likely prefers using Syrian rebel mercenaries to do its dirty work. That would pit lightly armed Syrians and their Libyan allies against similarly lightly armed Libyans from the Libyan National Army (LNA) of Haftar, backed by some Egyptian forces or aircraft. Russia already has aircraft in eastern Libya.

Egypt’s president has now openly hinted that the army could be used on foreign soil. His goal is to get the US to take seriously his demand for a ceasefire. Turkey has said it will build new military bases in Libya and has bragged that it now has bases in nine countries.

Turkey is trying to show it controls the eastern Mediterranean, and also controls US policy in Syria, Libya and Iraq. Turkey has demanded the Trump administration do more in Libya and the role of Russia has encouraged the US to be concerned. That means the US is in an awkward position. It wants to oppose Russia, but Egypt is a close partner of the US. Turkey is trying to blackmail the US.

Turkey is buying S-400s from Russia and trying to claim that if the US doesn’t act in Libya then Turkey could make trouble for US-backed forces in eastern Syria, or Turkey might spread instability in Iraq, where it is bombing areas in the Kurdish north. All Egypt can do is say that it might intervene to get Washington to take its views seriously. But Trump has signaled he doesn’t want more involvement in the Middle East and “far off places.”

Egypt has acted before in Libya. It has carried out airstrikes after attacks in Egypt and on Egyptians. But Egypt hasn’t sent tanks and serious equipment.

Nevertheless, Saturday’s speech by Sisi to the soldiers is a major step. On June 9 Turkey’s president said he reached an agreement with the US on Libya. The US had warned about foreign interference in Libya on May 20. The May statement came after the GNA took the key Watiya Airbase on may 18. Sisi met Haftar on April 14, May 9 and June 7, eventually urging a ceasefire. Since then Turkey rejected the ceasefire on June 10 and vowed not to meet with Haftar who Ankara calls a “warlord.” Turkey says Haftar rejected nine previous ceasefire deals.

Instead Ankara reached out to Italy to back its own “durable peace” in Libya, one that foresees Turkey and the GNA controlling Libya. Italy cares because it wants the GNA to keep migrants from crossing the Mediterranean. On June 20 the Arab League suggested talks to help heal Libya but the GNA rejected them.

We now know other wheels are in motion. Russia, Voice of America reported on June 17, has asked for the US to work with it on Libya. Russia’s foreign minister canceled a meeting with Turkey on June 16, apparently sensing Turkey won’t budge on Libya and it would be a waste of time. Turkey turned directly to Trump and Germany’s Angela Merkel, hoping Merkel will reach out to France and also Greece. Merkel is a key supporter of Ankara’s regime, selling Turkey tanks and also seeking to host Libya talks. Germany pays Turkey, via the European Union, to keep Syrian refugees from coming to Europe.

Those Syrians are now being sent to Libya by Turkey, so this works in Germany’s favor. Russia, for its part, may try to heat up tensions in Syria’s Idlib to pressure Turkey on Libya. All these conflicts and refugees are connected. In the meantime the US, through its AFRICOM military commanders, have warned of Russia’s warplanes in Libya on May 26 and June 18.

This big question now is Sisi. Will he send the army, or will the US listen to Egypt’s concerns and encourage a ceasefire. The US has trouble not following Ankara’s orders because Ankara can threaten US forces in eastern Syria. Additionally there is a well funded GNA lobby in Washington with connections to pro-Turkey voices that argue US foreign policy in the Middle East must be rooted in whatever Ankara demands.

This lobby believes that Ankara will one day turn on Iran and Russia and that the US must give Turkey more concessions to get Turkey to stop working with Moscow and Tehran. Oddly Turkey has also turned to Iran for support in Libya, offering Iran sanctions relief for Iran’s help fighting Kurdish militants in Iraq and aiding Turkey in Syria.

The US and Iran might find themselves on the same side in Libya via Turkey. It all hinges on Cairo now. If Cairo has a military footprint in Libya it can do what Turkey has successfully done and leverage it for concessions. For now Egypt must watch and contemplate the next step. Everyone is also looking to Washington to do more than just hint that it supports both Egypt’s ceasefire proposal and Ankara’s approach. What happens next will also affect Washington’s other allies, in Jerusalem and Riyadh and Abu Dhabi.

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Can Trump secure release of all US hostages in Iran?
Another prisoner exchange between Iran and the United States seems possible after two in just six months, but the previous exchanges have not generated any mutual trust.









Michael White, a freed US Navy veteran detained in Iran since 2018, poses with US special envoy for Iran Brian Hook on his return to the United States at Zurich Airport in Zurich, Switzerland, June 4, 2020. Photo by US State Department via REUTERS.

Mark Fitzpatrick

@MarkTFitz








Topics covered

Iran-US tensions
Jun 19, 2020

On the surface, momentum seems to be building toward a further prisoner exchange between Iran and the United States. After two detainee swaps in the past six months, both sides have expressed a desire for more. The Donald Trump administration has made winning the release of US citizens a priority, and the Hassan Rouhani administration called for its own citizens to be allowed to come home. Yet the previous exchanges have not generated any mutual trust.
On June 5, Iran turned over Navy veteran Michael White to US special representative for Iran Brian Hook in Zurich. White had been held in Iran for nearly two years on charges of "insulting the country's top leader” and publicly “posting a private photograph.” The United States then reciprocated by releasing Majid Taheri, an Iranian-American doctor who had been held over a sanctions violation. Science professor Sirous Asgari, who had also been caught up on a sanctions charge, was also allowed to return to Iran, although the United States said his case was unrelated to White’s. These releases followed a similar exchange in December, when Iran freed Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang, a US citizen who had been held for three years on spying charges, and American authorities freed stem cell scientist Massoud Soleimani, who faced sanctions charges.

The exchanges were a rare foreign policy success for President Donald Trump, who tweeted a note of thanks to Iran after White was freed and called for talks on a “big deal.” On June 16, Hook said he hoped for further prisoner exchanges and talks on all the issues that have bedeviled relations over the past four decades.
The Iranian authorities are not interested. On May 10, cabinet spokesman Ali Rabiei had offered Iran’s readiness for all prisoners to be discussed without any conditions. Contrary to press reports, however, he did not offer to talk directly with the US government on the matter. Ever since the Jan. 3 assassination of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, direct talks with the United States have been off the table. Iran only wants to speak with the Swiss government, which acted as an intermediary in the last two prisoner swaps. Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani dismissed Trump’s call for a ”big deal” and said “no dialogue will be held in the future.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi went further in denouncing the US government’s role in the latest exchange, claiming without evidence that Hook had tried to sabotage the swap. “They wanted him to die in Iran so they could take advantage of his death,” Mousavi was quoted as saying. Another government official who did not wish to be identified claimed senior State Department officials represented an “axis of spoilers.”


These outrageous charges reflect deep animosity. Several Iranian scholars contacted for this story said Iranian authorities believe that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Hook will do anything to try to bring Iran to its knees. “They wanted White dead in order to further isolate Iran and ratchet up the already heavy maximum pressure,” a Tehran-based professor said.

Iranian officials apparently resent the publicity that the United States attached to them, with pictures of Hook welcoming White and Wang on the Zurich airport tarmac. Neither does it help to couple prisoner releases with additional sanctions and threats. Although some have argued that Hook’s stance hinders the chances of a deal and claim he has been hesitant to engage, the latest successful releases could offer hope for future swaps.

While Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi met with Hook in Zurich in December, the Iranian officials who delivered White to Vienna this month were instructed not to even make eye contact with him, according to an adviser to the Iranian Foreign Ministry. The Iranians may be willing to meet with Trump as long as it is not just for a photo op, but not with Pompeo or Hook, the adviser told Al-Monitor. Over the past year, Iran has rejected three US attempts to initiate consular dialogue.

Where does this leave the prospect for further prisoner swaps? At least six other American citizens are known to be imprisoned in Iran, although the families of three of them do not want their cases publicized. The three public cases involve Siamak Namazi, imprisoned since October 2015; his father Baquer Namazi, detained in February 2016; and Morad Tahbaz, held since January 2018 along with other environmentalists. Iran is also holding citizens of other countries, including British charity foundation administrator Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. In all cases, the charges do not withstand scrutiny.
The injustice in the Namazi case is the most incomprehensible and heartbreaking. A respected UNICEF official, Baquer Namazi went to Iran at age 80 to try to free his son and was himself arrested. He was hospitalized 12 times while in detention. While now out on medical furlough, he cannot leave Iran. Siamak remains in unhealthy confinement in Evin prison even as 85,000 other prisoners were furloughed as a coronavirus precaution.

Nobody can explain this cruelty. Siamak’s brother Babak said his family members are “pawns in a game we don’t understand.” What the known cases all have in common is that the prisoners are dual citizens detained in a country that does not recognize dual citizenship. Until last year, Iranian Foreign Ministry officials indicated that this status made judicial authorities unwilling to countenance negotiations for their release. Zarif now says he has authority to negotiate the release of all prisoners, including “Iranian hostages held in — and on behalf of — the US.”
So, what is holding it up? Jason Poblete, who facilitated White’s release, notes that a humanitarian pathway has now been put in place for releasing hostages from Iran. Now more than ever, Trump needs a foreign policy victory. He will not get the big deal he touts, but he might be able to bring more American prisoners home. To do so his team will need finesse in working with Iran, even if only via Switzerland.

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UN says Afghan health workers facing deliberate attacks
By RAHIM FAIEZ
today

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — The United Nations on Sunday released a special report expressing concerns over what it called recent “deliberate attacks” against health care workers and facilities in Afghanistan during the coronavirus pandemic.

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, or UNAMA, said it had documented 12 deliberate acts of violence between March 11 to May 23, and that these attacks constitute war crimes.

The report said eight of the attacks were carried out by Taliban insurgents, while three were attributed to Afghan security forces. The most horrific attack, on a maternity ward at a Kabul hospital that killed 24 people last month, remains unsolved. The United States has said the attack bore the hallmarks of the Islamic State group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, which is fighting both the Taliban and the Kabul government.

“At a time when an urgent humanitarian response was required to protect every life in Afghanistan, both the Taliban and Afghan national security forces carried out deliberate acts of violence that undermined health care operations,” said Deborah Lyons, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Afghanistan, and head of UNAMA. “There is no excuse for such actions; the safety and well-being of the civilian population must be a priority.”

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid denied the U.N. report’s findings, saying, “We do not consider these allegations and reports to be accurate.” Sunday’s statement said Taliban militants had not attacked any health facilities and claimed they have instead protected them.

Afghan government officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press.

Afghanistan has 28,833 confirmed coronavirus cases with 581 deaths, although international aid organizations monitoring the country’s outbreak say the numbers are much higher because of a lack of access and testing capabilities.

Following the May 12 attack on the Kabul maternity hospital, Doctors Without Borders decided last week to end its operations in Kabul. The international charity, also known by its French acronym MSF, said it would keep its other programs in Afghanistan running, but did not go into details.

The attack at the maternity hospital killed two infants as well as several young mothers as well as nurses, and set off an hours-long shootout with Afghan police. The hospital in Dashti Barchi, a mostly Shiite neighborhood, was the Geneva-based group’s only project in the Afghan capital. The U.S. has said the attack targeted the country’s minority Shiites in a neighborhood of Kabul that the Islamic State group has repeatedly attacked in the past. The Taliban promptly denied involvement.

The U.N. report emphasized that deliberate acts of violence against health care facilities, including hospitals and related personnel, are prohibited under international humanitarian law and constitute war crimes.

“Perpetrating targeted attacks on healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when health resources are already stretched and of critical importance to the civilian population, is particularly reprehensible,” said Fiona Frazer, UNAMA Chief of Human Rights.

Hummm.....

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MOHAN GURUSWAMY | 21 JUNE, 2020

The Changing Nature of the Next War


Limited Options

In 1979 China attacked Vietnam at the province of Lang Son. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) withdrew about twenty kilometers inside. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) poured into the breach and were crowing about their quick victory, when Vietnamese military commander General Van Tien Dung closed the trap and battered the PLA with deadly artillery fire.

Incidentally, then Indian Foreign Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee who was visiting Beijing had to hurriedly return home. If he had stayed back for a few days he would have absorbed an important lesson from the Vietnamese, that is to let the military decide its strategy and battlefield tactics. The tactical sacrifice of territory to inflict a painful damage to the enemy is more important.

Unfortunately in India, we are obsessed with territory. Even after the Galwan and Pangong Tso incidents what our commentators and politicians mostly point to is “loss of territory”. We seem unconcerned about the military tenability of lines of actual or imagined control. For instance, does anybody consider the military viability of the “fingers” territory on the north bank of the Pangong? Will a general be allowed to marshal his resources at a place of his choosing, like Van Tien Dung did at Lang Son?

The question we need to ponder over is are we ready for a bigger conflict with China?

Lets take the Galwan situation. The PLA was seeking to establish dominance over the vital Darbuk-Daulat Beg Oldi (DBO) road, our only link with what we call Sub-Sector North (SSN). This is a long road of over 230 kms and goes alongside the Shyok river which in turn flows southward alongside a spur of the Karakorum, till it and bends along the Chip Chap river to end at DBO.

The Depsang Plains lies inside the crook of this elbow. The PLA effectively dominates Depsang which is just south of Aksai Chin, now with China. The road effectively ends at DBO, unless you want to go to via the Karakorum Pass a few kilometers ahead and then to Yarkand in Xinjiang.

To my mind the disputed Fingers 4-8 area north of the Pangong Tso is a side show. This does not have the strategic significance of the Darbuk-DBO road. The PLA is now at its closest ever to this road and can even bring it under mortar and machine gun fire. By interdicting this road the PLA will effectively cut off SSN from Ladakh. India literally has its back to the wall here, with a spur of the Karakorum range on the left and the LAC on the right.

In the outbreak of a larger conflict what is the survivability of this road? Do we invest huge forces to defend this area or do we learn from Lang Son?

To really beat back the PLA India needs to bring the IAF into play early. If the PLA has the upper hand on the land dimension, the IAF has a dominance in the second dimension. Its major bases are nearby on the plains and it can launch its fighter-bombers with the full fuel and weapons loads.

The PLA Air Force on the other hand operating from high altitude airfields has limitations on fuel and weapons loads. The dominance of the battlefield depends on how much force one can bring to bear on it. Here India has the advantage. But first we must stop equating military success with territory lost or gained.

If the second dimension comes into play, it wont be long before the third dimension- the sea is put into play. With 70% of its oil on sealanes running about 300-500 kms from its shore, India can effectively interdict Chinese foreign trade with the region. The PLAN will be loathe to engage the Indian Navy in an area where the leading Indian Ocean power, the US Navy also dominates.

War between between nuclear powers will not be without consequences to the ever increasingly inter-dependent world and hence international pressure to terminate conflicts before they expand and/or spiral out of control is only to be expected. How many nuclear weapons a country has does not matter, as for the world outside even the use of one will not be without huge collateral consequences?

Thus, while China will be interested in keeping any conflict limited and restricted to one dimension, it will be in India’s interest that it quickly escalate to the other two dimensions where it can bring its superior disruptive power into play.

The time window for such a conflict, if there is one, will be very narrow. Thus at best the two countries can fight a very limited war that does not cause irremediable loss of face to either one. It will be very important for both countries to have their nations believe that they have not emerged worse-off in the conflict. Face then becomes everything.

The national mood, not territory, is what the next conflict should be about. This kind of a conflict requires quick escalation to high kinetic levels before the conflict is forced to a halt by outside powers. The illusion of victory has to be created in this very limited space.

Victory will be a matter of perception. There will be no time and place for strategic victories. The sum of tactical victories will be the ultimate perception of victory. We have seen how soon air power came to be deployed over Kargil.

The terrain and array of forces on both sides of the India-China border suggests that air power come into play fairly early to score the wins that will influence perceptions.

India’s arms build up and preparations make it apparent that a conflict will not be confined to the mountains and valleys of the Himalayas but will swirl into the skies above, on to the Xinjiang and Tibetan plateaus and the Indian Ocean.

It will be logical for India to extend a Himalayan war to the Indian Ocean, particularly as India’s geographical location puts it astride the sea-lanes that carry over two thirds of China’s oil imports. To pay for this oil, 41% of China’s exports are now to the MENA region.

Asia is now the most dynamic economic region in the world. Six of the world's 10 fastest-growing major economies in the coming decade (including China and India) will be Asian countries. India has so far been careful about not semaphoring its capability too overtly, but it is sometimes useful to overtly convey this. There is an old Chinese saying that to scare away the monkeys you sometimes have to skin a cat.

Cover Photograph: Indian troops forming a man-tow for artillery over rough mountain terrain during the 1962 War

House Defense Bill Pushes Hypersonic Weapons for Zumwalt Destroyers, Slows LUSV Procurement
By: Megan Eckstein
June 22, 2020 6:28 PM



Sailors man the rails aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) as the ship pulls into Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam on April 2, 2019. US Navy Photo
The House Armed Services Committee may force the Navy to begin integrating hypersonic weapons onto the Zumwalt class of destroyers, something the sea service has talked about but not prioritized in its budget.
The Navy was put in charge of developing a common hypersonic glide body that will ultimately serve as a conventional prompt global strike weapon for the joint force, providing an alternative to nuclear weapons for strategic retaliatory strikes.
The Navy said early in development that it wanted to develop the weapon to the most stringent possible requirement – a weapon that could survive an underwater launch from a submarine – thereby making it easier to integrate the weapon into multiple kinds of launchers.

Earlier this year the service said it would devote money to integrating the weapon onto its Virginia Payload Module, a set of missile tubes added onto the Block V and beyond Virginia-class attack submarines. The Navy requested just over $1 billion in the Fiscal Year 2021 budget request for this effort, which would cover “continued development of the weapon system and flight subsystem, platform integration, and advanced research and development to support future spiral capabilities such as enhanced warhead, advanced communication, alternative navigation, and terminal sensor technology.” The weapon would reach initial operational capability in FY 2028, when it would be ready for use on the Virginia submarines., according to Navy budget documents.
In a section of its FY 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, the HASC strategic forces subcommittee directs the Navy to focus on surface ship integration, too.

A common hypersonic glide body (C-HGB) launches from Pacific Missile Range Facility, Kauai, Hawaii, at approximately 10:30 p.m. local time, March 19, 2020, during a Department of Defense flight experiment. The U.S. Navy and U.S. Army jointly executed the launch of the C-HGB, which flew at hypersonic speed to a designated impact point. Concurrently, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) monitored and gathered tracking data from the flight experiment that will inform its ongoing development of systems designed to defend against adversary hypersonic weapons. US Navy photo.
“The bill mandates that the department start integration of hypersonics on surface ships, on DDG-1000s, given that the department has been primarily focused on sub-based platforms,” a committee aide told reporters.
“And it asks for a report on certain questions and concerns that are ongoing, including operational control authority, whether we need to update our war plans, who would be responsible for targeting requirements, what the risks of miscalculation would be and what the risk mitigations might be, and finally on basing strategies for a land-based variant. And then it also requires a [Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation] report on costs and testing.”

Specifically, the bill calls for the Navy to start integration efforts on the Zumwalt class no later than Jan. 1, 2021.
Commander of Naval Surface Forces Vice Adm. Rich Brown has expressed interest in putting hypersonic weapons on the Zumwalt class, saying that the ship’s larger size, power generation and missile launcher compared to the Arleigh Burke-class DDG made it a great host for the conventional prompt strike weapon.
“I have got to tell you, I am thoroughly impressed with the capabilities that that destroyer will bring into our fleet. As a matter of fact, I would love to have six more of them, because the capabilities are that good. If you look at conventional prompt strike, I can think of no other better platform than to put conventional prompt strike on that platform. And then once that happens, or if that happens, make no mistake, it will put the fear of god into our adversaries once we marry those two platforms together,” he said during a media call.

The report to Congress that the NDAA language mandates would begin to address some thorny issues related to use of force, risk of escalation, command and control and more.
The submarine community has worked out some of these issues, having a Navy platform using a national strategic weapon – nuclear missiles – in its Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) program. Though it would be the Virginia-class SSNs firing off strategic hypersonic CPGS weapons – and those crews would have to manage having both strategic weapons for national tasking as well as their own weapons for self-defense and strike missions within their Navy fleet chain of command – it’s likely that some of the submarine community’s understanding of command and control, underwater communications, and training for national tasking could be put in place on the attack subs.
However, no surface ships today are equipped with these kinds of strategic weapons and have to deal with these kinds of issues.
The measure still has to survive a full committee vote next month, a full House of Representatives vote and then agreement by the Senate before being signed into law.

Unmanned Surface Vessels and Shipbuilding Plans

A Ghost Fleet Overlord test vessel takes part in a capstone demonstration during the conclusion of Phase I of the program in September. Two existing commercial fast supply vessels were converted into unmanned surface vessels (USVs) for Overlord testing, which will play a vital role in informing the Navy’s new classes of USVs. US Navy photo.
The HASC seapower and projection forces took on another hot topic in their legislation: unmanned systems.
The Navy will inherit two Large Unmanned Surface Vessels (LUSVs) from a Pentagon-level research program, and it has money in the current fiscal year to purchase two more as prototypes. The Navy had asked to buy two more LUSV prototypes in FY 2021 so it could have many vehicles in the water to fast-track learning, concepts development, fleet familiarization and more ahead of the start of a program of record and fleet operations.
HASC’s seapower subcommittee though is recommending that the full committee nix the funding for the two LUSVs in FY 2021.
“We have some language that fences money on that program until they can show us some design maturity and that they really understand the autonomy that they’re trying to get after. We don’t believe that going right into serial production on something that they don’t understand completely is the right way to do it, especially using (research and development) funds – this is all very similar to how [Littoral Combat Ship] started, I think all of you are probably aware that that was not a good news story for many of the first years,” a committee aide said.

Sea Hunter. US Navy Photo
The aide told USNI News that “if you look at their acquisition strategy, there’s really no gap in between what they’re calling these prototype ships and when they go into actual serial production. So essentially they’ve been trying to go into serial production from the very beginning. We don’t believe that that’s a sound strategy. Certainly prototyping is a good idea, and when we asked what they could do with six that they can’t do with four, we didn’t get any detailed answers on that other than, well we can get a lot more steaming hours. Well, that doesn’t tell me that you really need that many.”
The Navy’s Surface Development Squadron One (SURFDEVRON) told USNI News recently that they hoped to conduct certain events in parallel – figuring out manning, maintenance, training, operations, command and control, concepts of operations and more – and needed a large stable of prototypes to do that, rather than having to tackle those learning items sequentially if they didn’t have enough prototypes in the water.
“What we really need to see is that they have a full understanding of what the requirements are to then go and confidently build a ship that they’re confident in the design and it’s going to meet what their requirements are,” the aide said.
“Right now I feel like they’re wanting to build ships to figure out what the requirements are, which is the opposite of the way they should do.”

HASC also expressed concerns about unmanned ships carrying weapons, with the aide saying they worry about “highly technical weapons that you don’t want just exposed out there, unsecured, floating around on an unmanned ship.”
The HASC aide said the subcommittee recommends to the full committee funding to take an Expeditionary Fast Transport ship (EPF) and convert it to unmanned, since the Navy has said its solution to worries about the LUSV being armed is that it could start out being lightly manned until the Navy and lawmakers were comfortable enough with their ability to operate an unmanned adjunct magazine ship.
“That actually makes a lot more sense to us because right now you’re hearing them saying, well initially maybe they need to be lightly manned so we can have the people on there to really figure out how this is going to work. Well rather than go build a ship that is capable of housing lightly manned, why don’t you go and convert an existing ship that’s got all the plumbing and water necessary to have people on there, turn that into an unmanned ship and then learn from that, and then you can really warrant going and building a purpose-built unmanned ship” that could keep costs down by not including the habitability features needed for the crew.

The Navy has also discussed using lightly manned vessels for other purposes but has not elaborated on its plans, some of which are contained in two documents being held up by the secretary of defense.
The Navy has completed a long-range shipbuilding plan to accompany its FY 2021 budget request, as required by law, but Defense Secretary Mark Esper has not released that to lawmakers, pending further review by his office and newly sworn-in Navy Secretary Kenneth Braithwaite. Esper has also held up the release of an Integrated Naval Force Structure Assessment that outlines future plans by the Navy and Marine Corps to build existing and new platforms that can support their future forces in a future – likely distributed and fast-moving – fight.
The subcommittee requires the 30-year ship plan and typically threatens to fence off 25 percent of the Navy secretary’s travel funds if the plan isn’t submitted. In the FY 2021 NDAA language, though, the seapower subcommittee threatens to fence the defense secretary’s travel funds if the 30-year ship plan isn’t released, since Esper is the one blocking its release, the aide said.
The subcommittee would also ban the decommissioning of any Navy vessel until the Integrated Naval FSA is released, the aide said.

Though more information will become available next week when the bill’s funding tables are released, the staffer said the subcommittee recommends buying one Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine, two Virginia-class attack submarines, two Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, one frigate and two towing and salvage ships. This is one more Virginia SSN than the Navy asked for, and more than Senate Armed Services Committee provided for in their bill.
The HASC aide said that SASC claimed to pave the way for a 10th Virginia sub in the block buy by including advance procurement (AP) funding for an additional boat in their bill. But the HASC aide explained that “that’s not what they’ve done. They added AP (for) a second submarine in FY 21 that has already had all its advance procurement funded previously, so there’s no additional AP required. The only thing that that money would do if it was appropriated would be for a third reactor sometime in the future, which doesn’t seem to make sense; if you don’t feel like you can fund one in this year where we’ve already invested a billion dollars for FY 21’s second boat, it doesn’t lead you to believe you would ever have some other time to add a third boat sometime in the future on top of the two per year.”
Future of the Fighter Fleet

An F/A-18F Super Hornet, from the “Fighting Redcocks” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 22 breaks the sound barrier during a change of command ceremony aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz (CVN-68) on May 29, 2020. US Navy Photo
In the HASC tactical air and land forces subcommittee, lawmakers would fence off a portion of Navy and Air Force funds for Next Generation Air Dominance research and development until the services clue lawmakers in on what they want to see from their next-generation fighters.
The Navy has said it wants to stop F/A-18E-F Super Hornet production at the end of its current multiyear contract with Boeing, which ends in FY 2021. After that, the Navy wants to divert its attention and resources to developing the next fighter that will eventually replace the Super Hornets. The Navy has taken several stabs at this over the years and still isn’t clear on what this manned, unmanned, optionally manned or manned/unmanned teaming program might look like.
“When they field their capabilities, we just want to make sure that they’ve thought them through, that the department has determined that they are affordable, and that anything else that’s already in the budget into the future that’s high priority as well is not going to get pushed out unintentionally if they have unexpected cost growth or run into problematic issues when they field the capabilities,” a committee aide said when asked by USNI News what concerns the subcommittee had about the Navy’s NGAD plans.

On the topic of the F-18 production line, a committee aide said that “the production line issue is really a Fiscal Year ‘22 issue in terms of whether or not the Navy begins to turn it off,” and that this year’s FY 2021 bill doesn’t address the topic yet – though a second aide suggested that the full-committee bill, set for release next week, could lay the groundwork for keeping the line open.
“Knowing that most of the committees are probably going to give the Navy an indication of where they would like to go for the production line, that’s something we can look at and address next year if necessary if the Navy doesn’t line up with congressional desire,” the first aide said.

In the readiness subcommittee, lawmakers have taken an interest in the Shipyard Infrastructure Optimization Plan (SIOP), a 20-year plan to make the Navy’s four public shipyards more modern and efficient in their work supporting the carrier and submarine fleets. The subcommittee asks the Navy for briefings every six months on planning and executing the many projects that fall under the SIOP, and the full committee may look at creating a separate funding line for SIOP instead of lumping it in with military construction to give it more visibility, an aide said.

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House Defense Bill Pushes Hypersonic Weapons for Zumwalt Destroyers, Slows LUSV Procurement - USNI News

The World Is Awakening to China’s Sharp Power

China’s sharp power first began to be displayed in Hong Kong. Now it is seen all over the world.



By Simon Shen

June 23, 2020

Credit: Illustration by Catherine Putz
A term coined by Juan Pablo Cardenal in 2017, “sharp power” is wielded by authoritarian regimes to “manipulate and co-opt culture, education systems, and media.” This approach takes advantage of the asymmetry between free and unfree systems, allowing regimes to limit free expression and distort political environments in democracies while simultaneously shielding their country from outside influence. China’s foreign policy has transitioned in recent years from attraction-based soft power to sharp power, leveraging its economic might. The world’s democracies have felt the pain of China’s sharp power over the issues of the Hong Kong protests, Uyghur internment camps, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. However, China is unlikely to withdraw this foreign policy because of the domestic climate, fueling further tensions in its relationship with the United States and other democracies.

Before China’s breach into the West, Hong Kong was the test site for sharp power. When the Hong Kong entertainment industry reached its pinnacle in the 1990s, Cantonese music icons were able to co-host the June Fourth 10th anniversary Memorial Vigil with no political repercussions. Similarly, the late Taiwanese diva Teresa Teng, despite being labeled as a Chinese “traitor” for her politically sensitive songs, was invited by China to perform in the 1980s. Politics rarely got in the way of individual liberty and artistic expressions for artists based outside mainland China.

The industry has changed dramatically since Hong Kong started co-producing films with China. Entertainers often have to publicly toe the nationalist party line to secure job opportunities. Any ambiguous comments or actions would be quickly labeled as “pro-Hong Kong independence” and “unpatriotic,” impacting not only young artists but also household names in the Mandarin-speaking world.

Over the years, China’s sharp power has smothered Hong Kong’s civil society, from the media to the business sector — supposedly protected by the “one country two systems” principle. Now China’s push for the national security law, bypassing the city’s legislature, drives the final nail in the coffin of Hong Kong’s autonomy.

Western countries initially welcomed China’s soft power approach until Beijing started funding China studies centers to influence opinions in academia. The most notable example are the Confucius Institutes (CI), educational organizations promoting Chinese language and culture. The lack of transparency in their financial transactions with host universities and their censorship of CCP-sensitive discussions on campuses have spurred CI closures around the globe.

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Other Chinese government-associated funding offers were rejected by American universities over infiltration concerns. In Australia, legislators with ties to the Chinese propaganda groups are under fire. The international community no longer considers China’s economic incentives harmless.

Most recently, the West senses a threat to national security as China propagandizes its success in controlling COVID-19. Many scholars believed that the international community would prioritize profit and Chinese market access, but this is no longer true when China crosses the line of national security. Its aggressive use of sharp power will unite democracies and set off a global backlash instead. After all, China is not the only superpower in the world.

China has been showing its true colors via a long list of bullying incidents. In just the past two years, China has targeted the NBA (over the Houston Rockets’ general manager’s tweet), Arsenal (over star player Mesut Özil’s message supporting Hong Kong’s protests), and a plethora of international businesses from airlines to banks for listing Taiwan as a country.

International brands could be banned from the market for stances, or even just their employees’ social media activities, that China sees as “hurting Chinese peoples’ feelings.” Conversely, Chinese brands would never suffer such consequences abroad for openly criticizing leaders or capitalism. The controversial market advantages resulting from Chinese governmental subsidies and potential intellectual property infringements further stoked the dissatisfaction in the West.

Furthermore, the incident of Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific Airlines was a wake-up call, revealing the danger of international companies operating under China’s supervision. Amid the Hong Kong anti-extradition protests, China pressured Cathay Pacific Airlines’ mother company Swire over staff members publicly supporting the protest, leading to layoffs and the resignation of CEO Rupert Hogg. As a result, a reputable corporation had its name tainted. It’s doubtful the United States and other European countries would allow Chinese corporations to continue unregulated while disadvantaging their firms.

During the Cold War, intelligence agencies in the West heavily monitored covert Soviet investments operating in the homeland. The current Chinese infiltration in Western enterprises and media is more widespread than that of the Soviet Union, as demonstrated by the global propaganda campaign amid the pandemic. The Chinese Communist Party is also pulling the strings of Chinese enterprises, both state-controlled ones and “private enterprises” that are now often run by CCP members. Founders of mega-corporations such as Jack Ma and Pony Ma had to step down from their executive positions. The West’s scrutiny of Chinese corporations will only ramp up after COVID-19 and become an important topic in the U.S.-China trade talks.

Under international pressure, a politically realistic country would have a wide range of policy responses available. China, however, is regressing to a Cultural Revolution-like era where the CCP Publicity Department and hardline nationalist factions dominate public discussions and force all areas, from economic activities to foreign policy, to conform to the unbending Party ideology.

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The Cultural Revolution was a campaign initiated by Mao Zedong 50 years ago to consolidate power and purge his political opponents by labeling them enemies of the state. Moderates were humiliated publicly by Red Guards for “opposing revolution.” Even then, there was some flexibility in leadership and policies. For example, despite a climate of strong anti-American sentiments, the public did not greet with hostility President Richard Nixon’s visit in 1972 to normalize the China-U.S. relationship. The CCP leadership also distanced themselves from the anti-imperialists in the 1967 riot in Hong Kong, and they did not pursue the extreme option of taking over Hong Kong either.

Today, hardline nationalism is more pervasive with the help of Chinese social media and, intriguingly, linked to the nationalist factions’ economic interest. Foreign businesses that enter China’s market are susceptible to their competitors’ smear campaign: a few online comments by nationalists labeling a business as “pro-Hong Kong protest” will give the business a difficult choice: remain silent and be boycotted in China, or publicly side with the CCP and lose its international reputation. This not only stifles economic vitality but also gives the nationalist factions sway over the economy.

The lack of diverse voices also limits policy options for the CCP leadership. The internet is locked behind the Great Firewall and censorship has marginalized liberal voices for a long time. The leadership may avoid the risks of taking middle-of-the-road policies in fear of backlash from the dominant nationalist interest groups. How the Hong Kong government failed to pursue moderate policies in the current worsening crisis is a cautionary tale.

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The world is heading toward a polarized tomorrow, with no end in sight for China’s sharp power policy.

Dr. Simon Shen is the Founding Chairman of GLOs (Glocal Learning Offices), an international relations start-up company. He also serves as an adjunct associate professor in the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and associate director of the Master of Global Political Economy Programme of the CUHK. The author acknowledges Jean Lin, Coco Ho, Stanley Ho, Daniel Cheng, Chris Wong and Alex Yap for their assistance in this piece.

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Who Guards the ‘Maritime Silk Road’?
Veerle Nouwens

June 24, 2020




As China expands its global maritime interests, all eyes are on its navy. But Western policymakers concerned over China’s military capabilities and expanding geopolitical role are missing another security solution altogether: Chinese private maritime security companies. Little is known about them, though it appears that the few companies with a public web presence primarily operate across the Indo-Pacific, recruit Chinese military veterans and foreigners alike, and offer a range of armed and unarmed vessel protection services. The foreign companies traditionally dominating this industry, such as G4S, are reportedly losing some of their appeal, with Chinese companies that operate abroad in search of more affordable services and a better cultural fit. By offering services to protect what China calls the Maritime Silk Road, Chinese private maritime security companies stand to capitalize on business opportunities that are “on brand” with Chinese government interests.

But it is clear that this nascent industry within China is in need of greater regulation and professionalization in order to avoid potentially destabilizing conduct at sea, as well as reputational damage and diplomatic incidents for China. Chinese policymakers have already realized this with regards to their land-based private security companies, and some Chinese industry representatives are already calling for greater regulation and professionalization in the maritime space. It would be a mistake to view this as a matter of pure commercial interest. While there is currently no known link between Chinese private maritime security companies and the government, the strategic value of protecting Chinese commercial maritime interests is significant. If the protection of Maritime Silk Road projects and trade falls to private maritime security companies, this helps the government avoid conflating its Belt and Road Initiative — which, the government argues, is a strictly economic endeavor — with strategic military interests. It also helps free up navy resources. The question of who guards the Maritime Silk Road is therefore equally about who guards the rest of China’s interests.


Protecting the Maritime Silk Road: The Case for Chinese Private Maritime Security Companies
The number of Chinese citizens, investments, and assets overseas continues to increase as President Xi Jinping further develops his flagship Belt and Road Initiative, which is composed of hard and soft connectivity projects that span every continent as well as cyberspace and outer space. China’s Maritime Silk Road project, which centers around port construction, international shipping, ocean governance, and more, is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, but official documents say very little about the protection of relevant investments and persons at sea or on coasts. Against this background, various actors have come into greater focus as potential protectors of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Given that the primary geographic focus of the Maritime Silk Road covers vital sea lanes of communication across the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and the Pacific, speculation has grown that this responsibility will primarily fall on the People’s Liberation Army Navy. This is a reasonable assumption. Since 2008, the Chinese navy has participated in United Nations-mandated anti-piracy patrols in the “high-risk area” for piracy in and around the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters. It is equipped to undertake a range of responsibilities, from responding to the hijacking of commercial vessels to non-combatant evacuation of citizens, such as from war-torn Yemen in 2015. Chinese policy guidelines also point toward a potential role for the Chinese navy in protecting aspects of the Belt and Road Initiative. Since Beijing’s 2003 white paper on the “Diversified Use of the Chinese Armed Forces,” successive national defense white papers have indicated that the Chinese navy would take an increasingly prominent role in maritime escorts and evacuations of overseas citizens.

Complete reliance on the Chinese navy may be difficult and expensive given the vast expanse of Chinese interests around the world. But Beijing continues to invest in modernizing and professionalizing its armed forces with the aim of creating a modernized force with regional power-projection capabilities by 2035 and a world-class military by 2049. If commercial interest protection could be left to private security companies, the Chinese navy would be able to focus on more traditional sovereign-rights protection and military diplomacy. Moreover, in light of heightened Western concern over China’s militarily assertiveness under President Xi, the Chinese government has been at pains to emphasize that the Belt and Road Initiative is an economic initiative that is not underpinned by a military strategy. Interweaving the Chinese military into the Belt and Road Initiative would cause further scrutiny of China’s actions that the country cannot currently afford in its attempt to build its image as a benevolent and responsible global power.

Alternative options to the Chinese navy, of course, exist. Scholars like Andrew Erickson have examined the role of a Chinese blended civil-military effort for maritime security. This “maritime militia” integrates civilian assets into China’s military system to strengthen national defense capabilities, as seen in the South China Sea. However, in incidents like the 2014 standoff between a Vietnamese fisheries inspection vessel and Chinese state-owned commercial vessels, China has relied not only on the maritime militia but also on significant support from the China Coast Guard, which now falls under direct military command from the Central Military Commission. It remains an open question whether China would employ maritime militia forces, used to operating in waters claimed by China with which its personnel are deeply familiar, in distant oceans. And, while China has the world’s largest coast guard fleet, with some global-operations capability, it is not yet able to offer consistent security support far from China.

Thirdly, the security forces of host governments, such as those used in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, have not been seen as successful by some Chinese companies operating overseas in protecting their projects and personnel from high-level security risk. Indeed, in the case of Pakistan, the limits of such local security arrangements were highlighted in February 2018 when the general manager of COSCO Shipping Lines in Pakistan was killed in an attack in the port city of Karachi, while a bus of Chinese miners was attacked in Baluchistan province not long after.
Finally, well-established Western private security companies are considered financially unaffordable for Chinese companies, with foreign security services proving so costly that it has impacted the profitability of some Chinese businesses. Therefore, Chinese private maritime security companies offer a potentially cost-effective service specifically tailored to local business and culture.

A Patriotic Chinese Security Service
Little is known about Chinese private maritime security companies as these companies have a limited public presence. It is clear that the Chinese private maritime security company industry seeks to offer a tailored service for Chinese business. So far, however, China’s total private security company industry is estimated to only account for one-tenth of total spending by Chinese companies on overseas protection.
One reason for this is that while the number of Chinese private maritime security companies is growing, there are relatively few industry leaders. Hua Xin Security Services is one of them, representing the first Chinese maritime security company approved by the Chinese state to operate overseas. Another is Zhongjun Junhong Security Group “Sea Guards”, whose CEO Wu Guohua has over recent years sought to professionalize China’s overseas security service industry and has helped establish the China Overseas Security Association. Other companies actively promoting their services include Hanwei International Security Services, China Security Technology Group, and DeWei Security Group. There are likely more, but these companies offer a glimpse into this growing industry.

These companies offer a range of services, from armed and unarmed escort services for merchant ships and fishing vessels passing through the Gulf of Aden and Somali waters, as well as further along the Maritime Silk Road, to risk mitigation plans for vessels, personnel safety training before dispatch, real-time tracking, and security consulting (for example, regional security risk assessments). Private maritime security companies primarily orient their services towards Chinese enterprises operating abroad, offering them a recognizable and trusted Chinese service. Companies note their dependability in protecting their clients’ trade secrets. Foreign, non-Chinese competitors might not be so inclined to support the national cause. Another example of this is China Security Technology Group’s specific mention of high-tech services, such as real-time target monitoring through its Beidou satellite central control room. Beidou, China’s national global positioning system, offers navigational services to countries along the Belt and Road Initiative’s corridor. Bolstered by patriotic language, the information available on these companies’ websites and in news articles builds a wider picture of an industry committed to protecting Chinese businesses, citizens, and Belt and Road Initiative-projects overseas./



The industry’s patriotism extends to the recruitment pool as well, with companies hiring across China’s state security enterprise, including the army, navy, and police service. While both Hua Xin and China Security Technology Group stress that some of their security personnel have participated in the Chinese navy’s escort missions in the Gulf of Aden, others clearly value recruiting more widely from the Chinese navy or maritime-related forces. The Zhongjun Junhong Security Group’s maritime “Sea Guard” branch is specifically staffed by former Chinese military officers from the special forces, amphibious reconnaissance forces, and marine corps. The China Security Technology Group notes that it also recruits from the naval special warfare brigade. Hua Xin goes further and notes that 80 percent of the security personnel are members of the Communist Party of China.

Not all staff, however, are Chinese and there are indications that Chinese private maritime security companies are internationalizing to a greater extent than initially believed. China Security Technology Group employs third-country nationals, specifically Ukrainian and Nepalese nationals, as security guards. In addition, both China Security Technology Group and its “Sea Dragons” as well as Hua Xin have established local branches or joint ventures staffed by local employees. It is unclear, however, whether Chinese and foreign staff are given different responsibilities within companies.

continued



Chinese Private Maritime Security Companies Go Global
So far, Hua Xin is the only Chinese private maritime security company that has officially obtained permission to conduct armed escort missions overseas with the blessing of the Sri Lankan government and the Chinese Embassy in Sri Lanka. It has since reportedly obtained licenses from the national authorities of Djibouti and Egypt to conduct the same services, with other reports noting that Hua Xin has similar “bases” in these countries. For Hua Xin, these licenses appear to be used for escorting transits through the high-risk area off the coast of Somalia.
But it is not the only one to operate globally. Piracy, various articles note, is a global phenomenon and takes place in the Gulf of Guinea, Sulu Sea, Straits of Malacca, and Venezuela, among other places. The “Sea Guards” echo this, offering armed escorts in the Indian Ocean and along Africa’s west coast. China Security Technology Group has established branches or subsidiaries in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Algeria, Iraq, and Angola. Likewise, Hanwei International has established subsidiaries and office branches in Laos, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iraq, Nigeria, South Africa, and Papua New Guinea to support oil drilling platform guard services in addition to land-based projects. The services offered appear to be tailored to their local context. The “Sea Guards” offer unarmed escorts in the South China Sea and Malacca Strait, where the Junhong Group has established strategic alliances with national government agencies and security peers across Southeast Asia.

While private maritime security companies clearly operate far from Chinese shores, it is less clear how they are doing so. More information is needed on the legislation under which these companies operate in foreign countries. Indeed, some Chinese commentators note that while Beijing encourages Chinese companies to “go global” through the Belt and Road Initiative, it offers insufficient support to the private security sector. According to one article in China Security, a magazine for the Chinese security-service industry sponsored by the China Security Association, industry representatives claim that the lack of national guidance and regulation, licenses for armed services, or training on relevant laws and industry standards limits the ability of Chinese security companies operating overseas to professionalize to the standards of their Western competitors.

China’s Inadequate Legal Framework
So far, China has sought to manage the domestic security market. According to 2009 State Council legislation on domestic security companies providing armed services in China, private security companies are entirely under the control of the Ministry of Public Security and at least 51 percent of total registered capital must be state-owned. But this gave private security companies a measure of legal ambiguity when operating overseas. Additional regulations restricted the provision of domestic armed private security services. Such legislation includes the 2002 Regulations on the Use of Guns by Full-Time Guards and Escorts Operating within China, the aforementioned State Council legislation, and measures published in 2010 concerning State-issued Chinese Security Service Licenses.
In 2015, the Chinese government’s Maritime Safety Administration issued basic administrative measures that require Chinese-flagged ships sailing abroad through the Western Indian Ocean, off the coast of Somalia, or other areas subject to piracy to apply for a private armed security guard escort certificate. While unspecified by the regulation, a 2017 academic article in the Journal of Social Sciences clarified that the measures sought to regulate the contracting of foreign armed escort services on Chinese ships. Indeed, China’s Ministry of Commerce in 2018 offered further clarification. It noted that Chinese private security companies operating overseas are bound to the local laws and regulations of the country in which they operate. It also underscored that Chinese security personnel operating overseas can only perform security management and internal security duties, and must not conduct armed escorting or carry firearms while guarding.
However, the guidance is not a sufficient substitute for clear Chinese legislation, particularly in the private maritime security sector. Companies are therefore likely unaware of or ignoring their legal requirements in order to operate abroad.

A Non-Binding International Landscape
The international regulatory landscape is not much better, though several initiatives are worth mentioning.
For companies present in armed conflict, the intergovernmental Montreux Document on Private Military and Security Companies sets out obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law.
In its efforts to help regulate this industry, the Baltic International Maritime Council’s GUARDCON offers a standard contract for employing armed private security personnel. Some Chinese private maritime security companies recognize this certification because — though imperfect and non-binding — it helps build their reputation as professional companies. Hua Xin is currently the only Chinese private maritime security company certified by the International Code of Conduct Association, which describes its mission as “promoting responsible private security.” However, both Hanwei and China Security Technology Group are members of the Association and thereby committed to becoming certified.

Room for Maneuver and Error
Although these non-binding frameworks are a start, Chinese private military companies could easily and unwittingly break laws or purposefully exploit grey areas and loopholes. This is potentially already happening.
One article published by experts from Zhejiang University’s Center for Non-Traditional Security and Peaceful Development Studies notes that the lack of national regulations for private security companies operating firearms abroad is a significant hurdle that limits the type of services that can be offered to companies operating in territories with complex security environments.

Despite this, Chinese companies are clearly providing armed services by finding alternative solutions. While Hua Xin does so openly with the approval of the Chinese government, companies like Hanwei note that they have managed weapons entry or disembarkation operations in the ports of 19 littoral states across the Indian Ocean region. Little information is available on which regulations and laws were met in doing so.
A 2017 article in Caijing Magazine notes that the Chinese government did not regulate Chinese security companies operating overseas. Instead, these firms were only required to obtain a license from the country in which they are located if required by local law. Other Chinese private security companies, according to the article, simply formed temporary teams abroad, therefore avoiding any registration in China, after winning a contract through personal relationships or competitive underpricing.

Local subcontracting units offer another avenue for armed services. According to a Financial Times article, Chinese private security companies believe they can “borrow” weapons in emergencies. Recently updated guidance from the Baltic International Maritime Council underscored that the use of rented or borrowed weapons is illegal, as weapons are usually licensed to the end user, suggesting that this too may be happening onboard ships in cases of emergencies or to save operating costs.
Equally, little is known about Chinese private security companies’ use of floating armories — effectively, weapons storage vessels that lease out weaponry to security firms when firearms cannot enter or exit ports. As floating armories are not subject to any national or international laws and regulations, they benefit from a lack of oversight in how they, and the companies that use them, operate. This offers potentially another grey area that Chinese private maritime security companies, like others, are exploiting.

Shortcuts to providing armed services undercut the security companies that adhere to relevant laws and have chosen to implement the various standards and guidelines. Companies looking to circumvent legal requirements or recognized standards also run the risk of armed personnel conducting themselves unprofessionally at sea. This race to the bottom of Chinese private security companies has already prompted Chinese calls for stronger domestic and international regulation.

A Rising Tide for China’s ‘Sea Dragons’?
While Chinese private maritime security companies clearly offer more international services, Chinese observers stress that the sector still faces many challenges ahead. As a 2020 China Africa Research Initiative Working Paper notes, Chinese private maritime security companies will have to professionalize their services in logistics planning, armed executive protection, and maritime security in hostile environments. With relatively limited experience operating overseas, Chinese security personnel typically lack the necessary linguistic skills and understanding of foreign cultures needed to carry out missions abroad and compete effectively with more established Western private maritime security companies.
Moreover, few veterans will have experience in active combat situations. For those who participated in Chinese navy escort missions in the Gulf of Aden, these will have been governed by different rules when compared to the services provided by civilian and commercial enterprises. Clear rules for the use of force are therefore critical. One Chinese source asserts that Chinese private maritime security company maritime bodyguards can use lethal weapons to defend themselves when they encounter pirates, while the Chinese navy can only respond with warning shots unless their ship is directly attacked. This leaves the use of lethal force up to the discretion of the individual holding the weapon. What the Chinese navy has actually done vis-à-vis pirates when far from foreign eyes out at sea remains murky, but there is no public evidence of assertive rules of engagement.

By failing to better regulate and professionalize its private maritime security industry, China risks reputational damage or diplomatic incidents when armed private security companies operate in unfamiliar territory and without the relevant skills. Furthermore, the maritime domain brings with it added complexity when compared to land-based operations of private security companies. A ship on which a private security company operates, for instance, navigates a complex patchwork of legislation from the ship’s flag state, the port and coastal states whose waters it traverses, and the country of registration of the private maritime security company. The geographical area of operation has also expanded beyond that of the internationally regulated “high-risk area” around the coast of Somalia, leaving space for Chinese private maritime security companies to operate in areas with less regulation and oversight. These challenges are substantial and won’t be overcome easily. This is acknowledged by Chinese industry representatives and research experts in their calls for better regulation in Chinese domestic law for this sector, and for China to join the international community in ensuring binding regulations.

But Beijing also stands to gain more than simply damage control. The scale of the Maritime Silk Road projects and the security services that will be required necessitates a move away from relying solely on unaffordable foreign competitors, local security services, or a dependence on a navy still developing its “blue water” capability. Furthermore, the government is already at pains to point out that the Belt and Road Initiative is not part of a military strategic objective. Chinese private maritime security companies can therefore potentially provide a culturally recognizable, but also patriotic, service to protecting national commercial interests overseas. While there is no indication yet that the Chinese state seeks to direct or influence the operations of Chinese private maritime security companies, this may not be entirely ruled out in the future. Nevertheless, by relying more on the private sector and Chinese military veterans to handle commercial interest protection also helps free up Chinese navy resources for other more urgent tasks.

Despite the significant hurdles ahead, Chinese private maritime security companies are unlikely to sail into the sunset any time soon. Global policymakers monitoring Chinese maritime security actors should take note and closely monitor this nascent industry. However, more needs to be done. There remains a need for globally binding regulation and greater standardization in this sector. As efforts so far suggest, this is not an easy task. In the interim, policymakers should work with the Chinese government and Chinese industry to share lessons learned and best practices on setting national standards for private maritime security companies operating abroad and for those operating on vessels registered in their own country. While determining such best practices will likewise not be straightforward, as previous research shows a great variety of approaches to such regulation, continued engagement on this matter would be in China’s interest. Potential reputational damage and diplomatic incidents involving Chinese private security companies will continue to exist as long as Chinese companies feel there is money to be made and they are at liberty to operate abroad with little oversight. Finally, the operations of Chinese private maritime security companies operating in countries overseas requires greater transparency. Working with partners around the world in examining whether and how private maritime security companies, including those from China, are operating within their borders allows for more targeted policymaking responses. Ultimately, greater regulation, understanding, and transparency of the Chinese private maritime security sector is in everyone’s interest.

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Veerle Nouwens is a research fellow in the International Security Studies department of the Royal United Services Institute, focusing on geopolitical relations in the Asia-Pacific region. Her research interests include China’s foreign policy, cross-strait relations, maritime security, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.
Image: Lance Corporal J.J. Harper

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North Korea’s Anti-South Korea Campaign

• By: 38 North
• June 23, 2020
• Commentary

On June 16, North Korea demolished the inter-Korean liaison office in the Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC) with a dramatic explosion. The North’s move came just one week after severing all inter-Korean communication lines, and three days after Kim Yo Jong warned of “the useless north-south joint liaison office completely collap[sing].”[1] The liaison office, opened in September 2018, was a product of the Panmunjom Declaration adopted at the first Kim-Moon summit. Pyongyang’s physical destruction of this symbolic site was apparently an attempt to make a clean break with the Moon administration.


The demolition was followed by the Korean People’s Army’s (KPA) four-point action plan: redeploying troops to Mt. Kumgang and the KIC; reopening the guard posts along the border; beefing up forces along the border, including the maritime border; and supporting the North Korean people’s scattering of leaflets. If the plan is approved by the party’s Central Military Commission (CMC) and is implemented, it would be a further blow to inter-Korean reconciliation and the Panmunjom Declaration.[2] North Korea’s redeployment of troops to Mt. Kumgang and the KIC would be the first such occurrence since they were transformed into sites of inter-Korean economic cooperation approximately 20 years ago.[3]


Additionally, North Korea has reinstalled approximately 20 loudspeakers as of June 23, according to South Korean military sources. While this was not specifically part of the KPA’s announced four-point plan, the Panmunjom Declaration specifically prohibits the scattering of leaflets and use of loudspeakers along the Military Demarcation Line (MDL). The two Koreas removed their loudspeakers along the border in May 2018 as a follow-up to the first summit between Kim and Moon.


It is unclear how far the North will go to signal its break with South Korea, having left just enough room to de-escalate if and when it sees fit. The rhetoric has already taken a milder tone since the demolition of the liaison office, as it focuses instead on the nuisance of leaflet campaigns. Furthermore, its current propaganda campaign is unlikely to stop with just anti-South Korean actions. Recent North Korean Foreign Ministry statements about the status of US-DPRK relations provide an ominous sign that an anti-US campaign looms likely in the not-so-distant future.[4]


Built-In Offramps


North Korea’s rhetoric took a subtle but potentially meaningful turn on June 17, the day after the liaison office demolition. On the same day that the high-level North Korean statements presented unconditional warnings against the South, lower-level reports appeared to leave some room for flexibility in Pyongyang’s next steps. This does not mean they expressed a willingness to restart engagement with the Moon administration anytime soon, but rather a flexibility about how to modulate or end the ongoing anti-South Korea campaign.


A June 17 Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report on the liaison office demolition, for instance, said Pyongyang’s next steps will be determined by South Korea’s attitude: “Closely following the attitude of the south Korean authorities, we will set the intensity for carrying out successive action measures against the enemy and the time for decisive actions in response to their subsequent demeanor and conduct.”[5]


A separate June 17 KCNA report on Kim Yo Jong’s rejection of Seoul’s offer to send special envoys took a similar tone, implying the situation may depend on South Korea’s future actions:


Kim Yo Jong warned the south Korean authorities that they had better not try to give impression that they are trying something with the unrealistic proposal like the sending of special envoys, but take proper actions in return and calm down, strictly controlling words and acts of those fools who keep provoking us while adding fuel to fire without discernment of the worsening situation.[6]


The report also suggested the situation will not be an open-ended confrontation but will end when North Korea feels it has exacted a due price from Seoul.


Since those June 17 statements, North Korean rhetoric has, in general, taken a milder tone. Rather than following up with a KPA announcement or a report on a CMC meeting to discuss the KPA plan, which would have seemed the natural next step, state media shifted suddenly, just three days later, to preparations for an anti-South Korea leaflet campaign.[7] Beneath the language about the people’s soaring anger and resolve to turn out for leaflet-scattering operations, the main message remains mild compared to the first 12 days of the anti-South Korea campaign that started with Kim Yo Jong denouncing South Korean leaflets.[8]


The party’s United Front Department (UFD), which oversees inter-Korean relations, reaffirmed on June 20 that leaflets will be scattered as planned despite Seoul’s protest, stating that the inter-Korean agreement (Panmunjom Declaration) had “been already reduced to a dead document,” and that North Korea’s leaflet scattering will “not be bound to any agreement and principle.”[9]


However, while that language seemed to hint at abrogating the Panmunjom Declaration and possibly other inter-Korean agreements, North Korean media’s third-party news reports started citing South Korean civic groups calling on the Moon administration to implement the Panmunjom Declaration.[10] North Korea may have published these reports to leave open the possibility of returning to the Panmunjom Declaration at some point.


Notably, North Korea’s announcement of its next steps in phases, signaling flexibility based on response, is a departure from the norm. This is likely a way to maximize its options, giving itself room to make adjustments along the way. This phasing out of actions may also prove to be a tactic aimed at prolonging anti-South Korea sentiment at home while keeping the South Koreans on edge. Even if North Korea avoids a serious escalation of tensions, it is still unlikely to pursue further diplomacy with the Moon administration anytime in the near future.


Possible Next Steps


The KPA’s four-point action plan will be implemented if and when it is approved by the CMC, headed by Kim Jong Un. The KPA General Staff could simply issue a follow-up announcement, or North Korean media may report on Kim Jong Un presiding over a CMC meeting to discuss the plan. State media coverage of the KPA announcement or the CMC meeting will serve as a good indicator of North Korea’s intentions toward the ongoing anti-South Korea campaign.


Beyond what is stated in the KPA plan, there are several other areas where tensions could easily be triggered. For starters, a South Korean defector group claimed to have scattered 500,000 leaflets into North Korea on the night of June 22, defying South Korean government warning. North Korea has yet to react to this incident, but Pyongyang’s next steps could become harder-line in response to the latest leaf-scattering incident. The South Korean military’s response to the North’s leaflet-scattering operation also could trigger a harder-line response from North Korea.


Moreover, provocations along the MDL and in the Yellow Sea (West Sea), with or without North Korea’s formal abrogation of the inter-Korean military agreement, are possible. North Korean media coverage of South Korean military drills, a consistent point of contention from the North Koreans, has increased in recent weeks. For instance, a May 8 Ministry of People’s Armed Forces statement took issue with South Korea’s alleged violation of the inter-Korean military agreement in the Yellow Sea,[11]and Kim Jong Un guided frontline units’ artillery drills in March. Let’s not forget that Kim ordered soldiers to fire at an island detachment in the Yellow Sea on November 23, 2019, the ninth anniversary of Yeonpyeong Island shelling.[12]


Furthermore, North Korea will likely continue its testing of tactical weapons, namely artillery targeting South Korea. The rapid ascent of Pak Jong Chon, former KPA Artillery Bureau director and now the KPA General Staff chief, signals North Korea’s continued commitment to further developing, testing and perfecting artillery.


If history serves as any indicator, Pyongyang will eventually shift from its anti-South Korea campaign to the US. North Korea’s Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon already issued a statement on the second anniversary of the Singapore Summit that described the diplomatic window of opportunity as nearly closed due to many of the same grievances it has with Seoul.[13] North Korean media’s coverage of the US on June 25 will be a good indicator of how soon the North will start priming its populace for an anti-US campaign.

1. [1]
   See “KCNA Report on Cutting off All North-South Communication Lines,” KCNA, June 9, 2020; and “First Vice Department Director of WPK Central Committee Issues Statement,” KCNA, June 13, 2020.
2. [2]
   “Our Army Will Provide Sure Military Guarantee for All External and Internal Measures of Party and Government: Spokesman for KPA General Staff,” KCNA, June 17, 2020.
3. [3]
   Ibid.
4. [4]
   See “Our Message to U.S. is Clear: Ri Son Gwon, Minister of Foreign Affairs of DPRK,” KCNA, June 12, 2020; and “Press Statement by Director-General of Department of U.S. Affairs of Foreign Ministry of DPRK,” KCNA, June 13, 2020.
5. [5]
   “Ominous Prelude to Total Catastrophe of North-South Relations,” KCNA, June 17, 2020.
6. [6]
   “S. Korean Authorities Plead for Accepting Special Envoys,” KCNA, June 17, 2020.
7. [7]
   See “Preparations for Distributing Leaflets towards South Pushed forward,” KCNA, June 20, 2020; “Leaflet-scattering against South Will Not Be Bound to Any Agreement and Principle,” KCNA, June 20, 2020; and “KCNA Report on Planned Distribution of Leaflets against Enemy,” KCNA, June 22, 2020.
8. [8]
   “Kim Yo Jong Rebukes S. Korean Authorities for Conniving at Anti-DPRK Hostile Act of ‘Defectors from North,’” KCNA, June 4, 2020.
9. [9]
   “Leaflet-scattering against South Will Not Be Bound to Any Agreement and Principle,” KCNA, June 20, 2020.
10. [10]
    See “South Korean authorities hit for their attitude toward implementation of inter-Korean declarations,” Voice of Korea, June 18, 2020; and “Stop to Reckless Move of ‘Defectors from North’ Demanded in S. Korea,” Rodong Sinmun, June 22, 2020.
11. [11]
    “Spokesperson for Ministry of People’s Armed Forces of DPRK Blames S. Korean Military for Its Reckless Military Provocation,” Rodong Sinmun, May 8, 2020.
12. [12]
    “Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un Inspects Changrin Islet Defence Detachment,” Rodong Sinmun, November 25, 2019.
13. [13]
    “Our Message to U.S. is Clear: Ri Son Gwon, Minister of Foreign Affairs of DPRK,” KCNA, June 12, 2020.

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Iran’s Latest Misadventure Destabilizes the Caucasus
Stephen Blank

June 18, 2020




While still engaged in conflicts from Syria to Yemen, Iran is now destabilizing a dispute in the Caucasus that you’ve likely never heard of — the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Recently, Azerbaijan discovered that Iranian trucks are supplying energy to the self-proclaimed Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh, the province that Armenia captured in 1993 and which remains in dispute to this day.
Until recently, Iran was officially neutral on the issue of the disposition of Nagorno-Karabakh, and recognized that it was a province of Azerbaijan. This posture came despite the fact that Iranian policy towards Azerbaijan has been tense throughout the post-Soviet period, and it has been a steadfast partner to Armenia. Tehran’s stance was influenced by its own fears of a breakaway or secessionist Azeri minority in northwestern Iran. Indeed, Lt. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, Iran’s chief of General Staff, openly stated that Karabakh is Azeri territory and that changing borders by force is unacceptable.
Iran’s position on Nagorno-Karabakh has now changed, with troubling implications for regional security. Rather than supporting Armenia and seeking better ties with Azerbaijan — Tehran had even offered to mediate the conflict in the past — Iran has now shown that it is willing to undercut Azeri interests and the shaky truce with Armenia. Since outbreaks of fighting in the Caucasus could easily engulf both Russia and Turkey, this kind of meddling is provocative and a threat to regional stability.


Iran’s Shift on Nagorno-Karabakh
In April, Iranian trucks, bearing Iranian license plates, crossed into Nagorno-Karabakh and supplied the local population there with food, energy, and other products. These shipments are probably not the first ones undertaken by Tehran in violation of its own recognition of Karabakh as Azeri territory. Iranian officials, including from the Iranian embassy in Azerbaijan, denied the whole story, claiming that it was “fake news” generated by some separatist pro-Azeri opponent of the Iranian regime. Tehran’s actions and subsequent denials provoked a backlash from the Azeri government and public opinion.
Despite Iran’s claims that it is not recognizing Nagorno-Karabakh (or “Artsakh” as the Armenians call it) as an independent state or part of Armenia, bilateral cooperation with Armenia has grown since 2016. By that time, Iran was already building the Khudaferin high power plant on its border with Nagorno-Karabakh. Commenting on a 2018 interview with Nagorno-Karabakh’s Foreign Minister, Masis Mailyan, one account observed that Iran’s cooperation with Nagorno-Karabakh is mutually advantageous. Iran used to inform Azerbaijan about such activities — that no longer appears to be the case.

It’s likely that Iran’s cooperation with the government in Nagorno-Karabakh on energy shipments has been going on for some time, and that Armenia’s government has supported this cooperation as part of its larger relationship with Iran. That would implicate Yerevan — Armenia’s capital — in this break with international norms. Such cooperation also opens the door to Iranian transshipments of weapons and drugs to and through Karabakh that would also contravene international law. This would represent a major escalation, and constitute a serious threat to Azerbaijan. Since Iran shows a willingness to jeopardize its relations with Azerbaijan — and given its weapons and missile proliferation to its clients like the Houthi in Yemen — it’s plausible that Tehran might ship weapons to allies in Nagorno-Karabakh.
By extending this collaboration with Iran, Armenia places its generally good ties with Washington at risk. Abetting energy flows out of Iran while it is under American sanctions will jeopardize Yerevan’s ties with the United States and its access to the global financial system. Such a move would test the forbearance of the U.S. government, which recently showed special understanding to Armenia in regard to its economic ties to Iran and did not impose sanctions upon it regarding trade with Iran.

Implications for U.S. Interests
Iran’s behavior in the Caucasus has implications for U.S. interests. Tehran’s willingness to risk relations with Azerbaijan — with whom it has tried to establish a rapprochement since 2012 — represents a destabilizing new direction in Iranian foreign policy. Absent an American response, Iran may conclude that it can destabilize this region with impunity. Since Iran demonstrates a more cautious approach to countries on its border than with more distant theaters, this gambit suggests a greater tolerance for risk than many have hitherto believed.
Therefore, Iran may take more risks in regions where U.S. interests are more directly engaged, like the Middle East. Iran’s continuing nuclearization — and its refusal to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit certain sites — and its probes in Iraq and Syria highlight that trend. Although the United States killed Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January, the architect of much of Iran’s foreign adventurism, clearly Iran will not desist and is likely planning even bigger probes. More probes like this one against Azerbaijan are likely to occur sooner rather than later.

Developments in the Caucasus highlight the costs of the neglect that has characterized Washington’s approach to the region for over a decade. The United States has an interest in pacifying the region and helping countries escape the shadow of both Russian power and Iranian-supported terrorism. It also has a longstanding interest in supporting democracy as it supported Armenia’s democratic revolution in 2018. Lastly, the United States has an interest in maximizing energy flows from the Caspian Sea to Russia to sustain local governments and reduce Russian leverage on the Caucasus and Europe. When former National Security Advisor John Bolton traveled to Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in 2018, it was notable because visits from high-level American officials to the region are so infrequent. While there, Bolton offered U.S. arms sales to Armenia. In response, Armenia publicly spurned U.S. cooperation. Moreover, the country appears to be undergoing democratic backsliding, with the arrest of the oligarch and critic of the regime Gagik Tsarukyan, and its defiance of all efforts to negotiate peace in Nagorno-Karabakh.

It behooves Washington to pay more attention to this conflict, and the Caucasus more broadly, because a flare-up of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict could draw in Russia and Turkey. In 1993, the dispute almost led to a Russo-Turkish conflagration. Armenia could unsettle the region if it tries to hold on to what is universally recognized as Azeri territory. Since it appears to be conniving with Iran to sustain Nagorno-Karabakh — and ultimately incorporate it into Armenia — its policies should be exposed, or it should be induced to retract them at the risk of a major U.S. effort to support Azerbaijan’s. Such a threat might actually lead Yerevan to make peace now rather than bear the ever-higher costs of its current policies. And it would also have the benefit of exposing and thus minimizing Iran’s profile in the Caucasus.

Looking Ahead
Iran’s evolving position on the Nagorno-Karabakh dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan injects a new, destabilizing factor in the Caucasus. Tehran’s actions in the region will prove toxic for its ties with Azerbaijan. It will also demonstrate that Iran is a destabilizing force, not only in the Middle East and the Gulf, but also in the Caucasus. Armenia is left in a difficult position, as it could be seen as complicit with Iran and an accessory to evading U.S. sanctions.
Tehran’s new posture in the Caucasus is almost certainly not a one-off. It is therefore worth asking if this newest revelation of Iran’s destabilizing behavior will elicit a response from Washington. If so, the United States should support Azerbaijan’s ability to defend its interests. If that comes to pass, then something positive might actually emerge from this whole unhappy episode.

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Stephen Blank is an internationally recognized expert on Russian foreign and defense policies and international relations across the former Soviet Union. He is also a leading expert on European and Asian security, including energy issues. Since 2020 he has been a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute www.fpri.org. From 2013-2020 he was a Senior Fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council, www.afpc.org. From 1989-2013 he was a Professor of Russian National Security Studies at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College in Pennsylvania. Dr. Blank has been Professor of National Security Affairs at the Strategic Studies Institute since 1989. In 1998-2001 he was Douglas MacArthur Professor of Research at the War College.
Image: Maxim atayants

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With assault on Iraq, Turkey and Iran cement a partnership in crime



Updated 22 June 2020
David Romano
June 21, 2020 22:36
11746

• Turkey and Iran condemned for violating Iraq’s sovereignty with attacks on country’s northern Kurdish areas
• Apparently coordinated assault seen as fresh attempt to assert joint hegemony over the Middle East

MISSOURI, USA: Over the past 10 days, Turkey and Iran have launched a series of apparently coordinated air strikes and artillery barrages on Kurdish targets in northern Iraq.
The strikes included attacks on areas at the Iraqi-Turkish border, where Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militants remain active; Yazidi areas near Sinjar on the Iraqi-Syrian border; and areas on the Iraqi-Iranian border, where the PKK and a number of other Iranian Kurdish opposition groups have a presence.

International law appears to be of very limited use here. Both Turkey and Iran claim they are engaged in legitimate self-defense against Kurdish parties launching incursions against them from Iraqi Kurdistan.
Turkey in particular blames the PKK for a series of recent bombings in areas of predominantly Kurdish northern Syria, occupied by Turkish troops.

By contrast, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the UAE view the strikes as a clear violation of Iraqi sovereignty. From the Arab perspective, Turkey and Iran are brazenly flexing their muscles as if to remind Mustafa Al-Kadhimi, Iraq’s new prime minister, who the real regional powers are.
Iraq and the Kurdistan Regional Government of Iraq remain too weak to do anything about the strikes, and the rest of the world appears silent on the issue.



Syrian Arab and Kurdish civilians flee with their belongings amid Turkish bombardment on Syria's northeastern town of Ras al-Ain on October 9, 2019. (AFP file photo)
Turkish special forces were airlifted into border areas to conduct ground operations there. For the first time, Turkey also appears to have used its air force to strike Kurdish targets on the Iraqi-Iranian border area of Haji-Omran rather than just the Turkish-Iraqi border.

While used to Iranian shelling, Haji-Omran never fell under Turkish crosshairs before this month. Iran in turn appears to have targeted its artillery at the PKK, which remains Turkey’s primary enemy, rather than just against Iranian-Kurdish parties.
In the Duhok region near the Turkish-Iraqi border, at least four civilians were reportedly killed in the strikes, while other casualty reports trickled in from the Iraqi-Iranian border.
Turkish military officials released a statement claiming to have killed a number of PKK fighters, rather than civilians, in strikes on some 150 different PKK targets.

The Erbil-based news agency Rudaw reports that of the 264 villages in Sidakan district alone, “118 have been emptied due to Turkish airstrikes and Iranian artillery targeting guerillas of the PKK and other Kurdish insurgent groups.”
Anger over the attacks erupted in Iraqi Kurdistan, and the government in Baghdad lodged protests with both Turkey and Iran over the attacks. But in this part of the Middle East, authoritarian leaders operate with impunity on the principle of “might is right.”
With regular projections of military power and occupation forces in Iraq, Syria, Cyprus and now even Libya, Turkey in particular is intent on throwing its weight around in the region.
Ankara’s message appears to be that it will act forcefully wherever and whenever it wishes, with Turkish naval ships in the Mediterranean now even engaging in brinksmanship over gas deposits there.

Ambiguities in international law notwithstanding, the strikes on Iraq seem unlikely to accomplish anything apart from harming hapless civilians in the area.
Turkey and Iran have been launching attacks on these very mountainous Iraqi-Kurdish border areas for the last 30 years, with little to show for them beyond placating Turkish and Persian nationalist sentiment at home.
Neither Ankara, nor Tehran nor Iraqi Kurdish authorities can dislodge the PKK and various Iranian-Kurdish opposition groups from such mountainous terrain. The rebel groups will not suddenly surrender and end their campaigns as a result of air strikes and artillery barrages.

In the meantime, local Kurdish farmers and shepherds suffer from being caught in the crossfire of such conflict. Embattled and impoverished Kurds need more than words of support in such circumstances, but little seems forthcoming from the international community.
US President Donald Trump in particular could not care less about such attacks on Kurdish opposition groups. Although many in the Pentagon value a close relationship with the Kurds, they play a limited role in US policymaking, a fact most recently confirmed by Trump’s former National Security Adviser John Bolton in his White House memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”


During the past year, influential voices within the US Department of State even argued for closer cooperation with Turkey as a means of containing Iran. This likely formed part of President Trump’s logic when he betrayed Syrian Kurdish groups to a Turkish onslaught in October of 2019.
The whole notion of partnering with Turkey to contain Iran appears utterly ridiculous to most informed observers of the region. Turkey and Iran behave as allies more often than not. Turkish officials and business leaders helped Iran evade sanctions for years, and even now Ankara opposes renewed US sanctions on Iran.

One never hears reports of Turkish-Iranian tensions on their mutual border. Turkey and Iran also both appear increasingly beholden to Moscow. As the Arab world saw during the past week, Turkey and Iran even collaborate closely against Kurdish targets in joint military operations.
This leaves only a few differences between Ankara and Tehran, including backing different sides in the Syrian civil war and competing for influence over Iraq (a competition that Iran has largely won).
These differences are easily manageable within a relationship in which both sides share so much in common, from the increased role of religion in both regimes to their shared antipathy towards the US and the West.



An Iraqi Kurdish woman in Sulaimaniyah at a protest against the Turkish assault on northern Iraq. Below, a Kurdish female volunteer from the newly formed Community Protection Forces. (AFP)
When Turkey was under different leadership before 2002, one might have reasonably considered Ankara as a bulwark against Iranian expansionism. Today, in contrast, they look more like comrades in arms, engaged in a little friendly competition on the side.

One thing about the Iranian-Turkish relationship remains as true now as it did in the past — their common opposition to any Kurdish political gains in the region. While Turkey’s anti-Kurdish perspective appears more candid, Iran’s is probably no less strong.
Neither wants their own Kurdish populations to aspire to any sort of autonomy or political and social improvement, which in turn justifies attacks on Kurdish groups in neighboring states as well.
When in October 2017 the Iraqi Kurds held a referendum on independence, for instance, Ankara and Tehran had little trouble speaking with one voice against them.

Many in the Arab world, in contrast, appear to have an evolving perspective regarding the Kurds. Although few in the Arab world favor Kurdish secession from Iraq or Syria, the prospect of Kurdish political gains is not anathema to the Arab world as it once was.
During the recent Turkish and Iranian strikes on Iraqi Kurdistan, voices in the Arab world were among the only ones speaking out on behalf of Iraq and the Kurds.
-------------------
• David Romano is Thomas G. Strong professor of Middle East politics at Missouri State University

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With assault on Iraq, Turkey and Iran cement a partnership in crime

China is Building an Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Capability

June 24, 2020






China has developed three methods to use electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons that could attack the US electrical grid and be used as a first strike capability that likely aims to reduce US Homeland defenses before China conducts a full-scale attack. According to a US Congressional report by the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security, China has developed three methods for delivering specialized nuclear weapons capable of delivering a massive electromagnetic pulse that would knock out US electrical systems as a prelude to a full-scale attack.

1.) A "Super EMP," which is a nuclear warhead designed to maximize the electromagnetic shock wave, rather than a raw destructive power that is typical with a traditional weapon.

2.) A hyper-sonic weapon that travels so fast enemy air defenses cannot intercept it. China is believed to have created at least two hyper-sonic weapons and a video from earlier this year showed China testing a hyper-sonic nuclear DF-26 missile that can travel at speeds that reach mach 18.

3.) The third option involves China mounting EMP nuclear weapons on satellites in orbit enabling it to attack and cripple US military satellites. However, this option appears to be theoretical and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) likely does not have the capability to carry out this method at this time.

The report also calls China's "No First Use" doctrine to be almost certainly disinformation because the policy “does not withstand the test of common sense.” The Task Force believes China would need to adopt a first strike policy because it does not have the same level of ballistic missile early-warning systems that the US has and its nuclear arsenal is much smaller--estimated at 320 nuclear warheads as of January 2020. Therefore, Chinese military capabilities would be greatly reduced by a first strike from the US.

However, this inferiority to US military power may change over the next 10 - 20 years as many China watchers have observed the PLA steadily upgrading its overall military capability. China has been modernizing its ballistic missile arsenal by upgrading its missile forces in number, type, and capability, according to the Center for Strategic International Studies (CSIS). The DC-based think tank believes China has the most active and diverse ballistic missile development program in the world. Additionally, a series of Pentagon war games in May found that China would defeat the US Navy in a sea war by 2030 because of its improving ballistic missile capability. The graphic from CSIS below highlights China's growing arsenal of ballistic missiles.




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Cruise Missile Test Affirms Iran’s Regime Is Committed to Belligerence Despite Risks

Written by Alejo Vidal Quadras
25th June 2020



By: Alejo Vidal-Quadras
On Thursday 18th of June, Iranian state media declared that the country’s naval forces had carried out a successful test of a domestically produced cruise missile, striking targets as far away as 280 kilometers in the Sea of Oman and northern parts of the Indian Ocean. The codename for this military exercise, “Ramadan Martyrs”, made reference to an incident that occurred 40 days earlier during another exercise, when 19 Iranian sailors were killed and 15 were injured in a case of friendly fire.

This operation clearly signified the Iranian regime’s commitment to proceeding with its military buildup and attempted intimidation of foreign adversaries, regardless of risks stemming both from those adversaries and from the deficiencies in Iran’s own military technology and operational readiness. Iran’s regime has been making every effort to downplay those deficiencies in recent months, and the commentary surrounding Operation Ramadan Martyrs carried on this trend while also directing veiled threats against the United States and its allies.

Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, the commander of the Iranian Navy, declared that the development of weapons like the newly tested cruise missile makes the regime capable of repelling “any threat.” Deputy Defense Minister, Ghasem Taghizadeh, emphasized meanwhile that such development was ongoing and that the regime was committed to designing “state-of-the-art equipment” for domestic manufacture.
Such statements potentially serve as advance dismissal of prospective restrictions on Iran’s ongoing military buildup, which has generally relied on domestic activities along with some illicit imports from close allies. Broader imports have been obstructed by a United Nations arms embargo on Iran, but this is set to expire in October unless the US and its leading European allies find a way to extend it in the face of opposition from fellow permanent UN Security Council members Russia and China.

The US has lately insisted that the embargo should be extended indefinitely and that view has acquired more and more international support as tensions have continued to rise between the Iranian regime and its adversaries, both in the immediate region and in the West. The cruise missile demonstration is likely to contribute even further to the relevant anxieties, especially given that Iran’s brinksmanship with the US has begun to drift beyond the waters of the Persian Gulf.
Over the past several years, the regime has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz in response to actual or perceived offenses from Western forces. And during that same time, the military and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have attempted to showcase their readiness to enforce such a closure in various ways. These include close approaches of US warships by much smaller but faster IRGC attack boats, plus at least one military exercise in which swarms of missiles, boats, and helicopters demonstrated how Iran would supposedly be able to destroy an American aircraft carrier.

Early this month, it was reported that Iran’s Navy appeared to be preparing to re-run that exercise, having refurbished its rough mock-up of a Nimitz-class carrier near its southern coast. However, that fact also underscored the limitations of the earlier demonstration, which evidently failed to sink the mock-up despite it being smaller than the real thing and having no maneuverable or defensive capabilities. While these deficiencies are important to any realistic assessment of Iran’s prospects in a direct confrontation with the US, they are perhaps only incidental to an Iranian regime that is more focused on militarist propaganda than on actual readiness for conflict.

Tehran’s boasting has often reached absurd dimensions, as on the multiple occasions when naval officials have proclaimed the military’s intention to develop nuclear submarines and dispatch a flotilla to the Gulf of Mexico. No informed person takes these sorts of claims seriously, yet the regime uses them in hopes of projecting an image of strength during purely political confrontations with its adversaries. The notion of sending military forces to the American coast became especially relevant in April when five Iranian tankers began a long journey to Venezuela, laden with gasoline, as part of an effort to defy the pressures being exerted by the US on both countries.

The Iranian vessels entered Venezuela’s territorial waters at a time when the US Navy was present nearby, reportedly on a drug interdiction mission. This prompted widespread speculation about possible efforts to obstruct the tankers’ progress, though the US ultimate decline to take such action. Iran now seems poised to risk confrontation once again, as officials have begun to tease the possibility of sending two or three cargoes of gasoline to Venezuela each month.

In reporting on this, Reuters noted that this Venezuela policy was reportedly being directed primarily by the IRGC. Iran’s hardline paramilitary has long promoted particularly belligerent relations with Western democracies and it has been steadily gaining more influence over Iranian regime. The regime’s policy toward Venezuela is therefore part of a much larger pattern that encourages more military demonstrations and procurement, but risks ultimately overstepping the line into unintentional conflict with much larger and better equipped forces.


Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a professor of atomic and nuclear physics, was vice-president of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2014. He is President of the International Committee In Search of Justice (ISJ)


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Trump says US moving some troops from Germany to Poland after Duda meeting


Issued on: 25/06/2020 - 10:34
Modified: 25/06/2020 - 10:34


Poland's President Andrzej Duda listens to US President Donald Trump during a joint news conference in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, DC on June 24, 2020. © Carlos Barria, Reuters

Text by: FRANCE 24


President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States plans to move some troops from Germany to Poland, speaking as he hosted Polish leader Andrzej Duda at the White House just four days ahead of Poland’s election.




“We are going to be reducing our forces in Germany” from 52,000 to 25,000 troops, Trump said after an Oval Office meeting with his populist ally Duda.
“Some will be coming home and some will be going to other places,” Trump said. “Poland would be one of those other places.”
Duda called it a “very reasonable decision” and said he had asked Trump not to withdraw US troops from Europe “because the security of Europe is very important to me”.
Asked what kind of a message the redeployment sends to Russia, Trump said: “I think it sends a very strong signal.”

Duda’s meeting with Trump came just four days before voters in Poland decide on Sunday whether to give him a second term, and the timing of the meeting was criticised by his opponents as an attempt to gain a pre-election windfall.
Trump, who is seeking to demonstrate that the coronavirus pandemic – which has damaged his own re-election chances – is abating was lavish with his praise of Duda.

pic.twitter.com/uVyINiSqH0
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 24, 2020

Click to expand...

The meeting was Trump’s first with a foreign leader since the Covid-19 pandemic, which has left more than 121,000 people dead in the United States, hit in March.
“President Duda is doing very well in Poland,” Trump said following the third Oval Office meeting between the two men. “He’s doing a terrific job.”
Responding to critics of the timing, Trump said “the people of Poland think the world of him.”
“I don’t think he needs my help,” Trump said.

‘Troubled’
The main aim of the Polish side ahead of the visit was a boost in US military assistance – a constant demand from Warsaw, particularly since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Trump did not provide any figures for how many US troops would be shifted from Germany to Poland.
He also repeated his frequent accusation that Germany is not paying its fair share of NATO’s defense budget.
According to the Polish newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, 30 US F-16 fighter jets stationed in Germany could be moved to Poland along with some 2,000 troops.
NATO promised Russia in 1997 not to set up permanent bases in the former eastern bloc.
As tensions have grown however, the alliance has rotated troops through frontline countries.

President @AndrzejDuda after the meeting with President @realDonaldTrump: strengthening of military cooperation between Poland & the US is of crucial importance to the security of the European Union, the eastern flank of @NATO and most importantly to the security of Poland. pic.twitter.com/gpGrSWYtxs
— PLinNATO (@PLinNATO) June 24, 2020

Click to expand...

Even though the US troops would still be rotated under any scenario, Polish officials have raised the prospect of a more permanent US presence – perhaps in a facility paid for by Warsaw dubbed “Fort Trump”.
German Defense Minister Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer alluded to the agreement with Russia in an interview with the Atlantic Council on Wednesday.
“If for example US troops in Europe are moved to Poland, this must be done with the NATO-Russia pact in mind,” she said. “We must not lose sight of this point.”

The right-wing Duda, who is backed by the governing Law and Justice party, is the current frontrunner in Poland’s election – but the centrist europhile opposition candidate Rafal Trzaskowski has been catching up in the polls.
Trump is also facing a tough re-election battle and is struggling in the polls as he comes under fire for his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and the nationwide protests for racial justice.
A New York Times/Siena College poll published on Wednesday had his Democratic opponent Joe Biden with a 14-point lead among registered voters.
US Representative Marcy Kaptur, a Democrat from Ohio who co-chairs the Congressional Poland Caucus, condemned the decision to host Duda at this time.



“As a Polish-American and someone who deeply values the US-Poland relationship, I am troubled by President Trump’s inappropriate efforts to insert himself into Polish domestic politics and boost President Duda’s reelection with a White House visit,” Kaptur said in a statement.

“Unfortunately, President Trump’s invitation is not surprising given his favorability toward strongmen and those who undermine democratic institutions,” Kaptur said.

The timing of the visit was also criticised by Molly Montgomery of the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, DC.

“No US president should meet a foreign leader – friend or foe – mere days before she or he stands for election,” Montgomery said. “To do so undermines Poland’s democratic processes and our own values.”

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Who Is Winning the US-China Power Battle?


A global pandemic has, in a matter of months, changed the discourse on global order and U.S.-China great power competition.



By Monish Tourangbam and Anand. V

June 24, 2020

Credit: Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead
In a championship match, the stakes are always higher for the reigning champion trying to defend the title, compared to the contender, who has less to lose and more to gain with an upset win. Even when the match is a draw, there is more to lose for the champion in terms of status and position. In the U.S.-China great power tussle, it needs no explanation as to who is the defending champion and who is the contender for the top spot in the international system.

The United States has much to uphold to save the foundations of the post-war security and financial order that it engineered, the so-called liberal international order. From its old alliances and new partners in the Indo-Pacific to its long-running transatlantic alliances, from its hemispheric influence in the Americas to saving its assets in an uncertain Middle East and maintaining its diminishing returns in Africa, Washington has its hands full. Compared to trying to become the hegemon, being the hegemon and maintaining that status is a more difficult spot to be in.

China, on the other hand, has shown the ability and the intention to increasingly close its power gap with the United States, economically around the world, and militarily in its strategic backyard, the western Pacific. In the geopolitical hotspots of the South and East China Seas, Beijing seems to be putting into practice Sun Tzu’s stratagem of subduing the enemy without fighting. Without becoming involved a kinetic form of war, where U.S. military firepower would be currently hard to match, Beijing has attempted to militarize the geopolitical space in the western Pacific and make it costlier for the United States to stay the course.

The primary theater for power projection and tensions, essentially China’s regional perimeter, conjures up what offensive realists like John Mearsheimer have spoken of: the threat of a peer competitor, another regional hegemon, to U.S. primacy. China can play a longer game of gradually chipping off the United States’ patience, and undermining the durability of the U.S. alliance system in the region. While U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” sloganeering and his maverick behavior with allies and partners did send stress signals related to American commitments and reliability as a security guarantor in the region, the power game is more structural and precedes the Trump era.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic struck China, before spreading fast and furiously across the world, affecting the United States severely, and bringing U.S.-China relations to a new low, the two countries were fighting a vicious trade war that remains largely unresolved. At a time when the U.S. is still reeling from the pandemic and the challenges of reopening its economy, China is projecting itself as a country that has put the pandemic behind and is moving its economy ahead.

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China has now become the subject of a reinvigorated and coordinated attack from the United States. The U.S. has accused China of covering up the origin and seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and manipulating multilateral bodies like the World Health Organization to defend its botched handling of the outbreak. Washington has also criticized the way in which Beijing has utilized “mask diplomacy” across the world to, the critics allege, exploit the crisis and advance its interests. The United States is heading an effort to affix blame on China.

The history of the U.S.-People’s Republic of China relationship has been fraught with twist and turns. It started on a sour note, with Washington’s distaste for Communist China and the outbreak of the Korean War. Early in the Cold War, China under Mao Zedong’s leadership was far more antagonistic toward the United States than the Soviet Union. The great split in the Communist camp following the Sino-Soviet border conflict in the late 1960s paved the way for Sino-American rapprochement. From the Shanghai Communique signed in 1972, in which the U.S. and China together sought to counter hegemony in the Asia-Pacific, to the present day, wherein the U.S. sees China as a strategic threat, and a “near peer competitor” in the Indo-Pacific, the relationship has come full circle.

The end of the Cold War brought about a phase of economic accommodation between the two, and China’s integration into the global multilateral trading system. However, issues including the third Taiwan Strait Crisis, American criticism of human rights in China, the U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, as well as the unilateral military interventions by the United States and its support for “color revolutions,” created discord between the two countries. As long as the U.S. was occupied by the concerns of terrorism in the years after the 9/11 attacks, China found it easy to cultivate its stakes across the world without raising too many alarms in the West. In the beginning of the 21st century, China began to emerge as a strategic threat in U.S. grand strategy. However, the War on Terror distracted U.S. resources and attention, allowing a more open field for Beijing to increase its material capabilities and influence.

The Global Financial Crisis in 2008 brought a point of departure in the international system that dented U.S. influence and gave more space for China. Developments including the new Sino-Russian strategic alliance, China’s approach to countries like Iran and Venezuela that have their own animosities with the U.S., and Beijing’s spearheading of multilateral organizations representing the Global South are all signs of a shifting balance of power in China’s favor. China also started to demand equal treatment from the United States, codified in Xi Jinping’s “new type of major power relations” during the final years of the Barack Obama administration. With the rise of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, the stage was set for a more animated rivalry to play out between the two countries. China reacted with unparalleled assertiveness against Trump’s increasingly vocal attacks on China on economic, technological, and strategic fronts.

Washington has put forth what it calls a whole of government approach to counter the multiple domain challenge posed by a rising and increasingly aggressive China. The times to come will be trying for Washington — it is becoming less attractive for its allies and partners, who may one day need to choose between the U.S. and China. For Beijing, the very fact that U.S. allies and partners are increasingly finding it hard to side with Washington is already a win. The question is: how can Beijing and Washington compel each other to change their respective routes to global primacy? A few months is nothing in the timeline of the U.S.-China bilateral dynamics, but these past few months has been unlike any in recent history. A global pandemic has, in a matter of months, changed the discourse on global order and U.S.-China great power competition. These past few months in hindsight will be instrumental in how this great power tussle pans out.

Monish Tourangbam is a Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

Anand V. is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations, Manipal Academy of Higher Education.

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Capability Analysis
How China has Overtaken Japan in Naval Power and Why It Matters
June 22, 2020
Guest Author 3 Comments


The following article is adapted from a new report by Dr. Toshi Yoshihara at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), Dragon Against the Sun: Chinese Views of Japanese Seapower.
By Toshi Yoshihara

A major reversal of fortunes at sea has gone largely unnoticed. Over the past decade, the Chinese Navy sped past the Japanese maritime service across key measures of material prowess. The trendlines suggest that China will soon permanently displace Japan as the leading regional naval power in Asia. This historic power transition will have repercussions across the Indo-Pacific in the years to come. It behooves policymakers to pay attention to this overlooked but consequential shift in the naval balance between two great seafaring nations.

The Power Transition at Sea
The growing power gap between the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) is stark and will widen at an accelerated pace. China already boasts the largest navy in the world with more than 300 ships and submarines. By comparison, the JMSDF’s naval strength in 2019 included four light helicopter carriers, two cruisers, 34 destroyers, 11 frigates, three amphibious assault ships, six fast-attack missile boats, and 21 submarines. By 2030, the PLAN could have more than 450 ships and close to 110 submarines while the JMSDF will likely not be much larger than it is today.1
In aggregate tonnage for principal surface combatants, a rough measure of latent capacity and capability, China surpassed Japan in 2013. By 2020, the PLAN exceeded the JMSDF in total tonnage by about 40 percent. By average tonnage per combatant, a more precise measure of capacity and capability, the Japanese fleet continues to maintain a comfortable lead of about 45 percent over its Chinese counterpart. Japan’s position, however, may not hold for long as China puts to sea more carriers, cruisers, and destroyers.
In terms of firepower, the vertical launch system (VLS)—a grouping of silos that holds and fires shipborne missiles—furnishes a useful proxy for a fleet’s lethality. In this category of naval power, China’s catchup story is stunning. The JMSDF introduced VLS a decade earlier than the PLAN in the early 1990s. Yet, the Chinese quickly caught up and zoomed past the Japanese in 2017. By 2020, the PLAN had 75 percent more VLS cells than the JMSDF.
Number of VLS cells on JMSDF and PLAN destroyers and in the total surface fleets (CSBA)
More troubling still, China’s large arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) outranges that of the JMSDF by considerable distances. In a hypothetical fleet-on-fleet engagement, the PLAN could launch large salvoes of ASCMs that could reach its opponent’s warships well before the Japanese side could get within range to hit back, conferring a significant first-strike advantage to China. It remains to be seen whether Japan will introduce enough long-range ship-killing missiles, including the repurposed Standard Missile 6 air-defense interceptors, to close the range gap.
China’s air force and rocket force further tip the scales in its favor. Chinese airpower and missiles ashore would almost certainly join the fray in any conceivable conflict. The JMSDF’s surface fleet would have to fend off volleys of air-launched ASCMs and land-based anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles as well as missiles fired from ships and submarines. Japan’s maritime service thus inhabits a vexing and inhospitable operational environment.

Beyond Bean Counting
Fleet size, tonnage, and firepower do not provide a full measure of a navy’s combat power. Operational proficiency, tactical elan, regular and extended deployments in blue-water environments, and real combat experience are equally critical, if not more so, when evaluating a navy’s prospects for fighting and winning a war at sea. Even in this qualitative area, however, it is no longer axiomatic that Japan holds a decisive advantage over China.
PLA Navy aircraft carrier Shandong berthed at a naval port in Sanya (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Feng Kaixuan)
Over the past decade, the Chinese Navy has proven itself a capable expeditionary service. The PLAN’s various open ocean activities suggest that it has accumulated substantial at-sea experience. Notably, the Chinese Navy has sustained a continuous rotation of anti-piracy patrols in the Indian Ocean since 2009, an impressive feat by any measure. The PLAN has also dispatched flotillas for long-distance transits throughout the Western Pacific and beyond.
Peacetime exercises and constabulary operations may not be reliable indicators of how the Chinese Navy will perform in combat. The well-worn remark that China has not fought a war since 1979 remains valid. Of course, neither has Japan since 1945. The reality is that no one knows for certain how each side will fare until the shooting starts.
It remains unclear how the economic contraction following the COVID-19 crisis will impact China’s investment in its navy. What is certain, however, is that Japan will not escape the economic fallout from the global pandemic and the attending fiscal pressures on defense spending. The momentum behind the Chinese naval buildup, moreover, will likely not slow down enough to reverse the tilting naval balance in Beijing’s favor.

Why the Naval Imbalance Matters
Japan’s eroding naval position not only reduces its ability to defend the liberal international order, but it also weakens the deterrent posture of the U.S.-Japan alliance and, in the process, undercuts American strategy in Asia. Consider the centrality of Japanese seapower to the regional security architecture.
Japanese Navy destroyer Maya (DDG-179) (Japanese Ministry of Defense photo)
In peacetime, Japan’s maritime service helps deter aggression and keep the seas open to all, an essential condition for free trade and global prosperity. Should deterrence fail, the JMSDF would sweep clear the major maritime approaches to the theater of operations along the Asian littorals and conduct operations to obtain and exercise sea control alongside the U.S. Navy. Moreover, the sea service complements U.S. naval strengths, including undersea warfare, while making up for American capability gaps in such areas as minesweeping.

A revisionist China must carefully consider Japan’s still-formidable maritime service when calculating its options vis-à-vis the United States. Beijing would likely think twice about coercion or aggression if it believed that the alliance possessed overwhelming military superiority. Conversely, if Beijing concluded that Tokyo was becoming a crack in the armor, then it might be tempted to gamble.
The bottom line is that it is the combined power of the U.S. Navy’s forward-deployed naval forces and the JMSDF that helps to keep the peace in Asia. It is thus imperative that U.S. policymakers perceive the relative decline of Japanese seapower as a proxy for the corrosion of American power in the Indo-Pacific.
If past is prologue, China’s rapid accumulation of naval power—and Japan’s inability to keep up—portends unwelcome great power relations. The most striking historical parallel is Britain’s naval decline during the Cold War. In the late 1970s, the Soviets had far outstripped the British across major measures of naval power just as the PLAN is eclipsing the JMSDF today. By the early 1980s, it became increasingly doubtful whether Britain could defend its own backyard against Soviet designs.

Britain’s relative decline posed global dilemmas for the United States. If the U.S. Navy were tied down in an emergency elsewhere, there was concern that the Soviets might seize the occasion to test European resolve in the North Atlantic. It was feared then that the Royal Navy’s impotence in the face of a Soviet naval challenge would severely undermine stability, deterrence, and allied cohesion while opening the way for Moscow to advance its aims in Europe.
It does not stretch the imagination to foresee a similar risk today. American global commitments, particularly in Europe and the Middle East, could draw Washington’s attention to faraway theaters. In such circumstances, the United States would likely expect Japan to do much more to deter, if not oppose, Chinese opportunism. The extent to which the JMSDF upholds its end of the bargain would be a major test for the alliance.

Allied Implications
To be sure, any assessment of the Indo-Pacific strategic balance would be incomplete without accounting for the U.S. military, including its forward-deployed assets and its surge forces around the world. The combined naval power of the United States and Japan still outweighs that of China. But that margin of superiority is diminishing as China continues its ascent at sea, pulling even farther ahead of Japan.
Consequently, the security partnership’s capacity to deter aggression is likely to come under more strain. Equally worrisome, the PLAN and its sister services are already able to project power across and well beyond the first island chain, deliver ample firepower over long distances, and impose heavy costs on U.S. and Japanese forces. These developments are likely to challenge, if not upend, longstanding allied assumptions about escalation dominance and warfighting.
Allied policymakers must recognize that a historic power shift has already taken place in maritime Asia. For too long, defense planners and the broader strategic community have focused exclusively on the bilateral Sino-U.S. naval rivalry while slighting the local balance between China and Japan. In the past, when allied superiority and the JMSDF’s qualitative advances appeared insuperable, it was safe to take Japan’s role for granted.

Yet, today, as the balance tilts increasingly in China’s favor, Japan’s relative decline could emerge as a weak link in the alliance’s deterrent posture. Understanding the extent to which Japan has fallen behind, to include how the Chinese perceive the local imbalance, should assume a far more prominent place in allied decision-making. Such a comprehensive estimate must be integral to the allied calculus about strategy, posture, operations, and competitiveness.
Toshi Yoshihara is senior fellow at the Center for
trategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA). His latest book, co-authored with James R. Holmes, is the second edition of Red Star over the Pacific: China’s Rise and the Challenge to U.S. Maritime Strategy (Naval Institute Press, 2019).

Footnotes
1. For the 2030 estimate for the PLAN, see Captain James E. Fanell (ret.), “China’s global Navy eyeing sea control by 2030, superiority by 2049,” Sunday Guardian, June 13, 2020, available from China’s global Navy eyeing sea control by 2030, superiority by 2049 - The Sunday Guardian Live.
Featured Image: The picture shows aircraft carrier Shandong berths at a naval port in Sanya. China’s first domestically-made aircraft carrier Shandong (Hull 17) was officially commissioned to the PLA Navy at a military port in Sanya, South China’s Hainan Province, on the afternoon of December 17, 2019. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Feng Kaixuan)

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Hummm....."EMP" aside.....

Posted for fair use.....

China's 'no first use' nuclear fiction
By Peter Pry, opinion contributor — 06/24/20 03:00 PM EDT 143
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

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Many China experts in government and academia, and anti-nuclear activists such as the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists, appear not to be worried by China’s rapidly growing nuclear capabilities, because Beijing’s official policy promises that China will not be the first to employ nuclear weapons in a conflict. Beijing promises that its nuclear forces are for deterrence and retaliation only, not for aggression.

Western analysts consistently fail to understand that, for both Beijing and Moscow, nuclear war plans are national security “crown jewels” that they try to protect and conceal behind a bodyguard of lies and disinformation. Trusting open sources and commentary — especially when they are intended to cast nuclear doctrine in the most benign possible way — is a big mistake.

For example, during the Cold War the USSR went to extraordinary lengths to misinform Western policymakers and the public that Moscow had a nuclear “no first use” doctrine. This was intended to conceal its real nuclear war plans — that we now know entailed a massive nuclear first strike early in a conflict. The “no first use” disinformation campaign also was intended to mobilize Western anti-nuclear activists, in and out of government, to constrain U.S. nuclear programs and operational plans.

China’s alleged nuclear “no first use” doctrine, like the USSR’s during the Cold War, is almost certainly disinformation. “No first use” for China does not withstand the test of common sense.

No conservative military planner would adopt “no first use” when China lacks ballistic missile early warning system (BMEWS) radars and satellite early warning systems that would enable China to launch on tactical warning. “No first use” would doom China’s nuclear deterrent to certain destruction by a U.S. or Russian conventional or nuclear first strike, or to a nuclear first strike by India. China’s nuclear posture, especially the lack of early warning radars and satellites, is “use it or lose it,” which logically should drive Chinese military planners toward nuclear first use — indeed, toward surprise first use early in a crisis or conflict, based on strategic warning.

Regardless of China’s “no first use” declaration, it strains credulity that Beijing’s political leaders would adhere to such a policy if confronted with compelling political and military intelligence of an imminent U.S. attack. Such strategic warning was the basis for the former USSR’s secret plans for a disarming nuclear first strike under their VRYAN (surprise nuclear missile attack) intelligence program, that nearly resulted in a nuclear apocalypse during NATO’s theater nuclear exercise Able Archer 83.

Fortunately, at least some U.S. military leaders are not as naïve as academics about China’s “no first use” pledge. Adm. Charles Richard, chief of U.S. Strategic Command, testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February that he could “drive a truck through China’s ‘no first use’ policy.”

China’s unprecedented rapid expansion of its nuclear and missile capabilities is not consistent with a belief in “minimum deterrence” and “no first use.” It looks imitative of Russia’s policy seeking escalation dominance for nuclear diplomacy and nuclear warfighting.

Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned in May 2019: “China is likely to at least double the size of its nuclear stockpile in the course of implementing the most rapid expansion and diversification of its nuclear arsenal in China’s history. … China launched more ballistic missiles for testing and training than the rest of the world combined.”

China’s political and military leaders often have threatened nuclear war. In 2011, columnist Gordon Chang reported: “Former Chinese general Xu Guangyu … suggested China was planning a surprise missile attack on the American homeland.”
The People’s Liberation Army Second Artillery Corps — now the PLA Rocket Force, equivalent to U.S. Strategic Command — leaked a planning document, “Lowering the Threshold of Nuclear Threats,” that stipulated some conditions under which, in response to U.S. conventional attacks, China would launch a nuclear first strike. For example: “Targets that could draw such a response include any of China’s leading urban centers or its atomic or hydroelectric power facilities.”

• Coronavirus Report: The Hill's Steve Clemons interviews Parag Khanna

China’s military doctrine — including numerous examples of using nuclear EMP attack to win on the battlefield, defeat U.S. aircraft carriers, and achieve against the U.S. homeland a surprise “Pearl Harbor” writ large — is replete with technical and operational planning consistent with a nuclear first strike. Indeed, China’s classification of nuclear EMP attack in military doctrine as “electronic warfare” or “information warfare” indicates that EMP is not even considered a form of nuclear attack, but would be equivalent to non-nuclear EMP weapons and cyber warfare.

In March, a panel of China’s military experts threatened to punish U.S. Navy ships for challenging China’s illegal annexation of the South China Sea by making an EMP attack — one of the options they considered least provocative because the crew would be unharmed, but most effective because the ship would be disabled. Like other evidence, this, too, suggests Beijing considers EMP attack as something short of nuclear or even kinetic conflict, akin to “gray zone” threats such as electronic and cyber warfare.

Dr. Peter Vincent Pry was chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission and served on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee and at the CIA. He is the author of several books, including “The Power And The Light: The Congressional EMP Commission’s War To Save America 2001-2020” (2020).

Hummm.......

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About 6,500 Pakistan nationals operating as terrorists in Afghanistan, claims UN report
India Blooms News Service | @indiablooms | 25 Jun 2020, 10:15 pm

#Pakistan, #Afghanistan, #Terrorism

Brussels: A UN Security Council report has claimed that about 6,500 Pakistani's are operating as terrorist ranks in Afghanistan, media reports said.

The report said the issue poses a significant threat to the peace, stability and security of the war-torn country and South Asia region.

The report released by Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team, concerning the Taliban and other associated individuals and entities, published in the EU Chronicle, stated that the fighters trained by Pakistan-based terror outfits such as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) act as advisers, trainers and specialists in improvised explosive devices in Afghanistan, reports ANI.

The presence of such terrorists poses a complex challenge for the Taliban to prove its credibility as a counter-terrorism partner in the war-torn country.

Click to expand...

Furthermore, Pakistan's ambitions for Afghanistan and the support of its Inter-Intelligence Services (ISI) to Pak based terrorist organisations, as per the UN report implies that it too wants to be included in the race for control, reports the news agency.

Pakistan was placed in the grey list in June 2018 particularly for its poor record to check terror financing. The move by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) was supported by India, US, UK and some European countries.

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Ten Aid Workers Abducted in Niger
June 25, 2020 Juliet Norah Africa, Africa Freelancing Global Gigs, Global World, News Article
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• No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but militant groups with links to Islamic State and al-Qaeda are active in the region.
• The attackers arrived in the village on motorbikes and ordered the workers to follow them.
• The NGO has worked in volatile area near the borders with Mali and Burkina Faso without any problems and attacks in the past years.

At least 10 aid workers have been abducted by unidentified armed men in the Tillaberi area, south western part of Niger. The aid workers, who are all locals, were distributing food in a village when they were attacked, the aid group Action and Impact Progress (APIS) said.
The World Food Programme is the food-assistance branch of the United Nations and the world’s largest humanitarian organization addressing hunger and promoting food security. According to the WFP, it provides food assistance to an average of 91.4 million people in 83 countries each year.

APIS is a partner of the United Nations World Food Program. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but militant groups with links to Islamic State and al-Qaeda are active in the region.

According to Kididiatou Harouna, who works with APIS, the attackers arrived in the village on motorbikes and ordered the workers to follow them. She said that the NGO has worked in volatile area near the borders with Mali and Burkina Faso without any problems and attacks in the past years.

Attacks on aid groups and their workers by militants are a common occurrence in the area. In 2018, a German aid worker and a priest were abducted in the region. The militants have stolen a number of vehicles from aid groups, such as Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Last year, a vehicle stolen from MSF was used in an attack on a prison in Niamey, where the militants are being detained. The country has been suffering attacks from jihadists and ethnic violence,

According to the UN, Niger is home to 60,000 refugees from Mali who fled from the northern part of the country after al-Qaeda linked jihadists took control of the region in 2012. The militants were pushed out by a French-led military operation the following year, but parts of the country remain out of the government’s reach.
Militants with links to al-Qaeda and Islamic State have continued to operate in Sahel region, weakening the governments of these countries. Mali and Burkina Faso are the hardest hit, but Niger, which shares borders with the two countries, has been greatly affected by the violence.
Operation Barkhane is an ongoing anti-insurgent operation in Africa’s Sahel region, which commenced 1 August 2014. The operation is “to become the French pillar of counterterrorism in the Sahel region.”
The UN envoy in West Africa told the UN Security Council that attacks have increased in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger since 2016, with more than 4,000 deaths reported in 2019. Nigerien and Malian soldiers joined forces with the French troops in an ongoing operation dubbed Operation Barkhane.

The French-led Operation Barkhane leads a counter-terror fight in the Sahel states Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Chad and Mauritania. The other forces in the region include UN troops and the G5-Sahel force.

The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara carries out attacks in Niger’s western borders while the southern part of the country face regular attacks from the Boko Haram, the Nigerian’s jihadist group. Boko Haram has waged a decade-long armed campaign in northeastern Nigeria, and has claimed the lives of tens of thousands and displaced millions from their homes.

The violence has spread to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon, which has led to the creation of a regional military coalition to fight the attackers. Niger is part of a five nation anti-jihadist task force known as the G5 that was set up in 2014 with Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Chad. Niger alongside its neighbor’s Mali and Burkina Faso has been struggling to fight the jihadist insurgency.

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Shabaab hits Somali, Turkish bases with suicide bombings
By Caleb Weiss | June 25, 2020 | weiss.caleb2@gmail.com | @Weissenberg7


Since the beginning of the week, Shabaab, al Qaeda’s branch in East Africa, has launched two suicide bombings on two military bases across Somalia. One of the bases targeted was Turkey’s military base in Mogadishu.

On Sunday, Shabaab launched a suicide assault on a Somali military base in the town of Bacaadweyn in the north-central Mudug region. Local media reported that a suicide car bomb was detonated at the base’s perimeter before an assault team entered the fray.

As many as six people were killed in that assault, including two soldiers. Shabaab’s claim of responsibility, released through its Shahada News Agency, confirmed the use of a suicide car bombing while offering little additional detail compared to local news reports.

The suicide assault comes as Somali forces have launched an offensive earlier this month against Shabaab in the Galmudug region (comprised of the Somali regions of Galgaduud and Mudug). This came after Shabaab assassinated the governor of Mudug in another suicide bombing in the region last month.

Much of Somalia’s efforts have been directed around securing the areas near the cities of Galkayo and El-Buur.

Local media reported late last week that Galmudug state forces have wrestled back control over several areas of the state from Shabaab. Several commanders of the group in the area have also reportedly surrendered.

Shabaab has launched several strikes against Somali forces in retaliation. In addition to the suicide bombing in Bacaadweyn on Sunday, another suicide car bombing was reportedly thwarted in Galkayo.

Elsewhere in Somalia this week, Shabaab also claimed a suicide bombing at the Turkish military base inside Mogadishu. The base, which acts as a training facility, is Turkey’s largest overseas military installation.

At least two people were killed in that blast, which occurred after the bomber, disguised as a Somali military recruit, infiltrated a queue to enter the base.

Through Shahada News Agency, Shabaab greatly exaggerated the success of its operation by saying “7 officers of the government’s militias were killed and 14 others wounded as a result of a martyrdom operation targeting the Turkish military base in Mogadishu.

Shabaab often exaggerates the number of casualties and other details in operations that are not particularly successful.
While the attack marks the first time Shabaab has struck the base with a suicide bombing, it is not the group’s first attack against it. Indeed, Shabaab has long considered the Turkish presence inside Somalia as a legitimate target.

In May 2018, Shabaab claimed launching several rockets at the base. However, no material damage or injuries were reported.

At the time, Abdul Aziz Abdul Musab, Shabaab’s military spokesman said that “we do not distinguish between a Turkish, American, Kenyan, Ethiopian, or British soldier.” He went on to explain that “all of them are invaders fighting against the Shari’ah, and it is an obligation to expel them and kill them.”

While in Jan. 2015, Shabaab detonated a suicide car bomb on the popular SYL Hotel in Mogadishu, where a Turkish delegation was preparing for a state visit by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Shabaab continues to be one of Al Qaeda’s most effective branches. It maintains significant control over much of southern Somalia and retains the ability to strike in Mogadishu, Kenya, and against heavily fortified bases in both Somalia and Kenya.

Though its fortunes have ebbed and flowed over the past decade, it has weathered numerous offensives from an array of local, regional, and international actors, including the United States.

Caleb Weiss is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.

In the November Sierra category......

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Pakistan a ‘safe haven’ for ‘terror groups’: U.S. State Department
By Bill Roggio | June 25, 2020 | admin@longwarjournal.org | @billroggio



Pakistan remains a “safe haven” for a host of regional terror groups, including the Afghan Taliban and its integral subgroup, the Al Qaeda linked Haqqani Network, according the the State Department’s newly released Country Reports on Terrorism 2019.

“Pakistan continued to serve as a safe haven for certain regionally focused terrorist groups,” State notes in its opening paragraph on Pakistan. “It allowed groups targeting Afghanistan, including the Afghan Taliban and affiliated HQN [Haqqani Network], as well as groups targeting India, including LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jamaat-ud-Dawa] and its affiliated front organizations, and JeM [Jaish-e-Mohammad], to operate from its territory.”

After noting that Pakistan has taken “modest steps in 2019 to counter terror financing and to restrain some India-focused militant groups,” State criticizes Pakistan for failing “to take decisive actions against Indian- and Afghanistan-focused militants who would undermine their operational capability.”

Ironically, State praises the Pakistani government for playing “a constructive role in U.S.-Taliban talks in 2019.”

In other words, State is slamming Pakistan for continuing to harbor the Taliban, which continues to attack the Afghan government and military as well as remaining allied with Al Qaeda, while praising Pakistan as a partner for peace.

“In 2019, the Taliban and the affiliated HQN [Haqqani Network] increased terrorist attacks targeting Afghan civilians, government officials, and members of the international community,” the Country Reports on Terrorism 2019 section on Afghanistan notes. This trend has continued in 2020, despite the U.S. and the Taliban signing what is wrongly characterized as a peace deal.

The deal, which was signed on Feb. 29, 2020, is in fact a withdrawal agreement that is heavily weighted to benefit the Taliban. The U.S. and the Taliban agreed to halt attacks on each other. The U.S. committed to a full withdrawal in 14 months, removing Taliban leaders from international sanctions lists, and forcing the Afghan government to conduct a lopsided prisoner exchange.

The Taliban made no concessions. It is not required to denounce and target Al Qaeda and other allied terror groups, commit to a ceasefire, negotiate with the Afghan government, or protect key social reforms such as women’s rights. Instead the Taliban said it would not allow Afghanistan to be used as a launchpad for attacks on the West. This is the same promise the Taliban made prior to 9/11, which it of course did not honor.

Pakistan supported the U.S.-Taliban talks and continues to back the withdrawal deal as it benefits its Afghan proxy, the Taliban.

“India-focused militant groups” fight in Afghanistan
While State’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2019 rightly calls out Pakistan for remaining a safe haven for terror groups, it wrongly classifies LeT and JeM as “India-focused militant groups.” Additionally, it is wrong to call these outfits “regionally focused” and “India-focused”, as they support Al Qaeda and its global jihad.

LeT, JeM, and groups such as Harakat-ul-Muhahideen, and Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami not only operate against India, but also fight alongside the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. These groups were created with the support of Pakistan’s military and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and continue to base themselves inside Pakistan with the assistance of the government to this day.

State notes that Pakistan worked to “restrain some India-focused militant groups” after a suicide car bombing in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir that killed more than 40 policemen. That attack was carried out by JeM.

Pakistan has the ability to dial up and tamp down the violence in Jammu and Kashmir. It does this by using Afghanistan as a relief valve. Fighters from the Pakistan-backed terror groups redeploy from the Indian to the Afghan front when international pressure due to their attacks in India creates problems for Pakistan.

Pakistan’s dampening of the operations of terror groups in the Indian theater leads to an increase in attacks by these groups in Afghanistan. This is in direct contradiction to statements made by Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, who praised Pakistan as a partner for peace that “committed to helping reduce violence” in Afghanistan.

Just wrapped up a visit to Islamabad. #Pakistan supports efforts to accelerate intra-Afghan dialogue and negotiations, and is committed to helping reduce violence in #Afghanistan. Everyone I saw recognizes the benefit peace will bring to the region. //t.co/f2ENCLZoxl
— U.S. Special Representative Zalmay Khalilzad (@US4AfghanPeace) April 30, 2019

Click to expand...

Less that three years prior to making that statement, Khalilzad, Congressional testimony, called Pakistan “a State Sponsor of Terror.”

If Pakistan was indeed “committed to helping reduce violence” in Afghanistan, as Khalilzad claimed, it would dismantle the infrastructure of the Taliban, LeT, JeM, and the host of allied terror group that continue to base themselves inside Pakistan. Instead, Pakistan continues to not only provide safe haven for these groups, but directly backs them.

Bill Roggio is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Editor of FDD's Long War Journal.

Military Aviation News
Taiwan considers deploying tethered aerostat radar in South China Sea
Posted on June 26, 2020


Up Media reported on Jun. 23 that Taiwan is considering the deployment of two tethered aerostat radar systems, one in South China Sea and one north east of Taipei.


The South China Sea system will be deployed at Pratas Island and needs to have a detection range of 600km, it must stay airborne for up to a month. The other set is at Pengjia Islet and only requires a range of 200km, this has to be operational for 15 days each time.
Deploying at these two locations will help Taiwan monitor China’s military movements in the Bashi Channel and Miyako Straits.
However, the deployment at Pengjia Islet will be controversial has it will also be capable of monitoring Japanese and U.S. movements in the area.
For more information, hit the Source below
Source
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Iran Mobilizes Forces on Iraqi-Kurdish Border
Wednesday, 24 June, 2020 - 08:15






Khosrawi border crossing between Iraq and Iran (File photo: AFP)

Erbil- Asharq Al-Awsat

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) mobilized a large force on the border with the Iraqi-Kurdistan region, threatening to attack bases of Kurdish opposition groups if they continue to pose a threat to Iran.
The Kurdish media network Rudaw reported that during a meeting at the Mariwan border region, IRGC’s Brigadier General Mohammad Pakpour said his troops were targeting sites of hostile forces within Iraqi territories and the Kurdistan region, adding that they will continue to do so in the future.
“We would strike any location where terrorists are present, organized, and stationed… We will vigorously continue to cleanse the region of terrorists,” stressed Pakpour.

The Brigadier General indicated that the Kurdistan region and Iraq should enhance their monitoring of the borders, asking residents to stay away from the areas near the sites targeted by Iran.
Rudaw reported that a few days ago, IRGC began transporting heavily armed forces to the border areas between Iran’s Mariwan and Iraq’s Penjwen. It also warned the residents against approaching these areas until the end of this week.
On Tuesday, IRGC announced it was conducting major maneuvers in the Mariwan region, with the participation of ground and air forces, drones, and special task forces.

Meanwhile, the leadership of the Eastern Kurdistan Protection Units, the military wing of Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), announced that Iran mobilized large forces on the border villages of Mariwan and established large military bases.
The Units issued a statement saying the Iranian forces ordered shepherds to leave those areas, adding that drones flew over the area and artillery units shelled border areas for two hours Tuesday morning.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party announced that the Revolutionary Guard started to establish military bases in the villages on the border of Sardasht, adding that the Corps is also pushing residents towards fighting among its ranks.
Meanwhile, Turkey continues its “Claw-Tiger” operation to neutralize Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), in northern Iraq.
Last week, Baghdad summoned the ambassadors of Turkey and Iran protesting their ongoing military actions and violations of Iraqi sovereignty.

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Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.





American troops in Afghanistan have been the target of some Taliban operations backed by Russia, intelligence officials found.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz

• June 26, 2020Updated 4:35 p.m. ET
  
  

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials have concluded that a Russian military intelligence unit secretly offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan — including targeting American troops — amid the peace talks to end the long-running war there, according to officials briefed on the matter.
The United States concluded months ago that the Russian unit, which has been linked to assassination attempts and other covert operations in Europe intended to destabilize the West or take revenge on turncoats, had covertly offered rewards for successful attacks last year.
Islamist militants, or armed criminal elements closely associated with them, are believed to have collected some bounty money, the officials said. Twenty Americans were killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2019, but it was not clear which killings were under suspicion.
The intelligence finding was briefed to President Trump, and the White House’s National Security Council discussed the problem at an interagency meeting in late March, the officials said. Officials developed a menu of potential options — starting with making a diplomatic complaint to Moscow and a demand that it stop, along with an escalating series of sanctions and other possible responses, but the White House has yet to authorize any step, the officials said.

An operation to incentivize the killing of American and other NATO troops would be a significant and provocative escalation of what American and Afghan officials have said is Russian support for the Taliban, and it would be the first time the Russian spy unit was known to have orchestrated attacks on Western troops.
Any involvement with the Taliban that resulted in the deaths of American troops would also be a huge escalation of Russia’s so-called hybrid war against the United States, a strategy of destabilizing adversaries through a combination of such tactics as cyberattacks, the spread of fake news and covert and deniable military operations.


The Kremlin had not been made aware of the accusations, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. “If someone makes them, we’ll respond,” Mr. Peskov said. A Taliban spokesman did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Spokespeople at the National Security Council, the Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A. declined to comment.
The officials familiar with the intelligence did not explain the White House delay in deciding how to respond to the intelligence about Russia.
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While some of his closest advisers, like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have counseled more hawkish policies toward Russia, Mr. Trump has adopted an accommodating stance toward Moscow.
At a summit in 2018 in Helsinki, Finland, Mr. Trump strongly suggested that he believed Mr. Putin’s denial that the Kremlin interfered in the 2016 presidential election, despite broad agreement within the American intelligence establishment that it did. Mr. Trump criticized a bill imposing sanctions on Russia when he signed it into law after Congress passed it by veto-proof majorities. And he has repeatedly made statements that undermined the NATO alliance as a bulwark against Russian aggression in Europe.
The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the delicate intelligence and internal deliberations. They said the intelligence had been treated as a closely held secret, but the administration expanded briefings about it this week — including sharing information about it with the British government, whose forces are among those said to have been targeted.



Image
President Trump has suggested he believed a denial by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia of Kremlin interference in the 2016 election.Credit...Kirill Kallinikov/Host Photo Agency, via Getty Images
The intelligence assessment is said to be based at least in part on interrogations of captured Afghan militants and criminals. The officials did not describe the mechanics of the Russian operation, such as how targets were picked or how money changed hands. It is also not clear whether Russian operatives had deployed inside Afghanistan or met with their Taliban counterparts elsewhere.
The revelations came into focus inside the Trump administration at a delicate and distracted time. Although officials collected the intelligence earlier in the year, the interagency meeting at the White House took place as the coronavirus pandemic was becoming a crisis and parts of the country were shutting down.
Moreover, as Mr. Trump seeks re-election in November, he wants to strike a peace deal with the Taliban to end the Afghanistan war.

Both American and Afghan officials have previously accused Russia of providing small arms and other support to the Taliban that amounts to destabilizing activity, although Russian government officials have dismissed such claims as “idle gossip” and baseless.
“We share some interests with Russia in Afghanistan, and clearly they’re acting to undermine our interests as well,” Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the commander of American forces in Afghanistan at the time, said in a 2018 interview with the BBC.
Though coalition troops suffered a spate of combat casualties last summer and early fall, only a few have since been killed. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February agreement.
American troops have also sharply reduced their movement outside military bases because of the coronavirus, reducing their exposure to attack.

While officials were said to be confident about the intelligence that Russian operatives offered and paid bounties to Afghan militants for killing Americans, they have greater uncertainty about how high in the Russian government the covert operation was authorized and what its aim may be.
Some officials have theorized that the Russians may be seeking revenge on NATO forces for a 2018 battle in Syria in which the American military killed several hundred pro-Syrian forces, including numerous Russian mercenaries, as they advanced on an American outpost. Officials have also suggested that the Russians may have been trying to derail peace talks to keep the United States bogged down in Afghanistan. But the motivation remains murky.
The officials briefed on the matter said the government had assessed the operation to be the handiwork of Unit 29155, an arm of Russia’s military intelligence agency, known widely as the G.R.U. The unit is linked to the March 2018 nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury, England, of Sergei Skripal, a former G.R.U. officer who had worked for British intelligence and then defected, and his daughter.

Western intelligence officials say the unit, which has operated for more than a decade, has been charged by the Kremlin with carrying out a campaign to destabilize the West through subversion, sabotage and assassination. In addition to the 2018 poisoning, the unit was behind an attempted coup in Montenegro in 2016 and the poisoning of an arms manufacturer in Bulgaria a year earlier.
American intelligence officials say the G.R.U. was at the center of Moscow’s covert efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. In the months before that election, American officials say, two G.R.U. cyberunits, known as 26165 and 74455, hacked into Democratic Party servers and then used WikiLeaks to publish embarrassing internal communications.
In part because those efforts were aimed at helping tilt the election in Mr. Trump’s favor, his handling of issues related to Russia and Mr. Putin has come under particular scrutiny. The special counsel investigation found that the Trump campaign welcomed Russia’s intervention and expected to benefit from it, but found insufficient evidence to establish that his associates had engaged in any criminal conspiracy with Moscow.

Operations involving Unit 29155 tend to be much more violent than those involving the cyberunits. Its officers are often decorated military veterans with years of service, in some cases dating to the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Never before has the unit been accused of orchestrating attacks on Western soldiers, but officials briefed on its operations say it has been active in Afghanistan for many years.
Though Russia declared the Taliban a terrorist organization in 2003, relations between them have been warming in recent years. Taliban officials have traveled to Moscow for peace talks with other prominent Afghans, including the former president, Hamid Karzai. The talks have excluded representatives from the current Afghan government as well as anyone from the United States, and at times they have seemed to work at crosscurrents with American efforts to bring an end to the conflict.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. Trump has said he would invite Mr. Putin to an expanded meeting of the Group of 7 nations, but tensions between American and Russian militaries are running high.
In several recent episodes, in international territory and airspace from off the coast of Alaska to the Black and Mediterranean Seas, combat planes from each country have scrambled to intercept military aircraft from the other.
Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Charlie Savage is a Washington-based national security and legal policy correspondent. A recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, he previously worked at The Boston Globe and The Miami Herald. His most recent book is “Power Wars: The Relentless Rise of Presidential Authority and Secrecy.” @charlie_savage • Facebook
Eric Schmitt is a senior writer who has traveled the world covering terrorism and national security. He was also the Pentagon correspondent. A member of the Times staff since 1983, he has shared three Pulitzer Prizes. @EricSchmittNYT
Michael Schwirtz is an investigative reporter based at the United Nations. Previously he covered the countries of the former Soviet Union from the Moscow bureau and reported for the Metro Desk on policing and brutality and corruption in the prison system. @mschwirtz • Facebook

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Argument
Why North Korea Needs Its Nukes
Washington speaks of deterrence when it comes to Pyongyang, but Kim would never strike unless attacked first.

By Doug Bandow | June 26, 2020, 11:15 AM

People watch a television news broadcast showing file footage of a North Korean missile test, at a railway station in Seoul on March 9. JUNG YEON-JE/AFP via Getty Images





On June 25, 1950, North Korea sent 75,000 soldiers across its border with South Korea, the opening salvo of the three-year Korean War. The conflict, which the United States entered within days, served as one of the first proxy wars of the Cold War. And its bloody, but inconclusive, outcome in July 1953 reshaped U.S. foreign policy, including the country’s modern approach to nuclear deterrence. Seventy years on, deterrence is still the watchword for Washington’s approach to a nuclear Pyongyang—an increasingly misguided effort that should be reassessed.
In recent weeks, North Korea has been ramping up regional tensions. The coming months could well see Pyongyang stage a military confrontation with Seoul, or the country could test a nuclear weapon or send a missile toward the United States. Beyond the resulting physical danger, the latter two possibilities would pose a particular embarrassment for U.S. President Donald Trump, who declared Pyongyang’s nuclear threat to be over.
Trump may be the only person in Washington who believes that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is ready to surrender his nuclear arsenal

Trump may be the only person in Washington who believes that North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is ready to surrender his nuclear arsenal

Click to expand...

. Kim himself has suggested nothing of the sort. After weeks in hiding, the North Korean leader reemerged late last month to chair a session of the Central Military Commission on “new policies for further increasing the nuclear war deterrence” of North Korea. The participants intended to put “the strategic armed forces on a high alert operation in line with the general requirements for the building and development of the armed forces of the country.” That does not sound like preparation for denuclearization.

On the U.S. side, a Pentagon report on “Nuclear Deterrence: America’s Foundation and Backstop for National Defense” lumps North Korea (and nukeless-Iran) together with Russia and China as justifying the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang’s tests, notes the Pentagon report, “pose a threat to the U.S. homeland and our allies.”
In reality, however, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remains a modest nuclear power, with an estimated 20 to 30 warheads and sufficient fissile material for an additional 30 to 60 nuclear weapons. The regime produces enough nuclear material for up to 12 weapons annually. This arsenal offers a potentially potent deterrent but far short of a serious offensive weapon against another nuclear power.

Drew Walter, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear matters, admitted as much last month, saying that North Korea is “not yet on the scale of some of our other nuclear-armed potential adversaries.” So, he said, “I don’t foresee very exquisite new capabilities to deter North Korea in that sense.”
There are good reasons to wish that North Korea would abandon its nuclear ambitions. However, it is unlikely to do so. And so it is critical for Washington to understand why Pyongyang wants nukes.

The Kim family dynasty is a malign regime that emerged from the Soviet occupation zone of Japan’s former colony after Tokyo’s surrender in World War II in 1945. Over the years, North Korea’s security situation steadily deteriorated. The North’s economy stagnated and its people starved, while Beijing’s post-Mao transformation and the Soviet Union’s collapse deprived the North of its military backers. In contrast, South Korea surged ahead economically while enjoying a security guarantee from the globe’s dominant power, the United States. Moreover, during and after the Cold War, Washington took advantage of its position to defenestrate disfavored governments almost at will. In such a world, nuclear weapons looked increasingly attractive to the North as a means to deter attacks and preserve its regime. No doubt, nukes provide other benefits, too: They offer international status, strengthen domestic support from the military, and provide a tool for neighborly extortion. But their main advantage is that the only sure way to prevent an attack by nations with an overwhelming conventional advantage is with nuclear weapons.

Which means it makes little sense for the United States to speak of deterring North Korea. Pyongyang would attack only if Washington struck first, because the result of any nuclear exchange would be North Korea’s annihilation.
So why has the United States spent years frenetically attempting to block the North’s plans, buttressed by threats and even strategies to attack the North to destroy its nuclear capabilities? In essence, U.S. policymakers have plotted to strike the country now to preserve the United States’ ability to strike it later.

That is the practical reality of U.S. doctrine. After the North invaded the South in 1950, only urgent American intervention prevented conquest by Kim Il Sung. China subsequently deployed hundreds of thousands of “volunteers” to rescue its neighbor, and the war ultimately stalemated near the original border. An armistice but no formal peace followed. And U.S. forces remained, necessary to secure a country ravaged by war, badly behind economically, and unstable politically under an aging autocrat.

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Editors' Pick|28,660 views|Jun 26, 2020,03:28am EDT
Chinese Navy Submarines Could Become A Reality In Indian Ocean
H I SuttonContributor

Aerospace & Defense
I cover the changing world of underwater warfare.

The Chinese Navy is rapidly pursuing global capabilities. A key area of future operations may be the Indian Ocean. Chinese submarines in particular could have a strategic impact if they were roaming those waters. From China’s standpoint this would protect vital sea lanes that will be vulnerable in any war. Naturally many of the world’s navies would be concerned if this were the case. Chief among them is the Indian Navy, which currently has the largest submarine fleet in the South Asia region.



For Chinese submarines, the relevant routes into the Indian Ocean are the Malacca Strait, Sunda ... [+]
H I Sutton
Concern about China’s naval expansion is a hot topic on the world stage. The U.S. Navy is increasingly pivoting towards Asia. Speaking at the Brussels Forum virtual conference on June 25, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo referenced the Chinese Communist Party’s “threats to India” and other countries in Asia. “We are going to make sure that we are postured appropriately to counter the PLA.” (People’s Liberation Army, which includes the Chinese Navy.)

But much of the attention is on the South China Sea, where Beijing has made extensive territorial claims. The Indian Ocean theater seems less of a focus, at least in the public’s eye. For India, however, the threat seems very real. Chinese submarines have paid port calls in Pakistan and Sri Lanka in recent years.

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During peacetime Chinese submarines would be expected to enter the Indian Ocean through the Strait of Malacca. This should be done on the surface, which makes their presence obvious. China might still do it to send a message, but it is of limited utility in an operational setting where submarines want to hide their presence.

In wartime, Chinese submarines might slip through the Sunda Strait or Lombok Strait. These pass between the chain of Indonesian that separate the Pacific and Indian Oceans. One advantage over the Malacca Strait, which runs past Singapore, is that it would deliver the submarines to the deep water of the eastern Indian Ocean. From there they could take less obvious routes to their targets.

The Sunda Strait would be the shortest route, but it is very shallow at its eastern end so the deeper Lombok Strait might be preferred. There a submerged passage is likely considered feasible to the Chinese Navy.

Once through into the Indian Ocean, the submarines could get rearmed or resupplied without having to return to China. The Chinese Navy has already built a base in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. Even if the submarines themselves did not call in to the port, which would be closely monitored, vessels could operate from there to carry out at-sea replenishment.

And there is another Chinese port under construction at Gwadar in Pakistan. Work on an extension of that port, which may include a Chinese naval base, appears to be imminent. Gwadar has an advantage in that it is connected by land to China so supplies would not have to go by sea.

If China were to create a permanent Indian Ocean squadron, its natural bases would be Gwadar and Djibouti. There is also the small island of Feydhoofinolhu in the Maldives, which China is developing as a resort. Planners will be concerned that it could act as a support base or monitoring station in some scenarios.

For its part, the Indian Navy is also growing its capabilities and modifying its operating patterns to counter the threat. There is evidence that it has been testing its ability to forward deploy submarines to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This could hold the key to monitoring submarine activity in the Strait of Malacca.

At the same time, the Indian Navy’s U.S.-supplied P-8I Neptune aircraft are updating India’s anti-submarine reach in to the Indian Ocean and Arabian Sea. Together with the surface navy and the submarine force, this could hope to track Chinese submarine movements.

But in the vastness of the ocean this could be challenging. Even though China’s submarines may not be as quiet as their Western equivalents, they have a natural stealth advantage. Even very old submarines pose a serious threat that cannot be ignored in wartime. So for India it will be critical how quickly it can react to a more pervasive Chinese Navy presence in the Indian Ocean.


Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
H I Sutton


Using OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) to get to the stories first. Author of several books on Submarines, Special Forces and Narco subs. I mostly write about submarines
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Western Armor Looking East Again

By Donald Ramsay
June 26, 2020

For decades, the battlefield in Europe was in the East, as nations piled up armament in fear of a massive escalation that never occurred. Today, the playing field is still in the same place, but commercial strategies have replaced operational considerations. Armament producers in Western Europe are being called upon by Eastern countries, which are struggling to overcome the consequences of their Soviet past.

Urgent needs

Eastern European countries have stretched their military potential to the very last drop. Many are marked by extremely vast fleets of military vehicles that have much in common: many units, with few of them working. Most of these fleets are inherited from the Soviet days when things were done in vast volumes. When the Soviet empire dissolved, satellite countries remained with the armor, which Moscow had previously heavily subsidized, with nowhere near the necessary budgets to maintain or replace them. Thirty years later, the situation has become dire for many of them. And, ironically, Russia itself is in the same situation, symbolizing the predicament of all of its previous allies. Army recognition writes:


“The open sources say the Russian armed forces operate several hundred BMP-1 IFVs, with several thousand vehicles of the type being stored. According to the Military Balance 2018 analytical book published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the Russian Land Forces (SV) still use approximately 500 BMP-1s [...] The BMP-1AM Basurmanin IFV seems to be intended mainly for foreign customers. The Russian military is now receiving the BMP-2M Berezhok upgraded IFVs, and the modernization of the obsolete BMP-1 has almost no sense.”

An estimated 40 000 BMP-1s were built since the program’s inception in the 1960s, and many armies still use them - although they are nearing the point of irrelevance facing more modern types of armor.

Which only Western countries can satisfy

The trouble is that the military industry has been considerably concentrated in past decades, and Russia is only getting itself back on its feet. As military equipment gradually became more complex in Europe, most industrial firms dropped out of the market, leaving virtually only German Rheinmetall and French Nexter as armor providers. Nexter has designed the latest VBCI armored personnel carrier, designed in France and battle-proven in Afghanistan and Mali. The United Kingdom, which no longer can build its own armor, has expressed interest in purchasing it, and Nexter hopes to field many units in the armor-hungry nations of Eastern Europe. The VBCI is equipped with the latest military technology and is designed with modules that can be fitted with modern and future land drones. Janes.com writes:

“While the French Army VBCIs are fitted with a one-person turret armed with a 25mm dual feed cannon and 7.62mm co-axial machine gun (MG), other armament solutions are possible. French Army CP vehicles are fitted with a remote weapon station armed with a .50 M2 HB MG. If a heavier weapon system is wanted, a VBCI has been successfully tested with the Nexter Systems T40M two-person turret armed with a CTAI 40mm CTAS and 7.62mm MG."

German Rheinmetall is hoping to sell it highly-praised (though excessively priced) Leopard 2 to its Eastern neighbors, replenish their capacity for defense, and cover up the bad ink it’s been getting lately after its involvement in the Turkish attack on Kurdistan. Army Technology writes: “The turn of the year has been a busy period for Rheinmetall. The German company is engaging in a series of talks for joint ventures and investments to rapidly impose itself at the center of the European land defence industrial base. However, Rheinmetall's activities might be motivated more by a survivability dilemma than a genuinely expansionist strategy, according to an analysis by GlobalData." The Leopard 2 is the fer-de-lance of Germany's world-famous armor industry and is considered one of the world's best tanks.

A sticky past with Russia

Russia didn’t float the bill for entire fleets, back in the Soviet days, purely out of its good heard. By fielding its own equipment to satellite countries, Moscow built defense layers around itself and ensured loyalty. Military historian Tom Laemlein writes: “After four years of the Great War, all of Europe was overflowing with a mish-mash of military equipment, particularly small arms. The newly formed Polish Republic inherited large amounts of rifles from Russia, Germany and the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, spare parts and trained armorers were in short supply. A wide range of ammunition added an unwanted level of complexity. Without a functioning armaments industry of their own, Polish military leaders strove to consolidate rifles issued to their troops into the major types.” Economic dependence and inferior technological capacities left Eastern European countries with few choices but to turn towards Russia to re-arm. Once Soviet armor had been fielded in the respective armies, the need for maintenance further consolidated the ties with the Russian parent-state.

Eastern and Central Europe have reached the point of obsolescence, which they pushed back to its limit. Now that the time for the inevitable overhaul has arrived, many of these countries will have few options: once again turn to Moscow for assistance, jump out of the pan into the fire by turning to the U.S. (which seems disinclined lately to increase military assistance budgets in Europe), or turn to its European neighbors. So far, the strategic setting resembles a no-brainer.


Donald Ramsay is an Independent organizational consultant. Specialised in Defence and Security sectors, by passion and by profession.

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Tawhid al Jihad urges militant operations against Israel

By Joe Truzman | June 26, 2020 | Joe.Truzman@longwarjournal.org | @Jtruzmah


Against the backdrop of possible annexation of certain areas of the West Bank and President Trump’s Deal of the Century, Tawhid al Jihad released a publication promoting jihadist operations to prevent the implementation of those plans by Israel and the United States.

The video, titled “Rouse the Believers,” is the first major publication by the jihadist group this year. The group emphasized a conspiracy by “Jews and Christians” against the Palestinian cause.

The publication began by the group denouncing Trump’s Middle East peace plan and the United States’ 2017 decision that recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

“We have all heard the lying and falsehood of the Jews and American usurpers of our lands and our Aqsa by announcing Trump’s peace plan. Their talking is falsehood, and our doing is the truth,” the narrator stated.

Furthermore, behind the imagery of Tawhid al Jihad fighters training at a military camp in Gaza, the narrator urged followers to unite against Jews and Christians for the cause of jihad.

“Our nation! Our youth! Be careful! Obey your Lord! Unite your work! Sincerely intend to obey Allah! Be a strong barrier against aspirations of Jews and Christians and their followers. Be defenders of Islam! The Islamic Jihad is lasting forever in our nation,” the group stated.

Additionally, the group implied it would launch jihadist operations by showing recordings of various terrorist attacks against Israelis throughout the publication.

“May the matter of the Islamic nation rise by raising the matter of its Holy Quran, and by taking Jihad for the sake of Allah as a way to restore its stolen rights, as our predecessors were doing. We hate death, but we are ready to set fires for the sake of Allah,” the narrator stated as video of attacks were played.

It is common for Palestinian militant groups — especially Salafist-jihadi organizations — to call on Palestinians with or without ties to militant groups, to commit acts of terror against Israelis. In the “Rouse the Believers” publication, this message continued to be emphasized.

It is worth noting, the group has previously claimed success in conducting its own operations inside of Israel. In 2017, Fadi Ahmed al Qanbar – a militant belonging to the group – intentionally drove a truck into a group of IDF soldiers killing four in Jerusalem.

It’s not clear if threats from Tawhid al Jihad will materialize. Aside from a few rockets launched during recent conflict with Israel, the group has not conducted a major operation since 2017. However, it would be misguided to believe the group isn’t motivated to attempt another operation in the near future considering the group’s violent rhetoric about derailing Trump’s peace plan and West Bank annexation.

Joe Truzman is a contributor to FDD's Long War Journal.

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Satellite images show buildup at site of deadly India-China border clash
https://www.cnn.com/profiles/brad-lendon
By Brad Lendon and Maneeva Suri, CNN
Updated 6:19 PM ET, Fri June 26, 2020

Hong Kong (CNN)China appears to have rebuilt and expanded a military camp in the Himalayas that was the site of a deadly border clash with India, satellite images show.

The images, from the US satellite operator Maxar Technologies, were taken Monday, a week after what has been described as hand-to-hand fighting with sticks and clubs left at least 20 Indian troops dead.

China has not given any casualty numbers from the clash in a river valley along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the ill-defined and disputed border between the two powers high in the Himalayan mountains.

Beijing says the deadly clash began when Indian troops crossed into Chinese-controlled territory and tried to dismantle a tent camp erected by Chinese forces in the Galwan Valley at what is known as Patrol Point 14.


The new satellite images appear to show a large expansion of the Chinese encampment on the banks of a river since the fighting on the night of June 15.

The slider shows the buildup at Patrol Point 14 in the Galwan Valley between May 22 and June 22. This was the site of the deadly clash between Indian and Chinese forces on the night of June 15.

Maxar Technologies
"The small outpost ... has grown hugely in size," Nathan Ruser, a researcher at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute who first shared the images, tweeted on Thursday.
"Indian troops aren't dismantling this one."

At least one analyst, however, cast doubt on what the images showed.

"It looks to me where someone had camped, and it looks like it was a large camp, but they dismantled it," said Manoj Joshi, distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank.

Ruser said his analysis of satellite photos showed that since May the number of Chinese troops and vehicles within a kilometer of the border had gone from three to 46 while on the Indian side that number had decreased from 84 to 17.

• 
  

At least 20 Indian soldiers dead after clashes with China 01:57
Tensions continue to run high along the LAC, despite agreement between military leaders after the June 15 incident to defuse the situation.

China said this week that India was entirely to blame for the clash after Indian troops crossed the LAC in violation of an earlier agreement.

"It was shocking that Indian troops publicly violated the agreement, broke their own promise and crossed the LAC to provoke the Chinese side on June 15," Wu Qian, a spokesman for China's Defense Ministry, said Wednesday. "When Chinese military troops arrived to negotiate, they were suddenly attacked by Indian troops, and that led to a physical fight between the two sides and caused casualties."


A Chinese camp in the Galwan Valley in the Aksai Chin.

India's Ministry of External Affairs responded on Thursday, saying China instigated the deadly clash.

"It has been the Chinese actions thus far which have led to increase in tension in the region and also to the violent face-off of 15th June with casualties," it said in a statement.

China has been building up forces in the region for more than a month, the ministry said: "At the heart of the matter is that since early May, the Chinese side has been amassing a large contingent of troops and armaments along the LAC."


A PLA tank and artillery company encamped at Gorga in the Aksai Chin.

The Maxar satellite photos released this week appear to show China has put a tank company and artillery units at a camp north of Gogra. Another significant base was shown in the Kongka Pass.

Ruser, in an analysis released before the latest satellite photos came out, said previous such photos showed Chinese troops have been regularly crossing the LAC on patrols into Indian territory -- although not at the point of the June 15 clash -- but that reports of thousands of Chinese troops encamped in Indian territory were unproven.

But he did note that after India started to establish new positions in the Galwan Valley in May, China moved about a thousand troops into the area.

Joshi said China had changed its tactics in the region, from just patrolling disputed areas to occupying them.

"Now the Chinese seem to be indicating this is where the LAC should lie. It's now no longer a place you patrol but a place you hold," he said.





The valley, part of a region claimed as part of Xinjiang by China and Ladakh by India, is cold and inhospitable, draped in snow with temperatures around freezing, even in summer. Located high in the Himalayas, the average altitude is 14,000 feet (4,200 meters), almost double the height where altitude sickness kicks in, meaning any humans in the area have to undergo tedious, gradual acclimatisation or suffer crippling headaches, nausea and fatigue.

India and China went to war over the area in 1962, leaving thousands dead on both sides, and between that month-long conflict and Monday's skirmish, the region saw numerous fist fights and minor clashes between border guards and outraged statements from Beijing or New Delhi accusing the other of seeking to overstep the de facto border.

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Iran is ‘world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism,’ says US terrorism report
June 26, 2020 Liz George

Iran is “the world’s worst state sponsor of terrorism” according to the United States’ annual Country Reports on Terrorism released this week.

The report states that the Iranian regime continues to plot and commit acts of terrorism globally. “In the past, Tehran has spent as much as $700 million per year to support terrorist groups, including Hizballah and Hamas, though its ability to provide financial support in 2019 was constrained by crippling U.S. sanctions,” the report states.

Tehran has also allowed an al-Qa’ida network to operate in Iran as it sends money and fighters to Afghanistan and Syria. The report went on to state that the Iranian regime “continued to foment violence, both directly and through proxies, in Bahrain, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.”

“Today, al-Qa’ida’s network continues to exploit under-governed spaces, conflict zones, and global security gaps to recruit, fundraise, and plot attacks,” it says.

The violence and terrorism aren’t isolated to the Middle East. Recently, North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa have been impacted by terrorist plots that directly involved Iran through its IRGC and Ministry of Intelligence and Security.

Throughout 2019, European countries committed to combating Iranian regime-backed terrorism. Several countries pulled back on diplomatic relations following Iranian-supported schemes that included assassinations and bombings in Europe.

The United States designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) in April 2019, marking the first time part of another government has been given such a designation.

The unprecedented FTO designation from the United States, along with European countries’ efforts to fight Iran-backed terrorism, “reflected the Iranian regime’s unique place among the governments of the world in its use of terrorism as a central tool of its statecraft,” the report says.

The United States also employed a “maximum pressure campaign” that imposed new sanctions on Tehran and “launched a military operation that resulted in the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed “caliph” of ISIS.”

Last year, the United States created the Countering Transnational Terrorism Forum (CTTF). The forum united law enforcement, prosecutors and financial practitioners from over 25 countries “to disrupt Iranian terrorist activities and networks.”

Moreover, the second Western Hemisphere Counterterrorism Ministerial, held in July and cohosted by the United States and Argentina, led to Kosovo, Argentina, Paraguay, the United Kingdom and the United States all designated Hizballah a terrorist organization, upending the previously held “military wing” and “political wing” distinctions.

“There’s still counterterrorism work to do…But we’re undaunted in our pursuit of bringing terrorists to justice,” said Secretary Michael Pompeo during a press briefing on Wednesday.

The report says the most active and dangerous terrorist groups are Al Shabaab in the Horn of Africa, Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin in the Sahel, and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham/Al-Nusrah Front in Syria.

Jerusalem Post Middle East

IRGC commander threatens Israel in rare message from Syria - report
Ghaani said that Iran would continue to fight the “Zionist regime” and the US, and said the US and Israel were supporting ISIS.
By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
JUNE 27, 2020 21:08





Brigadier General Esmail Ghaani, the newly appointed commander of the country's Quds Force, is seen in Tehran, Iran, in this undated picture obtained January 3, 2020

(photo credit: TASNIM NEWS AGENCY/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)


Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force leader Esmail Ghaani recently visited Syria where he threatened Israel and the US, according to Iranian reports.

He went to the border city Albukamal which is in Syria on the Euphrates river across from Iraq. This is a key area for Iranian weapons trafficking and home to the Imam Ali base. Iran moves precision guided munitions and other weapons through this area and has a network of pro-Iranian militias between Albukamal and Deir Ezzor, a corridor of Iranian influence.


Ghaanisaid that Iran would continue to fight the “Zionist regime” and the US, and said the US and Israel were supporting ISIS.

Ghaani was appointed after the US killed IRGC Quds Force head Qasem Soleimani in January. He is known for his expertise on Afghanistan and has had a rocky relationship with pro-Iranian groups in Iraq and elsewhere. He doesn’t have the clout that Soleimani has but he is trying to show he can make the same clandestine trips that Soleimani was known for.

In Albukamal he visited a prayer room and posed for photos, two of which were circulated online. The report about his trip was initially published by Tasnim News in Iran, which is close to the IRGC. However, they then deleted the report. It was too late to hide it though because dozens of Farsi media had picked it up. The reports name was “US-Zionist conspiracies are not complete.”

Alam TV noted that Ghaani had a “message for the US and Israel.” Russia’s Sputnik headlined their report “from inside Syria.” Rasa News reported the same visit with photos.

Ghaani appeared to push several conspiracies during his trip. He claimed the 9/11 terror attacks were carried out by the US and used as a pretext for wars in the Middle East. He also claimed that the “children of the Prophet and Imams love to fight these world-consumers, and this spirit causes the failure of the US and Israel on the one hand and repression of ISIS remnants on the other.”


He said that Iran’s fighters in Syria, of which there are estimated to be tens of thousands of pro-Iranian militias and around 700 members of the IRGC, must prepare for martyrdom and they should be spiritual in their “resistance.” Iran believes it runs an “axis of resistance” in the Middle East against the US, Israel and Gulf countries.

Meanwhile in Iran the IRGC’s Ground Forces showed off new “self-sufficient” military vehicles and other developments they have made. They claim US sanctions have not affected them. IRGC head Hossein Salami also praised the IRGC for its self-sufficiency and “jihad,” and noted that the arms embargo on Iran has not stemmed its abilities. Iran’s enemies should prepare for “surprises,” he noted.

Ghaani was in Iraq around March 30 and again around May 20, according to reports. Some Iraqis resented Ghaani’s meddling in Iraq and he may have had to apply for a visa the second time. Iran has tasked a Hezbollah agent named Sheikh Mohammed Kawtharani with coordinating its role with the pro-Iranian Popular Mobilization Units.

The US put a bounty on Kawtharani on April 11, ten days after the Ghaani visit. On Friday 14 members of the pro-Iranian Kataib Hezbollah were detained in Baghdad while preparing rockets to fire at US troops. Pro-Iranian groups have carried out six rocket attacks on the US this month, including on the Green Zone, airport and Camp Taji.

Rocket attacks were carried out on June 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 18 and 22 according to various reports. It is believed that IRGC aerospace force head Amir Ali-Hajizadeh visited Albukamal on or about April 29, just seven days after overseeing the firing of a military satellite into orbit.

In January, March, and several times in May the Albukamal area was hit by airstrikes. The one in March laid waste parts of the Iranian base. On June 24 an onion factory in Syria and a radar dish installation near Suwayda, as well as areas near Deir Ezzor were hit by airstrikes.

Ghaani’s Albukamal alleged visit comes as Iraq sent forces to the border of Al-Qaim on June 27 to secure the area. The area is used for trafficking precision guided munitions to Hezbollah. In addition Iran suffered a mysterious explosion near an area where surface to surface missiles are made on June 25. At the same time in Iraq Iranian-backed militias are chafing to fight the US. Akram al-Kaabi of the pro-Iranian Nujaba militia released a statement on Saturday saying pro-Iranian groups were united with Iraqi security forces and has been seen with Ghaani recently. He said his militia was “partners in blood and jihad” with the Iraqi security forces.

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