WAR 05-08-2021-to-05-14-2021___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(469) 04-17-2021-to-04-23-2021___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(470) 04-24-2021-to-04-30-2021___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(471) 05-01-2021-to-05-07-2021___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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Breaking: Alpharetta based Colonial Pipeline shuts down gas lines after cyberattack

• Thread starter SmithJ
• Start date Today at 6:03 AM

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Riots in Minneapolis (now the main riot thread)

TERRORISM - Riots in Minneapolis (now the main riot thread)

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyyLkABze9Y .42 min Portland Antifa May Day Riot 2021 •May 2, 2021 Andy Ngo On 1 May, 2021, police declared a riot in downtown Portland as antifa shut down traffic and began smashing up buildings again. A separate antifa group went on to attack the...

www.timebomb2000.com

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Indo-Pacific News - Watching the CCP-China Threat
THREAD: 1) Leaked #Chinese document reveals a sinister plan to ‘unleash’ coronaviruses A document written by Chinese scientists and Chinese public health officials in 2015 discussed the weaponization of SARS coronavirus.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1391033790932283397

View: https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1391033790932283397

ALERT - The Winds of War Blow in Korea and The Far East

Posted for fair use..... https://the-japan-news.com/news/article/0007363712 N. Korea says Biden policy shows hostile U.S. intent, vows response 11:14 am, May 02, 2021 ReutersSEOUL (Reuters) — North Korea lashed out at the United States and its allies in South Korea on Sunday in a series of...

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Growing Threat From Nuclear-Armed China, Russia - MilitarySpot.com

MAY 7, 2021 - U.S. Strategic Command is responsible for America's nuclear deterrence, using nuclear weapons-capable submarines, intercontinental ballistic

www.militaryspot.com

Growing Threat From Nuclear-Armed China, Russia

MAY 7, 2021 – U.S. Strategic Command is responsible for America’s nuclear deterrence, using nuclear weapons-capable submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The two peer nuclear-armed nations that have displayed aggressive behaviors are China and Russia.

Navy Adm. Charles A. Richard, commander of Stratcom, spoke virtually today about the threat at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Project on Nuclear Issues Capstone Conference.

“As a nation, we have not had to consider the implications of engaging in competition through possible crisis or direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable adversary in nearly three decades,” he said. “Now, for the first time in our history, we face two nuclear-capable strategic peer competitors at the same time.”

Richard said he’d like to see a reduced role for nuclear weapons by the U.S., Russia and China and would like to extend the olive branch.

In the meantime, however, Stratcom works diligently to achieve a credible nuclear deterrent that is safe, secure and effective, he said, adding that nuclear deterrence is not just about protecting the homeland, it’s also about protecting allies.

China, Richard said, is a growing threat. Their strategic and conventional forces are rapidly expanding in all domains.

Beijing already has a plausible nuclear employment strategy in the region and is increasingly able to do that at the intercontinental range, he said.

The Chinese are deploying large numbers of solid-fuel ICBMs, and they also have strategic bombers and submarines. They’re well on their way to doubling their nuclear stockpile by the end of the decade, he said.

However, one must not simply compare stockpile sizes to address the threat, Richard said. “A nation’s stockpile is a very crude measure of its overall strategic capability.”

There are many other capabilities that must be factored in, he said, such as delivery systems, accuracy, command and control, readiness, posture, doctrine and training.

Russia is undergoing a very extensive nuclear modernization program, which is about 80% complete, he said, noting that the Kremlin says the modernization program is actually 88% complete.

The Russians have a number of novel weapon systems that include a nuclear-armed missile mounted on a hyperglide system and a nuclear-armed, underwater, unmanned vehicle, Richard noted.

Because of these growing threats from China and Russia, modernizing America’s own nuclear triad is of paramount importance, he said.

Richard highlighted the importance he places on having a highly skilled and motivated workforce to operate and maintain the nuclear triad. These would include scientists, software developers, engineers and technologists.

It would be nice, he said, for talented young people to come to Stratcom. The workforce is graying, and a good percentage of it is nearing retirement age.

Richard said one area of concern is that Russia and China are far outpacing the U.S. in producing science, technology, engineering and math graduate degree holders.

BY DAVID VERGUN, DOD NEWS

 

[Housecarl]

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Home - TheHealthGuild

News Journal News From The Web New and Noteworthy: What I Read This Week: Issue 242 Research of the week Make diets based on genotype work? Like ketones could help diabetes Neanderthals… Read More Benefits of L-Carnitine | Mark’s Daily Apple L-carnitine is a compound that the human body produces...

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Burkina Faso attacks displace thousands in ten days: UN | News from armed groups
By TheHealthReporter - May 7, 2021

Armed groups have displaced some 17,500 people in Burkina Faso in recent days, according to UNHCR, in an attempt to cause “chaos”.

More than 17,500 people in Burkina Faso have been forcibly displaced from their homes in the last ten days due to a series of attacks by unidentified armed groups that have killed 45 people, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said.

Attacks by al-Qaeda-linked armed groups and the Islamic State in the Sahel region of West Africa have risen sharply since the beginning of the year, especially in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, with civilians in charge.

A UNHCR statement said on Friday that gunmen had committed a series of attacks in three different regions, burning houses and shooting at civilians. The assailants also looted health centers and damaged homes and shops.

“Clearly, one of the reasons is to cause chaos and torment civilians,” UNHCR spokesman Boris Cheshirkov told a briefing in Geneva.

The security situation in the Sahel region is fueling one of the fastest growing displacement crises in the world, he said.

Security sources told Reuters on Monday that armed assailants had killed about 30 people in an attack on a village in eastern Burkina Faso.

Last week there were two Spanish journalists and an Irish citizen killed in an ambush by alleged rebels during a poaching patrol near a nature reserve in eastern Burkina Faso.
“The trends we see only point to the presence of more violence,” Cheshirkov said.

Spanish journalists David Beriain and Roberto Fraile and Irish wildlife advocate Rory Young were killed in an ambush in Burkina Faso last week [Javier Soriano/ AFP]

Burkina Faso’s ill-equipped army has struggled to contain the spread of violence.
Last year the government enlisted the help of volunteer militiamen to help the army, but they have been retaliated against by the rebels who attack them and the communities they help.

Armed groups have pushed for religious and ethnic tensions between the agricultural and livestock communities of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to boost recruitment among marginalized communities.

The worsening violence in the wider Sahel region has led to one of the world’s most acute humanitarian crises, UN agencies reported last week.

Violence in Burkina Faso has displaced more than 1.14 million people in just over two years, while the arid and poor country also hosts some 20,000 refugees from neighboring Mali seeking to protect themselves from violence.

 

[Housecarl]

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Russia Pledges Support For Tajikistan Amid Concern Over Afghanistan

President Vladimir Putin says Russia is working on strengthening its military base in Tajikistan to boost regional security as the situation escalates in Afghanistan.

www.rferl.org

Russia Pledges Support For Tajikistan Amid Concern Over Afghanistan
May 08, 2021 22:11 GMT

President Vladimir Putin says Russia is working on strengthening its military base in Tajikistan to boost regional security as the situation escalates in Afghanistan.

During a meeting with his Tajik counterpart Emomali Rahmon on May 8, Putin also said that Russia helps to “strengthen Tajikistan’s armed forces.”

Rahmon raised concerns over the rising tensions in neighboring Afghanistan since the United States' announcement last month that it will pull out all remaining American troops by September 11.

"I know you are concerned about this situation… For our part, we are doing everything we can to support you," Putin told Rahmon.

Tajikistan hosts about 7,000 troops from Russia’s 201st Motor Rifle Division that are stationed in three facilities.

Tajikistan, one the poorest former Soviet countries, has close economic ties with Russa as hundreds of thousands of Tajiks work in Russia to support families at home.

Rahmon was in Moscow to attend Victory Day ceremonies on May 9 to mark 76th anniversary of the end of World War II.

Russia and many other former Soviet countries commemorate the May 9 anniversary with parades and celebrations.

Rahmon, who has ruled Tajikistan with an iron since 1992, maintains close relations with Moscow.

Based on reporting by Reuters and TASS

 

[Housecarl]

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THE PROBLEMS WITH POLICING PAKISTAN

Violent protests by the now-banned Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan once again put the police in the direct line of attack

www.dawn.com

THE PROBLEMS WITH POLICING PAKISTAN
Zoha WaseemPublished May 9, 2021 - Updated 16 minutes ago


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Police and TLP protesters come face to face near the Yateem Khana Chowk in Lahore | Arif Ali/White Star

Violent protests by the now-banned Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan once again put the police in the direct line of attack, resulting in hundreds of casualties in the service. Police complain that their concerns fall on deaf ears, while they are often castigated for their brutality. Is the issue simply one of reforming the police?

The protests began on Sunday, April 11, intensifying the following day when the police were ordered to arrest Saad Rizvi, leader of the far-right religio-political group Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan [TLP].

Major roads and highways across the country were blocked, forcing people to observe a lockdown far more stringent than any recent government-imposed Covid-19 lockdown. As markets remained shuttered and people stayed at home, clashes between the police and protesters intensified outside.

Over the course of the next week, videos provided glimpses of what went on. Junior police officers were stripped of their equipment, pelted with stones and beaten with sticks. The wounded officers were taken hostage and paraded. Police stations were attacked and vehicles were burnt. More than 800 policemen were injured; at least four succumbed to their injuries.
Meanwhile, at least three TLP protesters were killed. A number of videos showed TLP supporters tear-gassed and critically wounded. The group claims that the police fired directly into the crowd, that their casualties are much higher, and that the police tortured their workers.

This was not the first time TLP workers and law enforcement agencies had clashed in Pakistan, and it is unlikely to be the last.

Resentments have increased on both sides in the aftermath of these protests. Police sources claim they feel ‘betrayed’ after the government negotiated with TLP representatives and agreed to consider their demands. Meanwhile, the TLP has opposed the ban placed on their organisation, which is now under review.

The sense of betrayal on the part of the police is exacerbated by the fact that senior police officers feel their concerns over radical groups capable of inciting violence fall on deaf ears. Yet, when push comes to shove, they find themselves on the frontlines, often ill-equipped, outnumbered and without clear instructions. This long-established pattern is only one of the problems facing policing in Pakistan.

A REPEATED PATTERN
It’s been a decade since Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was brutally killed. Following the late governor’s assassination, the police have been increasingly apprehensive about the rise of Barelvi extremism, more so since the establishment of the TLP in 2016.

In a recent article, journalist Azaz Syed wrote that the National Counter-Terrorism Authority (Nacta) chief in 2016, Ehsan Ghani (a former Inspector General of Police), had issued a formal warning against the TLP, “urging that they should be kept away from the political and electoral arena.” This appeal too fell on deaf ears.

A retired inspector general of police tells me that the practice of ignoring or dismissing police officers’ reports against such outfits and organisations has been common across successive governments.

“Police are dealing with these issues on the ground daily, but our reports are not read by the government,” he says, indicating that it is not just the rank-and-file but, often, also the senior police command that is deemed dispensable and disposable by political rulers.

This was not the first time TLP workers and law enforcement agencies had clashed in Pakistan, and it is unlikely to be the last.

In private conversations, police officers admit that policies of appeasing radical groups put the police in complicated and dangerous situations. They remember the 2017 Faizabad sit-in (also led by TLP protesters), when paramilitary forces were called for back-up but they refused to intervene in aid of the police. They resent army officers then stepping in and paying off protesters who had injured policemen, demonstrating a lack of respect for the police.

Police officers also recall how their own institution and the notorious Gullu Butt (a hired goon) were used during the 2014 Model Town tragedy, leaving several protesters dead in Lahore because of a violent police response commissioned by the former government of the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N).

Consequently, they claim, there is a lack of clarity on what the police response should look like in the face of political protests. Excessive force, for which the police leadership is ‘scapegoated’, can cost the police its legitimacy, while those who refuse to use force may be punished.

A senior superintendent of police, Muhammad Ali Nekokara, was dismissed from service when he refused to use force against protesters outside the parliament in 2014, wanting to avoid another incident like Model Town. Such punishment rarely extends to the political corridors, where policies are often made without input from police officers.

More recently, the refusal to arrest Captain Safdar, Maryam Nawaz’s husband, following a Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM) protest in Karachi, led to the notorious kidnapping of the chief of Sindh Police by army and intelligence officers, a stark demonstration of the forms and extents of interferences that can occur within the institution of the civilian police.

It is clear that policing in Pakistan has needed a rethink for years. This is a tabdeeli (change) the current government had promised. But, unfortunately, they have proven no better than their predecessors.

NO WILL FOR POLICE REFORM

Police officers arrest a TLP activist in Peshawar during a protest following the arrest of party chief Saad Hussain Rizvi | Shahbaz Butt/White Star

When the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) came to power, it championed police reform, and an independent police was one of its top commitments. But, it is evident by now that the government is uninterested in creating guidelines or improving policies that can yield better policing — during protests or otherwise.

The prime minister’s disregard towards improving policing and depoliticising the institution was obvious shortly after the PTI came into power in 2018. Readers may remember the late Nasir Durrani (former IG, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) resigning in protest as head of the then much-touted Punjab Committee on Police Reforms and Implementation, apparently because he was upset about the summary removal of Punjab IGP Mohammad Tahir.
The idea of this government being a harbinger of police reform was also called into question more recently when former Director General of the Federal Investigative Agency Bashir Memon alleged that the prime minister wanted him to act against his political and judicial opponents, in spite of a lack of evidence.

Police officers have long claimed that political interference hinders police accountability and breeds malpractice and corruption, trends observable across Pakistan. These claims must be put into a broader context and critically analysed. Only then can the police response to the TLP protests (or other protests for that matter), the state response to police grievances, and the prevailing culture of policing, be adequately understood.

Police officers claim that there is a lack of clarity on what the response should look like in the face of political protests. Excessive force, for which the police leadership is ‘scapegoated’, can cost the police its legitimacy, while those who refuse to use force may be punished.

A LEGACY OF REPRESSION
In 2004, Fida Mohammad and Paul Conway wrote that coercion employed by the criminal justice system (including the police) in Pakistan was part of the system’s hegemonic role in cultivating “submission to the established political order.” In other words, policing has always been central to the political elite’s coercive domination over the Pakistani populace. Problems in policing are thus connected not just to the institutions tasked with policing, but also to broader political and social agendas.

Police corruption and politicisation, for instance, are inherently connected to a legacy of colonial policing, in which the institution was designed and developed as a tool of repression — largely against those deemed to threaten state or elite interests.

In their 2014 paper on police corruption and legitimacy in Pakistan, Jonathan Jackson, Muhammad Asif, Ben Bradford and Zakria Zakar wrote that, after independence, colonial rulers were “replaced by the elites of the new-born country, and the police remained unsuccessful — or perhaps, more correctly, uninterested — in fulfilling any kind of service role and, often, in providing even a minimal sense of security or protection for ordinary people. The successful capture of the police by post-independence elites meant that the general population and the police remained distant.”

It is no surprise therefore, that the police remain one of the most distrusted, corrupt and disliked institutions in the country, a fact that police officers are all too aware of.

Over the past decade, thousands have been killed in police ‘encounter killings’, which remains a notorious practice even after the extrajudicial killing of an innocent young man Naqeebullah Mehsud in police custody in Karachi generated international outrage.

Jackson and his colleagues emphasised this when their survey data showed widespread experiences of police corruption (in Lahore), low levels of perceived effectiveness and fairness, and low levels of popular legitimacy.

This legitimacy has been further compromised by a history of police brutality, in the shape of police torture and extrajudicial killings. Last year, a citizen named Rafiullah (alias Amir) was beaten and paraded naked in a police station in Peshawar, a video recording of which went viral. In 2019, police officials tortured a robbery suspect, Salahuddin Ayubi, to death. Both incidents drew widespread condemnation, leading to the drafting of the Torture and Custodial Death (Prevention and Punishment) Bill 2020, that is yet to receive support in the Parliament.

Furthermore, over the past decade, thousands have been killed in police ‘encounter killings’, which remains a notorious practice even after the extrajudicial killing of an innocent young man Naqeebullah Mehsud in police custody in Karachi generated international outrage.

Such a legacy of repressive policing is complicated by the fact that, from the rank-and-file to the elite cadre of officers that form the Police Services of Pakistan, the police are inherently insecure.

AN INSECURE INSTITUTION
It is well-established that colonial police departments were designed to subjugate and suppress colonial subjects, prevent and curb rebellions, and secure the political and economic interests of the British empire.

What is lesser known is that police officers were poorly paid and that corruption was rampant, because the overarching idea was that, to subjugate the natives, a native cop had to be subjugated as well — to ensure his subservience to the command of elite (British) officers.

Simply put, police officers needed to be a little disempowered to ensure their obedience to their masters, prevent any rebellion on the part of the police, and guarantee that the orders given to the rank and file would be carried out, even if that meant turning a blind eye to police corruption.

Corruption, therefore, enabled the manifestation of police violence and repression.
It is essentially this inherited framework of colonial policing that continues to guide policing in postcolonial societies, especially in large parts of South Asia and Africa.

To understand contemporary police repression, therefore, it is imperative to expand upon the insecurities that continue to plague the police and that contribute to the delivery of poor policing in Pakistan.

A number of police officers and civilians alike have written about the organisational challenges faced by the police: political interference, financial hardships and job insecurity — all contributing to the so-called ‘thana culture’ (an abstract concept that seeks to capture police abuse, corruption and brutality occurring within police stations in Pakistan).

It is also worth mentioning that these challenges have co-existed with rampant crime, terrorism, political violence and contested civil-military relations.

In such an environment, the plight of lower-ranked police officers is seldom known, in spite of the fact that they constitute at least 95 percent of the civilian police and are state agents with whom common citizens have the most routine interactions.

The majority of lower-ranked police officials do not have access to subsidised housing, and most live in cramped, ill-maintained accommodation. They also do not have access to free healthcare. And the police hospitals that are available are filthy, shabby and unkempt, avoided by police officers themselves.

On the job, station-level officials are exposed not just to armed assailants and reckless drivers (including ‘VIPs’ who frequently challenge the authority of awkward constables), but also extreme heat and pollution, unsanitary work conditions, lack of clean water, lack of access to toilets, and a poor diet.

Furthermore, as I wrote in the Wafaqi Mohtasib report of 2015 (‘Mal-administration in Police Stations’), corruption at the level of the station is not just a product of excessive greed, but a practice encouraged to meet the demands of senior officers who expect regular ‘cuts’ or payments. In this way, police corruption relies on criminal activity in a given area, and both feed off each other.

Thus, certain types of police corruption are products of insecurity: lower-ranked officers are required to gather funds to keep stations running, while also meeting the demands of the higher-ups. Failing to do either can result in dissatisfaction that can cost the constable or inspector his position, aggravating work-related stress.

It is worth noting that there are no police unions in Pakistan to prevent such abuse of the police.

When the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) came to power, it championed police reform, and an independent police was one of its top commitments. But, it is evident by now that the government is uninterested in creating guidelines or improving policies that can yield better policing — during protests or otherwise.

Last year, for a project on policing Covid-19 in Pakistan, I found that a majority of police officers reported increased stress as a result of the public health crisis. They also reported an inability to communicate well with their supervisors, a fact that directly impacts how officers relate to their own organisation and deal with work-related stress.

Research carried out by academics at the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology on the police in Vehari, Punjab, revealed that, of the 120 police officers sampled, 97 percent reported suffering from high stress because of their working conditions. Part of this was attributed to strained relations between junior officers and their supervisors.

Senior officers often speak about the harsh conditions faced by lower-ranked officers on the job and due to their socio-economic backgrounds more generally. Nevertheless, misbehaviour on the part of police command with junior officers is seldom acknowledged.

During my ethnographic research on policing in Karachi, I encountered senior officers abusing their grade, and the chain of command, to bid junior officers to do their ‘dirty work’ (or that of their political patrons), such as influencing arrests.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

In other words, one of the greatest problems with police culture is that the police command metes out to lower-ranked officers the very (mal)treatment they receive from the political command: orders to do their ‘dirty work’, knowing that the juniors will be scapegoated should such work backfire.

OTHEY KEY PROBLEM AREAS

A police vehicle is seen in flames after lawyers set it on fire when they attacked the Punjab Institute of Cardiology in December 2019 | Aun Jafri/White Star

The structural issues of bad governance, vested political interests, incentives for repression, and insecurities within the institution discussed above, have generated multiple problems in Pakistani policing. Below, I would like to discuss three of these key problem areas.

I. Militarised Policing
First is the legacy of militarised policing that has been central to the ethos of colonial police structures, their postcolonial organisational development, and the overarching political environment in which this ethos has been sustained.

Militarised policing is the idea that ‘militarism’ (or the idea that states should have strong military capabilities to protect national security interests) permeate civilian policing. Civilian policing, and not just the army, becomes central to the security of the state.

Because of this, police power is created to supplement military power, and the idea of being at war with an internal enemy (criminals, militants, and even dissenters) drives routine police work.

Furthermore, the militarisation of policing (or mirroring the civilian police along military lines) is not just demonstrated through the hierarchical structure of the police and its command-and-control mechanisms, but also, increasingly, in the comparisons and competitions between the police and their military counterparts.

It does not help that policing in Pakistan, as elsewhere, is a pluralised landscape in which multiple institutions and agencies are involved in policing and police work, except that in ‘hybrid regimes’ such as in Pakistan — where civil-military relations remain contested — co-policing by police and (para)militaries not just co-produces repression, but also stimulates an unnecessary competition between the two institutions.

Such competition is fuelled by problematic state policies that deem it necessary to maintain a long-term paramilitary deployment in Karachi, and that deploy the armed forces not just for protests, but also to enforce pandemic-related regulations, as seen more recently.

In my brief research on the ‘partnership’ between the civilian police and the paramilitary in Karachi (carried out between 2015 and 2017), I found that the co-existence of both institutions resulted in a competition that was furthering the militarisation of policing.

This was partly due to the way the presence of armed and paramilitary forces cut into the legitimacy of the police, and partly due to the autonomy afforded to military institutions that police officers believe they are deprived of.

The continuation of militarised policing is also influenced by the fact that various political and social issues are routinely framed as security threats that demand swift and, at times, strong-armed responses on the part of law enforcement agencies.

This is applicable to protests, such as the TLP protests in April, as well. Protests, when securitised, are viewed as a law-and-order problem, rather than a political crisis. As a result, the police are left to rely upon conventional practices to break up protests (i.e., laathi charge, tear gas, water cannons).

There is limited importance given to non-coercive crowd management strategies that should be part of the internal standard operating procedures followed by police officers — such as negotiation, dialogue and communication between the police, public liaison officers, and protesters.

II. Police Martyrdom
Related to the idea of militarised policing, we can also observe a trend in civilian policing: shahadat [martyrdom] is increasingly accepted as part of the job description for those working in the areas of policing and law enforcement.

For instance, we see police media content routinely referring to lower-ranked officers as having joined the police to ‘sacrifice’ themselves — often quite literally.

During interviews for my doctoral research, junior officers would say to me that they “leave their homes adorning kafans [funeral shrouds]”. These comments demonstrate the everyday insecurity faced by street-level officers, most of whom, in the words of a retired police officer, “earn less than a ‘rehrri-wala’ [roadside hawker] per month.”

As police officers continued to be targeted and killed, at some point in the aftermath of the so-called ‘war on terror’, the rhetoric of martyrdom, fuelled by the effects of militarism, became ingrained and glorified in the culture of policing. We repeatedly see police officers correcting journalists and analysts for referring to slain officers as ‘killed’ and not ‘martyred’.

While efforts to recognise police martyrs may be a strategy to ensure that slain police officers’ families are granted the same financial compensation as military soldiers’ (a fair demand), in the overarching idea of police martyrdom we again see aspects of militarised policing.

The public and police, both, as consumers of this idea, now see police organisations ‘at war’ against enemies (of the state, of Islam, of the elite). And it is widely held that a police officer on duty may be expected to be martyred because of his duty (to the state, to Islam, to the elite).

But why should a street-level officer be told, or made to believe, that he has joined the police to achieve martyrdom and should thus be willing to sacrifice himself?

We frequently talk about policing being a ‘service’, not a force. It is, after all, the Police Services of Pakistan. The glorification of martyrdom may be applicable to force-like institutions — i.e., military institutions that are, by their very design, meant to fight wars — not public service institutions.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but martyrdom, or death in general, should not be normalised as the expected outcome of a public service in any country. In doing so, we risk avoiding the attribution of responsibility on the regimes whose securitisation policies have led to routine attacks against police officers.

There is also a risk that normalising police ‘martyrdom’ instead of critically questioning the policies resulting in police deaths, prevents us from seeing the problems of grooming the police as insecure agents of repression. For let us not forget, often a trigger-happy officer is shooting out of fear.

III. Discriminatory Policing
While the previous two problem areas looked at conceptual issues in Pakistani policing, I will now touch upon an outward-facing problem that affects police-community relations: police discrimination.

Discrimination on the part of the police can be meted out to citizens based on ethnic, linguistic, racial, religious, gender and class differences. Here, too, we see a continuation of Pakistan’s colonial legacy and police repression at work.

Recently, I conducted research for a project exploring the relationship between policing and migrant communities. My discussions with members of these communities revealed the everyday discrimination and harassment they face at the hands of law enforcement agencies: from extortion, to criminalisation, and sometimes being stopped for just ‘looking Bengali’ e.g., even though many of them were born in Pakistan.

Similarly, the recent police response towards civilians victimised and rendered homeless due to ‘anti-encroachment’ drives in urban areas such as Karachi, and the arrests of activists advocating for the basic right to housing, continually reminds us how policing is central to neoliberal policies and for protecting the interests of a capitalist state.

Addressing such discrimination and ‘othering’ on the part of the police — and state security institutions — demands committing to an overarching agenda that calls for shifts in social and political ideas on ethnic and religious diversity, shifts in state policies on marginalised communities, and shifts in policies that further class-based discrimination and segregation, for which the elite have always relied upon (com)pliant and subservient police officers.

Without such radical shifts, reforms that simply seek to modernise police training and equipment, cannot possibly impact the institutional culture of the police, which is currently ridden with authoritarianism, suspicion, mistrust of outsiders (including migrants and refugees), as well as institutional and individual insecurities.

The above is by no means an exhaustive list of problems and patterns, but they show how intimately social, political and even religious ideologies penetrate policing organisations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that police officers routinely look back at Mumtaz Qadri and wonder how many employees in their own institution share the sentiments of radical far-right groups. And how many police officers hesitate to engage with these groups’ violent tactics, considering them to be ‘apnay loag [our people],’ in part because of overlapping ideological beliefs, but also due to shared inequalities and cultural experiences of both lower-ranked police officers and TLP supporters.

TOWARDS TRANSFORMATIVE REFORM?

A file photo showing a PPP activist protesting the arrest of Asif Ali Zardari from his Islamabad residence in 2019 | Tanveer Shahzad/White Star

Contemporary police reform projects — when they are able to survive political tussles and bureaucratic bickering — are often too minutely focused on aspects such as training and education, and procedural matters such as tenure, transfers, and postings.

While these are no doubt critical to the delivery of good police work, such changes may only produce short-term results, instead of larger ideological changes in policing.
Then there are the donor-funded projects that are too reliant on an external organisation’s interest and their vision of police reform. The Asian Development Bank (ADB), for example, funded a multi-billion-dollar project to reform the criminal justice system, including the police, in Pakistan in the early 2000s. The much-touted Police Order 2002 came into being under the ADB’s Access to Justice Programme. The ADB had referred to it as a ‘landmark legislation’.

An evaluation of this programme’s progress after the project was completed several years later, found that it had not been effective in improving police performance and accountability, partly due to ‘lukewarm’ interest by provincial governments and the continued politicisation of the police.

By the time the evaluation was carried out (in 2009), the 2002 Order had been watered down due to resistance from provincial governments, the concessions made by the then federal government of Pervez Musharraf, and multiple amendments made in the law shortly after it came into effect.

For deeper structural and ideological changes in policing, there is a need for transformative police reform. Transformative reform demands consistent police accountability, especially one that prevents and hinders racist and corrupt police practices, practices that have been at the heart of colonial policing.

Calls for such radical, ‘bottom up’ reforms have witnessed a global surge, particularly in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing at the hands of the American police and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a recently published paper on police reform in a global perspective, Professor Tessa Diphoorn and colleagues emphasised that ‘reform needs to be considered through a transformative lens that employs a multi-agency and long-term approach.’

A multi-agency approach includes looking at various actors and networks that partake in policing, both public and private. And a long-term approach tells us to think beyond instantaneous, reactionary reform efforts that often follow political events (such as elections), or violent incidents (such as high-profile police killings).

Furthermore, the authors stress taking a holistic approach that targets the larger structures of violence and which demands that we critically study the political contexts in which repressive policing occurs.

In a recent talk, Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing, said that reformists need to address the regimes of exploitation, of which the police are but one part. The “locus of the struggle”, he said, cannot just be the police; instead, a struggle must take place at political levels, which urges us to shift away from neoliberal politics that enables oppression, discrimination, exploitation and a culture of authoritarian control.

Transformative reforms, therefore, need to occur on a much bigger scale, not simply at the level of the police. This is a significant, generational challenge. But without it, policing will remain central to the protection of state interests — even if that means sacrificing ‘good policing’ for the sake of an order in which regimes create and sustain radical forces that incite violence and create public disorder.
The writer is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Global City Policing, University College London. She tweets @ZohaWaseem
Published in Dawn, EOS, May 9th, 2021

 

[jward]

U.S. 5th Fleet seizes weapons shipment from stateless dhow in Arabian Sea

Reuters1 minute read

1/4
Thousands of illicit weapons are displayed onboard the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG 61) which was seized from a stateless dhow in international waters of the North Arabian Sea in this picture taken on May 8, 2021 and released by U.S.Navy on May 9, 2021. U.S. Navy Forces Central Command/U.S. Navy/Handout via REUTERS
The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet said on Saturday that the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG 61) seized an illicit shipment of weapons from a stateless dhow in international water of the North Arabian Sea on May 6-7.

"The cache of weapons included dozens of advanced Russian-made anti-tank guided missiles, thousands of Chinese Type 56 assault rifles, and hundreds of PKM machine guns, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades launchers. Other weapon components included advanced optical sights," the Bahrain-based Fleet said in a statement.
It added that the materiel is in U.S. custody awaiting final disposition, while the original source and intended destination of the materiel is under investigation.

“After all illicit cargo was removed, the dhow was assessed for seaworthiness, and after questioning, its crew was provided food and water before being released,” the statement said.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.


Posted for fair use

U.S. 5th Fleet seizes weapons shipment from stateless dhow in Arabian Sea

The U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet said on Saturday that the guided-missile cruiser USS Monterey (CG 61) seized an illicit shipment of weapons from a stateless dhow in international water of the North Arabian Sea on May 6-7.

www.reuters.com

 

[Zagdid]

Navy Littoral Combat Ships Are Getting Norwegian Naval Strike Missiles | The National Interest

Navy Littoral Combat Ships Are Getting Norwegian Naval Strike Missiles

Despite the good stealth and speed characteristics of littoral combat ships, the LCSs would have been reduced to bringing the proverbial knife to a swordfight.

by Sebastien Roblin May 8, 2021

On April 29, Admiral Mike Gilday informed Congress that by the end of 2022 the Navy planned to complete the installation of Naval Strike Missiles launchers developed by Norwegian firm Kongsberg on the service’s 31 corvette-sized littoral combat ships.

Gilday also announced that in that timeframe, fifteen each mine-countermeasure and submarine-hunting modules would be deployed on the LCSs after years of delays.

If that ambitious schedule is met, that should finally give the troubled and under-gunned vessels the long-range punch and unique mission capabilities they have conspicuously lacked.

Currently, even surface warfare variants of littoral combat ships rely on relatively small-caliber 57-millimeter guns and Hellfire missiles only capable of engaging enemies a few miles away, ie. within visual range. That’s a big shortcoming considering even much smaller corvettes and missile boats operated by China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia can carry powerful anti-ship missiles with ranges measured in the dozens or even hundreds of miles.

Despite the good stealth and speed characteristics of littoral combat ships, the LCSs would have been reduced to bringing the proverbial knife to a swordfight (or literally, guns to a missile fight) even when confronting much smaller and/or less sophisticated surface adversaries.

Now littoral combat ships will receive two launchers mounting four NSM launch canisters (or “Launch Missile Modules”) each installed on the bow aft of the 57-millimeter gun, along with the requisite fire control systems.

That won’t fix all of the problems with the littoral combat ships, such as outrageously high operating costs and frequent breakdowns of the Freedom-class LCS’s propulsion system. However, it will at least enable the corvettes to pose a credible threat to surface ships small and large, and thus help disincentivize aggression in contentious waters like the Persian Gulf and South China Sea.

The Navy has been promising such an upgrade for years. In 2014 it tested mounting both Naval Strike and Harpoon missiles on the USS Coronado. But though the NSM was formally adopted in 2018 as the RGM-184 missile, it was only deployed on one operational ship, the Independence-class Gabrielle Giffords. Furthermore, the Navy seemed unable to rearm the Giffords’s launchers following a test-shot, raising questions as to whether the service had logistics in place for the new weapon.

However, Admiral Gilday’s announcement suggests the Navy is now confident it can proceed with the NSM upgrade. In fact, the service is also considering testing and possibly deploying NSM canisters on its San Antonio-class Landing Platform Dock amphibious ships, which previously did not carry anti-ship weapons.

More importantly, at least ten forthcoming Constellation-class frigates will each mount sixteen RGM-184 canisters as their anti-ship armament.

NSMs are also deployed on ten Royal Norwegian Navy frigates and missile boats, and will be deployed on fifteen forthcoming Canadian Type 26 frigates, all but one of the German Navy’s twelve frigates, and eight Royal Malaysian Navy Maharaja Lela-class frigates.

The UK is also offering to sell eight NSM-equipped missile boats to Ukraine for $1.6 billion for deployment in the mid-2020s, while India is expected to procure helicopter-launched NSMs for its new fleet of MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopters.

A Naval Strike Missile measures about 4 meters long and weighs 880 pounds, including a 276-pound fragmentation warhead. That makes it a lightweight anti-ship missiles compared to the 488-lb warhead on the venerable Harpoon, or the 1,000-pound warhead on the sophisticated LRASM stealth cruise missile. However, lighter weapons are an easier fit for smaller ships than big missiles that require large vertical launch systems and lack powerful sensors that can detect very distant targets anyway.

You can compare here

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imwLc2T3oks&t=48s
from a Harpoon followed by an NSM that together capsized the decommissioned LPD Ogden in the 2014 SinkEx exercise.

At $2.2 million per missile, the NSM costs over 57 percent more than a $1.4 million Harpoon Block II missile but has a proportionately greater range of 115 miles. Furthermore, the NSM’s sensors and stealth characteristics theoretically make it more likely to hit a designated target.


Like the Harpoon, the NSM uses a solid-fuel rocket booster to leap off a ship-based launcher, then discards the booster and switches to a turbojet engine slung on its back as it skims low over the water to minimize radar detection range at speeds between 537 and 690 miles per hour.

To avoid the formidable air defense umbrella protecting modern warships, NSMs are shaped to have a reduced radar cross-section, and are built out of non-reflective composite materials. Furthermore, in their terminal approach phase the missiles perform randomized banking maneuvers to evade the target’s close defense weapons.

An NSM missile cruises towards coordinates assigned by the launch platform using a combination of GPS, terrain recognition imaging, and inertial navigation systems—all the while maintaining a two-way link with the launching platform allowing the operator to re-target or abort the strike midflight if desired.

As ships are constantly on the move, in the terminal phase the missile activates an infrared seeker to search for targets, classify their ship-type, and home in for the kill, while filtering out clutter produced by waves and coastlines. The IR seeker has the advantage of being far more discrete than the active radar-seeker on a Harpoon and is unaffected by -jamming. The sensor’s classification ability also in theory allows the missile to discriminate against hitting, civilian ships, decoys, or low-priority adversaries.

The NSM can also be used for precisions strikes on land targets, a useful ability to have in a pinch if more specialized land-attack capabilities aren’t close at hand.

The NSM’s characteristics have inspired other U.S. military services to adopt it as a shortcut to fielding anti-ship capability, which coveted today due to the perception that a conflict with China would be primarily naval- and air-warfare focused.

The U.S. Marine Corps, for example, plans to deploy hundreds of JSMs onto unmanned JLTV trucks (a next-gen Humvee replacement) it could quickly insert onto small islands in the Pacific to provide land-based anti-ship support to U.S. Navy vessels. The ship-hunting ROGUE-Fires robots could even be dropped on the deck of U.S. amphibious carriers to give them temporary anti-ship capability.

Meanwhile, in 2018 the Army also test-fired a ‘palletized’ NSM from a HEMTT logistics truck, though the service appears to be focusing instead on a ship-sinking Precision Strike Missile launched from its HIMARS rocket launcher system.

Abroad, Poland deploys NSM coastal batteries aimed at countering Russia’s Baltic fleet, while Romania plans to procure its own NSM batteries by 2024 that could defend its coastline from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The U.S. Air Force intends to use an air-launched variant called the Joint Strike Missile (JSM) which can fit into the internal weapons bays of F-35 stealth jet fighters operated by the United States, Norway, and Japan.

The JSM is one of the key new weapons set for integration in the F-35’s $16-billion Block 4 upgrade program. Compared to its surface-launched predecessor, the JSM offers a longer maximum range of up to 350 miles if it cruises at high altitude, though it can trade range for stealth by descending to a sea-skimming altitude. Japan, Norway, and the U.S. are all set to deploy air-launched JSMs.

Overall, the Naval Strike Missile may not have the range or speed of larger anti-ship missiles fielded by Russia and China, but seemingly is proving a convenient solution for rapidly fielding stealthy standoff anti-ship capability onto platforms that had little or none before.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Afghanistan: Army Angst Over Uncertainty On Post-Pullout Demands - Breaking Defense

“What’s that going to mean from an operational perspective?” acting secretary John Whitley asks. “What’s that going to mean from a budgetary perspective?”

breakingdefense.com

Afghanistan: Army Angst Over Uncertainty On Post-Pullout Demands
“What’s that going to mean from an operational perspective?” acting secretary John Whitley asks. “What’s that going to mean from a budgetary perspective?”

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
on May 10, 2021 at 3:25 PM

WASHINGTON: The Army is deeply unsure how the planned pull-out from Afghanistan — and what comes after — will drive demands on its troops and budget, acting secretary John Whitley said this afternoon. The best case scenario is a smooth withdrawal that frees up forces and funding for great-power competition with China and Russia, but that’s not an outcome Whitley is counting on.

Even in that best case, the Office of the Secretary of Defense probably won’t let the Army budgets keep fiscal savings from the withdrawal, warned Whitley, who previously served as Army comptroller. If all goes well, “there will be some freeing of resources,” he said. “The Army’s position would be, it would be nice if that stayed with the Army; that probably won’t be the department’s position.”

And that best case is far from guaranteed. “There’s a lot of risk; you don’t know exactly how these will play out,” Whitley said, pointing to the US withdrawal from Iraq in 2010. “The follow-on costs generally tend to be higher than expected.”


“The biggest one on our minds is Afghanistan”
This afternoon, the acting secretary – a holdover from the Trump Administration – was asked on an Atlantic Council webcast about threats that, while underappreciated right now, might loom large in the months to come.

“Obviously, probably the biggest one on our minds is Afghanistan,” Whitley replied. “What happens as we come out? What does the over-the-horizon [presence] look like? What does defense of any assets that remain in theater… entail? And how does that evolve and what changes?

“The commanders on the ground are doing a tremendous job of trying to plan that and trying to do this as professionally and safely and responsibly as we can,” he said. “We know, though, that the plans aren’t going to be perfect and the world will interfere.”

So, Whitley went on, “What’s that going to mean from an operational perspective? What’s that going to mean from a budgetary perspective?”

The Army’s also concerned about Russian deployments on the Ukrainian border and territorial disputes in Asia, Whitley said. But “No. 1 on the list is the Middle East,” he emphasized. “As much as we’re trying to pivot and focus elsewhere, certainly the Middle East remains our biggest point of engagement.”

Currently, the Army has about 485,000 regular active duty soldiers and over half-a-million part-time personnel in the Reserves and National Guard, noted Gen. James McConville, Army Chief of Staff. That is about the same size it was on Sept. 11, 2001, and well below its size during the peak commitments to Afghanistan and Iraq. The service had been trying to grow for several years but decided to stop given current budget pressures. Can the service shrink to save money for modernization?

“I think 485,000 active, a little over a million for the total force, is what we’re looking at [to meet the demands of] the present strategy,” McConville said today, speaking alongside Whitley. “[But] that’ll be driven by resources and by how much risk the department’s willing to take.

“We don’t set end-strength in a vacuum, we set it based on the requirements we’re given,” Whitley said. “The requirements right now exceed the end-strength,” he added, if you sum up both the current operational demands of theater commanders around the world and the need to have forces ready to go for a wide range of contingency operations plans (O-plans).

“The United States Army is fully committed today,” Whitley said. If you want to reduce Army end-strength, he said, “what requirements are going to be lifted from us? And that’s not a conversation we can have in the Army unilaterally.”

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

Posted for fair use.....

Top Russian Submarine Design Bureau Hit By Cyber Attack With Chinese Characteristics

The Rubin Design Bureau has designed ballistic missile submarines, among other types, as well as advanced unmanned underwater vehicles.

www.thedrive.com

Top Russian Submarine Design Bureau Hit By Cyber Attack With Chinese Characteristics
The Rubin Design Bureau has designed ballistic missile submarines, among other types, as well as advanced unmanned underwater vehicles.
BY JOSEPH TREVITHICK MAY 10, 2021

• THE WAR ZONE

VIA CYBEREASON
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JOSEPH TREVITHICKView Joseph Trevithick's Articles
@FranticGoat
Russia's Rubin Design Bureau was the target of a cyber attack involving an image file with malicious software embedded inside it via a specific tool that has become a hallmark of multiple entities linked to the Chinese government. The file could have been used to create a backdoor into the networks at Rubin, a prolific designer of submarines and other underwater platforms. Its portfolio includes the ultra-quiet Borei class ballistic missile submarine, the unique Belgorod and Losharik special missions submarines, and the Poseidon nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed ultra-long-range 'doomsday' torpedo, among other work.

Cybersecurity firm Cybereason first reported on the attack on April 30, 2021, but it's unclear when it was actually carried out. Metadata that the company provided along with its analysis says that the Rich Text Format (RTF) image in question was created in 2007, but the report says that this is almost certainly false and meant to help obfuscate its origins. Other portions of the metadata indicate that it was first accessed earlier in April, but that may just be when Cybereason first opened it up to assess it. It's also not clear if the attack was successful in any way.

APETROV09703 VIA WIKIMEDIA
A monument at the Rubin Design Bureau centered on a model of a Typhoon class ballistic missile submarine, the largest submarine ever built, by submerged displacement, to date. Above that, in the same scale, is a model of the Delfin, the Russian Navy's first combat-capable submarine, which entered service in 1903. Rubin designed both submarines.

"The initial infection vector is a spear-phishing email addressed to the “respectful general director Igor Vladimirovich [Vilnit]” at the Rubin Design Bureau, a submarine design center from the 'Gidropribor' concern in St. Petersburg, a national research center that designs underwater weapons like submarines," Cybereason's report says. "The email attachment is a malicious RTF document weaponized with a RoyalRoad payload, with content describing a general view of an autonomous underwater vehicle."



WHAT SECRETIVE ANTI-SHIP MISSILE DID CHINA HACK FROM THE U.S. NAVY?By Tyler Rogoway and Joseph TrevithickPosted in THE WAR ZONE
ANALYZING THE FIRST IMAGES OF RUSSIA'S HUGE DOOMSDAY TORPEDO CARRYING SPECIAL MISSIONS SUBBy Joseph Trevithick and Tyler RogowayPosted in THE WAR ZONE
U.S. AND BELGIUM NAB CHINESE SPY ACCUSED OF STEALING GE JET ENGINE TECH AND MOREBy Joseph TrevithickPosted in THE WAR ZONE
HONEYWELL FINED MILLIONS OVER EXPORTING SENSITIVE INFO ON F-22, F-35, AND MORE TO CHINA (UPDATED)By Joseph TrevithickPosted in THE WAR ZONE
ARMY HIRES COMPANY TO DEVELOP CYBER DEFENSES FOR ITS STRYKERS AFTER THEY WERE HACKEDBy Joseph TrevithickPosted in THE WAR ZONE

A "spear-phishing" attack involves tricking an individual into opening a file, received via Email or some other source, that contains malicious software (malware). That malware then infects the target's computer, and potentially other parts of any networks it is linked to, either carrying out certain malign tasks directly or providing a vector through which additional attacks can be carried out.

VIA CYBEREASON
A screenshot of the Email to Rubin's Director-General, Igor Vladimirovich Vilnit, to which the infected RTF image was attached.

In this case, according to Cybereason, the attackers used a program called RoyalRoad to embed a separate file, winlog.wll, into the RTF image. That subfile would then have loaded a piece of malware, called Portdoor, onto the target computer when the TRF was opened.
Cybereason said that Portdoor was "a previously undocumented backdoor" and had "the ability to do reconnaissance, target profiling, delivery of additional payloads, privilege escalation, process manipulation static detection antivirus evasion, one-byte XOR encryption, AES-encrypted data exfiltration and more." In short, it could have identified files of interest on the target computer, and potentially on networks it was linked to, and then paved the way for further attacks to either steal that information or carry out other malicious tasks.

The individuals who launched the cyber attack on Rubin are not identified in this report, which only says that the "previously undocumented backdoor [was] assessed to have been developed by a threat actor likely operating on behalf of Chinese state-sponsored interests. Beyond that, the RoyalRoad RTF "weaponizer" is a tool that has become very closely associated with Chinese government-linked entities, known by names like Goblin Panda, Rancor Group, TA428, Tick, and Tonto Team, according to Cybereason and other sources.

The Chinese government is certainly well-known for engaging in industrial espionage, including via cyberattacks, against foreign companies to steal information about military and non-military projects, as well as systems that could have both military and civilian applications. However, public reports about such incidents more typically involve Western companies or major firms in East Asia, rather than those in Russia.

The attack on Rubin is particularly notable given China's efforts to expand the overall size and capabilities of its submarine fleets, especially with the introduction of new, quieter, nuclear-powered ballistic and guided missile submarines. Though Russia's own defense acquisition and modernization efforts are often limited by budgetary issues and other factors, the country still has a significant knowledge base when it comes to the development of advanced submarines, thanks to Rubin, as well as the Malakhit Design Bureau. That latter firm developed the Yasen and Yasen-M class super-quiet guided-missile submarines. The Russian Navy just recently received its first Yasen-M, the Kazan, and you can read more about both types here. Rubin's website says that it, alone, has been responsible for the development of 85 percent of Soviet and Russian Navy submarines since 1901.


As already noted, Rubin has also been responsible for the development of a number of novel and otherwise highly specialized underwater systems, another area that China is increasingly interested in, as well. The Russian company's design work in this field includes the Poseidon torpedo, seen in the video below, and the Harpsichord large unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV), also intended for deployment from manned submarines.


It has also been developing another relatively large UUV, known as Cephalopod, which could potentially operate as a fully autonomous armed mini-submarine. Interestingly, the image in the spear-phishing Email sent to Rubin's director was a graphic of a design that appears to be at least closely related to Cephalopod.

VIA CYBEREASON
A copy of the image into which the malware had been embedded, which was then sent to Rubin's Director-General Vilnit. The system shown is similar, if not identical to an unmanned underwater vehicle Rubin has been developing called Cephalopod.

PUBLIC DOMAIN
An image that has been circulating online since at least 2017, showing various Russian unmanned platforms. A rendering of an unmanned underwater vehicle identified as Cephalopod is seen at the bottom right.

It's not clear where the attackers might have initially obtained that image or if they faked it themselves. "Whoever drew it knew a lot about AUVs and Rubin designs. So the image itself appears legit," H.I. Sutton, an expert on all things that operate underneath the waves, wrote regarding this entire report on his website, Covert Shores. Either way, whoever was behind the cyber attack could have used the graphic to further try to fool Vilnit into thinking it was an internal message and get him to open it.

It's also interesting to remember that a report emerged last year that Beijing and Moscow were cooperating on the development of a new non-nuclear submarine design. The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) already operates two Russian-made Kilo class diesel-electric attack submarines, as well as 10 more so-called Improved Kilos with enhanced performance and sonar capabilities, both of which are also Rubin designs. At the same time, there have been suggestions that this partnership could benefit Russia more than China since the latter appears now to be leading the two in the development of air-independent propulsion (AIP) systems used in very quiet diesel-electric designs.

RUSSIAN MINISTRY OF DEFENSE
A Russian Navy Kilo class submarine. The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy also operates submarines of this type.

Regardless, there are many instances where China has cooperated with foreign firms, including those in Russia, on the development, as well as production, of certain military systems, only for Chinese concerns to subsequently begin making unlicensed clones and derivatives. The Kremlin itself has publicly said that it has engaged with its counterparts in Beijing in the past on this matter, generally, as a potential impediment to future Russian arms sales to China.

"Unauthorized copying of our equipment abroad is a huge problem. There have been 500 such cases over the past 17 years," Yevgeny Livadny, the Chief of Intellectual Property Projects at Rostec, Russia's main state-owned industrial conglomerate, said in December 2019. "China alone has copied aircraft engines, Sukhoi planes, deck jets, air defense systems, portable air defense missiles, and analogs of the Pantsir medium-range surface-to-air systems."

No matter what, if the cyber attack on Rubin was indeed Chinese state-sponsored, it would certainly seem to indicate that officials in Beijing feel that there is much to be gleaned from that design bureau's work to further its own underwater ambitions. How this incident might impact further Russian-Chinese cooperation on submarines, or any other major industrial projects, defense-related or not, remains to be seen.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com

 

[jward]

The Realignment
In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board.
by
Michael Doran
and
Tony Badran
May 10, 2021

Tablet Magazine; original photos: Alex Wong/Getty Images; Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

On Sunday, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan phoned his Israeli counterpart and turned back the hands of time. According to the American readout of the conversation, Sullivan called “to express the United States’ serious concerns” about two things: the pending eviction, by court order, of a number of Palestinian families from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, and the weekend’s violent clashes on the Temple Mount between Israeli police and Palestinian rioters. The Biden administration, in other words, publicly asserted an American national interest in preventing the Sheikh Jarrah evictions, regardless of the dictates of Israeli law—just as Hamas was sending rockets and incendiary devices into Israel with the same message. This conscious effort to put “daylight” between the United States and Israel marked a clear return to the approach of President Barack Obama.

Sullivan’s call invites us to reopen an unresolved debate that began even before President Joe Biden took the oath of office. Is the new president forging his own path in the Middle East, or is he following in the footsteps of Obama? Until now, those who feared that his presidency might become the third term of Obama fixed their wary eyes on Robert Malley, the president’s choice as Iran envoy. When serving in the Obama White House, Malley helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, which sought accommodations with Tehran that came at the expense of America’s allies in the Middle East. In a revealing Foreign Affairs article, written in 2019, Malley expressed regret that Obama failed to arrive at more such accommodations. The direction of Obama’s policy was praiseworthy, Malley wrote, but his “moderation” was the enemy of his project. Being “a gradualist,” he presided over “an experiment that got suspended halfway through.”

Malley, the article leads one to assume, is now advising Biden to go all the way—and fast. But surely it is the president, not his Iran envoy, who determines the direction and pace of policy. Over the course of a career in Washington spanning nearly half a century, Biden has never cut a radical profile. Nor have Sullivan or Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The presence of this pair at Biden’s side signaled to many that Malley would not drive Iran policy. Shortly after the election, a veteran Washington insider noted to a journalist that “Blinken and Sullivan are certainly from the more moderate wing of the party, and that is reassuring.”

At his Senate confirmation hearing in January, Blinken continued to reassure by expressing his intention to fix the defects of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran nuclear deal is known. The following month, Foreign Policy reported that a split had opened up inside the government, with Sullivan and Blinken fulfilling the hopes placed on them. When Malley argued in favor of giving “inducements” to Iran to convince it to return quickly to the JCPOA, Sullivan and Blinken “dominated the discussion” by “toeing a harder line.”

Over the past month, that line became even harder—as in harder to see. On April 2, Malley gave an interview to PBS that raised eyebrows in Jerusalem, Riyadh, and in Congress. Ahead of nuclear talks in Vienna, where the Europeans were about to host indirect negotiations between Biden officials and Iranian representatives about resurrecting the JCPOA, Malley expressed an eagerness to lift American sanctions on Iran and ensure “that Iran enjoys the benefits that it was supposed to enjoy under the deal.” About the interview, an anonymous senior Israeli official said, “If this is American policy, we are concerned.”

Israeli intelligence operatives put an exclamation point on that sentence when they (it seems clear) sabotaged a power generator at the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility in Natanz. While damaging Iran’s nuclear program, the operation also signaled Israeli opposition to the American position in the Vienna talks, now underway.
The alarm in Jerusalem is justified, if the May 1 statement by Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s lead negotiator in Vienna, is anything to go by. The American negotiators, he claimed, had already agreed in principle to remove sanctions on Iran’s energy sector, automotive industry, financial services, banking industry, and ports—to eliminate, in other words, all of the most significant economic sanctions ever imposed on Iran. Recent statements from Biden administration officials give us no reason to disbelieve Araghchi, and the smart money is now on a full resurrection of the JCPOA in relatively short order.

But even the Israelis have yet to absorb the full scope and magnitude of Biden’s accommodation of Iran. The problem is not that Sullivan and Blinken are failing to restrain Malley, but that they are marching in lockstep with him. A consensus reigns inside the administration, not just on the JCPOA but on every big question of Middle East strategy: Everyone from the president on down agrees about the need to complete what Obama started—which means that the worst is yet to come.

If the control that Obama’s project exercises over every mind in the Biden administration is not already obvious, it is because confusion still reigns about the project’s true nature. Doubt us? Then take the following one-question quiz: To what, precisely, was Robert Malley referring when he spoke of Obama’s half-completed “experiment”?
If you answered “the JCPOA,” you got it wrong.
If you said “improving relations with Iran,” you scored much higher, but you still failed.
The Realignment



Tony Blinken’s Mideast Blind Spot
The U.S. secretary of state and his regional envoy Robert Malley played in the sandbox together as children in Paris but speak different languages when it comes to American foreign policy. The results may be the same.
byMartin Peretz

 

[jward]

The Death of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
A big problem that the Biden administration suddenly won’t have to deal with
byMichael Oren



Why Iran Is Getting the Bomb
The ‘moderates’ staffing the Biden administration will move quickly to cement Barack Obama’s foreign policy legacy, starting with its most obvious failures
byLee Smith

The president’s “ultimate goal,” Malley wrote, was “to help the [Middle East] find a more stable balance of power that would make it less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” That is a roundabout way of saying that Obama dreamed of a new Middle Eastern order—one that relies more on partnership with Iran.

And the dream lives on. In May 2020, six months after Malley penned his Foreign Affairs essay, Jake Sullivan, writing as an adviser to Biden’s presidential campaign, co-authored his own article laying out a Middle East strategy. The goal, he explained, is to be “less ambitious” militarily, “but more ambitious in using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to press for a de-escalation in tensions and eventually a new modus vivendi among the key regional actors.” If we substitute the word “balance” for “modus vivendi,” and if we recognize that “de-escalation” and “diplomacy” require cooperation with Iran, then Sullivan’s vision is identical to Obama’s “ultimate goal” as described by Malley. Sullivan emphasized that equivalence when he defined the objective of his plan as “changing the United States’ role in a regional order it helped create.”

This project to create a new Middle Eastern order, which now spans two presidential administrations, deserves a name. The “Obama-Biden-Malley-Blinken-Sullivan initiative” is quite a mouthful. Instead, we hereby dub it “the Realignment.” That it should fall to us, and at this late date, to name a project on which many talented people have been working for the better part of a decade is more than a little odd. Typically, presidents launch initiatives as grand as this one with a major address, and they further embroider their vision with dozens of smaller speeches and interviews. One searches in vain for Obama’s speech, “A New Order in the Middle East.”

Obama, it seems clear, felt his project would advance best with stealth and misdirection, not aggressive salesmanship. Biden, while keeping Obama’s second-term foreign policy team nearly intact, is using the same playbook. He and his aides recognize that confusion about the “ultimate goal” makes achieving it easier. Indeed, confusion is the Realignment’s best friend.

“Calculated to confuse” would make a fitting epitaph for the JCPOA—if ever it were to shuffle off this mortal coil. At 159 pages, containing five annexes, and replete with secret side deals, it packed into one binder enough smoke and mirrors to keep the American public confused for the past six years. Although the JCPOA is only one component of Obama’s grand project, its role is indispensable.

Let’s start with what the JCPOA does not do. Contrary to what its architects have claimed since 2015, the JCPOA does not block all the pathways to an Iranian nuclear weapon. How could it? The deal’s so-called “sunset provisions”—the clauses that eliminate all meaningful restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program—will all have taken effect in less than a decade; some of the most significant restrictions will disappear by 2025. By 2031, the Islamic Republic will have, with international protection and assistance, an unfettered nuclear weapons program resting on an industrial-scale enrichment capability. On the basis of this fact alone, the best one can possibly say about the deal is that it buys a decade of freedom from Iranian nuclear extortion.

But even that modest claim does not withstand scrutiny. The deal permits a robust research and development program, and it does not destroy facilities (such as the fortified bunker in the mountains at Fordow) that are indisputably part of a military, not a civilian, nuclear program. In other words, Iran is pursuing its nuclear weapons ambitions even during this period of supposed restrictions, and its program is continuing, as any newspaper reader can see, to serve as a tool of extortion.
So blatant are the deal’s failings that Biden officials do not deny the problem. Instead, they pretend to have a fix. Their plan? A “follow-on accord.” The JCPOA, they claim, is stage one in a multistage process, like a Silicon Valley product awaiting an upgrade.
It was Sullivan, in his Foreign Affairs article, who first floated the “follow-on” idea. Blinken then promised, at both his Senate confirmation hearing in January and a press conference on his first day on the job, to work for a “longer and stronger agreement.”

“Lengthen and Strengthen with Sullivan and Blinken!” would make for a catchy slogan if JCPOA 2.0 actually had a chance in reality. But the Biden administration insists it will not raise the idea of a longer and stronger agreement until after the full restoration of JCPOA 1.0. However, as we noted, JCPOA 1.0 quickly expunges all significant limitations on Iran’s nuclear program—permanently, and with an international seal of approval. By giving Tehran everything it ever wanted up front, JCPOA 1.0 obviates JCPOA 2.0.

Sullivan and Blinken profess to recognize the hideous flaws of the JCPOA, even as they sweat and toil to resurrect it from the tomb where Trump had buried it. The comfort they offered worried minds only increased when, according to the February Foreign Policy report, they overruled Malley, refusing Iran’s demand that the United States lift all sanctions as a precondition for returning to the JCPOA. The men of understanding, we were led to believe, were also men with backbone.
But that report merely deflected watchful eyes from the real story: the bargaining between Washington and Tehran that started the minute the administration took office. Even before the Vienna negotiations began in April, messages were winging their way from Tehran to Washington, through intermediaries who interceded with ideas about how the United States could relax sanctions without formally lifting them.

As a result, Sullivan and Blinken delivered inducements to Tehran—and lots of them. To give just a few examples: The Biden administration dropped American objections to a $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan to Iran. It rescinded the Trump-era policy at the United Nations, which had triggered the so-called snapback mechanism—a move to reimpose international sanctions on Iran for its violation of the deal. It released frozen Iranian oil funds in South Korea, Iraq, and Oman. These steps portended the imminent end of the sanctions regime, thus encouraging the Chinese to buy Iranian oil at a much higher rate than at any time since 2017. Against this background came Malley’s April 2 interview on PBS, in which he expressed an eagerness to lift all sanctions as quickly as possible.

The administration’s enthusiasm for maximum accommodation of Iran came as a shock to many observers, among them Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, who released a statement accusing the administration of breaking its word. Inhofe, the Israelis, and countless others had mistaken Blinken’s rhetoric for an actual plan to use the leverage built up by Trump to “fix” the nuclear deal.
To be fair, Blinken always said the administration intended to return to the JCPOA. About that, neither he nor Sullivan nor any other administration official ever lied. But they did strategically encourage people to believe things they knew were not, and never would be, true.

Their deceptions have gone far beyond narrow nuclear questions. Contrary to the claims of the administration, the JCPOA ends all of the most damaging sanctions on Iran—nuclear and nonnuclear alike. Thanks to one of its early sunset clauses, the JCPOA already ended an international ban on conventional arms sales to Iran, thus offering Tehran avenues for expanding its defense cooperation with Russia and China. As the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) will grow richer from oil sales, its international partnerships will also grow stronger. The network of militias surrounding Israel and America’s Arab allies will expand, and their sting, delivered by precision-guided weaponry, will become more venomous. Compounded by the backing of powerful friends like Russia and China, the difficulty of containing Iran’s regional project will increase. This analysis is not a theory; it is common sense.

The deceptions surrounding the JCPOA have a clear purpose: to make the administration appear supportive of containment when, in fact, it is ending it. But why are officials like Blinken and Sullivan so comfortable with such duplicity? Answering this question requires entering the Realignment mentality. The Foreign Affairs articles certainly offer one way in, but the most direct route is through the mind of Barack Obama, the author of the policy that Blinken and Sullivan are glossing.
The deceptions surrounding the JCPOA have a clear purpose: to make the administration appear supportive of containment when, in fact, it is ending it.

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The Realignment mentality fully crystalized on Aug. 31, 2013, the day Obama erased his red line on Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Obama first drew the red line for U.S. military action in the summer of 2012, after receiving reports indicating that Syrian dictator Bashar Assad was either using or preparing to use chemical weapons against civilians. Some of Obama’s advisers urged him, in response, to increase support for the rebels seeking to overthrow Assad. Instead, Obama drew his red line, hoping that Moscow and Tehran would restrain Assad and the White House would not be forced to take action. But almost exactly one year later, Assad dashed Obama’s hopes with a sarin gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians, perhaps over a thousand.

Nevertheless, Obama was as determined as ever to prevent American intervention in Syria—still with the assistance of Moscow and Tehran. What if, he asked himself, the United States were able to work in greater partnership with Russia and Iran to stabilize not just Syria but other trouble spots too? After all, a tacit U.S. arrangement with Iran already existed in Iraq, based on a supposed mutual hostility to Sunni jihadism. Couldn’t that model be expanded to cover the entire Middle East? A partnership with Russia and Iran could stabilize this vexed region. An attack on Syria, however, would alienate both Moscow and Tehran, damaging Obama’s dream of a new regional order.

As the American military readied a strike on Assad, Obama searched for a pretext to call it off. He found it by suddenly remembering his constitutional duty to seek congressional authorization for military operations. Republicans in Congress, Obama knew, would refuse to authorize military action, making them responsible for erasing his red line. The Republicans’ refusal to strike, Obama told Ben Rhodes, an aide and member of his inner circle, “will drive a stake through the heart of neoconservatism—everyone will see they have no votes.”

Obama had zero interest in weakening the Russian-Iranian entente. Instead, he sought to hobble the “correlation of forces” (to use the Soviet terminology) that he believed was boxing him in. Those forces included, in addition to a variety of groups in American domestic politics, traditional allies in the Middle East—Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey—all of whom were alarmed, each for its own reasons, by the rising power of the Russian-Iranian entente.

For his part, Russian leader Vladimir Putin understood Obama’s dilemma. He quickly offered a fig leaf that Obama readily accepted. Together, the two pretended to strip Assad of his chemical weapons. We say “pretended,” because the joint Russian-American initiative was a Potemkin facade designed to put an honorable face on Obama’s retreat. In return for the prize of American abstention from Syria, Putin was more than happy to destroy some of Assad’s chemical weapons.
But only some. The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the group that carried out the joint American-Russian policy, only destroyed the chemical weapons that Assad officially declared. Of course, he didn’t declare everything, a fact that became irrefutable in April 2017, when Assad conducted another sarin gas attack, this time killing almost 100 people.

For Obama, however, deterring Assad was always a secondary concern. He had now achieved what he saw as the biggest prize of all, namely, opening a path to a strategic accommodation with Iran, Russia’s ally in Syria. “If the U.S. had intervened more forcefully in Syria,” Rhodes told a reporter at the end of the Obama presidency, “it would have dominated Obama’s second term and the JCPOA would have been impossible to achieve.”
With the Syria example fixed in our minds, we are finally in a position to define what the JCPOA truly is rather than what it is not. As understood by its architects, the deal is two things at once. First, it is a vehicle for towing Iran’s nuclear program out of the main lanes of U.S.-Iranian relations and parking it off to one side, thereby creating political and diplomatic space for greater interaction between Washington and Tehran—a fundamental condition for building the new regional order to which the Realignment aspires.

Second, it is a tool for erasing the containment option in American foreign policy. Many analysts have interpreted the elimination of nonnuclear sanctions by the JCPOA as the product of inept bargaining. Wily Iranian negotiators, we have frequently been told, hoodwinked the naïve Obama, who, poor man, just can’t seem to get his head around the concept of leverage in negotiations.
On the contrary, a savvy Obama fooled the analysts by disguising the JCPOA as a nonproliferation agreement. In reality, the deal was a sneak attack on a traditional American foreign policy. It was and remains a Trojan horse designed to recast America’s position and role in the Middle East. Sullivan and Blinken’s task is to wheel the Trojan horse into the central square of American foreign policy and, by brandishing their “centrist” political credentials, sell it as an imperfect but valuable vehicle of containment.

The doctrine of Realignment builds on the erroneous assumption that Iran is a status quo power, one that shares a number of major interests with the United States. According to this doctrine, conservative Americans and supporters of Israel fixate on Iran’s ideology—which is steeped in bigotry toward non-Muslims in general, and which advertises its annihilationist aspirations toward the Jewish state in particular—but it is not useful as a practical guide to Tehran’s behavior. That’s what professor Obama taught us in a 2014 interview, when he claimed that Iran’s leaders “are strategic,” rational people who “respond to costs and benefits” and “to incentives.”

 

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U.S. allies needed to learn “to share the neighborhood” with Iran, he said in another interview. Their hostility was preventing Washington from gaining access to the more pragmatic dimensions of the Iranian government’s character. Israel, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia nurture paranoid fears, outsize ambitions, and grubby sectarian agendas that draw them into shadow wars with Iran. Out of excessive loyalty to its allies, America has allowed itself to be dragged into supporting their wars, needlessly embittering U.S.-Iranian relations while simultaneously exacerbating local conflicts.
According to the Realignment doctrine, America will help its allies protect their sovereign territory from Iranian or Iranian-backed attacks, but not compete with Iran beyond their borders. In the contested spaces of Syria, Yemen, and Iraq, the United States will force others to respect Iran’s “equities,” a term Obama once used to describe Iran’s positions of power. Thus, in practical terms, America will use its influence to elevate the interests of Iran over those of U.S. allies in key areas of the Middle East.

At home, this policy is controversial, to say the least, and necessitates the development of tactics to camouflage the tilt toward Tehran. The presentation of the JCPOA as a narrow arms control agreement is the most important of these tactics, but two others are particularly noteworthy.
The first is the bear hug: a squeeze that can be presented to the outside world as a gesture of love, but which immobilizes its recipient. The Obama administration perfected the move on Israel during JCPOA negotiations. American officials routinely bragged that they had raised military-to-military relations between the United States and Israel to glorious new heights. To be fair, the claim is not entirely baseless, thanks to joint projects such as the Iron Dome missile defense system, which allows Israel to protect its territory from Iranian-sponsored rocket attacks. But if Iron Dome was the seemingly loving aspect of the bear hug, the immobilizing part was the strong discouragement of Israeli military and intelligence operations against Iran’s nuclear program and its regional military network. Obama made both seem less necessary by continually pointing to Iron Dome, which became a U.S. device for forcing Israel into a more passive posture in the face of Iran’s rising power and continued aggression.

The bear hug is also a tool for gaslighting critics who accurately claim that the Realignment guts the policy of containment. The ongoing provision of American security assistance to allies allows the administration to plausibly claim that containment is alive and well—that the United States is indeed “pushing back” against Iran’s “destabilizing activities,” and that far from discarding its old allies, it is committed to their welfare.
The second tactic is the values feint. When Washington tilts toward Iran, it disguises its true motivations with pronouncements of high-minded humanitarianism—ceasing to be a superpower and instead becoming a Florence Nightingale among the nations, decrying human suffering and repeating mantras like “There is no military solution to this conflict.” The values feint exhorts allies, in public, not to retreat before Iran but to engage in the “three D’s”: diplomacy, dialogue, and de-escalation. This trio, first deployed by Obama in Syria, now routinely rolls off the tongues of Biden officials who, in keeping with a plan presented in Sullivan’s Foreign Affairs article, are busy encouraging America’s allies to sit down and negotiate with the Iranians.

“We support any Iranian dialogue with international, regional, or Arab powers,” Hassan Nasrallah said last week. “We consider it as helpful to calming tension in the region.” The leader of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the most lethal Iranian-backed militia in the Arab world, strongly approves of the Sullivan plan. And why wouldn’t he? The three D’s transform Iran and its proxies into America’s partners in “peace” diplomacy, and those seeking to contain them into bloodthirsty enemies of peace.

Now that we can see past the cute tricks that hide the Realignment’s true goals, we can state its four strategic imperatives in plain English: First, allow Tehran an unfettered nuclear weapons program by 2031; second, end the sanctions on the Iranian economic and financial system; third, implement a policy of accommodation of Iran and its tentacles in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Lebanon; and fourth, force that policy on America’s closest allies. If the United States follows those commandments, then a kind of natural regional balance will fall into place. The United States, so the thinking goes, will then finally remove itself from the war footing that traditional allies, with their anti-Iran agenda, have forced on it. Thereafter, diplomatic engagement with Iran will be the primary tool needed to maintain regional stability. (If you doubt us on this, give Malley’s and Sullivan’s Foreign Affairs articles a closer read.)

The Realignment rests on, to put it mildly, a hollow theory. It misstates the nature of the Islamic Republic and the scope of its ambitions. A regime that has led “Death to America” chants for the last 40 years is an inveterately revisionist regime. The Islamic Republic sees itself as a global power, the leader of the Muslim world, and it covets hegemony over the Persian Gulf—indeed, the entire Middle East. But the only instrument it has ever had to achieve its objectives is regional subversion.
Ayatollah Khamenei, the head of this colossal project, is a lord of chaos. After oil, the Islamic Republic’s major export item is the IRGC-commanded terrorist militia—the only export that Iran consistently produces at a peerless level. Malley and Sullivan got it exactly wrong when they argued, in effect, that allies are suckering the United States into conflict with Iran. It is not the allies but the Islamic Republic that is blanketing the Arab world with terrorist militias, arming them with precision-guided weapons, and styling the alliance it leads as “the Resistance Axis.” It does so for one simple reason: It is out to destroy the American order in the Middle East.

Iran’s militia network and nuclear program have made it strong enough to be a major factor in every troubled corner of the Middle East, but not strong enough to build an alternative order. Herein lies a curious contradiction in Khamenei’s project. Iran cannot actually hold or stabilize contested areas without a helpful American posture.
Iran is strong enough to be a major factor in every troubled corner of the Middle East, but not strong enough to build an alternative order.
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This same contradiction bedevils the Realignment, whose architects think that partnership with Iran is the ticket to ending American military interventions in the Middle East. But the experiences of both Iraq and Syria proved the fallacy of this vision. On Obama’s watch, when the U.S. withdrew its troops from Iraq, Iran’s influence increased exponentially. And what happened? Iran-backed militias sprouted like weeds across the landscape. The ensuing chaos created the vacuum which the Islamic State filled, forcing Obama to re-intervene militarily—but now with the American military serving, in effect, as the air force of Iran’s militias. Obama didn’t end military interventions; he just switched sides.

An analogous process took place in Syria. In order to save the Assad regime, Iran needed not just the intervention of the Russian military to shore up its position against the Syrian opposition forces, but the assistance of the United States. Obama kept both Turkey and Israel at bay while the Russians, Iranians, and Iran’s militias slaughtered over 500,000 people and uprooted 10 million more from their homes.
Obama and his staffers, who are now Biden’s staffers, already tested the potential of Realignment. It brought only suffering and death, not to mention a general weakening of the American position.

Domestic politics partially explains the hold that this empty theory exercises over otherwise bright minds. The Realignment was the signature initiative of Barack Obama, who remains either the most powerful man in Democratic politics or a very close second. By winning the presidency, Biden is the leader of the party today, but he owes much of his personal popularity as well as his victory itself to his former boss.
The organizational chart of the State Department says that Malley reports to the secretary of state. What the chart does not reveal is that Malley, as the keeper of Obama’s Iran flame, reports to Blinken, in effect, through Obama. As for Sullivan, he reports to Biden directly, but his ability to deviate from Obama’s agenda is limited by a simple fact of life. As Sullivan himself observed in a December interview, “We’ve reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy.”

Biden won the electoral college by only 45,000 votes spread over three states—a razor thin margin. He still desperately needs the support of Obama, who alone can bridge the Democratic Party’s progressive and Clintonian wings. Moreover, if power is the ability to convince people that their success in the future requires keeping you happy in the present, then Obama has a lot of direct power over Sullivan. If Sullivan aspires to one day serve as secretary of state or secretary of defense, he knows that Obama will remain a power broker in Democratic politics long after Biden has left the scene.
The political heft of the Realignment derives not just from Obama’s personal support but also from the support of progressives whose cosmology it affirms. It equates a policy of containing Iran with a path to endless war, and transforms a policy of accommodating Iran into the path to peace.

 

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It reduces the complexities of the Middle East to a Manichean morality tale that pits the progressives against their mythological foes—Evangelical Christians, “neoconservatives,” and Zionists. The Realignment depicts these foes as co-conspirators with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plotting to keep America mired in the Middle East.
The role that the Realignment casts for Israel bears close scrutiny. Jake Sullivan’s Foreign Affairs article called for preventing U.S. allies from holding American policy “hostage to maximalist regional demands” regarding the JCPOA. Yet Sullivan all but abstained from mentioning Israel, the country that has been most vocal and effective at making such demands. This omission is, of course, no accident.

Contemporary progressivism is, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about Zionism. One of its cherished goals is to reduce American support for Israel, and the Realignment helps it realize that ambition—but it does so slyly. It refrains from making its anti-Zionism explicit for fear of stirring up opposition to the project among the largely pro-Israel American people. But by upgrading relations with Iran, the Realignment perforce downgrades the Jewish state.

How Israel responds to this downgrading will depend on how its prolonged domestic crisis, marked by four national elections in two years’ time, finally gets resolved. Netanyahu haters in the Biden administration will be sure to delight if he is toppled from power and succeeded by someone with less foreign policy experience, such as Yair Lapid, the chairman of the Yesh Atid party. The White House believes that a post-Netanyahu Israel will work to accommodate its main demands. If, however, Netanyahu remains in power (or if he is succeeded by someone with a similar disposition on Iran), then the Israelis will not readily accept the diminished role assigned to them by the Realignment.

As Biden moves swiftly to put Netanyahu (or a like-minded successor) in a bear hug, the Israeli prime minister will bend, twist, squirm, and occasionally throw a sharp elbow and kick a shin. Both Biden and Netanyahu, each for his own domestic reasons, will deny the depth of the conflict. Broad smiles, professions of friendship, and much fancy footwork, all produced for the benefit of the cameras, will turn this wrestling match into a contorted tango.

Their dance will move through five flashpoints—the five irresolvable tensions between Jerusalem and Washington that the Realignment creates. The first is, of course, the JCPOA. The Israelis, for their part, will try to prevent the quarrel from poisoning cooperation in general, but will not refrain from exposing the defects of the deal to the world, and especially to Congress. The JCPOA breathes an air of distrust into U.S.-Israel relations, which will thicken as Israel continues to conduct covert actions inside Iran. The Biden team’s response, as we have already seen, will be to urge restraint on Jerusalem, thus generating the second flashpoint.

The primary goal of Israeli covert operations has historically been to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, but more recently, they have also served as a means to publicize the flaws of the JCPOA and to expose Iranian cheating. The covert Israeli campaign now also serves as propaganda by action, showcasing opposition to Biden’s Realignment. The recent sabotage of the Natanz nuclear facility’s power station, a case in point, coincided not just with the negotiations in Vienna over the JCPOA, but also with the visit of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Jerusalem. The operation embarrassed Washington, not least by refuting its contention that the only way to prevent war is to legitimize Iran’s nuclear program. If diminutive Israel can sabotage Iran’s most secure facilities on its own without sparking a war, how much more could it accomplish with the active assistance of the United States?

For its part, the Biden administration responded to the embarrassment by issuing a private rebuke to Jerusalem, while calling for more coordination and an agreed policy of “no surprises.” A similar dynamic is playing out over the third flashpoint—namely, the clash between Washington and Jerusalem over Israeli attacks on Iranian military targets in Syria and elsewhere in the region. A meeting in April between Sullivan and his Israeli counterpart, Meir Ben-Shabbat, established “an interagency working group” to focus on the threat of Iranian-produced precision-guided missiles, which Tehran provides to its regional assets. The White House will spin the working group as a united effort to “push back” on Iran, but it is actually a tool for monitoring and restraining Israel.

As the pressure from Washington to support the three D’s mounts, Jerusalem will search for partners who can assist it, both in containing Iran and in persuading the United States to abandon the Realignment. Impediments to effective coordination between Riyadh and Jerusalem abound, but the Saudis remain the most likely candidate, as there is still a chance that shared circumstances will force closer coordination between the two. But the Biden team will monitor relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem and interdict when necessary—thus creating the fourth flash point.

It was, once again, the Obama administration that fashioned the template for such interdiction. In 2012, when Washington grew fearful that Israel might launch an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, four senior U.S. diplomats and military intelligence officials briefed Foreign Policy on alleged cooperation between Azerbaijan and Israel in preparation for the attack. “The Israelis have bought an airfield,” one anonymous official said, “and the airfield is called Azerbaijan.” Officials in Baku categorically denied the report, which indeed was likely bogus. But the point was to intimidate Jerusalem and any of its potential anti-Iran partners, not to put out truthful information.

The final flashpoint will be the Palestinian question. As tensions with Jerusalem rise over Iran, the administration will execute its values feint, criticizing Israel for choosing the path of “war.” But it will be over the Palestinian issue that the Biden team will deliver the harshest public scolding. The issue helps camouflage American rage over Israel’s independent Iran policy, presenting it instead as a righteous fight over “values.”
The administration wasted no time in reviving this values conflict. On April 7, Blinken resumed U.S. funding for the Palestinian leadership that the Trump administration had cut, including for the controversial United Nations Relief and Works Agency, saying it “aligns with the values and interests of our allies” (as defined solely by the Biden administration, he neglected to add). Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United States and the United Nations, quickly clarified that “Israel is strongly opposed to the anti-Israel and antisemitic activity happening in UNRWA’s facilities.”

Elevating the Palestinian question to the top of U.S.-Israel relations will further reduce the chance of a bilateral Saudi-Israeli breakthrough. Any efforts to advance the Abraham Accords, or to thwart the White House’s Iran policy, will be met with rebukes that Israel is trying to detract from justice for the Palestinians. The launch of another round of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations might be one way for the Biden team to lend plausibility to this claim. Given the failure of previous rounds, however, Biden may instead choose to launch talks with Israelis and Palestinians about how to preserve the two-state solution in the absence of a peace process. From any such talks, demands on Israel to take impossible actions will flow like a gusher, allowing Washington to pose as the champion of Palestinian rights against the recalcitrant Israelis.

With the stage thus set, an echo chamber of “independent” voices in the media will deliver a harsh reproach to Israel, which the Biden team will have scripted but will prefer not to deliver directly. “The United States needs to tell Israeli leaders to cease provocative settlement construction and … oppressive security practices,” wrote Obama’s CIA director, John Brennan, in The New York Times on April 27. This was an early warning. As the tensions between Jerusalem and Washington mount, voices shriller than Brennan’s will decry the Israelis as corrupt and cruel warmongers, sabotaging not just peace diplomacy, but also mom and apple pie.

For the pro-Israel community, the Realignment represents both an intellectual and political challenge. Intellectually, it forces a rethinking of what constitutes a pro-Israel policy. Traditionally, a position passes this litmus test if it supports strong bilateral ties, including the provision of American military aid. But supporters of the Realignment—by guaranteeing Israel’s qualitative military edge and right to defend itself, and by verbally affirming the enduring strength of American-Israeli bonds—easily pass this test, even as they empower Iran across the Middle East and provide it with a pathway to a nuclear weapon. To give the term “pro-Israel” a definition that meets the challenge of the day requires advocating for the containment of Iran, not just the defense of Israel, and for a peace strategy that focuses on Saudi Arabia.

For Jewish Democrats especially, this definition poses a severe political challenge. Progressives and Biden surrogates will attack this definition of “pro-Israel” as the “Trumpist” version, which to them means repudiating American values, choosing war over diplomacy, whitewashing Saudi “crimes,” and helping Israeli settlers “colonize” the Palestinians.
Some supporters of the administration will not hesitate to accuse Jews of sending American men and women in uniform to die for Israel. In 2018, when the Mossad spirited the nuclear archive from Tehran, Colin Kahl, a Stanford professor and Biden’s former national security adviser, tweeted that the Israeli operation “sure has an eerie pre-2003 Iraq vibe to it.” In other words, the Israeli intelligence operation, a heroic feat straight out of a Hollywood movie, was a Jewish plot to sucker America into a war for Israel. Kahl is now Joe Biden’s undersecretary of defense for policy, the third most powerful person in the Pentagon. During his Senate confirmation process, Kahl’s supporters defended him against the accusation that he harbored an anti-Israel bias by noting that, under Obama, he helped advance American-Israeli cooperation on Iron Dome.
As the pro-Israel community debates what constitutes sensible policy, its right and left wings are gearing up for a fight.

Enter: Sullivan and Blinken. They move between the bickering factions, holding up their arms in a plea for calm. The duo have exactly what it takes to forge a third way between Trump’s “maximum pressure” and Obama’s Realignment—a Clintonian way that will square the circle, thread the needle, and ride two horses at once. Don’t brawl with each other, they say. Don’t split your community. Rest assured, we have your back. We have no illusions about Iran. Our commitment to Israel’s security remains unyielding.
Wouldn’t it be nice to believe all that? Unfortunately, this third way is a myth—and a dangerous one at that. It is buying time and goodwill for an administration that, as it races hell-for-leather to finish what Obama started, deserves neither.

The Realignment is just clever enough to be stupid on a grand scale. When Malley refers to Obama’s presidency as a half-finished experiment, he means, more specifically, that the United States failed to compel its Middle Eastern allies to accommodate Iran. Washington, he explained in his Foreign Affairs article, must stop “giving its partners carte blanche” and “enabling their more bellicose actions” directed at Iran and its proxies. The ally who needs its blank check revoked most urgently, Malley explains, is Saudi Arabia, and the arena in which to start is Yemen. Washington, he wrote bluntly, must press Riyadh “to bring the conflict to an end.”

Sullivan’s Foreign Affairs article took this idea further, developing the plan for pressing Riyadh to end the war in Yemen. The United States, he explained, should tell the Saudis in no uncertain terms that a failure to end the intervention would put at risk the American security guarantee for Saudi Arabia. According to Sullivan, Washington must “insist on serious, good-faith Saudi diplomatic efforts to end the Yemen war and de-escalate with Iran as part of the terms under which it maintains a complement of U.S. troops deployed in Saudi Arabia.” To sustain this “de-escalation,” the U.S. must then press Riyadh to enter into “dialogue” with Tehran.

Clearly, the plan to give a rib-cracking bear hug to Saudi Arabia was in place long before the election of Biden. Once the new team took office, it lost no time in putting on the squeeze. On Jan. 27, the administration announced a freeze on arms sales. On Feb. 4, it declared an end to support for “offensive” operations in Yemen. On Feb. 5, it expressed its intentions to remove the Houthis, Iran’s proxy in Yemen, from the terrorism list, and on Feb. 16, it made good on its promise.

Taking a leaf from Obama’s Syria playbook, the Biden administration thus recognized Yemen as a de facto Iranian sphere of interest. However, the slogan of the Houthi movement—“Allah is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse on the Jews, Victory to Islam”—does not poll well among a majority of American voters. To disguise the fact that its policies are empowering the Houthis and the Iranians, the Biden administration deployed the values feint.
The Biden administration thus recognized Yemen as a de facto Iranian sphere of interest.

 

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The goal of the decision to lift the terrorism designation on the Houthis, Blinken explained, was to alleviate “the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.” The administration came to the decision, he said, because it listened to the United Nations, humanitarian groups, and bipartisan members of Congress, all of whom had warned that designating the Houthis as terrorists “could have a devastating impact on Yemenis’ access to basic commodities like food and fuel.”

The Yemen values feint is a full-spectrum affair, with America not just celebrating itself as Florence Nightingale, but disparaging Saudi Arabia as a malevolent beast. On Feb. 26, the Biden administration released a declassified intelligence report on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the columnist whom a team of Saudi operatives killed in Istanbul in 2018. The report, which concluded that the crown prince approved the assassination, came in response to no new developments. The administration dredged up the 2-year-old file purely in order to use it as fodder in a values barrage.

The crown prince, for his part, was in no doubt about the true reason for this salvo. “We are seeking to have good relations with Iran,” he said in a major television interview at the end of April. “We aim to see a prosperous Iran. We are working with our partners in the region to overcome our differences with Iran.”
But on March 7, two weeks after the release of the Khashoggi report, the administration’s values guns fell conspicuously silent. On that day, dozens of Ethiopian migrants in a detention center in Sanaa, Yemen, protested their unbearable living conditions. Their Houthi guards corralled the protesters into a hangar, told them to say their “final prayers,” and tossed explosive grenades into the structure. “[P]eople were roasted alive,” said one of the survivors. “I had to step on their dead bodies to escape.” Nary a peep was heard in Washington about this attack, let alone about the Houthi military campaign in Yemen which redoubled thanks to America’s green light.

By rewarding Iranian aggression, the Realignment’s faux humanitarianism only brings greater suffering to the people whose afflictions it pretends to alleviate. The sanctimonious policy simply ensures that Iran will enjoy a permanent Arabian base for launching strikes against America’s most important Arab ally, Saudi Arabia.
The tilt toward Iran in Yemen also has sinister implications for America’s rivalry with its greatest competitor in the world today. China and Iran recently signed a 25-year “strategic partnership” that funnels hundreds of millions of dollars into Iran, helping Tehran expand its nuclear power program, modernize its ports, and develop its energy sector. The deal also includes greater cooperation on defense and the transfer of Chinese military technology. Meanwhile, Beijing is upgrading its naval base in Djibouti, building a dock that can accommodate aircraft carriers 20 miles from Yemen across the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, which controls the approaches to the Suez Canal from the Indian Ocean. With each passing day, the prospect of a Chinese-Iranian alliance capable of dominating the strait increases.

The expansion of Tehran’s strategic cooperation with Beijing immediately after the election of Biden mirrors the cooperation with Moscow that followed the completion of the JCPOA in 2015. Iran’s growing international partnerships, themselves a product of the Realignment, only strengthen Tehran’s resolve to destroy the American regional security system. The Islamic Republic is an unappeasable power. Khamenei will pocket every concession that America offers and then demand more—in blood.

Yet it is with supreme confidence that the supporters of Realignment present their policy. They make as if the superiority of their method has been proven—as if we can all see that their formula will take America off its war footing, and stabilize the Middle East, and protect America’s interests, and safeguard its closest allies. Not only is the claim too good to be true, but there is simply no evidentiary basis for it—zero. If any evidence did exist, the supporters of Realignment would make their argument honestly and forthrightly and stop hiding behind a high wall of cute deceptions.

The same supreme confidence also characterizes the Biden team’s attitude toward Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign, which it derides as reckless, incoherent, and ineffective. On Trump’s watch, the Iranian economy suffered catastrophic losses. Not only did anti-regime demonstrations break out in every major Iranian city in 2019, but corresponding protests erupted in Iraq, aimed directly or indirectly at Iran’s proxies there. But Trump’s “maximum pressure” policy was much more than just the imposition of economic sanctions. It also included direct American military action, support for military action by allies, unilateral American covert operations, and support for the covert operations of allies—all of which the Realignment is bringing to an abrupt end.

Most impressive of all was the blow that Trump delivered to the IRGC, the most feared element in a regime that, increasingly, rules through fear alone. Trump ended the fiction, which had greatly benefited Iran, that its proxies were independent actors rather than direct arms of the IRGC. This policy of holding Iran directly responsible culminated in the killing of Qassem Soleimani, the head of the IRGC’s Quds Force and the second most powerful man in Iran.
Meanwhile, the Israelis (presumably) escalated their covert campaign of sabotage and intelligence collection against Iran’s nuclear program. Earlier in Trump’s presidency, they damaged dozens of sensitive Iranian facilities and captured its nuclear archive. In a dramatic operation, they killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the head of Iran’s nuclear program. To the best of our knowledge, Iran has apprehended no Israeli operatives, who apparently have the run of the entire country.

By penetrating Iran’s defenses, Israel—with the support of the Trump administration—shredded Obama’s major justification for the JCPOA by demonstrating that the United States can manage the Iran challenge, including its nuclear dimension, with a relatively light American military commitment. The networks inside Iran sabotaging the nuclear program are not American; they are Israeli. By supporting America’s ally, Trump did not get suckered into unwanted conflicts; he empowered others to do America’s work for it.

Trump followed the example of all U.S. presidents prior to Obama, who conceived of the Middle East as a rectangular table, with America and its traditional allies seated on one side, and America’s rivals, including Iran and Russia, on the other. The job of the United States, in this time-honored conception, is twofold: to mediate among the allies, who are a fractious lot, and to support them against the opposing side.

“Maximum pressure” was a form of collective security. It encouraged closer cooperation between American allies, and therefore played a major role in the Abraham Accords, the peace agreements leading to expanded cultural, economic, and military ties between Israel and Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Sudan—all of which are close to Saudi Arabia. None would have normalized relations with Israel if Riyadh had opposed the move. The next logical step in the process, and the strategic prize of the effort, was for the next U.S. president to advance the Israeli-Saudi rapprochement.
It is impossible to exaggerate the value to the United States of a full-blown Saudi-Israeli peace agreement or even of significant steps in that direction. The 9/11 attacks announced that a doctrine of radical intolerance had taken deeper root inside the Muslim world than we had realized—a doctrine that seeks to wall off Muslim societies from non-Muslim influences.

The Emiratis, the lead players in the Abraham Accords, see peace with Israel as part of a multipronged effort to refute this intolerant view of Islam and Muslim history. Saudi Arabia is the most powerful Arab country and, thanks to its guardianship of Mecca and Medina, one of the most influential countries in the entire Muslim world. It has also long been the fortress of conservative Islamic jurisprudence and Quranic literalism. If the country toward which all Muslims pray five times a day, and to which some 2 million make annual pilgrimages, develops openly friendly relations with the Jewish state, the implications for relations between Muslims and non-Muslims everywhere would be profound.

Yet the Biden administration has forbidden its officials from even using the term “Abraham Accords,” which, under the influence of the Realignment, it abhors. Because the accords are politically popular, even in Democratic circles, the administration will refrain from expressing its abhorrence frankly, and will look for every opportunity to claim that it looks favorably on the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In reality, however, the Biden team has no intention to expand the Abraham Accords, whose very existence is a blot on the Democrats’ record. It refutes the dogma preached by the Obama administration that peace between Israel and the Arab world must begin with a Palestinian-Israeli agreement.

More importantly, the accords are also a threat to the Realignment itself. The Saudi-Israeli thaw resulted in part from the sense of threat they share about the rise of Iran, and the increasing unreliability of the American security guarantee. A strong partnership between Riyadh and Jerusalem would inevitably become the primary node of opposition to the Realignment from within the American alliance system. A desire to end any unsupervised discussion of expanding the Abraham Accords is probably an additional reason why the Biden administration devoted its first days in office to publicly disparaging Mohammed bin Salman and privately pressing him to kowtow to Tehran. “Do not dare assist Israel” was another implicit command that the Khashoggi values barrage delivered to Riyadh.

When Biden took office, he faced a fork in the road. On one path stood a multilateral alliance designed to contain Iran. It had a proven track record of success and plans of even better things to come, as the recent act of sabotage at Natanz demonstrated. The alliance’s leading members were beckoning Biden to work against a common foe, but also to promote greater cooperation and possibly even an official peace agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. On the other path stood the Islamic Republic, hated by its own people and, indeed, by most people in the Middle East. It offered nothing but the same vile message it had always espoused. Standing with it were all of the most malignant forces in the Middle East, who either look directly to Tehran for leadership or thrive on the chaos it sows.

Biden chose Iran, fracturing the U.S. alliance system and setting back the cause of peace. His choice also delivered a victory to China and Russia, who are working with Iran, each in its own way, toward America’s undoing. In a perverse effort to liberate itself from its allies, the United States is soiling its own nest.
Michael Doran is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C.
Tony Badran is Tablet magazine’s Levant analyst and a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He tweets @AcrossTheBay.

#Iran
#JCPOA
#Iranian nuclear deal
#Obama
#Joe Biden
#Antony Blinken
#Netanyahu
#Saudi Arabia
#Abraham Accords

Posted For Fair Use

The Realignment

In the Middle East, Biden is finishing what Obama started. And his top advisers are all on board.

www.tabletmag.com

 

[jward]

Lockheed unveils '6th-Generation Fighter for the Middle Class'
badlawyer

3 minutes


Concept art released by the Air Force Research Lab in 2018 shows a potential next-generation fighter concept or F-X. (Air Force Research Laboratory)
By Scheisskopf

BETHESDA, Md. — Lockheed-Martin has unveiled a “6th Generation Fighter for the Middle Class” in response to the Biden administration’s interim National Security Strategic Guidance.
“This aircraft’s lethality is a testament to the resiliency of the middle class,” said Lockheed CEO James D. Taiclet.
“Its low observability combined with long-range attack performance will provide unprecedented successes on the battlefield,” Taiclet said before hastily checking his prepared remarks and adding, “For America.”

The Sixth-Generation Fighter for the Middle Class, or 6GFFTMC as the Air Force is calling it, “is easily the most advanced fighter the world has ever seen,” said Gen. Mark Kelly, commander of Air Combat Comand.
“Additionally, it will provide the needed precision strike capabilities that the middle class expects and, quite frankly, deserves,” he said.

Air Force officials noted that the F-22 and F-35 fighter jets were aircraft that Wall Street wanted but not the aircraft needed by Main Street. Officials have complained for months that Congress may not give the service its proposed budget, which trickles down to benefit local Air Force communities in the form of much-needed strip clubs and tattoo parlors.
“I’ll be honest, the previous fighter jets we’ve built were for the elites, the globalists,” said Taiclet. “This airplane, this is going to provide ‘air dominance’ for the Average Joe.”

“You’ve earned it, America,” Taiclet said. “This one’s for you.”
Lockheed rival Boeing issued a press release shortly after the announcement that introduced plans for its new bomber, which would “help secure a future for the average American.”
“We’re talking about Joe Sixpack who works hard, pays his taxes, and just wants his munitions delivered without a lot of fanfare so he can get his kids into college and then maybe buy that truck he’s had his eye on,” the press release said.
Meanwhile, the Navy said it would move forward with its existing plans.
“The only thing middle America needs is a 500-ship Navy,” said Adm. Michael Gilday, chief of naval operations.

Posted for fair use

Lockheed unveils '6th-Generation Fighter for the Middle Class'

Finally an aircraft for the Average Joe.

www.duffelblog.com

 

[jward]

Hmm. I wonder if it'd be easier to populate a new planet via cloning, or stick to carting the embryos in the cargo..
Better chance of getting zactly what u want via cloning eh

popularmechanics.com

Russia Is Going to Try to Clone an Army of 3,000-Year-Old Scythian Warriors
Caroline Delbert

6-8 minutes

Russian Geographical Society

• Russia’s Defense Minister suggested he wants to clone a group of ancient warriors.
• That’s going to be tricky. To date, there haven’t been any human clones, and the odds are low for even non-human clones.
• The legality of cloning is murky because of the medical uses for specific kinds of cloning.

When you hold a job like Defense Minister of Russia, you presumably have to be bold and think outside the box to protect your country from enemy advances. And with his latest strategic idea—cloning an entire army of ancient warriors—Sergei Shoigu is certainly taking a big swing.
➡ You think science is badass. So do we. Let’s nerd out over it together.
In an online session of the Russian Geographical Society last month, Shoigu, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, suggested using the DNA of 3,000-year-old Scythian warriors to potentially bring them back to life. Yes, really.
First, some background: The Scythian people, who originally came from modern-day Iran, were nomads who traveled around Eurasia between the 9th and 2nd centuries B.C., building a powerful empire that endured for several centuries before finally being phased out by competitors. Two decades ago, archaeologists uncovered the well-preserved remains of the soldiers in a kurgan, or burial mound, in the Tuva region of Siberia.

Because of Tuva’s position in southern Siberia, much of it is permafrost, meaning a form of soil or turf that always remains frozen. It’s here where the Scythian warrior saga grows complex, because the frozen soil preserves biological matter better than other kinds of ground. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu knows this better than anyone, because he’s from Tuva.
“Of course, we would like very much to find the organic matter and I believe you understand what would follow that,” Shoigu told the Russian Geographical Society. “It would be possible to make something of it, if not Dolly the Sheep. In general, it will be very interesting.”

Shoigu subtly suggested going through some kind of human cloning process. But is that even possible?
To date, no one has cloned a human being. But scientists have successfully executed the therapeutic cloning of individual kinds of cells and other specific gene-editing work, and of course, there are high-profile examples of cloning pretty complex animals. Earlier this year, for example, scientists cloned an endangered U.S. species for the first time: a black-footed ferret whose donor has been dead for more than 30 years.
So, why are humans still off the menu?

Blame a technical problem with the most common form of cloning, which is called nuclear transfer. In this process, a somatic cell (like a skin or organ cell, with a specific established purpose in the body) has its nucleus carefully lifted out, and this nucleus is deposited in an oocyte, or egg cell, with its nucleus carefully removed. It’s like a blank template waiting to have a new nucleus swapped in.



Human cloning runs into real-world obstacles, both legally and scientifically.
gremlinGetty Images

“From a technical perspective, cloning humans and other primates is more difficult than in other mammals,” the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Human Genome Research Institute says on its website:

“One reason is that two proteins essential to cell division, known as spindle proteins, are located very close to the chromosomes in primate eggs. Consequently, removal of the egg's nucleus to make room for the donor nucleus also removes the spindle proteins, interfering with cell division.”

You might remember spindle proteins from your mitosis diagrams back in high school biology. And while there’s a relatively easy way around this problem, it’s almost moot when cloning humans is considered extremely taboo in most of the world. In some places, it’s also explicitly illegal.

“We would like very much to find the organic matter and I believe you understand what would follow that.”

Curiously, the U.S. hasn’t banned the gene editing of embryos. But the NIH doesn’t fund research on the practice, and places like in-vitro clinics aren’t allowed to do any non-U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved manipulation of embryos under any circumstances.
That example starts to illustrate why the problem is so complex—because a lot of cutting-edge genetic medicine is walking right up to the line without crossing it. Making laws that address full human embryo cloning, then, requires a jigsaw puzzle of careful language that doesn’t rule out these kinds of therapeutic cloning.



Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu wants to clone Scythian warriors.
HandoutGetty Images

But let’s say Russia ignores all legality in favor of Shoigu’s big plans. In that case, scientists would have to develop a way to lift out the human nucleus without damaging the cell beyond repair.
Scientists have cloned certain monkeys, so primates are at least hypothetically still in the mix, despite the spindle proteins. But the success rate even for non-primate clones is already very low—it took Dolly the sheep’s research team 277 attempts to get a viable embryo.

And what if all of that went perfectly? Well, the Scythians were powerful warriors and gifted horsemen, but scientists—or the Kremlin—must carefully monitor a cloned baby version of a deceased adult warrior for illnesses and other prosaic childhood problems. Who will raise these children? Who will be legally responsible for their wellbeing?
Shoigu may envision a future race of extremely capable fighters, but ... that’s at least 20 years away, with an added coin flip on nature versus nurture. After all, the Scythian warriors didn’t have plumbing, let alone smartphones. This is a whole new world.

Posted For Fair Use

Russia Is Going to Try to Clone an Army of 3,000-Year-Old Scythian Warriors

Good luck with that.

www.popularmechanics.com

 

[jward]

Uganda’s Museveni Unleashes a Reign of Terror
Liam Taylor

9-11 minutes


The unmarked white vans, known locally as “drones,” stop at marketplaces and on busy street corners across Uganda. A mix of uniformed and plainclothes security officers shove terrified captives into the vehicles and drive them to undisclosed locations. Many are never seen again. The pages of the Daily Monitor, an independent Ugandan newspaper, are awash with stories of families searching desperately for their missing loved ones.

Their crime: supporting opposition candidate Bobi Wine in the country’s January presidential election.
From his origins in a ghetto in the capital, Kampala, the popstar-turned-politician—whose real name is Robert Kyagulanyi—rose to challenge long-ruling President Yoweri Museveni in one of the bloodiest elections in Uganda’s history. Over the course of two days in November, at least 54 opposition supporters and bystanders were killed when riots broke out across Kampala after Wine was briefly jailed for allegedly violating COVID-19 restrictions.
By December, some 100 members of Wine’s campaign team had been arrested, including his best friend Nubian Li, music producer Dan Magic and bodyguard Eddie Mutwe. All three remain behind bars. Another of Wine’s young bodyguards, Francis Senteza, died when a military truck ran him over, in what Wine insists was a deliberate killing, despite army denials.
Ugandans went to the polls Jan. 14 with the internet shut off across the country. The 76-year-old Museveni easily clinched a sixth term in office, as official results showed he took nearly 59 percent of the vote to Wine’s 34 percent. The opposition challenger, who spent 11 days after the election under house arrest, cried foul and accused the government of vote-rigging.

Wine’s party, the National Unity Platform, or NUP, now estimates more than 600 of their supporters have disappeared and believe the true number of missing people could be much higher. While the abductions are seemingly concentrated around Wine’s political stronghold in central Uganda, senior NUP members told me that a hotline they set up rings multiple times a day, as callers from across the country report missing relatives.
“The objective of the regime is to create fear, to make sure that people are so scared of saying anything,” Wine told World Politics Review in an interview, his voice hoarse at times with sorrow and fatigue.
Those who do reemerge are often found on the side of the road, bearing signs of torture. In images compiled by Wine’s legal team, the victims’ bodies are marked by scars, apparently from being whipped with electric wires. Some of their wounds appear black with necrosis.

The government has made few attempts to disguise this recent clampdown, according to Leonce Byimana, executive director of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International, a Washington-based NGO that recently published its own report on torture in Uganda. “Everybody can see,” Byimana said.
The wave of abductions seemingly began in December, picking up in frequency in the wake of the election. The victims, whose only known crime was supporting the opposition, include men and women, young and old. Some of them monitored the polls and collected evidence of alleged vote-tampering. Others simply endorsed Wine publicly.
Ronald Segawa says he was abducted in late January, shortly after the election. He had posted a video on Facebook telling people to vote for Wine. His assailants beat him with what he suspects were rifle butts, pulled out his fingernails and electrocuted his back and arms, all while questioning him about Wine and the video. They then dumped him at the gate of the mortuary of the government-run Mulago Hospital.

“I wailed so loud and told them I didn’t know anything,” Segawa said in a video about his ordeal, posted on social media. “I felt a lot of pain and told them you are killing me for nothing.”
Police have denied Segawa’s allegations of torture, even as similarly horrifying stories continue to mount.
Fabian Luuka was allegedly kidnapped on the outskirts of Kampala in late February along with two other young men, reportedly for being in possession of NUP membership cards. He was discovered on the side of a highway in late February, with the flesh of his buttocks and leg gouged out. Luuka was rushed to a Kampala hospital where he died of his injuries in March, leaving behind two young children.

“The objective of the regime is to create fear, to make sure that people are so scared of saying anything.”

“He is the only one who had the honor of having a grave,” Wine said when asked about Luuka, noting that the men captured alongside him are still missing.
“During his burial, they were saying, ‘At least this one has been buried,’” recalled Lina Zedriga, a lawyer and vice chairperson of the NUP. The mourners, she added, had haunting questions.
“Ours, in the next village, we now don’t know where he is. Are these people dead? Are they living? How long are we going to live without closure?”

Zedriga knows their pain all too well. In 2001, her husband, a supporter of veteran opposition leader and then-presidential candidate Kizza Besigye, vanished without a trace.
“I have a missing husband myself. It is my reality,” Zedriga told me. “The experience of mothers whose sons are missing, women whose husbands are missing, young men whose wives are missing is very devastating. It is so devastating that I don’t know what to say.”

The government has acknowledged detaining only a small fraction of the disappeared. In mid-April, Internal Affairs Minister Jeje Odongo said that security forces had arrested roughly 1,300 people in relation to the election, including the November violence, but claimed most of the people the NUP says are missing are instead hiding in rural villages.
Odongo’s comments echoed a revelation Museveni made in March: that 51 people reported missing by their relatives were being held by the Special Forces Command, an elite unit of the military headed by Museveni’s son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba. The president bragged that these detainees had become supporters of his party, the National Resistance Movement, or NRM. “Too bad for the traitors, these poor youth gave up the whole scheme and are now our friends,” he boasted of the captives in a statement to Uganda’s Daily Monitor.

In a televised address in February, he also said 242 people he decried as terrorists had been arrested and that Ugandan commandos, previously deployed to counterterrorism missions in Somalia, had “killed a few.”
However, in the same speech, he denied that the government is abducting civilians. “The talk of disappearances should be ignored because it cannot happen under the NRM,” Museveni said. “We never cover up. There’s nothing which we do and hide.”

The post-election atmosphere of heightened brutality has not gone unnoticed overseas. Human rights experts from the United Nations released a statement last month expressing alarm over the crackdown. And the U.S. State Department recently issued visa restrictions “for those believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic process in Uganda”—although it remains to be seen whether the Biden administration will reassess the nearly $1 billion in security assistance that Washington provides Museveni’s regime annually. The European Parliament has drafted a new resolution calling for targeted sanctions in Uganda in response to alleged electoral fraud.
Ugandan bureaucrats have scoffed at such rebukes. “We are partners, equals, and none of us should act as if you are superior to the other,” Foreign Minister Sam Kutesa said at a tense meeting with European diplomats in the city of Entebbe earlier this year.

With his supporters disappearing from the streets, Wine is running out of options. He has withdrawn a Supreme Court petition challenging Museveni’s victory, accusing the judges of bias. His subsequent calls for large-scale demonstrations seem to have fallen on deaf ears, but he continues to urge the International Criminal Court to investigate government abuses in Uganda.
On Monday, Wine said on Twitter that his home was surrounded by soldiers, checking each vehicle that came in and out of the compound. Besigye’s party reported a similar security presence around his house. The moves are likely meant to intimidate the opposition ahead of Museveni’s inauguration this week. The army said it had arrested more than 40 people for allegedly planning to disrupt the proceedings.

Despite the brutal crackdown on his supporters, Wine has not given up hope. “The absence of an alternative keeps me going, because I know that there is no other life other than a free life. We are in chains everywhere,” Wine said. “We want to have a right to life. That’s why we dedicate anything and everything to that freedom.”
Sophie Neiman is a freelance reporter and photojournalist, covering politics, conflict and human rights in East and Central Africa. Her work has appeared in numerous outlets, including African Arguments, The Christian Science Monitor and The New Humanitarian.

posted for fair use

Uganda’s Museveni Unleashes a Reign of Terror

The unmarked white vans, known locally as “drones,” stop at marketplaces and on busy street corners across Uganda. A mix of uniformed and plainclothes security officers shove terrified captives into the vehicles and drive them to undisclosed locations. Many are never seen again. The pages of the...

www.worldpoliticsreview.com

 

[jward]

U.S. lifts sanctions on senior figure in Mexico's Sinaloa cartel
Wed, 12 May 2021, 2:45 pm·2-min read

FILE PHOTO: Recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by soldiers at the hangar belonging to the office of the Attorney General in Mexico City

(Reuters) -The United States lifted financial sanctions on a top lieutenant of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel on Wednesday, saying Jesus "El Rey" Zambada, who gave testimony against kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, had shown behavioral change.
Information published by the U.S. Treasury Department said that Zambada was removed from the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

A department spokesman said Zambada was no longer engaged in sanctionable activities.
El Rey, or The King, was arrested in 2008 after a gunbattle in Mexico City, where he was suspected of controlling smuggling through the capital's international airport. He was extradited to the United States four years later.
El Rey demonstrated a change in behavior and circumstances, the spokesman said, adding that the primary goal of sanctions is behavioral change. A person could be re-designated should new evidence or circumstances merit, he said.
A U.S. law enforcement official declined to discuss Zambada's whereabouts or legal status, saying such information is not public.

Brother to the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, El Rey was a witness at the trial in the United States of former cartel boss Guzman in 2019. El Mayo's son, Vicente Zambada, also testified.
The two witnesses had pleaded guilty to U.S. charges and agreed to testify against Guzman, accused of trafficking tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into the United States.
Guzman was convicted by a jury and is imprisoned in the United States.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has previously said El Rey is not in its custody, leading to speculation he may be in a witness protection program.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Mark Hosenball in Washington; writing by Cassandra Garrison in Mexico City; editing by Grant McCool)

Posted for fair use

U.S. lifts sanctions on senior figure in Mexico's Sinaloa cartel

Information published by the U.S. Treasury Department said that Zambada was removed from the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control. A department spokesman said Zambada was no longer engaged in sanctionable activities. El Rey, or The King, was arrested in 2008 after a gunbattle...

sg.news.yahoo.com

 

[jward]

Yes, It’s True, The F-22 Isn’t In The Air Force Chief’s Future Fighter Plans
The Air Force has confirmed it’s looking at a radical reduction in tactical fighter jet types, but that’s easier said than done.
By Thomas Newdick May 13, 2021

• The War Zone

Thomas Newdick View Thomas Newdick's Articles
@CombatAir


Following the words of Chief of Staff of the Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr., yesterday, the military aviation world has been, it’s fair to say, reeling, with the news that the service is planning to do away with its much-vaunted F-22 Raptor stealth fighter. General Brown spoke of a desire to trim the Air Force tactical aviation fleet back to four types of fighter jets, plus the A-10 attack jet, which simply refuses to die.

Some of Brown’s original quotes about the Air Force’s ongoing TacAir study were presented in a way that was not necessarily immediately clear. The TacAir study, meanwhile, is part of a wider Air Force assessment of the optimum balance for its future tactical fighter force and is asking some big and difficult questions. The Air Force has now clarified to The War Zone what exactly Brown meant by his “four plus one” aspiration for the service’s tactical aviation fleet.

U.S. Air Force

A pair of U.S. Air Force F-22s in formation with an F-15C. Under General Brown’s plan, both these air superiority fighter types could be on the way out.

The story was broken by Oriana Pawlyk at Military.com, who quoted Brown as saying: “My intent is to get down to about four. And really, a four plus one, because we’re going to have the A-10 for a while ... [the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter], which will be the cornerstone, the F-15EX, and then we're going to have [the F-16 Fighting Falcon] for a while as well.”
According to the Military.com report, Brown didn’t mention the F-22 by name, nor the F-15E Strike Eagle, for that matter, suggesting that the countdown was already on to divest those two types. While there has been talk of the F-15EX potentially replacing the Air Force’s hard-worked F-15E fleet, the Raptor’s place had generally been considered safe until now, since it offers a portfolio of capabilities that are still unmatched by any other fighter. Brown also didn’t mention the fourth platform, although the implication was that this space would be taken by the forthcoming Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, or at least by the sixth-generation fighter portion of it since that ambitious effort likely aims to field a “system of systems,” rather than a single fighter as per the traditional model.

Air Force Boss Wants Clean-Sheet Fighter That’s Less Advanced Than F-35 To Replace F-16 By Thomas Newdick Posted in The War Zone

These Images Of An F-22 Raptor's Crumbling Radar Absorbent Skin Are Fascinating By Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone

The Air Force's Secret Next Gen Air Dominance Demonstrator Isn't What You Think It Is By Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone

Air Force Admits F-22 Raptors Won't Hit 80 Percent Mission Capable Target On Time By Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone

Let's Talk About The Air Force Potentially Replacing The F-15E With The F-15EX By tyler rogoway and jamie hunter Posted in The War Zone


Breaking Defense then reported that the four tactical jets that Brown was referring to were the NGAD, F-15EX, F-16, and F-35, but didn’t add anything about the plans for the F-22. However, that source did add that Brown sees a decision on the F-16’s replacement being made in the next “six, seven, eight years,” and that the Viper might be superseded by “more F-35s or something else.” That “something else” refers to the potential all-new fighter jet that Brown first disclosed back in February. At the time, The War Zone looked at the implications of a potential ‘clean-sheet design’ to replace the F-16 and its possible impact on long-held plans to buy 1,763 copies of the F-35A, originally intended as the F-16’s successor.

U.S. Air Force/Master Sgt. Shane A. Cuomo

F-22s from the 94th Fighter Squadron, Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia, and F-35As from the 58th Fighter Squadron, Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, during an integration training mission over the Eglin Training Range, Florida.


Finally, Defense One weighed in, reporting that Brown said specifically that NGAD would replace the F-22.
An Air Force spokesperson has now confirmed to The War Zone that, yes, the four platforms that the Air Force's top officer was talking about are the NGAD, F-35, F-15EX, and F-16, “plus the A-10 in the near/mid-term.”

U.S. Air Force

The current mainstays of the Air Force tactical aviation fleet: A-10, F-22, F-35, F-15C, F-15E, and F-16.

When asked whether the Air Force is looking at the possibility of retiring the entire F-22 and/or F-15E fleets as part of the TacAir study, as this suggests, the answer was, however, non-committal: “We expect to determine the right mix of aircraft for the future through the ongoing TacAir study,” we were told.
“The F-22 is still undergoing modernization,” Air Force spokeswoman Ann Stefanek told Air Force Magazine, stepping back further. “There are no plans to retire it in the near term.”

Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin concept artwork of a tailless, fast, long-range, and very stealthy manned penetrator, providing just one idea of what the manned element of NGAD might look like.

Put together, however, it seems clear that the Air Force Chief of Staff currently favors trimming down the tactical aviation fleet to those four types, including the retirement of the F-22 (and the F-15E).
Before #SaveTheRaptor starts trending on Twitter, it’s important to remember that the TacAir study is just that — a study that looks to assesses the optimum balance for the Air Force’s tactical fighter force and which is being run alongside another initiative, the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE). After all, Brown himself also said that the target was “about four” fighter types, plus the A-10, which is now expected to remain in service into the 2030s, and the Air Force has confirmed that there is no planned F-22 retirement date as of now.

Even if the Air Force were to decide that it could do without the F-22, a program to actually divest it would certainly meet concerted opposition — getting such legislation past lawmakers would likely be difficult in a similar manner as successive plans to retire the A-10 fleet or at least a portion of it. It would also be complicated by the fact that the Air Force has made concerted efforts to use Raptors to maximize the effects of fourth-generation jets, like the F-16. Only recently, meanwhile, the Air Force successfully demonstrated the ability to team up five F-35As and a single F-22 that were able to communicate with each other using their proprietary stealthy datalinks via a U-2S Dragon Lady spy plane.

U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Mary Begy

 

[jward]

continued

An F-16C from Shaw Air Force Base, South Carolina, and an F-22 Joint Base Langley-Eustis, Virginia. The jets are assigned to the respective Air Force Demonstration Teams for the Viper and the Raptor.

The Raptor retirement plan, if it’s finally adopted, also places a significant burden on the NGAD, which would have to be combat-ready and available in the required numbers such that retiring the F-22 would not have an adverse effect on overall Air Force capabilities

In fact, the idea that the NGAD is being lined up, in some planning, at least, as a Raptor replacement is interesting in itself. The NGAD — or at least, the fighter-like element of it — will have to be able to do all the F-22 can do, and more.
At the same time, after its production run was cut short at just 187 examples, the Raptor today is seriously hampered by the small size of the fleet, which in turn impacts the costs of sustaining and operating the jets. The aircraft’s low-observable capabilities remain effective, but the technologies involved are now aging and are also increasingly difficult to maintain.

U.S. Air Force/Airman 1st Class Alex Echols

An airman from the 325th Maintenance Squadron Low Observable next to an F-22 at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. The squadron looks after the low-observable coatings to ensure the F-22s maintain their precious stealth capabilities.

Despite its young age, the F-22 fleet has persistently abysmal mission capability rates, a key metric used to determine how many aircraft are actually available to fly combat sorties at any time. In particular, structural modifications designed to extend the service life of the F-22 and increase its availability long-term have had an adverse effect on mission capability rates. Earlier this year, structural modifications were completed on 135 F-22s at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. “Hundreds of thousands of hours were dedicated to coating restoration, mitigating corrosion, aircraft modifications, modernization, and repair,” the Air Force confirmed at the time.

What is more, the F-22 has always been limited by its range. The addition of external fuel tanks significantly hampers the aircraft's low-observable profile and performance. While that might not be such a big deal for a North American Aerospace Defense Command mission, warding off Russian long-range bombers and their escorts, it means the F-22’s utility would be much reduced in a conflict against China over the Taiwan Strait, for example. Really any major conflict against a near-peer competitor would mandate tanker aircraft operate within a few hundred miles or so of the F-22’s target area, which may not even be possible without putting those assets at high risk. This is a major problem we have highlighted for years and has increasingly become an issue the USAF is acknowledging itself.

Beyond its small fleet & high operating/sustainment costs that go along with it, especially with the older avionics & LO skin, the F-22 is short-legged when it comes to combat radius even compared to the F-35A. NGAD's top performance priority would be drastically increasing range https://t.co/Beeadvhtu8
— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) May 13, 2021​

With all that in mind, we can expect the NGAD design to be tailored to overcome all of those disadvantages. Increased payload, broadband low-observability, enhanced networking, updated sensors and electronic warfare capabilities, extreme situational awareness, and capacity for expansion for new capabilities, such as directed-energy weapons, are all also likely on the to-do list for NGAD. It is expected that unmanned systems, as well as manned/unmanned teaming concepts, will play a huge role in NGAD, so it is not just a single unified aircraft system, but a family of systems. Inflight software updates enabled by open architecture, and perhaps even rapid prototyping and production of new design iterations, will all help make this a reality.
Given the paucity of information about NGAD that’s reached the public domain so far, it’s likely to be some time before we get anything more concrete about the technical and capability aspects of this program. But this will have to change if Brown and the USAF really wish to sell the F-22 retirement scheme in exchange for pursuing NGAD with major financial backing.

U.S. Air Force/Staff Sgt. Daniel Robles

General Brown in an F-35 Lightning II simulator at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.

There is also the question of how the F-35 will fit into these still-emerging plans. Only recently, a senior Air Force officer said that there was no value in including the current fleet of F-35As in tabletop wargames simulating future high-end conflicts, such as one covering an American military response to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Moreover, the F-35 program, as a whole, is facing a new level of scrutiny, although Brown has said he sees the jet as the “cornerstone” of the Air Force fighter fleet.

But what of potential plans to retire the F-22? In the past, Brown has said he wants the TacAir study to be completed in time to help inform decisions for the Air Force’s Fiscal Year 2023 budget request. “In the budget for FY 23, that’s where I see that we’ll really make some key decisions,” he said, earlier this year.
While the Air Force may be looking at a future without the Raptor, there is still a long, long way before that becomes a reality. Right now, it’s simply too early to predict what kind of impact the TacAir study might have on the F-22, or any other Air Force fighter program, for that matter.
Contact the author: thomas@thedrive.com

Posted for fair use

Yes, It’s True, The F-22 Isn’t In The Air Force Chief’s Future Fighter Plans

The Air Force has confirmed it’s looking at a radical reduction in tactical fighter jet types, but that’s easier said than done.

www.thedrive.com

 

[jward]

India-France Naval Exercise: Growing Strategic Synergy
By Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan for The Diplomat

7-8 minutes

Flashpoints | Security | South Asia
France has emerged as one of India’s closest strategic partners and the relationship is likely to bloom further in the coming years.

Credit: Twitter
Two weeks ago, the Indian and French navies conducted a three-day (April 25-27) bilateral naval exercise. The exercise was part of the annual series of bilateral exercises between the Indian and French militaries that have the stated goal of upholding the rules-based order and promoting a stable maritime security order in the Indo-Pacific. Varuna 2021 was the 19th edition of this series of exercises. France has remained one of India’s strongest strategic partners and given the growing security challenges India faces in its immediate neighborhood and in the Indo-Pacific, it is likely that there will be further enhancement of this partnership.

An Indian Ministry of Defense statement on the Varuna 2021 exercises stated that “the three-day Varuna [exercises] will see high tempo-naval operations at sea, including advanced air defense and anti-submarines exercises, intense fixed and rotary wing flying operations including cross deck helicopter landings, tactical maneuvers, surface and anti-air weapon firings, underway replenishment and other maritime security operations.” The exercise comes against the backdrop of the Quad plus France naval exercise that took place in the Bay of Bengal earlier in April. Along with the Quad countries, France remains a key Indo-Pacific power with an important presence and influence in the Indo-Pacific. The Quad plus France exercise was a significant opportunity to demonstrate the naval strength that these five key naval powers bring to the maritime spaces in the Indo-Pacific. Commenting on the Quad plus exercise, Rear Admiral Jean-Mathieu Rey, the joint commander of French armed forces in the Asia-Pacific, said that “Such exercises are excellent opportunities for our respective units to train together, with the intention to heighten the level of our bilateral and multilateral partnerships and to demonstrate our ability to operate together in the area.”

France’s military presence in the Indian Ocean is significant, with facilities in the island of La Réunion, Mayotte, and the French Southern and Antarctic Lands. India and France signed a military logistics agreement in 2018, which gives reciprocal access to each other’s military facilities. With that agreement in hand, India can be expected to widen its strategic outreach in the Indian Ocean. This will enhance India’s overall naval capacity, especially in the western Indian Ocean.
A French Embassy statement said “The ‘Varuna’ joint exercise is part of the French carrier strike group’s ‘CLEMENCEAU 21’ deployment, which the French Navy is conducting from February to June 2021 in the eastern Mediterranean, the Gulf and the Indian Ocean (Arabian Sea). Its goal is to contribute to the stabilization of these strategic zones and strengthening cooperation with the navies of partner countries, in particular India for the Indian Ocean component.”

For the Varuna 2021 exercises, the Indian side was represented by the guided missile destroyer INS Kolkata, guided missile frigates INS Tarkash and INS Talwar, Fleet Support Ship INS Deepak, a Kalvari class submarine (an Indian-built version of the French Scorpene class submarine) and P8I Long Range Maritime Patrol Aircraft. The French force included the aircraft carrier Charles-de-Gaulle (carrying various types of aircraft including Rafale-M fighters and E2C Hawkeye for surveillance), Horizon-class air defense destroyer Chevalier Paul, Aquitaine-class multi-missions frigate FNS Provence and the command and supply ship Var.
Following the exercise, the French ambassador to India stated in a tweet that “During three days of intensive drills, 8 Flag of France and Flag of India warships & their air wings demonstrated high level of interoperability in all aspects of naval warfare: anti-surface, anti-submarine, air defense.” The French Embassy in a statement on the exercise noted that “this exercise underscores the shared interests and commitment of both nations in promoting maritime security in the Indo-Pacific. It bears testimony to the vitality of the strategic partnership between France and India, which continued being strengthened despite the pandemic.”

The Indian Navy was also upbeat about the exercise, with the navy spokesperson praising in a tweet the growing “scope, complexity of ops & level of participation.” The Indian Ministry of Defense stated that the “INS Tarkash will continue to exercise with the French Navy’s Carrier Strike Group (CSG)” for a few more days. Clearly, this is a demonstration of the comfort level between the Indian and French militaries as well as the increasing strategic synergy between the two countries.

This comfort level has been growing. It was evident when the India and France for the first time undertook joint patrols from Reunion Island in March 2020, France’s naval base in the Indian Ocean. Following that exercise, the commander of the Indian Navy P-8I, which was part of the joint patrols, reportedly stated that these operations “make it possible to maintain the security of international maritime routes for trade and communications.” The kind of patrols India undertook with France is significant because previously India typically did Coordinated Patrols (CORPAT) only with its neighbors, countries like Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, and Indonesia. The U.S. had earlier pitched for such an exercise with India, but Delhi is reported to have turned down the request.

France has emerged as one of India’s closest strategic partners and this relationship is likely to bloom in different formats in the coming years. While the bilateral engagement will remain a key pillar, involving Paris in many trilateral and minilateral platforms in the Indo-Pacific will strengthen India’s maneuverability as India aligns closely with the U.S. and other Western powers. France has expressed its keenness to join the India-Australia bilateral exercise, AUSINDEX. Reportedly, talks are on regarding the modalities of such engagement.

Posted for fair use
India-France Naval Exercise: Growing Strategic Synergy

 

[Housecarl]

U.S. lifts sanctions on senior figure in Mexico's Sinaloa cartel
Wed, 12 May 2021, 2:45 pm·2-min read

FILE PHOTO: Recaptured drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman is escorted by soldiers at the hangar belonging to the office of the Attorney General in Mexico City

(Reuters) -The United States lifted financial sanctions on a top lieutenant of Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel on Wednesday, saying Jesus "El Rey" Zambada, who gave testimony against kingpin Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, had shown behavioral change.
Information published by the U.S. Treasury Department said that Zambada was removed from the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control.

A department spokesman said Zambada was no longer engaged in sanctionable activities.
El Rey, or The King, was arrested in 2008 after a gunbattle in Mexico City, where he was suspected of controlling smuggling through the capital's international airport. He was extradited to the United States four years later.
El Rey demonstrated a change in behavior and circumstances, the spokesman said, adding that the primary goal of sanctions is behavioral change. A person could be re-designated should new evidence or circumstances merit, he said.
A U.S. law enforcement official declined to discuss Zambada's whereabouts or legal status, saying such information is not public.

Brother to the head of the Sinaloa cartel, Ismael "El Mayo" Zambada, El Rey was a witness at the trial in the United States of former cartel boss Guzman in 2019. El Mayo's son, Vicente Zambada, also testified.
The two witnesses had pleaded guilty to U.S. charges and agreed to testify against Guzman, accused of trafficking tons of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine into the United States.
Guzman was convicted by a jury and is imprisoned in the United States.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons has previously said El Rey is not in its custody, leading to speculation he may be in a witness protection program.

(Reporting by Daphne Psaledakis and Mark Hosenball in Washington; writing by Cassandra Garrison in Mexico City; editing by Grant McCool)

Posted for fair use

U.S. lifts sanctions on senior figure in Mexico's Sinaloa cartel

Information published by the U.S. Treasury Department said that Zambada was removed from the sanctions list of the Office of Foreign Assets Control. A department spokesman said Zambada was no longer engaged in sanctionable activities. El Rey, or The King, was arrested in 2008 after a gunbattle...

sg.news.yahoo.com

When you add this to the Mexican president charging Biden with backing a group that is working to over throw the Mexican government, things look to get a lot worse soon.....

 

[jward]

The Army Has Finally Revealed The Range Of Its New Hypersonic Weapon
Joseph Trevithick

11-13 minutes



The U.S. Army has finally provided an official range for its future Long Range Hypersonic Weapon, or LRHW. This range figure notably means it would have been prohibited under the now-defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, that the United States and Russia were parties to until 2019. This disclosure also follows criticism earlier this year from a senior Air Force officer about the utility of this weapon, especially in the Pacific region.

"The Long Range Hypersonic Weapon provides a capability at a distance greater than 2,775 km," an Army spokesperson said, according to Breaking Defense. This means that the LRHW can strike targets at least 1,725 miles away. For comparison, the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) short-range ballistic missile, the longest-range ground-based missile system currently in Army service, can only reach targets out to 300 kilometers, or close to 186 miles.

US Army

One of the first inert Long Range Hypersonic Weapon missile canisters, which are now being used for training purposes, arrive at an undisclosed US Army base in 2021.


The complete LRHW missile consists of a large rocket booster with an unpowered hypersonic boost-glide vehicle on top. The rocket is used to loft the conical boost-glide vehicle to a desired speed and altitude. The vehicle then detaches and comes zooming back down toward its target along an atmospheric flight trajectory at hypersonic velocity, defined as anything above Mach 5.

Hypersonic boost-glide vehicles are designed to have a high degree of maneuverability, especially compared to traditional ballistic missiles, even those with advanced maneuverable reentry vehicles. This makes them ideal for striking time-sensitive or other high-value targets protected by dense enemy air and missile defenses and doing so on short notice, even at extended ranges. The combination of speed and maneuvering makes it very difficult for opponents to spot and track these weapons, let alone try to defend against them, including just trying to relocate critical assets or otherwise seek cover.


It had first emerged in 2018 that the Army, together with the U.S. Navy and Air Force, were working together on a tri-service hypersonic weapons program. LRHW is the Army's component of this program, while the Navy's portion is known as the Intermediate-Range Conventional Prompt Strike (IRCPS) system. Last year, the Air Force announced that it was abandoning its segment, the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon (HCSW) program, in favor of the AGM-183A Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW), which uses a wedge-shaped boost-glide vehicle.
The LRHW and IRCPS systems both use the same core missile and boost-glide vehicle, but are being adapted for launch from ground-based and naval platforms, respectively. Details have been slowly trickling out about this joint-service hypersonic weapon in recent years, but, as already noted, the statement to Breaking Defense is the first time an actual official range has been given.

US Army

An infographic showing the common boost-glide vehicle and missile design that the Army and Navy are both using in their LRHW and IRCPS programs, as well as the components specific to the Army's ground-based system.


The figure is immediately interesting in the context of the INF treaty, which had prohibited the United States and Russia from deploying nuclear or conventionally-armed ground-based cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,420 miles. The Army withdrew its nuclear-armed Pershing II medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM), which had a maximum range of around 1,100 miles, from service as a result of that deal. The last of these missiles were decommissioned in 1991.

DOD

US Army Pershing II medium-range ballistic missiles, where were withdrawn from service as part of the INF deal.


With all this in mind, it's perhaps unsurprising that the weapon's range has been kept under wraps for so long. The U.S. government, under President Donald Trump, only formally withdrew from the INF in 2019, ostensibly over Russia's fielding of a prohibited ground-based cruise missile system, something the Kremlin continues to deny it has done. At that point, work on at least the underlying components of the LRHW had been going on for years. In 2017, the Navy even conducted the first flight test of what subsequently emerged was a common boost-glide vehicle design, launching it from an Ohio class submarine. The INF did not place any limitations on the development or fielding of ship- or submarine-launched cruise or ballistic missiles.

In 2017, reports also emerged that the United States had begun at least exploring the development of an INF-busting missile in response to Russia's treaty-violating cruise missile. The INF did not expressly ban the research and development of ground-based weapons with prohibited ranges, providing no actual tests were carried out and that no such weapon was actually fielded.
It's also interesting to note that the Navy consistently describes its version of this weapon, which, again, will use the exact same core missile packaged for launch from submarines and ships, as being "intermediate range." Intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM) are defined as having maximum ranges between 1,864 and 3,418 miles, the lower end of which is still greater than the 1,725 miles figure that the Army has now provided for LRHW.
LRHW is also just one of a number of post-INF land-based missiles that the Army, as well as the U.S. Marine Corps, is now pursuing. Both services are looking at the possibility of fielding ground-launched versions of the Tomahawk cruise missile. The INF had led to the scrapping of a previous land-based Tomahawk variant, the BGM-109G Gryphon, which had been in service with the U.S. Air Force.

US Army

A ground-based launcher fires a BGM-109G Gryphon missile during a test.


The Army is also developing a replacement for ATACMS, the Precision Strike Missile (PrSM), the range of which is no longer limited by that treaty. Just yesterday, Lockheed Martin announced that it had demonstrated the ability of that weapon to hit targets out to nearly 250 miles and there has already been talk of pushing that out further to somewhere between 340 to 372 miles.
There is also another ground-based hypersonic weapon program, Operational Fires (OpFires), that the Army is working on, together with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The OpFires missile also carries an unpowered boost-glide vehicle and it is unclear exactly how this weapon differs from the LRHW design.

The disclosure of the LRHW's range now is also not entirely surprising. While a guest on an episode of Air Force Association's Mitchell Institute’s Aerospace Advantage podcast in March, Air Force General Timothy Ray, head of Air Force Global Strike Command (AFGSC), said, in no uncertain terms, that he felt the LRHW program was "stupid." Ray was especially critical of the weapon's utility in the Pacific, where a number of American allies, including Australia and South Korea, have already said they have no interest in hosting them. There have been reports that Japanese authorities could be inclined to allow future Army missile units onto its soil, possibly through rotating deployments.

“There are a lot of countries that have to agree to this. I could see some of them probably agreeing in the European theater, maybe in the Central Asian theater, but I don’t see it coming together with any credibility in the Pacific any time real soon,” Ray said. He also touted the Air Force's own work on the ARRW program, as well its experience with the kinds of long-range bomber operations into which those weapons are expected to be integrated, including in the Pacific.

USAF

A US Air Force B-52H bomber carries two captive-carry AGM-183A ARRW test articles under its wing.


Ray's comments ultimately led to a meeting between the Army and Air Force chiefs of staff and prompted public statements of support for the LRHW from other senior U.S. military officials. Land-based hypersonic weapons, as well as other ground-launched longer-range missiles, are a core component of the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI) concept that the U.S. military has proposed as a way to counter China in that region, which you can read about more in detail here.
As Breaking Defense pointed out, with a range of 1,725 miles, LRHWs fired from the U.S. island of Guam, where the weapons would be based without any need for foreign consent, could reach Taiwan. This would allow their potential use in response to a Chinese invasion of that island. Officials in Beijing see that island, which presently has a completely autonomous government, as an integral part of China and they routinely threaten to use military force should authorities in Taipei declare full independence from the mainland.

LRHWs capable of striking targets 1,725 miles or more away would be able to reach deep inside the Chinese mainland if they could be positioned in Japan, or the Philippines, another country that has come up in discussions about basing these weapons. Having these missiles in Japan would also mean they could prosecute targets in North Korea or Russia's Far East region.
"You might aggregate Navy and Army; you might aggregate Air Force and Army, but if someone shows up to the battle and they don’t have long-range fires and the adversary does, you can’t effectively operate in that theater," Air Force General John Hyten, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in April, speaking about future operations generally. "This means you want each service to bring those long-range fires; so, the joint warfighting concept succeeds if all of the force can apply fires wherever they happen to be, wherever the target is, whatever the lines of conflict, that is the joint warfighting concept."
All this being said, budgets are likely to be a key factor in any future discussions about Army ground-based hypersonic or other longer-range missile capabilities. The Air Force notably abandoned HCSW, its companion to the LRHW/IRCPS program, in order to refocus resources on the ARRW project.
As it stands now, the Army hopes to have a prototype battery ready to begin live-fire testing of the LRHW sometime in the 2022 Fiscal Year. That unit is then expected to form the core of a limited operational capability with this weapon in the next fiscal cycle.

By disclosing the LRHW's range, the Army seems to be making a new pitch for that weapon's place in the future mix of long-range strike capabilities across the U.S. military. In doing so, the service has also made clear that the U.S. military has now left the limitations that the INF treaty had imposed far behind.

Posted for fair use

The Army Has Finally Revealed The Range Of Its New Hypersonic Weapon

The missile's range would've violated a now-defunct treaty with Russia and this disclosure comes amid criticism of its utility in the Pacific region.

www.thedrive.com

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Germany goes Hail Mary on funding Europe’s next-gen fighter

German defense leaders admit they have no firm financing plan for the Future Combat Air System, but they still hope to submit the project to lawmakers for approval soon.

www.defensenews.com

Germany goes Hail Mary on funding Europe’s next-gen fighter

By: Sebastian Sprenger   3 days ago

COLOGNE, Germany — German defense leaders have admitted there is no firm financing plan for the Future Combat Air System, but they still plan to submit the project to lawmakers for approval soon.

At issue are the next phases for the German-Franco-Spanish, next-generation fighter aircraft, dubbed 1B and 2. The decision to proceed marks something of a point of no return given the billions of euros to be pumped into flyable prototypes.

In a May 7 letter to lawmakers, German Defence Ministry leaders sketched out a sporty timeline for presenting a signature-ready deal to parliament, a mandatory step before money can start flowing. The idea is to send the proposal to the relevant Bundestag committees for review in the last week before the summer recess, the week of June 21. The timing is critical because once parliament goes out of session, the following six months, at least, will be consumed by the September national election and the ensuing formation of a new government.

The setup of the FCAS construct is complicated enough: Berlin, Paris and Madrid endeavor to build a sixth-generation fighter aircraft on equal terms. Each country brings a national industry champion — Airbus Defence and Space, Dassault and Indra, respectively — which also are meant to cooperate on equal terms. Below that, there are trinational industry teams for various components, including an engine for the centerpiece fighter aircraft as well as sensors, drones and stealth technology.

Disagreements between Dassault and Airbus over work share and the handling of intellectual property rights slowed progress in recent months, though recent reports suggest there is a deal within reach. The dispute extends to lower-tier teaming arrangements as well as negotiations between governments. Most recently, engine-makers Safran Aircraft Engines, MTU Aero Engines and ITP Aero announced they had sorted out their disagreements.

Germany’s iffy defense budget projections add to the uncertainty surrounding the program. Defense officials have all but thrown up their hands when it comes to getting key programs included in the budget in the short term. After that, all bets are off, as government analysts expect the modernization requirements to outpace available spending after 2022.

Large projects like FCAS typically come with considerable uncertainty built in, but German lawmakers typically force the government to show its hand at key junctures before cutting any checks. The May 7 missive to parliament about FCAS and other funding plans includes only a generic reference — “federal budget” — in places where programs are supposed to be delineated to specific line items in the defense budget nomenclature.

“Normally, such a proposal would never make it here,” said a Bundestag aide, adding that the tactic of submitting unfunded programs could serve to pressure the Finance Ministry headed by Olaf Scholz, a Social Democrat who was just named his party’s chancellor candidate for the Sept. 26 general election.

German finance officials flagged several outstanding hurdles in a report on FCAS to lawmakers earlier this year. For one, a French request to except certain French intellectual property concessions, classified as “specific foreground information,” from the overall sharing architecture had raised eyebrows in Berlin and Madrid. The dispute likely would not be completely resolved before the end of May, the March report read, adding that France had yet to spell out its specific reasoning at the time.

In addition, industry offers had come in at 25 percent above the budget ceiling of €2.5 billion (U.S. $3 billion) agreed by the partner nations for program stages 1B and 2, the Finance Ministry report stated. The companies also were expecting to receive “significant” additional services from the nations as in-kind contributions, it added.

The three governments had yet to speak to the possibility of a budget increase as a result of “high industry demands” at the time, according to the March document.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

NATO Plans To Focus On Russia And China – OpEd

By Robert Johnson “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in a blunt interview with The Economist in November 2019. Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice”, he said, and needs to start thinking of itself strategically as a...

www.eurasiareview.com

NATO Plans To Focus On Russia And China – OpEd
May 14, 2021 IDN

By Robert Johnson

“What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” French President Emmanuel Macron declared in a blunt interview with The Economist in November 2019. Europe stands on “the edge of a precipice”, he said, and needs to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power; otherwise, we will “no longer be in control of our destiny.”

That was two years after Donald Trump took over as the U.S. President. But the apprehensive environment prompted NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg to appoint the “NATO Reflection Group,” co-led by former German Defence Minister Thomas de Maiziere and former US State Department official Wess Mitchell. This was also in view of the fact that NATO’s “Strategic Concept” outlining threats and capabilities to counter them has not been revised since 2010.

“Nuclear deterrence” has been at the core of NATO’s mutual security guarantee and collective defence since its inception in 1949. The very first NATO Strategic Concept the same year referenced the requirement to “ensure the ability to carry out strategic bombing promptly by all means possible with all types of weapons without exception.”

Both the 2010 Strategic Concept and the 2012 Deterrence and Defence Posture Review made clear that the current 30-nation North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) seeks its security at the lowest possible level of forces and is fully committed to arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation.

The United States committed nuclear weapons to NATO in July 1953, with the first American theatre nuclear weapons arriving in Europe in September 1954. NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements, which were already in place by the time negotiations for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) began in the 1960s, were codified by the United States and the Soviet Union as a precursor for the final agreed NPT text.


The United Kingdom has also extended its nuclear forces, including its current single submarine-based system and Continuous At-Sea Deterrent, to the protection of NATO Allies for over 50 years.

Since the height of the Cold War, it has unilaterally reduced the size of its land-based nuclear weapons stockpile by over 90 per cent, reducing the number of nuclear weapons stationed in Europe and its reliance on nuclear weapons in strategy, stresses NATO.

Since progress on arms control and disarmament must take into account the prevailing international security environment, NATO argues, at the Warsaw Summit in 2016, NATO leaders recognised that conditions for achieving further disarmament were unfavourable given Russia’s aggressive actions and military build-up in recent years.

During the 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels, Heads of State and Government once again affirmed NATO’s long-standing commitment to nuclear deterrence, stating that “as long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance.”

The NATO Reflection Group, set up by NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, presented its final report on November 20, 2020. Titled “NATO 2030: United for a New Era”, the report focuses on the challenges of today and tomorrow. These, it says, are “Russia’s aggressive actions, the threat of terrorism, cyber-attacks, emerging and disruptive technologies, the security impact of climate change, and the rise of China.”

Decisions on dealing with the challenges will be taken at the NATO Summit in Brussels on June 14, 2021, at NATO HQ in Brussels, Belgium. “This is a unique opportunity to reinforce NATO as the enduring embodiment of the bond between Europe and North America,” says a NATO press release.

The North Atlantic Council (NAC), NATO’s principal political decision-making body, consisting of Permanent Representatives from its member countries, had this to say on the Extension of the New START Treaty:

NATO welcomes and fully supports the agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation to extend the New START Treaty for five years. NATO Allies believe the New START Treaty contributes to international stability, and Allies again express their strong support for its continued implementation and for early and active dialogue on ways to improve strategic stability.

Allies remain collectively determined to uphold existing disarmament, arms control, and non-proliferation agreements and commitments. Allies support further arms control negotiations, with the aim of improving the security of the Alliance, taking into account the prevailing international security environment. Allies see the treaty’s extension as the beginning, not the end, of an effort to address nuclear threats and new and emerging challenges to strategic stability.

Even as the United States engages Russia in ways that advance our collective interests, NATO remains clear-eyed about the challenges Russia poses. We will work in close consultation to address Russia’s aggressive actions, which constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.

 

[jward]

Looks interesting, if yer the sort who finds such things interesting. . .

Heiko Borchert
@HeikoBorchert


We are excited to share our inaugural paper: "Beware the Hype" looks at the interplay btw #UAV, #EW & #airdefense in #UKR, #SYR, #LIB & #ARM-#AZE. By @HeikoBorchert@_schuetzt @Warkhorse

See: https://defenseai.eu/daio_beware_the_hype

Don't forget to follow @Defense_AIO
. Many thanks!



posted for fair use

https://defenseai.eu/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/DAIO_Beware_the_Hype.pdf