WAR 05-16-2020-to-05-22-2020___THEWINDSofWAR

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

(417) WAR - 04-25-2020-to-05-01-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(418) 05-02-2020-to-05-08-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

WAR - 05-02-2020-to-05-08-24-2020___THEWINDSofWAR

(415) 04-11-2020-to-4-17-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** https://www.timebomb2000.com/xf/index.php?threads/04-11-2020-to-4-17-2020___-the-winds-of-war.572027/ (416) 04-18-2020-to-4-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (417)...

www.timebomb2000.com

(419) 05-09-2020-to-05-08-15-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

WAR - 05-09-2020-to-05-08-15-2020___THEWINDSofWAR

(416) 04-18-2020-to-4-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (417) WAR - 04-25-2020-to-05-01-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (418)...

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Turkey detains pro-Kurdish mayors, removes them from office

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish authorities on Friday detained four more elected mayors from Turkey’s mainly Kurdish populated east and southeast regions, as the government pressed ahead with its crackdown on a pro-Kurdish party it accuses of links to Kurdish militants.

apnews.com

Turkey detains pro-Kurdish mayors, removes them from office
yesterday

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish authorities on Friday detained four more elected mayors from Turkey’s mainly Kurdish populated east and southeast regions, as the government pressed ahead with its crackdown on a pro-Kurdish party it accuses of links to Kurdish militants.

The mayors from the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP, were detained at their homes, removed from office and replaced with government-appointed trustees, the state-run Anadolu Agency reported. A fifth mayor was also fired, but hasn’t been detained.

The government accuses the party of links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The HDP denies the accusation.

The HDP denounced the crackdown on the elected mayors as a government “coup.”

“This amounts to the rejection of democracy, this amounts to the non-recognition of the will of the people,” party co-chairman Mithat Sancar said.

The Kurdish people won’t yield to pressure and will fight for their democratic rights, Sancar said at a news conference.

The four mayors were elected to office in local elections last year in the cities of Igdir and Siirt as well as in Siirt’s districts of Baykan and Kurtalan and the district of Altinova in Mus province.

HDP says the government has appointed caretaker mayors to 45 out of a total of 65 municipalities that the party won in local elections in March 2019. At least 21 mayors have been imprisoned on terror-related charges.

Seven former HDP lawmakers, including former chairman Selahattin Demirtas, are also in prison.

Nacho Sanchez Amor, the European Parliament’s rapporteur on Turkey, called on Ankara to stop removing the elected officials without court decisions.

“Local councils should have at least the possibility to appoint an interim mayor among its elected members!” he tweeted. “Credibility on fundamentals of democracy is at stake.”

The New York-ba
sed Human Rights Watch has criticized Turkey’s crackdown against the mayors, saying it amounts to a violation of voters’ rights.

The PKK is considered a terror organization by Turkey, the U.S. and the European Union.

Meanwhile, authorities detained 38 people for questioning over an attack Thursday that killed two workers who were distributing aid to people in a district in eastern Turkey. The district has been placed under quarantine because of the new coronavirus outbreak.

Turkish officials have blamed the attack on the PKK.

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

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Iran’s Satellite and the IRGC Space Program

www.armscontrolwonk.com

Iran’s Satellite and the IRGC Space Program
Run time 53:34
by ACW Podcast | May 12, 2020 | No Comments
Iran launched a small satellite into orbit. But more importantly, it was Iran’s revolutionary guards, not the civilian space program, that did the launching — and with a new solid rocket motor as the second stage. Fabian Hinz joins Jeffrey to talk about the IRGC space program and break down its most recent launch.
Support us over at Patreon.com/acwpodcast!

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

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Deadly Rio police raid brings crowds into streets of quarantined favela

A deadly police raid in Rio de Janeiro on suspected drug traffickers on Friday morning drew crowds into the streets of a neighborhood under quarantine, provoking criticism from residents and activists.

www.reuters.com

World News
May 15, 2020 / 4:08 PM / Updated 8 hours ago
Deadly Rio police raid brings crowds into streets of quarantined favela

Ricardo Morães
3 Min Read

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A deadly police raid in Rio de Janeiro on suspected drug traffickers on Friday morning drew crowds into the streets of a neighborhood under quarantine, provoking criticism from residents and activists.

According to a Reuters witness and media reports, heavily armed police entered Rio’s “favela” shantytown known as Complexo do Alemao and killed at least 10 people. Police said they came under grenade and gunfire attack, a common occurrence in areas controlled by drug gangs.

When a Reuters photographer arrived shortly afterward, residents had carried five bodies to the entrance of the favela. Dozens of people, most of whom had no masks or any other protective equipment, were gathered in a tight intersection under a drizzle. Acquaintances and family members of the dead embraced and consoled one another.

“Social distancing? For who?” asked Fábio Felix, a left-wing lawmaker, on Twitter. “It’s incredible that the lives of the poor aren’t worth anything, even during a pandemic!”

Police said in a statement the incident would be reviewed by homicide detectives, following standard practice. The police said they came under heavy grenade and gunfire attack several times while in Complexo do Alemao, and recovered dozens of high-powered weapons. One police officer was injured.

Several residents complained that the government was offering little aid to contain the novel coronavirus, but was still engaging in violent police operations that risked spreading the virus through low-income communities.

The city of Rio had registered 1,509 deaths from the coronavirus and 11,264 confirmed cases by Thursday evening, according to municipal authorities, who say those figures are likely undercounting the outbreak due to a lack of testing.

Police violence has been rising rapidly in Brazil, where authorities including President Jair Bolsonaro have encouraged police to kill more. In violent Rio, police killed 1,810 people in 2019, the highest number since record keeping began in 1998.

“Within and outside the context of a pandemic, we demand that public security authorities respect human rights while policing,” the Brazilian office of Amnesty International said on Twitter.

Reporting by Ricardo Morães; Writing and additional reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Grant McCool

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

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Nuclear-armed submarines and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific | The Strategist

The maritime strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific is changing rapidly. The future of undersea nuclear deterrent forces has strategic, operational and force structure aspects for all major powers in the region. Strategic competition in an ...

www.aspistrategist.org.au

Nuclear-armed submarines and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific

14 May 2020 | James Goldrick

The maritime strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific is changing rapidly. The future of undersea nuclear deterrent forces has strategic, operational and force structure aspects for all major powers in the region. Strategic competition in an increasingly competitive environment has a significant maritime element, which itself is profoundly influenced by the continuing importance—and progressive expansion—of the region’s underwater nuclear deterrent forces.

To a greater extent than during the Cold War, both threatening and protecting such assets will be difficult to separate from other maritime campaigns. This particularly applies to potential anti-submarine warfare (ASW) operations in the East and South China Seas, as well as to India and Pakistan and to North Korea, creating uncertainty over the possibility of unplanned escalations and outright accidents.

Maintaining any kind of regional balance will, therefore, call for cool judgements on the part of all the players, judgements that will need to be continually revised in the light of technological innovation and force development.

The US Navy’s nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) force is central to the country’s nuclear arsenal. While the navy can’t be complacent about threats to the survivability of its submarines, until there are revolutionary developments in sensor technology, the combination of geography, oceanography, and platform and missile capabilities means that its at-sea deterrent will remain the most secure element of America’s nuclear force and thus receive high priority in funding.

The problem for the US Navy is that it will need to start replacing the Ohio class within the next decade, but the cost of 12 new Columbia-class submarines will severely limit its ability to regenerate all the other force elements that will be required to meet the combined challenges of China and Russia.

The navy’s efforts represent just one part of a strategy to push the US’s competitors off balance and regain the strategic initiative. An important maritime element is likely to be undermining China’s efforts to create an underwater ‘bastion’. Here, the Americans must weigh the benefits of actively threatening the security of the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s SSBN force against the resource commitments that that would entail, as well as the complications that it could represent for alliance arrangements, notably with Japan and Australia.

In seeking to become the predominant maritime power in the western Pacific, China has its own problems of resources and technology. However attractive the concept of an at-sea deterrent force within its nuclear inventory may be, China must first extend the range of its submarine-launched missiles and considerably improve the stealth qualities of its missile submarines if it is to create a capability sufficient to pose a credible threat to the continental United States.

Russia’s challenges are in some ways parallel to those of the US, particularly its need to sustain an SSBN force while modernising the remainder of its navy. Maintaining an at-sea nuclear deterrent remains the highest priority. However, replacement of the older SSBN with the new Borey class must be consuming a very large share of the Russian navy’s resources. To the SSBN program must be added the need to renew the nuclear-powered attack submarine force and continue development of the ASW capabilities necessary to secure the bastions against potential attackers. The limited money available means that Russia’s maritime power-projection assets don’t enjoy the same level of attention.

Japan’s defence expansion, despite the tensions with China and the rise of the PLA Navy, has been relatively limited. Its most significant new elements are focused on developing amphibious forces capable of responding rapidly to any threat to the Ryukyu Islands, including the contested Senkaku (Diaoyu) Islands. Japan’s ASW efforts are much less visible in, but perhaps more significant for, its maritime strategy. Japan’s submarine force is slowly expanding, and the modernisation of its surface and air ASW forces continues.

Australia faces equivalent challenges. Because it is one of the few regional players with substantial high-technology capabilities, particularly in the ASW domain, Australia’s assistance will be eagerly sought by the Americans, just as they have long looked to Japan. While its defence expansion remains relatively constrained—and slow—Australia’s emerging force structure will provide both independent national capabilities and strategic weight in alliance terms in ways that are relatively new. Australia has been a regular presence in the South China Sea over many years, but the latest Indo-Pacific Endeavour task group deployments have been on a larger scale than the individual ship deployments of the recent past.

North Korea remains a wild card. Its efforts to develop an underwater nuclear deterrent are only a small part of the increasingly complex problem its future presents for neighbouring countries and the region as a whole.

India must balance its apparently unresolvable tensions with Pakistan against a developing strategic rivalry with China that has important maritime dimensions. The growing Chinese economic and military presence in the Indian Ocean threatens India’s self-image as the dominant power in the region. India’s interest in the South China Sea represents something of a riposte and a deliberate effort to complicate China’s maritime strategy.

On the other hand, the entry of the first Indian SSBN into operational service and the start of its deterrent patrols may have added to India’s nuclear capabilities, but they also create a hostage to fortune that the Indian Navy must factor into its dispositions. Whether Pakistan will add to India’s problems by embarking nuclear weapons in its submarine force is uncertain, as is the priority that the Pakistan Navy will give to locating and tracking Indian SSBNs.

In sum, strategic competition in the increasingly competitive Indo-Pacific has a significant maritime element. Distinguishing threatening and protecting nuclear assets from routine maritime campaigns is increasingly difficult. As SSBN capabilities proliferate, and ASW technology advances, maintaining a regional maritime balance will increase in complexity.

This piece was produced as part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy: Undersea Deterrence Project, undertaken by the ANU National Security College. This article is a shortened version of chapter 2, ‘Maritime and naval power in the Indo-Pacific’, as published in the 2020 edited volume: The future of the undersea deterrent: a global survey. Support for this project was provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Author
James Goldrick served as a rear admiral in the Royal Australian Navy, has published widely on naval issues and now has appointments at UNSW Canberra, the ANU Strategic and Defence Studies Centre and ANCORS (Australian National Centre for Ocean Resources and Security). Image: US Strategic Command.

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

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The Chinese Navy’s Unusually Heavily Defended Fortress Near The Indian Ocean

China is building a string of overseas bases, with the furthest afield being in Djibouti. This base is particularly heavily defended, a modern-day fortress. It is hard not to draw parallels with ancient Chinese forts and of course the Great Wall of China.

www.forbes.com

Editors' Pick|21,975 views|May 15, 2020,07:50am EDT
The Chinese Navy’s Heavily Defended Fortress Near The Indian Ocean
H I SuttonContributor

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

Diagram of Chinese Navy (PLAN) fortifications at the overseas Base in Djibouti

With its multiple layers of defense, thick walls and corner towers the base in Djibouti resembles a ... [+]
H I Sutton
The Chinese Navy is building a string of overseas bases. So far the largest and furthest afield is in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. This strategically-located base appears ready to receive large warships, maybe even aircraft carriers. One aspect of the base is particularly interesting: It is a modern-day fortress built from scratch. If the Communist country was hoping to give off non-imperialist vibes as it expands its presence overseas, then it may have chosen the wrong architects.

And it is not just castle aesthetics, the base really is designed to be highly defendable on a scale rarely seen, even in war zones. Construction of the walls started in early 2016, and was substantially complete by spring 2017. The base has been built up since.

Approaching by road, you first have to turn off the perimeter road and pass through a substantial automated outer gate. Turning 90 degrees, always good for slowing vehicles down, you then pass through two vehicle checkpoints and a chicane. Eventually the main gate is in sight. It appears to have last-ditch pop-up vehicle barriers and large concrete doors.

Today In: Aerospace & Defense

If you you tried to circumvent the vehicle route described above, you would face many layers of defense. First there is a high perimeter fence which separates the public road from the private perimeter road. Then there is another high fence with razor wire before you climb up a steep slope to the outer wall. This is made out of ‘Hesco’ style barriers with razor wire along the top. Hesco barriers are wire frames filled with giant sandbags. They are commonly used by Western forces in Afghanistan and Iraq as the main walls of fortified bases. Here they are relegated to just being an outer wall.

Inside the Hesco wall is the main wall built out of concrete. It has crenelations, meaning the up-and-down style battlements familiar from medieval castles. There are also gun loops, which are holes to fire weapons through. And there are tall towers on the corners.

Not every side of the base is defended equally, but there are substantial defenses on all sides. Even approaching from the water side of the base would require negotiating a series of security fences and guard positions. Inside the base itself there are a few more defensive positions.

An attack on the base would be responded to by the marines stationed there. Armored vehicles seen in the base include ZBD-09 infantry fighting vehicles and ZTL-11 assault guns. These are armed with an array of automatic cannons, anti-tank missiles and large caliber guns.

Other countries’ military bases in Djibouti, such as the U.S. Navy’s Expeditionary Base at Camp Lemonnier, also have physical defenses, but nothing that compares to the Chinese base.

So who are they defending against? This style of defenses are negligible against advanced adversaries. So it appears that the focus is on insurgents and local low-tech threats.

China does not have first hand experience of its bases being attacked in the way that Western forces have in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it may have learned from them. Yet it is hard not to see these defenses and draw parallels with ancient Chinese forts and of course the Great Wall of China.

H I Sutton

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

Hummm.....

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U.S. on Track to Pull Troops from Afghanistan Despite Turmoil

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is on track to meet its commitment to the Taliban to withdraw several thousand troops from Afghanistan by summer, even as violence flares, the peace process i

www.realcleardefense.com

U.S. on Track to Pull Troops from Afghanistan Despite Turmoil

By Robert Burns
May 16, 2020

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States is on track to meet its commitment to the Taliban to withdraw several thousand troops from Afghanistan by summer, even as violence flares, the peace process is stalled, and Kabul struggles in political deadlock.

U.S. officials say they will reduce to 8,600 troops by July 15 and abandon five bases. And by next spring all foreign forces are suppose to withdraw, ending America’s longest war. Yet the outlook for peace is cloudy at best. In the absence of Afghan peace talks, the Trump administration may face the prospect of fully withdrawing even as the Taliban remains at war with the government.

That has concerned some lawmakers, including Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and member of the House Armed Services Committee. She says the United States needs to keep a military and intelligence presence in Afghanistan to prevent extremist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State’s Afghan affiliate from forming havens from which to attack the U.S.

“Withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan won't end the war — it will just let the terrorists win," she told The Associated Press.

Some question whether the U.S.-Taliban agreement signed in Doha, Qatar, on Feb. 29, which the Trump administration billed as “a decisive step to achieve a negotiated peace,” was instead mainly a withdrawal agreement. President Donald Trump had campaigned on bringing troops home from foreign wars. And though the Afghan government publicly supported the deal, it did not participate directly in the negotiations and has not, in Washington's view, capitalized on the chance for peace talks.

“President Trump promised to bring our troops home from overseas and is following through on that promise,” the White House said when the Doha deal was signed.

The deal stipulated that the Taliban would start intra-Afghan peace negotiations on March 10, but that has not happened. The Taliban and the Afghan government also have squabbled over a promised release of each other’s prisoners.

“A lot of this boils down to: Was the U.S.-Taliban agreement any kind of serious negotiation at all, or was it just totally a fig leaf to cover abject withdrawal? I suspect the latter,” said Stephen Biddle, a Columbia University professor of international and public affairs and a former adviser to U.S. commanders in Kabul.

“It gave away almost all the leverage we had in exchange for virtually nothing,” he added. “It looks very much like a situation in which the Taliban have concluded that the Americans are out, and they're going to play out the string and see what happens when we're gone."

The United States has been the prime backer of the Afghan government since it invaded the country soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and overthrew the Taliban, which was running the country and harboring al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. According to U.S. government auditors, Washington has committed $86 billion to support Afghan security forces and is still spending about $4 billion a year.

The Trump administration has expressed frustration with the lack of movement toward peace talks, but it has not threatened publicly to pull back from its commitment to fully withdraw. It did conduct an airstrike against the Taliban in defense of Afghan ground forces in early March just hours after Trump had what he called a good conversation by phone with a senior Taliban leader, Abdul Ghani Baradar.

Although the drawdown is required by the Doha agreement, U.S. defense officials had said for many months that they wanted to reduce to 8,600 — the approximate number of troops that were supporting Afghan forces and conducting counterterrorism operations when Trump took office.

American officials constructed the Doha agreement mainly as a way of ending U.S. involvement in the war, rather than as an assured path to peace. The withdrawal is subject to Taliban assurances, but it does not require a peace settlement.

The deal also is seen by the U.S. as a way to enlist the Taliban in the fight against the Islamic State group. The American military considers the group's Afghan affiliate as a greater threat than the Taliban.

The U.S. agreed to withdraw not just military forces but also all intelligence agency personnel, private security contractors, trainers and advisers. NATO allied forces also are to withdraw.

The Doha deal was seen at the time as Afghanistan’s best chance at peace in decades of war, but the government has since been consumed with political turmoil. Ghani and his rival Abdullah Abdullah have both declared themselves winners of last year’s presidential polls, and each declared himself president.

Defense Secretary Mark Esper has said that getting out of Afghanistan would advance his aim of devoting more forces to the Asia-Pacific region to counter China, which he sees as the No. 1 long-term threat to the United States.

Esper has been skeptical of the Taliban's commitment to peace, and on May 5 he said neither the Taliban nor the Afghan government is abiding by the agreement.

Esper said the Taliban should return to the reduced levels of violence that existed in the week before the Feb. 29 Doha signing. At the time, Ghani put his government forces in a defensive stance, but on Tuesday he ordered a return to the offensive, expressing anger for two attacks, including one that killed 24 people, including infants, at a hospital. The Taliban denied responsibility and the U.S. has blamed the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan for the attack. The Taliban on Thursday said it had carried out a suicide bombing as retaliation for having been falsely accused by Ghani.

A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Thomas Campbell, indicated the U.S. stance has not changed.

“Consistent with the agreement, the U.S. military will continue to conduct defensive strikes against the Taliban when they attack our (Afghan) partners.,” he said Wednesday. "As the secretary of defense stated recently, this is going to be a windy, bumpy road, but a political agreement is the best way to end the war.”

Housecarl · May 16, 2020

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U.S. Special Forces Test Laser Gunship For Covert Strikes

The AC-130J Ghostrider gunship is a fearsome flying arsenal, so why would Air Force Special Forces add a comparatively low-powered laser to it? The answer may be 'plausible deniability.'

www.forbes.com

Editors' Pick|13,246 views|May 15, 2020,12:36pm EDT
U.S. Special Forces Test Laser Gunship For Covert Strikes

David HamblingContributor

Aerospace & Defense
I'm a South London-based technology journalist, consultant and author
The prospect of laser fire from above moved closer with an announcement from the U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command (AFSOC) that they will test fire a high-energy laser weapon from an AC-130J aircraft in 2022. The plan was disclosed at the at the Virtual Special Operations Forces Industry Conference this week.

The AC-130J Ghostrider is a fearsome flying arsenal. Like its Vietnam-era gunship predecessors, it carries a radar-guided 105mm howitzer and 30mm rapid fire cannon. The modern version also has precision strike capability, dropping 250-pound GPS-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs and 34-pound laser-guided AGM-176 Griffin missiles.

AC-130J Ghostrider gunship
US Air Force
AFSOC have been working towards the laser-armed gunship for at least five years, in partnership with the Naval Surface Warfare Center, and have carried out studies and ground tests.

Laser weapons are of course the Next Big Thing, and they are being fitted to everything from fighter jets to ground vehicles and even submarines. However, the laser-armed gunship is different to the others in one important respect. The Self-Protect High-Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) on those jets is to defend against missiles, and ground troops and warships have lasers for protection against drones. The gunship laser is an offensive weapon intended to take out targets on the ground. The question is: what targets?

Today In: Aerospace & Defense

Most military lasers are in the 30-50 kilowatt range, with some getting up to 150 kilowatts. The laser being tested on the Ghostrider is in the middle range at around 60 kilowatts. At such power levels it would be highly effective at melting small quadcopters out of the sky, putting missiles out of action or even, given time, damaging small boats. But such lasers are of little use against full-size targets. This type of laser is basically a long-range blowtorch, able to give someone a serious burn, not kill them unless they stand still long enough. It would be even less effective against vehicles. Meanwhile the Ghostrider’s GAU-23 30mm cannon will punch through two inches of steel plate from a mile away and destroy a light armored vehicle with one shot — and it fires 200 shots a minute.

The Ghostrider already has ample firepower for battlefield targets. It can carry out the traditional gunship role of fire support against vehicles and enemy positions with its artillery, but it can knock out buildings and bunkers with bombs, and the small Griffin missile, with laser precision and low-collateral damage warhead, can take out high-value targets in a counterinsurgency situation.

So why the laser? At the conference, the developers talked about the laser’s ability to deliver what they call ‘scalable effects,’ which means selectively damaging a vehicle’s tires rather than blowing it up, for example, something aided by the laser’s accuracy. However, perhaps more importantly the new laser will give AFSOC something they have always highly valued: covert strike capability.

Unlike the zap-guns in the movie, real-life laser weapons do not produce a visible beam. Even if the light catches dust or other particles, it is infrared and invisible to the human eye. There is no smoke trail, impact, or explosion, just a silent, deadly beam. Which is exactly what you want for covert operations.

As far back as 2008 John Corley, Director of the USAF’s Air Armament Center gave a presentation on emerging capabilities including an airborne tactical laser weapon in a C-130. He estimated that a 100-kw laser would have an effective range of “10 Km+” and listed as an advantage “Covert – plausible deniability.”

Presentation slide on Airborne Tactival laser Weapon

Airborne Tactival Laser Weapon
US AIR Force

Striking at night and from long range, a laser-armed Ghostrider would be neither seen nor heard. The laser might not be able to knock out tanks but it could, for example, damage radio or radar equipment, start fires, set fuel or ammunition stores ablaze, and destroy vulnerable gear like rockets on their launchers. And there would be no forensic traces left at the target site: no shell fragments or tell-tale missile parts to indicate where the strike had come from.

The effort to put a laser on the Ghostrider was recently upgraded to a demonstration program. After years of delays, funding has now been provided for the project. A successful demonstration will lead to further development and, ultimately, an operational laser system. Any further information about the laser or what it gets used for will depend on what Air Force Special Operations Command wish to share.

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

Best known for 'Swarm Troopers: How small drones will conquer the world' and I am interested in cutting-edge military technology in general and unmanned systems in
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jward · May 16, 2020

Elephants in the Room
Under Cover of Pandemic, China Steps Up Brinkmanship in South China Sea
Beijing has increased pressure on its nervous neighbors in its quest to dominate the entire South China Sea.

By Robert A. Manning, Patrick M. Cronin | May 14, 2020, 11:44 AM

A Great Wall 236 submarine of the Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy in the sea near Qingdao, China, on April 23, 2019. MARK SCHIEFELBEIN/AFP via Getty Images

While the world is distracted by the coronavirus pandemic, China has been quietly taking paramilitary and political-legal actions in the South China Sea that could be game-changing for the region. Betting that the United States is focused elsewhere and exhausted from years of Chinese encroachments, Beijing’s efforts are approaching an irretrievable tipping point. China aims to coerce its maritime neighbors to abandon their claims and territorial rights under international law and irrevocably alter the status quo. Beijing seeks to impose its so-called nine-dash line, an unrecognized boundary it has drawn around 85 percent of the South China Sea, almost all of it in international waters, and through which $3.4 trillion in shipped goods pass each year—freely, at least for now.
A bit like Russia in Crimea, Beijing is creating facts on the ground.

A bit like Russia in Crimea, Beijing is creating facts on the ground.

China’s claims to the disputed islets and reefs encompassing the Paracel and Spratly islands—which it calls Xisha and Nansha, respectively—have a questionable basis in international law and are based instead on an oval-shaped series of dashes drawn on map of the South China Sea. These islets, some of which Beijing has artificially reclaimed and fortified with military bases, overlap with claims by Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Brunei. China’s line was originally drawn by the pre-Communist government of Chiang Kai-shek in 1947 and modified in 1952 by Mao Zedong. In 2009, in a diplomatic note to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, China attached the dashed-line map and claimed that it had “indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters, and enjoys sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the relevant waters as well as the seabed and subsoil thereof.” Beijing has pressed that claim with growing assertiveness ever since, all the while exploitingthe ambiguity of terms such as “adjacent” and “relevant.”

Disputed Claims in the South China Sea

Source: Center for Strategic and International Studies, Permanent Court of Arbitration
Never mind that Beijing’s claims are fundamentally incompatible with established international law on maritime boundaries, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified and by which it professes to abide. Never mind, as well, that the claims have been ruled fraudulent by an international tribunal in The Hague. This is part of a broader Chinese strategy to create its own version of the Monroe Doctrine, the 19th-century policy by which the United States claimed all of North and South America as its rightful area of control at the exclusion of the European powers. Beijing seeks a sphere of decisive influence with military defense capabilities to raise the cost of any potential U.S. intervention. In short, while the world fights COVID-19, China is moving closer to establishing regional dominion.

In short, while the world fights COVID-19, China is moving closer to establishing regional dominion.

These actions, and the response by the United States and the countries in the region, will determine whether the region’s future will be one of openness and shared prosperity or coercion and conflict.
Trying to create a fait accompli is the only way to interpret Beijing’s behavior in recent weeks. On April 18, China declared the establishment of two new administrative districts, one headquartered on Fiery Cross Reef, an artificial island in the Spratlys, and the other on Woody Island in the Paracels. It has named 80 islets and reefs, including not only artificial ones but also 55 entities that are permanently underwater. These actions are meant to create new facts to buttress claims to control the 1.4 million square miles of the South China Sea.
To enforce these claims over the past year, China has ramped up the pressure by using its three navies—the fleets of the People’s Liberation Army, China Coast Guard, and maritime militia—in waters off Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Its illegal fishing has led Indonesia to step up naval actions, including sinking more than a dozen Chinese fishing boats around the Natuna Islands, internationally recognized to lie in Indonesian waters. Rather than back off, China resumed illegal fishing around the Natuna Islands at the end of March. While China does not dispute Indonesia’s sovereignty over the area, Beijing makes the absurd claim that these have been “traditional Chinese fishing grounds since ancient times,” as if Indonesian, Malaysian, or Vietnamese fishermen (whom Chinese vessels systematically harass) did not exist in the past.
More ominously, Beijing has been raising the stakes over the past year by threatening major offshore oil and gas projects inside Malaysia’s and Vietnam’s internationally recognized exclusive economic zones (EEZs). (A country’s EEZ extends 200 nautical miles off its shores.) In late April, a Chinese survey ship escorted by the China Coast Guard harassed an exploration vessel operated by the Malaysian energy giant Petronas inside Malaysia’s EEZ. The intimidation of the drillship followed similar standoffs last year. Before reaching Malaysia, the survey ship sailed through Vietnam’s EEZ near the site of a previous incident. In 2019, Chinese and Vietnamese ships tried to block each other’s exploration of five offshore oil blocs inside Vietnam’s EEZ. This has raised worries in the region that China is trying to disrupt and gradually strangle Malaysian and Vietnamese oil and gas operations in the area and erase their territorial claims. The cost to Malaysia will be severe if Petronas has to pull the plug on important projects. Similarly, Hanoi fears that ExxonMobil and Rosneft might abandon projects in Vietnamese waters if Chinese harassment continues.

China’s gambit is an existential test of the United States’ position and credibility in Asia. Equally, China is challenging the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which brings together countries opposed to Chinese expansion but with little record of standing up to Beijing with anything other than rhetoric and diplomacy. The United States has no territorial claims but an enduring vital interest in freedom of navigation. To date, the U.S. response to China’s bellicosity has been mainly diplomatic condemnation and a ramping up of so-called freedom of navigation operations by the U.S. Navy in international waters claimed by China. These operations are necessary but not sufficient, as they have had no visible impact on Chinese behavior so far. Similarly, while ASEAN wags its finger at Beijing, the organization has spent nearly 20 fruitless years trying to negotiate a code of conduct for the South China Sea with Beijing.The central role in standing up to China will fall on ASEAN, a potentially powerful alliance of 10 nations with 625 million people and nearly $3 trillion in combined GDP.
The central role in standing up to China will fall on ASEAN, a potentially powerful alliance of 10 nations with 625 million people and nearly $3 trillion in combined GDP. But because ASEAN’s decisions require unanimous consent, forceful action has been blocked by two of its members, Cambodia and Laos, that are beholden to Beijing—giving China a de facto veto in the bloc. ASEAN needs to reinvent its decision-making process or risk irrelevance. If ASEAN cannot find the will to act as a bloc, then those ASEAN members that do want to act should form a maritime bloc as a coalition of the willing.
Bolder Asian action also requires reliable U.S. leadership. Regional players fear that provoking China will result in economic coercion. But Beijing’s recent actions have spurred an unusually strong reaction from maritime ASEAN states fearing permanent Chinese pressure. Sea-bordering Southeast Asian countries are acutely aware that inaction risks giving Beijing permanent control over economic and military activities in the South China Sea—which would be a mortal blow to their strategic autonomy. The time is therefore ripe for a U.S.-led coalition. The United States, Japan, and Australia would be wise to take the lead in crafting a code of conduct for the Western Pacific based on recognized international law and established maritime legal institutions.

If ASEAN can take collective action, China’s power over its member countries will dissipate. Conversely, Beijing’s bullying tactics are most effective when it successfully divides and isolates its neighbors. After the China Coast Guard sank a Vietnamese ship and injured eight fishermen on April 3, the Philippine Foreign Affairs Department took the rare step of expressing support for Vietnam. Beijing took note. Similarly, it made a difference when Vietnam rescued Filipino fishermen who were stranded last year after a suspected Chinese maritime militia vessel sank their boat.
Preventing the Western Pacific from turning into a China-owned lake requires working together to defend partners and international law. Maritime states like the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei should enhance cooperation by coordinating their coast guard operations, increasing their sharing of intelligence, and reaching an accord on how their overlapping South China Sea maritime boundaries should be demarcated.
Meanwhile, the United States should act as a catalyst for the region’s defense by funding the bipartisan congressional Indo-Pacific Deterrence Initiative, which would provide military funding and build on earlier efforts. If Beijing’s South China Sea gambit succeeds, it would be a ruinous blow to U.S. credibility, rippling across U.S. alliances and partnerships in the region. China understands the stakes and so must ASEAN and the United States.

Robert A. Manning is a senior fellow of the Brent Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security at the Atlantic Council and a former official in the U.S. Department of State during the George W. Bush administration. Twitter: @Rmanning4

Patrick M. Cronin is the chair for Asia-Pacific security at the Hudson Institute and a former USAID official in the George W. Bush administration.

posted for fair use

Under Cover of Pandemic, China Steps Up Brinkmanship in South China Sea

Beijing has increased pressure on its nervous neighbors in its quest to dominate the entire South China Sea.

foreignpolicy.com

Housecarl · May 17, 2020

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China’s DF-26: A Hot-Swappable Missile?

A closer look at how the DF-26 IRBM of the PLA Rocket Force, which can carry multiple sorts of warheads, is supposed to work.

www.armscontrolwonk.com

China’s DF-26: A Hot-Swappable Missile?

by Joshua Pollack | May 17, 2020 | No Comments
By Joshua H. Pollack and Scott LaFoy

P.W. Singer and Ma Xiu have an important story in PopSci with a nifty find about China’s DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which carries either nuclear or conventional payloads. It goes some way toward resolving a debate among English-speaking analysts about how these missiles are operated.
Here, we flesh out the story with some additional textual and visual evidence.
(Also see Ankit Panda’s discussion at The Diplomat, found here.)

A multi-purpose missile
First, some background on the debate. Unlike other Chinese missiles associated with more than one warhead type, the DF-26 lacks publicly declared sub-designations indicating which sort of warhead it is meant to carry. For example, the DF-21A is nuclear, the DF-21C is conventional, and the DF-21D carries a conventional anti-ship warhead. These designations are acknowledged by the PLA Rocket Forces and appear in U.S. government reports. But the DF-26 has only ever been identified as DF-26, without any suffixes, by either government.

(Undated pictures of debris from missile tests complicate that story somewhat by including suffixes and also prefixes. One American news story also claimed that there is a DF-26C. More about these puzzle pieces in a little.)

This terminological quirk raises a question: is the PLA Rocket Force deploying the DF-26 in the same manner as the DF-21, with separate, dedicated nuclear, conventional, and anti-ship brigades? Or is each and every DF-26 unit trained and equipped to launch any or all available payload types, as the lack of any “A,” “C,” or “D” suffixes seems to imply?
Singer and Ma have unearthed a fascinating CCTV feature from 2017 describing the training of a missile brigade, which they identify as the 646 Brigade. The CCTV report makes it abundantly clear that this unit’s personnel train to operate both conventional and nuclear weapons, potentially within the span of a single operation: an exercise is described in which launch units fire conventionally armed missiles, then promptly relocate, reload, and prepare to conduct “nuclear counterstrikes.” This may well be the common pattern for all current and planned DF-26 brigades, although there’s not enough information in this story to be confident of that.

As it turns out, this isn’t the first Chinese source to describe this feature, although it’s probably the most explicit. An article by Wang Changqin and Fang Guangming of the PLA Academy of Military Science appeared in China Youth Daily in November 2015, and was helpfully translated by Andrew Erickson soon afterward.
Wang and Fang write (in Erickson’s translation):

"In contrast with the DF-21D is the DF-26’s distinct characteristic of being nuclear and conventional all in one; that is, the one missile body can carry a nuclear warhead (singular or plural not indicated) for a nuclear strike against the enemy, or it can carry a conventional warhead (singular or plural not indicated) for a conventional firepower attack against the enemy. That “change the warhead, not the missile” feature provides a rapid switch between nuclear and conventional…."

"China has only a limited number of nuclear weapons, and as a medium range ballistic missile, by changing to a nuclear warhead at the last minute it (the DF-26) can as needed form up a nuclear deterrent and nuclear counterattack capability linking long and short ranges and strategic and campaign roles…."

"The DF-26 has numerous “fast” features such as fast switch between nuclear and conventional, fast road movement, fast launch preparation, and fast displacement and withdrawal…."

"[An] emphasis was put on improving reliability, maintainability, and supportability, with a modular design of the missile’s structure. Significant is a carrier to which several types of warhead can be fitted, including two types of nuclear warhead and several types of conventional warhead which use different destructive mechanisms to attack specific targets. For example, penetration warheads would be used to damage area type targets such as airfields and ports, piercing and exploding warheads would be used to destroy hardened targets such as bunkers and cave depots, and fuel-air explosive warheads would be used against electromagnetic targets such as command organizations and computer centers. Such a “one carrier, many warheads” design enables the DF-26 to execute long and medium-range precise strikes against many kinds of targets."

This account of a fast-switch capability, along the slogan “change the warhead, not the missile,” implies that a warhead could be replaced in the field, even after a missile has been loaded onto a launch vehicle. This impression is reinforced by the enumeration of at least five types of warhead (two nuclear types, conventional submunitions, conventional penetrator, and thermobaric), which probably means that alternative warheads are brought along in another vehicle or vehicles, rather than hauling a large number of differently preloaded missiles into the field. As Wang and Fang put it, “one carrier [i.e., booster], many warheads.” Five warhead types may not even be a comprehensive listing, considering the anti-ship role that they mention elsewhere in the article.

This would mean that the DF-26 is not only dual- (or multi-) capable, but that each individual launcher and its crew are prepared to handle all warhead types, just as the 2017 CCTV feature suggests. Even more than that, it suggests that each individual missile could carry any of the available warhead types, which can be exchanged in the field.

Still, this article is subject to interpretation. Back in 2016, Jordan Wilson took a different view of Wang and Fang, writing in a USCC staff research report, “As China’s launch brigades have in the past been dedicated to either nuclear or conventional missions, but not both, the ‘modularity’ of the design likely means these launch vehicles can be assigned to either nuclear or conventional brigades, rather than that an individual brigade could quickly switch between warhead types.”

Everything hinges on… a hinge
Now let’s add a new, striking detail. When DF-26 launch vehicles first appeared in public, at a military parade in Beijing in September 2015, they looked like this:

DF-26 on parade, Beijing, 2015. Note how the nose of the missile container projects over the cab of the TEL. Source: PopSci
As we can see in the image above, each six-axle transporter-erector-launcher (TEL) carries a missile canister raised slightly for the parade display, with its business end lifted above the TEL’s cab. There is precedent: DF-21C and DF-21D missile canisters are paraded at the same jaunty angle.

Photos from the 2015 parade have become the standard images of the new IRBM accompanying English-language publications.

Here’s where it gets interesting. In all subsequent images of the DF-26 broadcast on Chinese television, its TEL is unlike the model that appeared in the 2015 parade. Instead, we see a slightly different vehicle. What catches the eye most of all: the canister isn’t elevated at all, but is shown in its resting position. It’s almost horizontal, and the nose of the canister is about halfway submerged into the cab of the TEL.

DF-26 on parade, Zhurihe, 2017. Note that the missile canister is partly submerged into the cab of the TEL. Source: CCTV4
Looking even more closely, there’s another difference on the business end: The orientation of the seam on the warhead’s clamshell-type cover has changed. In 2015, the seam was vertical, as is also seen on the DF-21C and DF-21D:

Closeup of DF-26, Beijing, 2015. Note the divot in the roof of the cab where the nose of the canister would normally rest. Source: SinoDefence Forum
In later imagery, the shape of the canister’s nose is slightly different, and the seam is horizontal:

Closeup of DF-26, Zhurihe, 2017. Source: CCTV4
What is more, the new cover has a feature that is, to the best of our knowledge, unique within the PLARF: it’s fixed in place. Instead of splitting and falling off the erected canister just before launch, the cover is built into the launch vehicle! Its top half rests on a hinge on top of the TEL. When it swings open, it exposes the warhead to view, like so:

DF-26s with hinged clamshell covers open, showing off the goods. Source: Beijing Television
As shown above, the cover is part of the TEL, and not part of the canister. Lest there be any doubt, here’s a still from CCTV showing a DF-26 missile being loaded onto an empty TEL, with the hinged cover opened to receive the warhead. Notice how the warhead protrudes from the canister, unlike on any other canisterized missile we’ve seen in the PLARF.

DF-26 in a nighttime missile transloading exercise, broadcast January 2019. Note how the hinged top of the clamshell cover is attached to the TEL, not the missile canister. Source: CCTV7
By the same token, the cover has to flip open before the missile can erect into launch position. Here’s how that looks:

DF-26s shown partially elevated. Source: Beijing Television

DF-26 shown fully elevated. Source: Beijing Television
Judging by its appearance, the hinged clamshell cover on the DF-26 TEL could be opened and closed as often as required. This feature permits the crew ready access to the warhead. Consistent with our understanding of the Wang and Fang article from 2015, this feature could enable rapid switching of warheads on a launch-ready missile, making it “hot-swappable.”

What’s less clear is whether the warhead swapping is supposed to happen right on top of the TEL. One possibility is that a loader vehicle removes the missile canister, holds it while crew members replace the warhead, and then puts it back on the TEL. This approach strikes us as perhaps more practical. But either way, it would involve just a single missile, which can carry any sort of available warhead and is never removed from its canister in the field.*

*Not counting, you know, launches.

(The only other large launchers in the PRC that are known to have anything resembling this sort of separate payload cover are the TELs for the KZ-1A and KZ-11 space launch vehicles, which are considered to be derived from, or heavily influenced by, PLARF missile systems.)

We don’t know why this sort of TEL didn’t appear on television until after the September 2015 parade. But that was before the November 2015 publication of the China Youth Daily article, so it’s possible that the modularity of the design had not yet been cleared for public release, in a manner of speaking.

We also don’t know why prefixes and suffixes appear on some post-test DF-26 debris in pictures and videos that have popped up online at different times. Judging by the paint job in one such instance, it was a developmental test, not involving production missiles. But another image shows what looks like a solid rocket motor painted green, which suggests a launch exercise. The circumstances that produced these images are somewhat murky.

Solid rocket motor debris, marked “E/ADF-26B.” Note the black-and-white paint scheme with visibility stripes, indicating a developmental test. Source: East Pendulum

More launch debris, marked DF-26C. There appears to be a partial letter ‘A” and a smudge in the image, suggesting an attempt to digitally obscure a prefix. Source: SinoDefence Forum

What you don’t know actually can hurt you
There’s a moral to this story. In his impressively rich and detailed paper on the problem of “pre-launch ambiguity,” James Acton describes the risks that nuclear-armed countries run in a crisis or in wartime if they are mistaken or simply uncertain about the presence of enemy nuclear weapons. As Acton explains, this is a real-world phenomenon, not hypothetical, underscored by errors and gaps in knowledge during past episodes, including the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Yom Kippur War.

Does the PLA see the intensification of these risks as advantageous? One way of looking at it is that the PLARF is preparing to play a “shell game” with its relatively scarce nuclear warheads, making them harder to find and target by unobtrusively salting them into a large, mostly conventional missile force. But another way of looking at it is “Russian roulette,” in which an attack on missiles, presumed to be conventionally armed, risks hitting a nuke. Whatever the idea was, any attempts by the U.S. to engage an alerted DF-26 will probably involve significant uncertainty about whether its forces might be about to strike at enemy nuclear weapons.

Here’s a little parable about the risks associated with attacking the deployed missile forces of another nuclear-armed country. Slightly over a decade ago at a U.S.-Chinese “Track II” meeting in Beijing, American participants were reported to have pressed their Chinese counterparts about the limits of China’s nuclear no-first-use (NFU) commitment. One of them raised the possibility of U.S. conventional strikes against Chinese nuclear forces: what would happen then? Would China adhere to NFU in the strictest sense, or would it use its remaining nuclear weapons to retaliate against a conventional counterforce attack? One of the Chinese participants, a retired senior military official, is said to have responded, “Try it and see.”

Facing ambiguously armed missiles, the U.S. military could find itself running that sort of risk, even without any intention of attacking Chinese nuclear weapons. Whether that’s by accident or by design, it raises the stakes of a shooting war. That’s something that we hope defense planners and senior decision-makers will keep in mind.

Housecarl · May 17, 2020

Hummm.....

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Iran’s Defense Ministry Eyes Strategic Partnership With Iraq

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami underlined closer defense cooperation and strategic partnership with the new Iraqi government for regional security and stability. In a videoconference with his new Iraqi counterpart Juma Anad Saadoun on Sunday, the Iranian defense minister...

www.eurasiareview.com

Iran’s Defense Ministry Eyes Strategic Partnership With Iraq
May 18, 2020 Tasnim News Agency 0 Comments
By Tasnim News Agency

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami underlined closer defense cooperation and strategic partnership with the new Iraqi government for regional security and stability.

In a videoconference with his new Iraqi counterpart Juma Anad Saadoun on Sunday, the Iranian defense minister emphasized the need for closer defense cooperation between Tehran and Baghdad to ensure regional stability and security.

Congratulating the Iraqi minister on taking office, Hatami said Iran is willing to provide all of its capacities for Iraq. “We seek to become strategic partners and turn our relations into a successful paradigm of cooperation.”

The Iranian official also hailed the formation of the new Iraqi government on the basis of national consensus and in line with the interests of all Iraqi ethnic and religious groups.
Pointing to the historical, cultural and religious commonalities between the two neighbors, the Iranian general said, “Iran’s principled policy is (support for) a united, independent and powerful Iraq with the participation of all ethnicities and religions.”

He further wished the new government of Iraq success in fulfilling the national demands, improving the economic situation and fighting against the coronavirus, saying the Iranian Defense Ministry would donate a consignment of COVID-19 diagnostic test kits and other coronavirus-related medical supplies to the Iraqi Embassy in Tehran.

Hatami also invited the new defense minister of Iraq to pay an official visit to Iran.
In a telephone conversation with Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi last week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani reaffirmed the country’s commitment to supporting Iraq, saying Tehran will fully back the new Iraqi government to help it serve the interests of the Iraqi nation.

Tasnim News Agency
Tasnim News Agency is a private news agency in Iran launched in 2012. Its purpose is to cover a variety of political, social, economic and international subjects along with other fields

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Tensions Rise As New Iraqi PM Confronts Iran’s Proxies – OpEd

By Baria Alamuddin* Tharallah (God’s Revenge) emerged in 2003 as a notorious Basra-based, Tehran-funded death squad, hunting down and gruesomely murdering Sunnis, Baathists, and anyone Iranian agents paid them to kill. British soldiers in December 2003 raided a Tharallah torture chamber. It has...

www.eurasiareview.com

Tensions Rise As New Iraqi PM Confronts Iran’s Proxies – OpEd
May 18, 2020 Arab News 0 Comments
By Arab News

By Baria Alamuddin*

Tharallah (God’s Revenge) emerged in 2003 as a notorious Basra-based, Tehran-funded death squad, hunting down and gruesomely murdering Sunnis, Baathists, and anyone Iranian agents paid them to kill. British soldiers in December 2003 raided a Tharallah torture chamber. It has regained nationwide notoriety in recent days after opening fire on protesters outside its headquarters.

Several hundred demonstrators have been gunned down by paramilitary elements since mass protests erupted in the fall of 2019. Militias are accustomed to routinely getting away with murder. However, in a break with precedent, Tharallah’s headquarters were subsequently raided by security forces and their leader, Yousif Al-Musawi, arrested.

The fact that a raid against the headquarters of an Iran-backed militia was one of the first moves taken by new Prime Minister Mustafa Al-Kadhimi could be interpreted as a significant gesture of intent. Al-Kadhimi declared that “those who spill Iraqi blood will not rest.” He also liberated large numbers of Iraqis detained during the protests.

But let’s keep matters in perspective: Some other smaller “rogue” militias, such as the Abu-Al-Fadl Al-Abbas Brigade, have, over the past couple of years, had their offices closed down and leaders arrested — accused of the same criminal activities that larger militant factions from Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi engage in with impunity. The principal militias arguably profit from the squashing of their smaller rivals, offering exclusive control over neighborhood territories for extorting businesses, terrorizing locals and running narcotics, prostitution and oil-smuggling rackets.

Al-Kadhimi was previously the director of national intelligence, known for his cozy ties with the US. He holds British citizenship and was formerly a journalist and human rights activist. The prime minister has won praise for his speed in putting a Cabinet together and the technocratic flavor of his appointments. Observers were reassured by the appointment of experienced figures like Finance Minister Ali Allawi and Gen. Abdel-Wahab Al-Saadi as head of the counterterrorism service.

However, Iran-aligned elements accuse him of green-lighting the US attack that killed Iranian Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani and paramilitary overlord Abu-Mahdi Al-Muhandis in January. Al-Muhandis’ Kata’ib Hezbollah militia described Al-Kadhimi’s nomination as tantamount to a “war against Iraqis,” suggesting that the prime minister should be “behind bars.” Lebanese Hezbollah-affiliated cleric Ali Kourani, meanwhile, accused Al-Kadhimi of plotting with the US to disband Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi. Other Hashd elements are temporarily giving him the benefit of the doubt. Militia leader Qais Al-Khazali previously accused Al-Kadhimi of killing Soleimani and spying for the Americans, but then emerged with conditions under which he would accept his candidacy — including (of course) steadfast support for the Hashd.

In a catastrophic economic climate, Al-Kadhimi is faced with the unenviable task of slashing salaries, laying off employees, cutting subsidies and imposing taxes. According to one source: “Iraq is like a racing car that has been neglected and repeatedly wrecked. Al-Kadhimi is not the racing car driver. He’s the tow truck driver.” The Hashd’s readiness to allow Al-Kadhimi’s appointment may be premised on the awareness that nobody could navigate Iraq through the coming tumultuous year and emerge without their reputation destroyed.

Iraqi oil revenues plunged from $7.1 billion in April 2019 to $1.4 billion in April 2020 and are set to fall further given OPEC’s production cuts. The government requires about $4 billion per month just to pay state employees. Two full months of oil income would be required to cover the $2.16 billion annual budget of Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi.

The budgetary cake may have shrunk from lavish chocolate gateau to a plain cupcake, but paramilitary warlords would rather burn down heaven and earth than see their portions reduced. As one regional expert told me: “Because the pie is getting smaller, their appetite is getting bigger.” The same source speculated as to whether Al-Kadhimi’s control over the budget could allow him to gradually “suffocate” the Hashd through squeezing their resources. Iraq’s UN envoy affirmed that the government’s priority was “restricting weapons to state hands” and consolidating Iraqi sovereignty. We’ll see what happens.

In Iraq and Lebanon, the Hashd and Hezbollah will fight tooth and nail to ensure they aren’t impacted by budget cuts; including corrupt revenue sources and their foot soldiers on the state payroll. In this fraught political environment, there are fears that militias are again resorting to assassinations and violence to confront all challengers. Following the deaths or disappearances of a string of figures associated with the protest movement, lawyer and activist Daoud Al-Hamdani was assassinated in Diyala in recent days.

One pledge Al-Kadhimi may deliver on is preparing the ground for early elections, as promised to protesters — offering a glimmer of hope for Iraq. In 2018, the Iran-aligned paramilitary Fatah list won a dismal 48 out of 329 seats, but was able to play a dominant role amid a deeply fractured parliament. Recent protests throughout Shiite regions focused anger against these militias, which frequently responded with deadly force, making it almost a certainty that fewer Shiite voters would now cast ballots for pro-Iran sectarian elements. Fresh elections could, therefore, benefit moderate Shiite factions and liberal cross-sectarian forces — if these entities get their act together.

Just like Hezbollah, the Hashd has displayed immense skill in infiltrating and corrupting every level of every governing department. Disentangling and dismantling the Hashd octopus will take years — brigade by brigade — perhaps starting with smaller criminal entities like Tharallah, but ultimately moving on to the bigger beasts. There couldn’t be a better time to start than now, when the state coffers physically can’t afford to pay these parasites, which are preying upon the Iraqi body politic.

Al-Kadhimi’s tenure represents a window of opportunity for the Arab world and the West to re-engage with Iraq and empower moderate elements that could squeeze out the sectarian, Iran-allied factions in forthcoming elections.

Only Iraqis can win their country back. The protesters’ demands must be translated into a governing agenda that guarantees that Iraq’s vast wealth isn’t squandered on paramilitancy and advancing its Iranian neighbor’s hostile regional ambitions. Starving and desperate citizens require leaders who inspire genuine hope and can recultivate national pride — irrespective of tribe, ethnicity or sect — by putting Iraqi identity first.

Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.

Arab News
Arab News is Saudi Arabia's first English-language newspaper. It was founded in 1975 by Hisham and Mohammed Ali Hafiz. Today, it is one of 29 publications produced by Saudi Research & Publishing Company (SRPC), a subsidiary of Saudi Research & Marketing Group (SRMG).

Housecarl · May 17, 2020

Hummm.....

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Iran Supreme Leader says Americans will be expelled from Iraq and Syria

***

www.haaretz.com

Iran Supreme Leader Says Americans Will Be Expelled From Iraq and Syria

Khamenei said Americans' actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have led to them being hated, according to a transcript of a speech to students

Reuters
May 18, 2020 1:54 AM

Americans will be expelled from Iraq and Syria, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said on Sunday, renewing Iran's demand for U.S. troops to be withdrawn from the Middle East.

Iran almost got into a full-blown conflict with the United States when a U.S. drone strike killed top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad on January 3, prompting Tehran to retaliate with a missile barrage against a U.S. base in Iraq days later.

Khamenei said Americans' actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria had led to them being hated, according to a transcript of a speech to students published on his website.
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"The Americans won't stay in Iraq and Syria and will be expelled," Khamenei said.

Last month, U.S. President Donald Trump said he had instructed the U.S. Navy to fire on any Iranian ships that harass it at sea, but said later he was not changing the military's rules of engagement.

After Trump's statement, the head of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards, Major General Hossein Salami, said that the Islamic Republic would destroy U.S. warships if its security is threatened in the Gulf.

Housecarl · May 17, 2020

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6 IS militants, policeman killed in attacks in Iraq

www.nagalandpost.com

6 IS militants, policeman killed in attacks in Iraq
Baghdad, May 17 (IANS) | Publish Date: 5/17/2020 9:11:04 AM IST

Six Islamic State (IS) militants and a policeman were killed in two attacks in the provinces of Salahudin and Diyala, security sources said.

In Salahudin province, the paramilitary Hashd Shaabi artillery pounded IS positions in al-Zarga area, in east of the provincial capital Tikrit, some 170 km north of Baghdad, leaving six IS militants killed, the Hashd Shaabi said in a statement on Saturday, Xinhua news agency reported.

In the eastern province of Diyala, a policeman was killed and an officer wounded when IS militants opened fire on their police checkpoint in al-Abbara area in northeast of the provincial capital Baquba, located some 65 km northeast of Baghdad, Ahmed al-Shimmary from the provincial police said.

The attacks came as the extremist IS militants intensified their attacks on the security forces, including Hashd Shaabi forces, and civilians in the Sunni provinces which once were under the control of IS militants, since the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, resulting in the killing and wounding of dozens of people.

Earlier in the day, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi said that the Iraqi forces will launch a major offensive to eradicate IS militants, and that the Hashd Shaabi forces will be at the forefront of the security forces in the upcoming offensive.

The security situation in Iraq has been improving since Iraqi security forces fully defeated the IS militants across the country late in 2017.

However, despite repeated military operations against the IS remnants, IS militants are still hiding in deserts, rugged areas as well as in Himreen mountain range which extends in the provinces of Diyala, Salahudin and Kirkuk. They are capable of carrying out frequent guerilla attacks against security forces and civilians.

Housecarl · May 17, 2020

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Report: Jihadist Influence Growing in Northwest Nigeria

Northwestern Nigeria has been wracked by years of insecurity involving clashes between rival communities over land, attacks by heavily-armed criminal gangs and reprisal killings by vigilante groups

www.voanews.com

Africa
Report: Jihadist Influence Growing in Northwest Nigeria
By Agence France-Presse

May 17, 2020 07:31 PM
Map of Gamboru Nigeria

Gamboru Nigeria

LAGOS, NIGERIA - Nigerian jihadist groups are gaining sway in the restive northwest and the region could become a "land bridge" to Islamists across the Sahel, the International Crisis Group warned Monday.

Northwestern Nigeria has been wracked by years of insecurity involving clashes between rival communities over land, attacks by heavily-armed criminal gangs and reprisal killings by vigilante groups.

The violence has left an estimated 8,000 people dead since 2011 and displaced over 200,000, the Brussels-based research group said in a report released Monday.

"As security has deteriorated, the region has steadily come under the renewed influence of jihadist groups, which have also stepped up attacks on security forces," it said.

"The spike in jihadist activity in the North West has raised fears that the region could soon become a land bridge connecting Islamic insurgencies in the central Sahel with the decade-old insurgency in the Lake Chad region of north-eastern Nigeria."

Nigeria has suffered from a 10-year conflict with fighters from the Boko Haram group and its splinter factions in the northeast of the country that has left over 36,000 people dead.

Officials have during the past year sounded the alarm over signs of the growing jihadist influence among the numerous armed groups in the northwest.

"Two Boko Haram offshoots are making inroads into the region, where they are forging tighter relationships with aggrieved communities, herder-affiliated armed groups and criminal gangs," the report said.

One of the factions is an al-Qaeda linked outfit known as Ansaru that broke off from the main Boko Haram group in 2012 and was widely seen as dormant after being dismantled by security forces.

The second splinter is the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), which has become a dominant force in the northeast of Nigeria after declaring allegiance to the Islamic State group in 2016.

Both Ansaru and ISWAP have been sending supplies and clerics to the northwest and started claiming credit for attacks in the region, the report said.

In a sign of Ansaru's growing menace the Nigerian police announced a major operation against the group in February in which it claimed to have killed 250 fighters.

The report warned that the "poorly secured international boundary" between Nigeria and Niger to the north "enables the influx of arms and facilitates the movement of jihadists."
Those ties could be fortified and stretch further to Burkina Faso and Mali where jihadists also under the IS banner killed thousands last year.

The Nigerian authorities have launched repeated military operations and local peace talks to try to curb the violence in the northwest.

But so far neither strategy has succeeded in ending the violence and much of the region remains a security vacuum.

Housecarl · May 18, 2020

Posted for fair use.....

The Doomed Treaty: Russia’s Position on Prolonging New START

The Donald Trump administration has signaled that it is not interested in prolonging the New START strategic nuclear weapons limitation treaty after its expiration in February 2021, expressing the need to focus on the strategic threats emanating from China instead; this has seriously complicated...

jamestown.org

The Doomed Treaty: Russia’s Position on Prolonging New START
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 17 Issue: 69
By: Pavel Luzin

May 18, 2020 05:27 PM Age: 8 mins

Russian YARS ICBM (Source: Sputnik News)

The Donald Trump administration has signaled that it is not interested in prolonging the New START strategic nuclear weapons limitation treaty after its expiration in February 2021, expressing the need to focus on the strategic threats emanating from China instead; this has seriously complicated the Kremlin’s position on the ten-year-old arms-control regime. Moscow’s strategic nuclear arsenal has long been a pillar of its great power status. But the ongoing collapse of the arms control agenda allows Moscow to expand its opportunity for further bargaining with Washington. Russia’s leadership certainly needs this enlargement and will follow several avenues to achieve it.

Per the conditions of New START, the United States and Russia agreed that neither side may deploy more than 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBM), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM) and heavy bombers, and no more than 1,550 nuclear warheads. Though Washington and Moscow maintain near parity of deployed warheads (1,372 and 1,326, respectively), the number of deployed missiles and heavy bombers is much more lopsided, at 655 for the US and 485 for Russia, as of March 2020 (State.gov, March 1). This disparity does not represent any real security threat for Russia, but it does create a political challenge for the Kremlin, since it undermines the appearance of an equal relationship with the United States.

In terms of nuclear forces, Russia must actively seek to achieve a new balance in the coming years. By the mid-2020s, Moscow will need to dismantle more nuclear missiles and submarines than it is able to replace. For instance, Russia has 91 old ICBMs: 46 R-36M2 (SS-18) and 45 Topol (SS-25) missiles (Russianforces.org, January 4). This is almost 30 percent of all deployed Russian ICBMs. Despite regular efforts to extend the missiles’ lifetimes, they will have to be retired in large numbers over the coming years (Krasnaya Zvezda, December 16, 2019). At the same time, current annual manufacturing capacity at the missile plant in Votkinsk is only estimated at approximately 12–16 Yars (RS-24) ICBMs. Moscow is additionally conducting research and development on the new heavy liquid fuel ICBM Sarmat (RS-28), an advanced version of the R-36M2. However, the missile plant in Krasnoyarsk will not begin producing Sarmat missiles until the mid-2020s, and it may have an industrial capacity of fewer than ten missiles per year.

A similar issue is inherent in the strategic naval forces: in the coming decade, Russia needs to dismantle seven Soviet-era nuclear-missile submarines. Russia plans to replace them with seven Borei-class submarines, including one that should be commissioned by this summer (TASS, May 13). Nevertheless, the manufacturing of Boreis faces numerous delays—originally, Moscow planned to complete construction on eight of these vessels by the end of 2020, but the number will in fact only reach four by this December.

Russia additionally plans on modernizing its 55 Tu-95MS heavy turboprop bombers and 11 Tu-160 heavy jet bombers (RIA Novosti, February 5). Moreover, Moscow has scheduled the manufacture of new Tu-160s within the next ten years. But as of May, it is unclear if Russia’s defense industry will be able to realize these plans at a proper pace.
Therefore, between the middle and end of this decade, the number of Russia’s nuclear forces will likely stabilize somewhere below 500 deployed ICBMs, SLBMs and heavy bombers. Since the lifetimes of new ICBMs, SLBMs, submarines and modernized strategic bombers are longer, any kind of return to a quantitative arms race with the US would only be possible for Russia at the end of the 2020s, at the earliest.

Due to this context, Moscow may prefer to return to the negotiating table on strategic arms limits in the future, when it will have a stronger bargaining position and will be able to extend the diplomatic agenda to encompass missile defense, space and/or other global security issues. The Kremlin leadership is, thus, likely to increase uncertainty in the domain of strategic arms for the long-term purpose of forcing the United States to take Russia as seriously as it now takes China.

Russia has at least two options for increasing nuclear instability if New START collapses next year. The first such tool is continued development and deployment of the Avangard nuclear hypersonic glider. As of May 2020, only two gliders were confirmed to have been deployed—reportedly, on Soviet-era UR-100N UTTH (SS-19) ICBMs (Russianforces.org, December 27, 2019). The authorities contend that the production of additional units is underway (Russianforces.org, December 27, 2019; Mil.ru, January 6, 2020). Nevertheless, the gliders face the significant problem of being too heavy for the modern Yars missile. Consequently, the Kremlin may have to continue to rely on Soviet-era liquid-fuel missiles with larger throw-weights (TASS, May 28, 2019). With the Avangard onboard, they may be able to partly fill the gap in ICBMs, but it will hamper the introduction of 28 newer missiles in their place. Pointedly, the Avangard changes nothing in terms of nuclear deterrence, which implies that the hypersonic gliders could be easily traded away in future negotiations, if the Kremlin sees the chance for striking a separate bargain with the United States.

The second option is a conversion of Tu-22M3 jet bombers into nuclear-capable heavy (strategic) bombers. As of this spring, Russia has been modernizing 30 of these jets, and the first converted (Tu-22M3M) versions are now undergoing flight tests (Lenta.ru, March 20). Their new engines and avionics were unified with the modernized Tu-160 heavy bombers, so when the Tu-22M3M is presumably introduced into service in 2021, it will be capable of filling the gap in Russia’s deployed strategic arms. Again, however, the problem lies with the defense industry: the Kuznetsov engine plant produced only four engines in 2018; and since 2019, the plant has been contracted to build only 22 additional engines (Samregion.ru, October 16, 2018). Even the Russian military has complained about these low production rates (TASS, February 5, 2020).

Consequently, the probable expiration of the New START treaty will allow the Kremlin to cover up the actual number of its strategic arms as the problems related to their modernization and development begin decreasing Russia’s arsenal. Over the coming years, Moscow will likely seek to launch a new Cold War–style arms race in order to pressure Washington to negotiate on strategic security and other political issues, even as Russia’s nuclear forces dwindle. Prolonging the treaty may be an option, but likely only if the Kremlin can secure a bilateral presidential summit with the White House.

Housecarl · May 18, 2020

Hummm.....

Posted for fair use.....

Turkey’s Heavy ‘Tiger’ Rocket Spotted in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Exclave

Baku has initiated large-scale weapons readiness efforts in Nakhchivan. The official YouTube channel of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense features a video showing Turkish-manufactured multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) stationed in the strategic western exclave (YouTube, May 2). Of these...

jamestown.org

Turkey’s Heavy ‘Tiger’ Rocket Spotted in Azerbaijan’s Nakhchivan Exclave
Publication: Eurasia Daily Monitor Volume: 17 Issue: 69
By: Can Kasapoglu

May 18, 2020 05:29 PM Age: 6 mins

Turkish TRG-300 Tiger MLRS (Source: weaponews.com)

Baku has initiated large-scale weapons readiness efforts in Nakhchivan. The official YouTube channel of the Azerbaijani Ministry of Defense features a video showing Turkish-manufactured multiple-launch rocket systems (MLRS) stationed in the strategic western exclave (YouTube, May 2). Of these arms, the 300-millimeter TRG-300 Kaplan (Tiger) deserves special attention, particularly in light of the delicate regional military balance between Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Produced by Roketsan, the TRG-300 Tiger is the latest variant of Turkey’s 300-millimeter-class MLRS. It fires a fairly accurate rocket with a circular error probable (CEP) of less than ten meters thanks to its global positioning (GPS)- and inertial navigation system (INS)-supported guidance features. With a 105-kilogram warhead configuration, the Tiger has up to 120 kilometers of range and effective radius of some 70 meters; while the heavier, 190-kilogram warhead option (Block-2) has a range of 90 kilometers and around 80 meters of effective radius, prioritizing overwhelming firepower. Both warhead configurations enable high-explosive and steel ball variations (Roketsan.com.tr, May 12).
The TRG-300 Tiger is designed to annihilate a broad array of critical target types, including troop concentrations, high-importance facilities, command-and-control (C2) and radar sites, as well as artillery and air-defense systems (Roketsan.com.tr, May 12). During the February 2020 escalation with the Syrian Arab Army in Idlib, the Turkish military deployed the Tiger MLRS to the front lines (Aksam, February 21).

Azerbaijani-Armenian clashes mostly revolve around Karabakh; yet, geo-strategically, heavy deployments in Nakhchivan offer Azerbaijani defense planners some valuable opportunities for outflanking their regional rival. Notably, in December 2013, President Ilham Aliyev issued a decree establishing the Special Combined Arms Army (Əlahiddə Ümumqoşun Ordusu—SCAA) in the strategic western exclave (Mod.gov.az, 2014). Moreover, the new combat formation has close ties with Turkey’s formidable 3rd Field Army (3. Ordu), overlooking the Caucasus frontier.

Militarily, Nakhchivan enables a second offensive route in addition to the Line of Contact around Karabakh, which has the potential to overstretch the Armenian forces in a multi-front war (see EDM, August 3, 2017, June 4, 2018, June 12, 2018, July 11, 2019; Bellingcat.com, October 4, 2017). Such an assault could unfold in one of two ways. Azerbaijan’s SCAA can opt to launch an offensive directed at Armenia’s capital, Yerevan, in an effort to distract the Armenian formations. Or it might cut into the critical lines of communications between Armenia and the Armenian forces in Karabakh. Until 2016, such scenarios were deemed rather improbable. However, following the serious April 2016 clashes, known as the Four Day War (see EDM, April 6, 2016 and May 5, 2016), the Azerbaijani forces proved that their newly gained capabilities could deliver a much more effective assault compared to their unsatisfactory showing during the 1990s (Chathamhouse.org, July 2016).

In tandem with the abovementioned scenarios, the heavy firepower delivered by Turkey’s combat-proven MLRS promises to be a gamechanger when it comes to Azerbaijani-Armenian correlation of forces along the Nakhchivan front. Available Azerbaijani military writings attach utmost importance to deep-strike capabilities offered by rocket-artillery systems (T. Mikayılov et.al., “Müasir Əməliyyatlarda Atəşlə Zərərvurmanin Xüsusiyyətləri,” Vol. 2, No. 1, 2016). Modern MLRS doctrines, unlike the unguided “rain of steel” Soviet tactics of the bygone Cold War era, stress combining destructive high-precision firepower with rapid mobility. That is, today’s mobile rocket launchers are designed to shoot, move to a new firing position, and keep shooting. Turkey’s 122-millimeter and 300-millimeter MLRSs also depend on this design philosophy. Furthermore, Turkey’s 300-millimeter-class MLRS baseline represents perhaps the longest-range and heaviest warhead combination among the Western arsenals of the same type (Roketsan.com, May 14, 2020; The National Interest, September 17, 2019). From their combat deployment positions, Azerbaijan’s Turkish-manufactured heavy rockets can be used either for attacking the outskirts of the Armenian capital or, in a more calculated concept of operations, to hit Armenia’s strategic highway along the north-south axis, disrupting its logistics routes (see EDM, August 3, 2017).

Meanwhile, the bilateral defense ties between Ankara and Baku have scaled-up to a new level over the past decade, becoming a genuine military alliance, thanks to the 2010 Agreement on Strategic Partnership and Mutual Support (ASPMS). Referring to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, the ASPMS’s Article 2 elucidates a casus foederis, obligating the parties to cooperate against any aggression faced by either country, to the extent each deems necessary. Furthermore, the agreement’s Article 7 underlines that the two states shall coordinate their C2 and force structures, including during peacetime (Resmigazete.gov.tr, May 2011). Since then, joint exercises between the two militaries have been shaped accordingly.

Starting in 2019, two major joint exercises with pronounced land warfare components—“Mustafa Kemal Ataturk” and “Sarsilmaz Kardeslik” (“Steadfast Brotherhood”)—showcased mechanized breakthrough offensives, overwhelming land-based fire support, and accompanying army aviation (Yeni Safak, May 3, 2019; YouTube, June 11, 2019). When looked at in total, these drills conspicuously resembled the Azerbaijani order of battle during the April 2016 Four Day War.

Overall, Turkey and Azerbaijan have managed to further the notion of “two states, one nation” beyond only rhetoric. And the deployment of 300-millimeter TRG-300 Tiger heavy MLRS units to Nakhchivan looms large as yet another manifestation of their military alliance, which had already visibly paid off for Baku in the spring 2016 clashes.

Housecarl · May 18, 2020

Posted for fair use.....

Air Force Reviews Preliminary Design For Future ICBM

ladailypost.com

Air Force Reviews Preliminary Design For Future ICBM

Submitted by Carol A. Clark
on May 18, 2020
- 6:37 am

AFNWC News:

HILL AFB, Utah — The Air Force reviewed Northrop Grumman’s preliminary design for the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent in late April, advancing the program toward its next milestone and acquisition phase.

The GBSD intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) will modernize or replace the current Minuteman III ICBM’s systems for command and control, launch and flight.

Under the Defense Acquisition System, a PDR assesses the maturity of the preliminary design, as supported by requirement trades, prototyping, system reviews, etc.

“The PDR ensured Northrop Grumman’s design is sufficiently mature and ready to proceed into detailed design with acceptable risk, and will meet performance requirements within budget and on schedule,” said Col. Jason Bartolomei, GBSD system program manager.

From April 28-30, the Air Force hosted the PDR meetings in a secure virtual environment at 19 locations across the United States, connecting over 25 government organizations.

“Accomplishing this PDR is a huge success for the program, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Bartolomei said. “The GBSD team overcame many challenges to accomplish such a large, complex PDR for an Acquisition Category 1-D program. Our classified network and digital engineering capabilities were key to this milestone, but secondary to the hard-work and commitment of the entire organization. We have an amazing workforce.”

“GBSD is the most cost-effective option for maintaining a safe, secure and effective ground-based leg of the nuclear triad,” Bartolomei said. “It will address capability gaps to meet warfighter requirements, maintaining the preeminence of America’s ground-based nuclear strategic deterrent.”

The GBSD program is currently in its Technology and Maturation Risk Reduction phase. The Air Force anticipates receiving DoD approval to enter Milestone B later this year and awarding the contract for the Engineering and Manufacturing Development phase before the end of the fiscal year.

The EMD phase will conclude with the development, test and evaluation of the GBSD system, before it proceeds into the Production and Deployment phase. Deployment of the new ICBM is planned to begin in the late 2020s and span about nine years.

Located at Hill AFB, the GBSD program office is part of the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. The center is headquartered at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, and is responsible for synchronizing all aspects of nuclear materiel management on behalf of Air Force Materiel Command, in direct support of Air Force Global Strike Command. The center has about 1,300 personnel, both military and civilian, assigned to 18 locations worldwide.

Housecarl · May 18, 2020

Posted for fair use.....

UN-backed Libyan forces take key airbase from rebel general

Loss of al-Watiya airbase south of Tripoli deals major blow to renegade general Khalifa Haftar

www.theguardian.com

Libya

UN-backed Libyan forces take key airbase from rebel general
Loss of al-Watiya airbase south of Tripoli deals major blow to renegade general Khalifa Haftar

Patrick Wintour Diplomatic editor
Mon 18 May 2020 07.05 EDT First published on Mon 18 May 2020 06.23 EDT

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A tank of the UN-backed GNA in Tripoli, Libya, last month. GNA forces have been mounting strikes against the airbase for weeks. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

Forces allied with Libya’s UN-supported government have wrested control of a key military base on the outskirts of the country’s capital from Khalifa Haftar, dealing a significant blow to the renegade general’s military and its morale.

Pro- and anti-Haftar media reported that his eastern-based forces had withdrawn from al-Watiya airbase 90 miles south of Tripoli. Footage posted on social media appeared to show Government of National Accord (GNA) forces driving down runways at the base unhindered.

Haftar planned to take Tripoli in a lightning operation in April 2019, but his forces have been mired in fighting ever since. Many of their attacks have been launched from al-Watiya.

His retreat, following other recent military reverses, will force those foreign capitals that back him to review the viability of his plan to overthrow the UN-recognised GNA, which is based in Tripoli.

GNA forces have been mounting strikes against the airbase for weeks, including its supply lines, but over the weekend stepped up the assault by destroying its Russian-made Pantsir air defence system. The airbase had been in Haftar’s hands since 2014.

Turkey, in defiance of a UN arms embargo, signed a treaty with the GNA in November last year, and, in return for Libyan permission to access Mediterranean gas fields, has been supplying military support to the GNA. The bilateral treaty has been sharply criticised by Greece as being in breach of international law and in violation of Greek sovereignty.

The growing Turkish support for the GNA, driven by Ankara’s desire to secure its energy supplies and extend its access to Mediterranean gas fields, has included the supply of both drones and Syrian mercenary forces.

Ankara argues the GNA remains by law the UN-recognised government and says its actions only redress the imbalance caused by the supply of arms and mercenaries to Haftar by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Russia. France also unofficially backs Haftar, regarding him as a bulwark against terrorism in the Sahel.

The second air base in the west, Mitiga, is also run by the GNA and Haftar now has no air base in west Libya.

Increasingly many of these assaults are killing civilians and destroying hospital facilities at a time when the country is trying to control a coronavirus outbreak. More than 1,000 have been killed in the year-long battle for Tripoli.

The concern for France and the UAE is that it is possible al-Watiya airfield will become a strategic asset for Turkey, especially if it takes an interest in the country’s southern oilfields. The capture will also free up GNA troops to put pressure on Haftar’s forces south of Tripoli.

Haftar remains in controls of the oil terminals in the east, and has blocked the export of Libyan oil, the lifeblood of the economy. He also appears to have seen off an attempt last month to weaken him politically by dividing him from the leaders of the house of representatives, the parliament based in the east.

The European Union, concerned by migration from Libya to the EU’s southern flank, has just launched a naval blockade of the Mediterranean, codenamed Operation Irini, in an effort to enforce a UN arms embargo. The operation’s structure and composition has been criticised by the GNA and Turkey.

The GNA accused the EU mission of bias since it contains ships from Greece and France, the two EU countries most opposed to Turkey’s involvement in Libya.

The GNA foreign ministry also claims that because the focus is on enforcing the arms embargo by sea, Haftar’s supplies by air and land are excluded from EU attention.

On Friday the Turkish minister of defence, Hulusi Akar, questioned the legality of Operation Irini, arguing it had been launched without consultation with Nato, the UN or the GNA itself.

Akar said: “They only prevent maritime entry and exit. This is not an arms embargo, but rather an embargo on the activities of the legitimate government, which has not asked for that [launching Operation Irini].”

“There is no legal basis for this operation without an official request from the [Libyan] government. Therefore, this only supports Haftar.”

The EU had been in the diplomatic lead trying to negotiate a ceasefire and political agreement between Haftar’s forces based in the east and the GNA forces in the west, but talks staged in Berlin in January foundered, leading to the resignation of the UN special envoy for Libya in March.

Housecarl · May 18, 2020

Hummm.....

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1262438333734682626

View: https://twitter.com/Eljarh/status/1262438333734682626?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

(For images please see source...HC)

Mohamed Eljarh
@Eljarh
·
4h

Key difference between the GNA's alliance with #Turkey & LNA's alliance with its external backers - GNA with Turkey is a strategic alliance and is long term in nature. The alliance between LNA & its external backers is transactional & was never strategic in nature. #Libya

Replies

elli thoma
@elli7814
·
4h

Replying to
@Eljarh
And because that LNA's alliance are more focus on their countries and the fight with covid-19 right now. And Turkey in the opposite put full support.

Mohamed
@Mohamed_m1992
·
4h

Replying to
@Eljarh
The LNA was interested in new venture financing. a bridge facility to get it to self-sustaining cash flow.

Batman
@51Batman
·
2h

Replying to
@Eljarh
Surely Arabs like UAe and Egypt see it at as strategic in that they want an Ally in Libya

View more replies

More Tweets

Joseph Dempsey
@JosephHDempsey
·
9h

Pantsir S1 UAE edition, one/two owners, manual included, sold as seen. Collection only.

Show this thread

Oded Berkowitz
@Oded121351
·
6h

#Libya- some great relics found in al-Watiyah, like a Cold War time capsule.

Taher EL-Sonni طاهر السني
@TaherSonni
·
8h

Hours ago Alwatia airbase in the west has been liberated ... UN sanctions committee will be busy with the weapons we found there... It’s the final countdown..Int. Com. should start thinking of the day after

3.9K views
0:00 / 0:44

danielboon · May 18, 2020

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1262542162102833152

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/EndGameWW3/status/1262542162102833152

jward · May 19, 2020

Assessing China’s Assertiveness at Commodore Reef

Implications for the future of international law and good order at sea in the South China Sea.

By Christian Vicedo

May 18, 2020

In this July 13, 2018, photo, people read books near a globe showing the southeast countries on the South China Sea with nine-dash line claims under Chinese territory on display at a bookstore in Beijing.
Credit: AP Photo/Andy Wong

The incident earlier this year between Philippine and Chinese naval vessels near Commodore Reef foreshadows dynamics that might characterize regional maritime security in the face of an increasingly assertive China. In this regard, it is essential to reexamine the incident through the lens of international law and good order at sea to understand its implications.

Revisiting the Commodore Reef Incident

On February 17, 2020, the Philippine Navy corvette BRP Conrado Yap (PS-39) conducted a patrol mission near the Philippine-occupied Commodore Reef in the South China Sea (SCS). During the mission, it encountered a PLA Navy (PLAN) corvette with hull number 514. PS-39 radioed the Chinese Navy Ship (CNS)-514, which responded with the following statement: “The Chinese government has indisputable sovereignty over the SCS, its islands and its adjacent waters.” Subsequently, PS-39 instructed the CNS-514 to proceed directly to its next destination but the Chinese vessel simply repeated its earlier response and maintained its course and speed.

In an interview, an official of the Armed Forces of the Philippines Western Command (AFP-WESCOM) noted that PS-39’s crew visually observed that the gun control director of the CNS-514 was being aimed at their ship. The AFP-WESCOM official explained that the “gun control director can be used to designate and track targets and make all the main guns ready to fire in under a second.” He also argued that the visual identification confirmed the “hostile intent” of the Chinese vessel.

In international reports regarding the incident, the gun control director has been referred to as a fire control radar. This makes sense since in modern fire control systems, the gun director, which performs trigonometric solutions for firing on the target, and the radar, which provides information on the location of the target, are often combined as one component of the fire control system, as in the case of SAAB’s Ceros 200 and Thales’ LIROD Mk2. If the CNS-514 in question is the Chinese Navy Ship Liupanshui, which bears the same hull number, then it is a Type 056A Jiangdao class corvette equipped with a Type LR66 fire control radar and Type IR 17 optronics to guide its weapons system.

The Commodore Reef Incident and International Law

It must be noted that Commodore Reef may legally be considered a rock following the 2016 Arbitral Award on the Philippine case versus China. In this regard, Commodore Reef is only capable of generating territorial waters. At the same time, Commodore Reef is also situated within the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). In this regard, depending on the distance of the exact location of the incident from Commodore Reef, one of two possible navigational regimes may apply. In the territorial sea-scenario, the CNS-514 is only legally entitled to exercise its right to innocent passage guaranteed by the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC). Under the law, PS-39 may take necessary steps to “prevent passage which is not innocent,” one that is prejudicial to the country’s “peace, good order, or security.” In this regard, PS-39’s instruction to the CNS-514 to “proceed to its next destination” is within its rights as a coastal state. As per the LOSC, CNS-514 should have also proceeded in a “continuous and expeditious” manner and refrained from employing the threat of use of force.

In the EEZ-scenario, CNS-514 should have simply asserted its exercise of freedom of navigation rather than China’s “indisputably sovereignty.” In this scenario, the freedom of navigation cannot be suspended by PS-39 since the EEZ is likewise considered to be part of international waters in which a flag state exercises “high seas freedoms.” However, it must be underscored that as per LOSC, the high seas and EEZs are to be reserved for peaceful purposes. This means that the use of force or threat of use of force is still discouraged. Consequently, the next relevant question is whether CNS-514’s aiming of its fire control radar on PS-39 constituted a threat of use of force or manifested hostile intent.

Under the 2009 San Remo Handbook on Rules of Engagement (ROE), “aiming or directing weapons” and “illuminating with radar or laser designators” are considered to be indicators of hostile intent. The act of energizing a ship’s fire control radar in the form of a warning is only considered acceptable as a proactive measure in ascertaining the hostile intent of another ship if the latter has displayed indications of hostile intent. Since a radio warning is not an indication of hostile intent under the San Remo Handbook, the PS-39’s actions should not be interpreted as indicative of hostile intent, therefore making the CNS-514’s act of aiming its fire control radar incompatible with generally accepted ROE.

The Commodore Reef Incident and Good Order at Sea

The actions of CNS-514 also contradicted principles set forth in multilateral arrangements for good order and peaceful management of disputes in the SCS which China has proclaimed to support. It must be recalled that under the 2002 ASEAN-China Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the SCS, the parties undertook to “resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means, without resorting to the threat or use of force” and in accordance with LOSC. Relatedly, the parties undertook to “exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that would complicate or escalate disputes and affect peace and stability.”

In addition to expressing its intention to apply the Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea (CUES) in the SCS during the 19th China-ASEAN Summit in 2016, China also agreed with other ASEAN-Plus countries in subscribing to CUES during the 5th ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM)-Plus in 2018. It must be understood that as a standardized protocol, CUES carries both operational and political significance as it was adopted during the Western Pacific Naval Symposium (WPNS) organized by China in 2014. Interestingly, however, the actions of the CNS-514 contradicted CUES with respect to the use of fire control radar. Under CUES, as an “assurance measure for naval ships,” the commanding officers need to “consider the potential ramifications before engaging in actions that could be misinterpreted.” It specifies that the “actions the prudent commander might generally avoid” include “simulation of attacks by aiming guns, missiles, fire control radars, torpedo tubes or other weapons in the direction of vessels or aircraft encountered.” Clearly, the actions of CNS-514 are incompatible with CUES.

Conclusion

The future of international law and good order at sea arguably holds dim prospects when the most powerful and influential coastal state of the SCS complies with neither international law nor the rules set forth by multilateral maritime security arrangements to which it is a party. In the absence of a multilateral security arrangement that can proactively protect the rules-based order and deter assertiveness in the SCS, China might continue to proclaim respect for international law and express support for good order at sea while behaving within a completely different paradigm during unplanned encounters. Likewise, China might expand its gray zone coercion activities and push the envelope of near-armed attack scenarios to impose its territorial and maritime claims on its small power neighbors. Moreover, China might continue to intimidate its small power neighbors while dismissing diplomatic protests and other legal remedies as false accusations, provocations, and unacceptable international judgments as it previously did with respect to the aforementioned Commodore Reef incident, the Scarborough Shoal Stand-Off of 2012, and with the 2016 Arbitral Award on the Philippine case versus China.

Christian Vicedo is a security analyst based in Manila. His writings have appeared in Pacific Forum PacNet, East Asia Forum, and The Diplomat.

posted for fair use

Assessing China’s Assertiveness at Commodore Reef

Implications for the future of international law and good order at sea in the South China Sea.

thediplomat.com

jward · May 19, 2020

..humm. I believe any "marriage" can succeed, with commitment, but these two may well find themselves coming home from the honeymoon on separate camels

Afghan President and Rival Announce Power-sharing Agreement

Two months after Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah each declared themselves president, the rivals have arrived at a deal.

By Rahim Faiez

May 18, 2020

Afghan President and Rival Announce Power-sharing Agreement

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, right, and political rival Abdullah Abdullah, speak after they signed a power-sharing agreement at the presidential palace in Kabul, Afghanistan, Sunday, May 17, 2020.
Credit: Afghan Presidential Palace via AP

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani and political rival Abdullah Abdullah signed a power-sharing agreement, two months after both declared themselves the winner of last September’s presidential election, Ghani’s spokesman said Sunday.

The political deal would see Ghani remain president of the war-torn nation, tweeted his spokesman Sediq Sediqqi. The deal also calls for Abdullah to lead the country’s National Reconciliation High Council, and he will be able to appoint half of Ghani’s Cabinet and issue executive orders.

The Reconciliation Council has been given the authority to handle and approve all affairs related to Afghanistan’s peace process. The council will have five deputies from both leaders’ teams.

Omed Maisam, a spokesman for Abdullah’s team, confirmed an agreement had been signed at the presidential palace. “A technical team will work on the implementation of the agreement and details will be shared later,” he said.

Afghanistan has been in political disarray since the country’s election commission in December announced Ghani had won the September 28 election with more than 50 percent of the vote. Abdullah had received more than 39 percent of the vote, according to the election commission, but he and the Elections Complaint Commission charged widespread voting irregularities.

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Ghani and Abdullah both declared themselves president in parallel inauguration ceremonies in March. They have been locked in a power struggle since then and the discord prompted the Trump administration to announce it would cut $1 billion in assistance to Afghanistan if the two weren’t able to work out their differences.

A peace agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban signed February 29 calls for U.S. and NATO troops to leave Afghanistan. It was seen at the time as Afghanistan’s best chance at peace following decades of war.

Since then, the U.S. has been trying to get the Taliban and the Afghan government to begin intra-Afghan negotiations, but the political turmoil and personal acrimony between Ghani and Abdullah impeded talks. Negotiations that were to take place in March never happened.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke with the two leaders Sunday, saying he was pleased by their willingness to move toward intra-Afghan negotiations but “regretted the time lost,” said State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus.

U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad tweeted that the Afghan leaders must stick to the commitments they had already made, and “take seriously the resolve of the Afghan people, and the world, to finally see an end to this conflict.”

Another important point in Sunday’s 5-page agreement was granting the rank of marshal to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a strong Abdullah supporter and ex-vice president.

A former Uzbek warlord, Dostum left Afghanistan in 2017 to Turkey after the attorney-general’s office launched an investigation into allegations that his followers had tortured and sexually abused a former ally turned political rival. On Dostum’s return to Kabul in 2018, an Islamic State suicide bomber carried out an attack near the airport, killing 14 people and narrowly missing Dostum.

Despite 18 years and billions of dollars in international aid, Afghanistan remains desperately poor. The poverty level soared from 35 percent of the population in 2012 to more than 55% last year. Poverty in Afghanistan is defined as a person who survive on $1 or less a day. Successive Afghan governments, including Ghani’s, have been accused by international watchdogs of widespread corruption.

Meanwhile, Kabul and other cities are in lockdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Afghanistan has performed only limited testing so far with about 22,000 tested. The country has more than 6,400 confirmed infections in a nation of 36.6 million. As more testing becomes available, the country’s confirmed infection numbers will likely rise sharply, according to public health officials. The death toll — officially at 168 — is likely much higher.

The country’s health care system, devastated by four decades of war, is woefully unprepared for a major outbreak.

By Rahim Faiez for the Associated Press

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Afghan President and Rival Announce Power-sharing Agreement

Two months after Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah each declared themselves president, the rivals have arrived at a deal.

thediplomat.com

jward · May 19, 2020

Pandemic Propaganda and the Global Democracy Crisis
Haroro J. Ingram

May 18, 2020

With a global toll of over four-and-a-half million confirmed cases and over 300,000 deaths and counting, the coronavirus (COVID-19) is leaving devastated healthcare systems, economies, and societies in its wake. It is a global crisis that presents particularly unique challenges for democracies. The evidence is clear that social distancing is crucial for flattening the epidemic curve and many governments have responded by imposing strict lockdowns and even surveillance measures on its citizens. For democracies, the implementation of such draconian measures, even if only temporarily, places pressures on democratic institutions which, in turn, risk undermining public trust that democratic freedoms are being protected. In the face of these unprecedented challenges, a variety of malign actors have looked to exploit these crises with pandemic propaganda and disinformation. It is no coincidence that the world’s democracies have been the target of such malign influence efforts by the global champions of authoritarianism and violent extremists alike.
For example, despite COVID-19 being traced to the city of Wuhan in November 2019, and the Chinese government’s inaction, coverups, and lies all but guaranteeing the virus’s global spread, Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials have actively championed conspiracies that the U.S. Army is the source of the virus while engaging in a broader “soft power” campaign to present itself as the world’s public health leader and threaten “economic coercion” against nations that criticize it. The CCP’s aggressive approach offers hints to its possible post-pandemic aspirations. Meanwhile, the Russian government has broadly followed its customary playbook with multilingual campaigns, spreading false and provocative messages designed to sow discord and mistrust in western democracies. On the other end of the threat spectrum, violent non-state actors from far-right extremists to jihadis have variously framed the pandemic as either indicative of or a catalyst for the collapse of democratic and free market systems. Whether stated explicitly or implied, the theme that binds much of this pandemic malign influence currently targeting western nations is that democracy, both as a system of government and a set of values, is incapable of dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak.

It is therefore important not to view pandemic propaganda and disinformation solely through the lens of the COVID-19 bubble. It is also the latest instrument of anti-democratic malign influence designed to erode a “trinity of trusts” in democratic populations: social trust, trust in authorities/expertise, and trust in democracy. Understanding pandemic propaganda and disinformation in this way highlights the importance and urgency of confronting it, especially given the immense pressures democratic institutions will face in the coming months. All this is at a time when democracy has been in global decline for over a decade, a phenomenon known as the global democratic recession. A recent series of War on the Rocks articles argued that new frameworks through which to understand propaganda and disinformation threats are needed to improve strategic-policy discourse and decision-making. The COVID-19 crisis has highlighted the pertinence of that appeal. In many ways, this article is a response to that call. It argues that anti-democratic malign influence is a useful framework through which to not only understand propaganda and disinformation threats, but to devise strategies that are complementary to broader national security and to foreign and public policy objectives.

A Torrent of Malign Influence and the Need for New Frameworks
The U.S. government’s interagency will be severely tested by a confluence of forces in the coming months. Three are particularly significant. First, the immense pressures being placed on all parts of the U.S. interagency by the COVID-19 pandemic will be significantly compounded by a workforce weakened by illness and social-distancing restrictions. The agencies responsible for confronting malign influence threats, such as the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC), and the broader intelligence community, will need to deal with a surge of pandemic-related activities with an overstretched workforce and potentially constrained budgets. International allies, so crucial to effectively monitoring and confronting malign influence threats, will be dealing with their own resource and personnel limitations, further weakening overall efforts.

Second, the COVID-19 pandemic and the draconian government responses necessary to lessening its impact will cause significant social upheaval and financial volatility as health systems are put under strain and unemployment soars. The world is facing an economic recession that may deteriorate into an economic depression. Fear, stress, and uncertainty will have a profound psychosocial impact on individuals and communities all over the world. Studies have shown that extreme stress impairs cognitive function, making it harder (i.e., more time and energy intensive) to switch from “automatic” to “deliberative” thinking, thus rendering people more susceptible to cognitive biases. These conditions will increase individual and collective vulnerabilities, potentially broadening the pool with whom malign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation resonates.

Third, the wave of malign influence activities targeting the November presidential election is yet to hit in full. Given the practical and symbolic importance of free and fair elections in the democratic system of government, elections are a high-value, high-impact target for malign influence actors, especially those buoyed by the turmoil caused during the 2016 presidential election. The Democratic primaries were targeted by Russian government and pro-Kremlin entities in ways which suggest that new tools, strategies, and troll farms have been added to that information arsenal. The coronavirus has already caused the postponement and cancellation of some Democratic primaries and, with the prospect of the pandemic remaining a public health threat through the fall, there are growing concerns that the integrity of the presidential election is at risk.

The overall picture that emerges is deeply concerning. With the capacity of the United States and its allies potentially being overstretched and distracted while vulnerabilities in target populations are exacerbated by pandemic-induced crises, opportunities will be ripe for exploitation by malign state and non-state actors. Under these conditions, gaps in the U.S. posture to deal with propaganda and disinformation threats will be exposed.
The policy paper Persuade or Perish assessed the U.S. posture to confront foreign malign influence threats based on a year of interviews with State Department officials and exclusive access to internal GEC assessments. Recognizing that posture is as much the product of institutional history as it is of contemporary decisions, the policy paper offered historical context for National Security Strategy 2017’s assertion that “U.S. efforts to counter the exploitation of information by rivals have been tepid and fragmented. U.S. efforts have lacked a sustained focus and have been hampered by the lack of properly trained professionals.” The history of the U.S. government’s foreign policy and national security information sector is characterized by a century-long trend of intermittently building, dismantling, then rebuilding its central mechanisms. Since 2017, however, a concerted effort has been made to enhance interagency legislative, strategic-policy, and operational capabilities. For the GEC, this included its codification into law, the appointment of Lea Gabrielle as Special Envoy, and the implementation of an internal strategy for managing the GEC’s growing responsibilities, budget, and personnel as the overarching coordinating mechanism for the U.S. interagency and its multisector partners. More broadly, the introduction of a suite of legislative changes in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019 enabling a full spectrum approach by the U.S. interagency is a significant step in the right direction. Efforts have also been made to address specific threat vulnerabilities, such as the appointment of Shelby Pierson as the nation’s top election security official to improve federal, state, and local coordination.

But decades of fluctuating support for the U.S. government’s national and foreign policy information sector will take time to overcome. It is little wonder, then, that the policy paper identified inadequate efforts to retain institutional knowledge and limited mechanisms for strategic and communicative coordination as crucial gaps in the current U.S. posture. Additionally, in interviews with State Department officials, many expressed the urgent need for a new overarching framework to understand the spectrum of state and non-state malign influence threats targeting the United States and its allies. Without such a framework, counterstrategy efforts risk being siloed around certain threats (e.g., jihadi) while other threats are inadvertently given the space to evolve until focus and resources belatedly shift (e.g., Russia, China, far-right). Moreover, the ways in which malign influence threats are understood, and counterstrategies are developed, need to synchronize with broader national security, and with foreign and public policy objectives. Anti-democratic malign influence is a framework that looks to broadly satisfy these requirements.

jward · May 19, 2020

continued

The Strategic Logic of Anti-Democratic Malign Influence
As detailed in a recent article for the Royal United Services Institute, a diverse spectrum of state and non-state propaganda and disinformation threats targeting democracies like the United States are best understood as anti-democratic influence activities due to their shared strategic logic of intents and effects. As illustrated in Figure 1, anti-democratic malign influence seeks to erode a “trinity of trusts” in target populations: social trust (i.e., trust in others), trust in authority/expertise, and trust in democracy. Of course, malign influence activities inevitably have other, shorter-term aims, such as terrorist propaganda, which may seek to recruit or incite, while disinformation from state actors may seek to divert or distract its audiences. While this framework is complementary to understanding those more immediate goals, it brings into focus broader psychosocial and strategic effects that are especially pertinent in the medium and long terms. It is useful to consider examples.

Figure 1: The strategic logic of anti-democratic influence activities. (Graphic by the author)
Anti-democratic malign influence targets — whether strategically or incidentally — a “trinity of trusts” in the population that are crucial to a functioning democracy. From jihadis to racist far-right groups, violent extremist propaganda targeting democratic populations not only seeks to polarize and antagonize identity differences, but to highlight the inadequacies of the democratic system to justify calls for violence against it. In a 2013 article in Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire English-language magazine, the author compels Western Muslims to realize that the promises of democracy are made to all but them because “your belongingness to Islam is enough to classify you as an enemy. They do not consider our citizenship and the childhood we spent in their neighborhoods.” A central narrative in the strain of the racist far-right propaganda that inspired mass murders in Norway and New Zealand is that, to varying degrees, liberal democracy is destroying the white race, its legacy and future in a process described as the “Great Replacement.” The COVID-19 crisis has been opportunistically exploited by violent extremists. For example, the Islamic State’s al-Naba newsletter framed the coronavirus as God’s punishment against “idolatrous” nations (e.g., secular democracies) while far-right extremists responded in a variety of ways from blaming minority groups (i.e., eroding social trust) to highlighting how the pandemic would exacerbate systemic weaknesses inherent to democracies.
This broad strategic logic is evident in the influence efforts of adversarial state actors, too. When the Russian Internet Agency targeted antagonistic political groups with disinformation to incite opposing protest actions during the 2016 presidential election, its broader purpose was to erode social trust. Chinese government efforts to coopt academics and politicians have clear short-term objectives, such as the championing of CCP-approved talking points and policy ends. However, this coopting of academics and politicians also may have the effect of reducing public trust in authorities and experts over time. Adversarial state actors have been especially active in leveraging COVID-19 in their malign influence activities. For instance, Chinese officials have actively tried to degrade trust in not only American experts and authorities by championing discredited conspiracy theories, but trust in the capability of democracies more broadly to deal with the crisis. Pro-Kremlin pandemic propaganda and disinformation has attempted to incite anti-NATO attitudes in Eastern European audiences while a European Union report highlighted how Russian disinformation efforts attempted to sow mistrust and worsen the health crisis in Western countries. In March, Chinese agents used a similar strategy by disseminating messages in the United States that were designed to sow panic and distrust amongst Americans just as the pandemic was surging. That China, Russia, and Iran have adopted largely similar propagandistic talking points — championing anti-American conspiracy theories, highlighting the supposed ineptitude of western responses, and dismissing calls for transparency as petty politics while praising each other’s responses — is in many ways reflective of a shared anti-democratic logic.

The framework proposed here is useful for not just understanding a spectrum of threats, but appreciating the potential effects of such activities on target populations over time. The research underpinning this model suggests that, with ongoing exposure, target populations may become more susceptible to polarizing narratives that offer bipolar explanations for and solutions to their perceptions of crisis. Think, for example, of the rise of populist leaders whose narratives typically refer to an idealized history tied to a small but “pure” constituency that must overcome the mongrel hordes and corrupted elites. A weakening “trinity of trusts” in a population can also lead to increasing attitudinal support for undemocratic forms of government or even, at the more extreme end, engagement in politically-motivated violence. Moreover, because anti-democratic propaganda and disinformation tends to exploit extant vulnerabilities, over time it may broaden the pool of those for whom such malign influence resonates. This underscores the importance of actively pushing back against anti-democratic malign influence, especially during times of crisis when the population’s vulnerabilities are heightened. After all, even before the spread of COVID-19, democracy around the world was on the slide.

A Global Democratic Recession on the Precipice of Crisis
Since 2006, and in stark contrast to the preceding thirty years, there has been a decline in both the number of democracies and the level of freedoms within democracies around the world. A recent Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index report described democracy as being in “retreat” globally. It is a finding echoed by a Freedom House report that suggests democracy’s thirteen-year drop has resulted in 116 countries experiencing a net decline in key measures of democratic health, compared to 63 with a net improvement. While the failure of second and third wave democracies, especially in Africa and Asia, accounts for some of this drift, perhaps the most troubling trend has been the freedom decay in established, prosperous first wave democracies. The “trinity of trusts” inside the world’s democracies are often fragile and commitment to democracy itself is suffering. For example, a Pew Research study polling across 38 countries found that only about a quarter of the respondents were “committed democrats” while almost half were “non-committed democrats,” and a further 13 percent supported nondemocratic forms of government.

The picture is simple and unequivocal: the global democratic recession is sliding towards democratic depression. To add insult to injury, democracy’s decline has been partnered by a global authoritarian resurgence. It would be wrong, however, to suggest that this authoritarian resurgence and the spread of anti-democratic malign influence has caused democracy’s slump. Rather, the most destructive wounds to the democratic cause have been self-inflicted. It is perhaps little wonder that faith in democracy is waning, even in the most prosperous and established democracies, after years of politicians telling electorates that certain democratic promises and freedoms need to be diluted or temporarily suspended in the name of counterterrorism with democratic institutions and processes being cynically used to make undemocratic reforms. Larry Diamond, a leading democracy scholar, identified reductions in per capita income and weak constraints on executive power as key drivers of the fragility of a democracy. These considerations may prove especially pertinent now amidst a global pandemic given the weakening global economy and the necessity of draconian measures to stifle COVID-19’s spread. Rest assured that malign state and non-state actors will continue to use influence operations to opportunistically exploit vulnerabilities, especially the say-do gaps between democratic promises and reality. On the other hand, Diamond’s study points to the importance of a supportive international environment for increasing resiliencies within democracies. With 2020 emerging as a crucial year in both the struggle against the COVID-19 virus and the global democratic cause, the question is what should the United States and its allies do?

Persuade or Perish
While pandemic propaganda and disinformation represent a crucial public health threat, this article has argued that these actions are also part of a broader and varied range of anti-democratic influence activities designed to destabilize democratic societies and catalyze the dysfunction of democratic institutions. This has important implications for practice. First, this framework provides multisector practitioners with an overarching paradigm that brings into focus both the intended psychosocial and strategic effects, and the vulnerabilities that these malign influence activities seek to exploit. Consequently, rather than a “whack-a-mole” approach, targeting malign influence actions as they emerge, operational and strategic planning can be guided by a more coherent and encompassing program. Second, government officials should look to frame pandemic propaganda and disinformation as not only an assault on public health but on democracy in their addresses. The more that international allies, the private sector, media, civil society, and the general public can be educated about the systemic and ongoing effort to erode the “trinity of trusts” in democracy, the better equipped those sectors will be to identify threats, respond appropriately, and call out those who purposely or inadvertently amplify malign influence efforts.

Echoing the recommendations outlined in an earlier assessment, U.S. efforts to counter propaganda and disinformation threats would benefit from strategic guidance, broadly similar in intent to the Reagan administration’s National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75, which clearly outlines a set of broad interlocking principles, intents, and objectives to synchronize messaging and action across the interagency. NSDD75 detailed a comprehensive and flexible agenda to coordinate the U.S. government’s interagency as the Reagan administration shifted from a posture of “containment” to “rollback” against the Soviet threat. Whether such a document is developed specifically for confronting COVID-19 propaganda and disinformation or the broader threat of anti-democratic malign influence, strategic coordination is a crucial mechanism for achieving a more coherent and less siloed approach. The development and dissemination of a “new” NSDD75 would also help to improve communicative coordination to avoid the type of messaging schizophrenia that can emerge across a diverse interagency dealing with a rolling crisis.

Finally, democracies around the world need to establish a unified front against these anti-democratic adversaries. At first, this may be largely symbolic and ad hoc. But, over time, it will be important for a shared understanding of these threats to inform the foundations of a more coordinated global effort of not only intelligence and knowledge sharing, but of messaging and action as well. There is an opportunity in the midst of this crisis for democracies to demonstrate transparency and accountability (especially when it will hurt) and show how a free and open society is in fact best positioned to deal with a crisis that demands factual, evidence-based strategic-policy decisions. It is precisely because of the weakness of these values and practices that authoritarian regimes — like those in China, Russia, and Iran — are inherently disadvantaged. Their ruling elites will instinctively prioritize self-protection, censorship, and propaganda over the alternative, to the detriment of their own people (their most exposed victims) and, in the case of COVID-19, the world.
Errors will inevitably be made along the way. Already the greatest hits to the credibility of democracies around the world have come from the mistakes of their own governments and of its leaders. As Wallace Carroll, the former deputy-director of the Office of War Information, wrote in his exceptional book Persuade or Perish in 1948: “The psychological war is like that; it is fought, not on two roughly parallel linear fronts, but over the whole 360 degrees of the circle, and the most dangerous and telling blows are sometimes struck by those who in the linear war are on your side.” There is something that all the world’s democracies could do right now, and that is publicly join Australia in its demand for an independent inquiry into COVID-19’s origins and transparency around the CCP’s initial response. If the hyperventilating rhetoric of Chinese officials is enough to intimidate other democracies from publicly supporting Australia’s call, then the world can expect more CCP aggression in the West Philippine Sea, crackdowns on pro-democracy advocates in Hong Kong, and a variety of other anti-democratic actors feeling empowered to act out.

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Pandemic Propaganda and the Global Democracy Crisis - War on the Rocks

With a global toll of over four-and-a-half million confirmed cases and over 300,000 deaths and counting, the coronavirus (COVID-19) is leaving devastated

warontherocks.com

jward · May 19, 2020

Everything Old is New Again: Flawed Thinking About the Future of War

Paul Barnes | May 19, 2020

We therefore conclude that war does not belong in the realm of arts and sciences; rather it is part of man’s social existence. War is a clash between major interests, which is resolved by bloodshed—that is the only way in which it differs from other conflicts.

— Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book Two, Chapter Three

War, as the often-misquoted old Prussian states, is a social activity; neither an art nor a science, its delivery is as much affected by human appetites, tastes, and moods as it is by scientific principles. Military history is littered with examples of warfare conducted, conceptually and practically, without recourse to pertinent evidence or analysis. What’s more, war conducted at the whims of presentism, fashion, and the prevailing zeitgeist are not things of the past, remnants of an unenlightened age; contrary to the belief of at least one postmodern military commander, today’s operations are often built upon the preferred flavors and mythologies of past experience rather than empirical observation.

In 1853, the British explorer and polymath Sir Richard Burton published a book, A Complete System of Bayonet Exercise. In it, Burton made the case for practical training in dueling with the bayonet, and also reflected an emerging taste for field training moving away from the practice of intricate drilling on the parade ground that had been central to military training since the days of Gustavus Adolphus. An officer in the army of the Honourable East India Company, Britain’s privatized government on the Indian subcontinent, Burton had little experience of the use of the bayonet. His visionary gift was neither practical nor researched. Rather, it was based on a keen sense of the prevailing taste of his age and a gift for publicity. Attracted by the nobility of single combat and the joust, the British Army rapidly adopted Burton’s ideas and would make bayonet dueling a mainstay of military training until the mid-twentieth century.

The problem with the Army’s decision was that the available evidence contraindicated dueling. In Paddy Griffith’s book, Forward into Battle: Fighting Tactics from Waterloo to the Near Future, the author’s exhaustive research makes clear that even at the height of the Napoleonic era the bayonet’s utility was largely psychological. Battle was decided by a mixture of artillery, the volley fire of massed infantry, and the bayonet charge; bayonet fighting was rare and almost never took on the character of a duel—the most likely outcome of a determined bayonet charge was to find a field strewn with kit and accoutrements when the smoke of battle cleared. The bayonet was critical to the rout, not the contact; there is no evidence of an Arthurian melée in what should have been the laboratories of the Napoleonic era. Indeed, the evidence that the bayonet was a weapon of intimidation was vetoed by the fancies and preferences of men immersed in the romanticism of the Gothic Revival.

Professor Anthony King, in his book The Combat Soldier, and Aaron Miedema, in Bayonets and Blobsticks: The Canadian Experience of Close Combat 1915–18, are clear, however, that although the effectiveness of the bayonet in the early twentieth century may have been understated, the bayonet was rarely used as Burton and the training manuals intended. Despite significant evidence that bayonet dueling on an Industrial-Age battlefield was beyond unlikely, it remained a key aspect of training and tactics as a physical weapon throughout the Second World War. In this respect, the prevalent taste and a cultural preference for imagined Gothic heroism would be more important than observed truth when preparing soldiers for war.

The insidious grips of fashion and conservative preference are not reserved for tactics, techniques, and procedures. Neither are they historical phenomena preserved in aspic as artifacts of a bygone age. At the operational and strategic levels, even the most revolutionary changes in politics, concepts, and doctrine often overlay deep-seated cultural and organizational preferences. In the 1920s, theorists of the Soviet Union’s Red Army developed the concept of Deep Battle, using thinking latent from the Tsarist era, which recognized that modern conventional warfare had ceased to take place either at a geographical point, as in the time of Napoleon, or as a linear phenomenon, as observed in Industrial-Age warfare.

Military thinkers like Mikhail Frunze, Vladimir Triandafillov, and Mikhail Tukhachevsky postulated that in future warfare, victory would come to the side that broke through the full depth of its opponent’s defense, not at a single point or across a broad crust. Interestingly, however, Soviet Deep Battle, the product of revolutionary thought, and harshly critical of “capitalist warfare,” saw the breakthrough as being predominantly achieved by waves of infantry, massed artillery fires, and the shock of cavalry, rather than by a combination of mechanized armor, infantry, and airpower. In short, despite labored claims to the intellectual superiority of Marxism, and the avowed destruction of the thinking of the ancien regime, Russian military culture and society demanded an attachment to manpower, mass, and attrition rather than maneuver and precision mechanization in the facilitation of the breakthrough. Doubtlessly, Soviet experience in the Second World War would teach the value of mechanization and technology, but mass, not precision, would remain the touchstone of the Russian military into the twenty-first century.

It would be convenient to think that these tendencies are restricted to the West’s opponents, but Western military thinkers would be well advised not to read the preceding paragraphs with a sense of wry superiority. In the 1980s, with the experience of Vietnam behind it, and with lessons taken from the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, the United States Army developed the doctrine of AirLand Battle to counter Soviet strategy, still heavily predicated on the precepts of Deep Battle. America, and her European allies, adopted the doctrine universally, along with a professed belief in maneuver and mission command. The problem was that when closely examined, as it was by Robert Leonhard in his inspired book, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle,” it became apparent that, for all the statements in support of the superiority of maneuver, the actual practice remained the prosecution of attrition warfare, mirroring capabilities and using precision munitions to destroy as much of the Soviet enemy as possible. In that, it reflected the practices and cultural preferences held by the United States Army since at least the American Civil War. In short, prevalent military and societal cultures proved too strong for enlightened concepts.

That the problem of the dominance of culture over evidence remains is evidenced by the precipitate return to conventional warfare as the basis of military training after the end of offensive operations in Afghanistan in 2014. Today, maneuver and its components—pre-emption, dislocation, and disruption—are mantras readily repeated across all Western militaries, but the key measure of operational success remains its antithesis, destruction. In the twenty-first century, when faced with much more complicated operating environments than the North German Plain and the Fulda Gap, Western militaries continue to default not to the widely espoused concept of maneuver, but to firepower and attrition, albeit supported by satellite-enabled precision munitions. The West might like to think it fights smart, but whether in southern Lebanon, Iraq, or Afghanistan, it readily falls back on materiel and mass as its dominant concept. Imagine if you will the destruction wrought had the opposing acolytes of mass met in battle in central Europe in the late 1980s—an unstoppable force meeting an immoveable object.

Thus far, we have considered the underlying conservatism of military organizations and the effect that their inherent reactivity has on military performance, but thinking back to Sir Richard Burton, it is clear that today’s reactionaries are reflecting the attitudes and preferences of the past’s progressives. Paradoxically, while militaries are wedded to concepts and doctrines with which they are comfortable, they are also attracted to the shiny and new. Presentism, the belief that current circumstances are unique and unprecedented, infects almost every aspect of postmodern military thinking, albeit to a greater or lesser degree across national boundaries. In recent years, would-be military philosophers have dined-out on the supposed changing nature of warfare and an expansion in the number of domains of war. The truth is, however, far less prosaic; war’s nature remains political and its effects are only felt where humans live.

The effect of presentism has not just been felt in high concepts. At the strategic, operational, and tactical levels, apparent novelties such as information maneuver, cyber warfare, and gray-zone operations have used up considerable intellectual oxygen. To be sure, these observations are important, but are in fact little more than a repackaging of timeless artifacts of political maneuver—sabotage, espionage, and propaganda with a microchip inserted. As such these novel concepts are essential parts of all warfare, not its replacement.

In conclusion, the twin menaces of intellectual conservatism and neophilia, both of which have dogged militaries for centuries, are alive and well today. There is ample evidence that the character of warfare is changing, but this must be seen against a backdrop of history, a history that has seen many changes in warfare across the millennia; success in future war lies not in the pursuit of disconnected novelties, but with interpreted evidence divorced from service culture. If militaries can divest themselves of a preference for outmoded ideas of how they should behave, they can be molded to fight the wars of the twenty-first century independent of the fashions of the nineteenth.

Paul Barnes is a serving soldier in the British Army with operational experience in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He was the first NCO to fill the prestigious RUSI Army Fellowship in its 188-year history, and is a member of the RUSI Military Science Advisory Board. He has an MA in military history and is a member of the Military Writers’ Guild.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the British Army or United Kingdom Ministry of Defence, or the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

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Everything Old is New Again: Flawed Thinking About the Future of War - Modern War Institute

We therefore conclude that war does not belong in the realm of arts and sciences; rather it is part of man’s social existence. War is a clash between major interests, […]

mwi.usma.edu

jward · May 19, 2020

World News
May 19, 2020 / 3:31 AM / Updated an hour ago
Eastern Libyan forces pull out of parts of Tripoli

2 Min Read

FILE PHOTO: Members of Libya's internationally recognised government flash victory signs after taking control of Watiya airbase, southwest of Tripoli, Libya May 18, 2020. REUTERS/Hazem Ahmed/File Photo

TUNIS (Reuters) - Eastern Libyan forces pulled out of parts of Tripoli overnight, they said, after losing one of their main strongholds in western Libya on Monday, in a major blow to their year-long campaign to seize the capital.

Libyan National Army (LNA) spokesman Ahmed al-Mismari said the force had carried out a “redistribution and repositioning in the battle fronts, disengaging from some crowded residential areas”.

It has been fighting for more than a year to capture Tripoli, seat of the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is recognised by the United Nations and has moved onto the front foot in the war since January with military help from Turkey.

The LNA, under Khalifa Haftar, is supported by the United Arab Emirates, Russia and Egypt.

On Monday, pro-GNA forces took the Watiya airbase west of the capital after weeks of attempts, their biggest advance in a year that deprives the LNA of its only airfield near Tripoli.

After taking the base, they paraded what they said was a captured Russian-made Pantsir air defence system mounted on a truck, along with an Arabic manual.

Mismari said the base had been abandoned as part of a long-planned strategic decision and that only old, obsolete equipment was left there.

GNA Interior Minister Fathi Bashagha said on Twitter that “Haftar’s chance of success is now effectively zero” following his loss of Watiya.

Reporting By Hani Amara in Istanbul, Ayman al-Warfali in Benghazi and Angus McDowall in Tunis, Editing by William Maclean
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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Eastern Libyan forces pull out of parts of Tripoli

Eastern Libyan forces pulled out of parts of Tripoli overnight, they said, after losing one of their main strongholds in western Libya on Monday, in a major blow to their year-long campaign to seize the capital.

www.reuters.com

danielboon · May 19, 2020

USS Theodore Roosevelt returning to sea as China steps up coronavirus-era 'harassment' of US spy planes, ships
The aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt will return to sea later this week before Memorial Day after a coronavirus outbreak sidelined the massive warship for nearly two months after more than 1,000 sailors tested positive, Navy officials said Tuesday. Since heading into port, China appears to have taken advantage of the situation and ramped up its harassment of the U.S. military and its regional allies amid the global pandemic.

With the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier moored on the Pacific island of Guam, Chinese forces have “continued risky and escalatory behavior,” according to a senior Pentagon official.

Since mid-March, about the same time the U.S. aircraft carrier pulled into Guam, Chinese fighter jets have harassed U.S. reconnaissance aircraft “at least nine times” in the South China Sea, according to Reed B. Werner, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Southeast Asia, in an interview with Fox News.

The provocative behavior has not been limited to the skies.

Werner also cited “harassment” of the Japan-based guided-missile destroyer USS Mustin last month near a Chinese aircraft carrier strike group that was patrolling through the South China Sea. A Chinese escort ship maneuvered in an “unsafe and unprofessional way” without being specific.

The recent confrontations between the Chinese and American militaries have not been previously reported.

Trump says he's 'very disappointed' with China
President Trump addresses U.S. relationship with China during Cabinet meeting.
“We do find the current trend line very worrisome,” Werner said, adding that did not know if the harassment since mid-March represented an uptick.

The U.S. government has lodged formal complaints over the unsafe interactions as well as through “private channels” in one case, he added.

“We’ve made démarches... on a regular basis,” Werner said.

He elaborated, “We continue to see Chinese destabilizing behavior in the South China Sea” during the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. “As countries are focused inward, China continues to push forward.”

This included harassment of U.S. allies in the region, including Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] member states, Werner added. Last week, the U.S. Navy dispatched the littoral combat ship Gabrielle Giffords near an oil-and-gas platform off Malaysia after harassment by a Chinese government-owned research vessel and other warships.

Eric Shawn: Make China pay for coronavirus

Eric Shawn: Make China pay for coronavirus

Video
China has been in discussions with ASEAN members about a “code of conduct” largely in the South China Sea. Werner says the Pentagon remains “skeptical” about China’s sincerity in the talks.

“They continue to intimidate and bully others,” he said, accusing Beijing of breaking other commitments in the past, including Chinese President Xi Jinping’s pledge at the White House in 2015 not to militarize the man-made islands in the South China Sea. Werner declined to discuss any recent developments on the islands, citing intelligence concerns.

Werner said Chinese fishing fleets also were heading “further and further south” in the past five years from the disputed Paracel island chain in the South China Sea down to the Natuna Islands near Malaysia and Indonesia.

Werner accused Beijing of “coercive, destabilizing, and commercially extractive” behavior in Southeast Asia.

Since the Theodore Roosevelt arrived in Guam, the U.S. Navy has sent more warships to the South China Sea near China’s contested islands and the Air Force has flown B-1 bombers overhead. The amphibious assault ship America recently joined the guided-missile cruiser Bunker Hill from the TR strike group as well as an Australian frigate for operations in the South China Sea.

Asked if the Pentagon would support Rep. Mac Thornberrys plan to launch a new counter-China fund to the tune of $6 billion a year, similar to the European Deterrence Initiative established in 2014 to counter Russia, Werner said, “Right now, we are discussing this very issue within the department.” Thornberry, R-Texas, is the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee.

In a recent report in The Times, U.S. defense officials were quoted anonymously as saying American forces would be “overwhelmed” by China in a sea battle and be unable to stop an invasion of Taiwan.

“Every simulation that has been conducted looking at the threat from China by 2030 have all ended up with defeat of the U.S.,” Bonnie Glaser of the Washington think-tank Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) told The Times.

What is the U.S. going to do about China?

What is the U.S. going to do about China?

Video
“That is not a prevailing view in the department,” Werner said, pushing back on the reports, including a recent David Ignatius column in the Washington Post. Ignatius quoted a similar abysmal record in recent war games from a new book, “The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare,” by Christian Brose, a former staff director on the Senate Armed Services Committee and adviser to the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

Werner acknowledged threats from China were “definitely not overblown.”

China has held a large advantage over the U.S. military regarding ground-based intermediate-range missiles. One of the reasons the Trump administration pulled out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, officials said, was because China was not party to the agreement between the U.S. and Russia.

Recently, the U.S. Marine Corps announced it would deploy ground-based missiles in the coming years to raise the stakes against Chinese aggression in the region and narrow the missile advantage. The new strategy has relied on the ability to deploy the land-based missiles near China on bases inside countries allied with the U.S.

USS Theodore Roosevelt returning to sea as China steps up coronavirus-era 'harassment' of US spy planes, ships

China appears to have taken advantage of the coronavirus outbreak and ramped up its harassment of the U.S. military and its regional allies amid the global pandemic.

www.foxnews.com

danielboon · May 19, 2020

US Navy warns vessels in the Middle East to stay away from its warships or risk being seen as a 'threat'

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) vessels conducted unsafe and unprofessional actions against U.S. Military ships by crossing the ships’ bows and sterns at close range while operating in international waters of the North Arabian Gulf.

Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy vessels drove close to US warships in a provocative incident in the North Arabian Gulf. US Navy

The US Navy warned vessels in the Middle East to stay at least 100 meters from US warships in a Tuesday notice.
"Armed vessels approaching within 100 meters of a US naval vessel may be interpreted as a threat and subject to lawful defensive measures," the notice read.
The warning comes after President Donald Trump said in late April he had ordered the Navy to "destroy" Iranian gunboats that get too close to US ships, an apparent response to an incident last month in which Iranian vessels harassed US Navy and Coast Guard ships in the Persian Gulf.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In a message aimed at Iran, US Naval Forces Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, issued a warning Tuesday ordering foreign vessels to stay away from its warships or risk being seen as a threat.
A Notice to Mariners issued Tuesday said that "due to recent events and in order to enhance safety, minimize ambiguity and reduce opportunities for miscalculation, all vessels are advised to maintain a safe distance of at least 100 meters from US naval vessels in international waters/straits."
"Armed vessels approaching within 100 meters of a US naval vessel may be interpreted as a threat and subject to lawful defensive measures," the notice added.
A defense official told Insider that the Notice to Mariners does not represent a change to the rules of engagement, which allow ship captains to exercise the right to self-defense and use lethal force in cases where hostile intent is perceived.
While close approaches, even by countries like Iran, are troubling, they are not normally considered a threat requiring "defensive measures."
The notice follows a tweet by President Donald Trump in late April stating that he instructed the US Navy to "destroy any and all Iranian gunboats if they harass our ships at sea."

"We don't want their gunboats surrounding our boats and traveling around our boats and having a good time," Trump said at a White House press briefing later that day.
"We don't want them anywhere near our boats," he added.
On April 15, nearly a dozen Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) gunboats sailed out to harass US Navy and Coast Guard vessels operating in the Persian Gulf, with one of the boats crossing just 10 yards in front of a Coast Guard cutter.
The Iranian vessels did not respond to efforts by the US Navy to communicate with them for about an hour.
"We're not going to stand for it," the president said at the April 22 briefing. "They'll shoot them out of the water," Trump said, referring to US warships firing on Iranian gunboats.
Pentagon leaders said at the time that they interpreted the president's tweet as a warning to Iran, one they welcomed. Gen. John Hyten, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the Department of Defense would "apply the clear direction from the commander-in-chief into lawful orders that we execute."
He stated US commanders are ready to respond with "overwhelming lethal force" if threatened by Iran.

US Navy warns vessels in the Middle East to stay away from its warships or risk being seen as a 'threat'

A notice sent out Tuesday says that "armed vessels" that come within 100 meters of a US naval vessel "may be interpreted as a threat."

www.businessinsider.com

night driver · May 19, 2020

Someone mentioned that things in the South China Sea were heating up.

Proof of this is that the TR is going to sortie this week (within 8-10 days).

MAJOR question is, "Who is going to be sleeping in the Captain's Stateroom?" My gut feeling from watching the send off the ratings gave Crozier, they want him BACK driving their lives around.

Gonna be an interesting announcement when they DO tell us who will have the conn.

danielboon · May 19, 2020

Taiwan fears uptick in military threat from China in wake of coronavirus

Taiwan is fearful that Beijing will step up direct military pressure this year in the wake of the coronavirus epidemic, with increasingly frequent incursions into airspace traditionally respected as a safety buffer zone. Such operations are below the threshold of war but would expand the area China dominates militarily, mirroring the approach Beijing has taken to establish virtual control over the disputed South China Sea. “Once the pandemic recedes, the Chinese communists will fly across the Taiwan Strait median line more and more often, until the line disappears,” said a recently retired Taiwanese senior military official. “They will create a new status quo under which they will regularly operate much closer to our airspace, and move around there at will.”

Last week, Japanese news agency Kyodo reported that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was planning an exercise for August that would simulate the seizure of Pratas, a Taiwan-held atoll at the northern entrance of the South China Sea. At the same time, the Chinese government announced two month-long live-fire drills near the port of Tangshan, interpreted by some military experts as an exercise for an attack on Taiwan. “Because of this, cross-Strait relations have become very tense right now,” the senior official said.

Southern Taiwan lacks air power capable of countering incursions as its fleet of F-16s is deployed further north. “The south-west has become our most vulnerable open flank,” said a Taiwanese former national security adviser. “We are addressing this problem only now.” The Chinese defence ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Several Chinese analysts declined to comment. Subscribe to read | Financial Times

jward · May 20, 2020

PM Infantry Weapons undergoing largest modernization effort in decades
May 19, 2020

QUANTICO, Va. —
Marine Corps Systems Command’s Program Manager for Infantry Weapons has begun a large-scale modernization project to increase the lethality of the infantry squad.
PM IW strives to equip and sustain the Marine Corps with fully-integrated infantry weapons, optics and nonlethal systems for the Ground Combat Element.
The portfolio’s modernization efforts adhere to Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. David Berger’s vision to redesign the force to meet the challenges of a new age of great power competition. Through PM IW, the Corps plans to field numerous new weapon and optic systems over the next decade.
“This is the largest modernization of the infantry squad in the last 25 years,” said Lt. Col. Tim Hough, MCSC’s program manager for Infantry Weapons.

Strengthening systems
PM IW has begun the procurement of the Modular Handgun System, which will replace all Marine Corps pistols. This striker-fired pistol includes a plastic clip-on piece, enabling Marines to change grip sizes to accommodate different hand sizes. The weapon is compatible with the pistol-aiming module used by some units.
MCSC will begin fielding the system this fiscal year.
“The MHS improves on the precision and reliability of the legacy platforms, while also bringing with it new, more effective ammunition,” said Maj. Mike Brisker, weapons product manager for PM IW.

“In line with the Commandant’s Planning Guidance, we’re looking to lighten the load and increase the overall lethality of Close Combat Forces—specifically infantry Marines.”CW4 David Tomlinson, an infantry weapons officer with PM IW

MCSC is expanding the use of the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle. Originally fielded to infantry units as a replacement for the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in 2011, the rifle received overwhelmingly positive feedback from Marines. This feedback led to the Marine Corps’ decision to field the M27 to all rifle platoons as their primary individual weapon.
“We expect fielding of [the M27] to conclude by the end of this fiscal year,” said Brisker.
PM IW is also enhancing its optic systems. Fielded in spring 2020, the Squad Binocular Night Vision Goggle is a helmet-mounted system that offers improved depth perception, and the ability to detect and recognize targets in extreme low light, in inclement weather and in the presence of obscurants. The SBNVG provides additional capabilities that the legacy system, the AN/PVS-14, lacked.

Since awarding a contract in February 2020, PM IW plans to begin fielding the Squad Common Optic in fiscal year 2021. The SCO includes a magnified day optic, which improves situational awareness, decreases engagement times and increases probability of hit.
“The Squad Common Optic enables Marines to see farther and identify the enemy more quickly,” said Hough.
MCSC is collaborating with other services to field certain systems. For example, the Marine Corps will partner with the Army to procure the Next-Generation Squad Weapon system, intended to replace the M27 and become the primary individual weapon for infantry units.
The NGSW will provide a significant boost to the lethality of the individual soldier and Marine. The weapon includes an optic/fire control system that will incorporate a disturbed reticle to improve the shooter’s accuracy.
The Marine Corps could receive first deliveries of the NGSW as early as fiscal year 2025, said Brisker.
Additionally, PM IW and Fleet Marines are participating in the Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System and the Enhanced Night Vision-Binocular programs to help inform requirements and programmatic decisions in the future.
Enhancing performance

PM IW’s modernization efforts mirror MCSC’s mission to increase lethality among Marines. The command is continuously striving to equip Marines with the capabilities needed to successfully fulfill missions. To meet this goal, PM IW will continue to solicit feedback from Marines and industry.
“In line with the Commandant’s Planning Guidance, we’re looking to lighten the load and increase the overall lethality of Close Combat Forces—specifically infantry Marines,” said CW4 David Tomlinson, an infantry weapons officer with PM IW.
Tomlinson believes upgrading Infantry Weapon systems will ultimately enhance performance on the battlefield and increase survivability at a time when enemies are strengthening.
“These efforts show we are focused on staying abreast of advancements that are coming quickly,” said Tomlinson. “It also shows our desire to stay persistent, look toward the future, and make sure our Marines receive the best [systems] we can buy.”

Author: Matt Gonzales
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PM Infantry Weapons undergoing largest modernization effort in decades

QUANTICO, Va. — Marine Corps Systems Command’s Program Manager for Infantry Weapons has begun a large-scale modernization project to increase the lethality of the infantry squad. PM IW strive…

www.justtherealnews.com

jward · May 20, 2020

Iran Quietly Lowers the Temperature With U.S.
Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides, Iran has toned down its approach to the West on several fronts, and the U.S. has reciprocated.

The Grand Bazaar in Tehran, Iran, last week. After months of attacks on American forces in Iraq, Iran has called off its proxy militias, one of several de-escalation steps.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
By Alissa J. Rubin and Farnaz Fassihi

May 19, 2020

BAGHDAD — After years of increasing tensions that nearly led to war, Iran has moderated its approach to the West, shifting from a policy of provocation to one of limited cooperation. The change reflects an effort to avoid direct confrontation with the United States that the Iranians say could benefit President Trump in the November election.
Nowhere is the shift more evident than in Iraq, where Iran has backed a pro-American prime minister and ordered its proxy militias to cease their rocket attacks on American forces.
The Americans, while publicly dismissive of any change in Iranian posture, have quietly reciprocated in modest and indirect ways.
Taken together, the openings represent an incipient détente that, even if it does not last or lead to the end of hostilities between Iran and the United States, has already lowered the temperature of the relationship, reducing the risk of open conflict.

“A war is less likely to happen, but there is still the risk of a confrontation,” said Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. “But it’s less likely because the intent of the primary actors has shifted. Both Iran and the U.S. definitely do not want a war six months before the U.S. elections.”
Iran’s shift, which has not been announced or explained publicly, appears to be tactical, analysts said, noting that the country still vehemently opposes the Trump administration’s demand that it renegotiate its nuclear agreement with the West and that it has not backed off its goal of ousting the United States military from the Middle East. Publicly, both countries remain engaged in verbal warfare.

Image

Anti-war activists marching in Washington in January. The détente has made open conflict less likely.Credit...Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
But the recent signs of de-escalation have been significant:

After months of hit-and-run attacks on American forces in Iraq that pushed the United States and Iran to the brink of war in January, Iran has called off its proxy militias and the attacks have largely ceased.
When Iraq’s Parliament chose an American-backed prime minister this month, Iran, which has been instrumental in choosing previous Iraqi governments, ultimately acceded to the choice and helped put him in office.
In April, Iran reached out to the United States to open negotiations for a prisoner swap, offering to release a United States Navy veteran held by Iran in exchange for an Iranian-American doctor detained by the Americans.
Attacks on merchant ships and tankers in the Persian Gulf that threatened one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes for much of last year have been ratcheted down, although not entirely ended.

Diplomats, Iraqi and Iranian officials and analysts cite a combination of reasons for the change, including a fear of war with the United States. They also note that Iran is overextended — fighting a coronavirus epidemic, a tanking economy and public unrest at home — and needs to retrench.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/17/...on=CompanionColumn&contentCollection=Trending

Who Can Say ‘No’ to Cuomo? His Top Aide, Melissa DeRosa
Tehran was caught by surprise when the Americans retaliated for the killing of an American contractor in Iraq in December by killing the leader of Iran’s elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani. The United States threatened a disproportionate response if another American was killed, something Iran could ill afford.

“Iran is redefining its regional policies after Gen. Suleimani’s assassination,” Mohamad Hossein Malaek, a seasoned Iranian diplomat and former ambassador to China, wrote in Iranian Diplomacy magazine in April. “It’s reshuffling its cards, it’s reassessing its capabilities, and it has entered the arena with a new perspective and plan.”

merlin_166699986_5cb16343-0c2e-442f-824b-e488ba48ddd3-articleLarge.jpg

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Mourners in Tehran after the death of Lt. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in January. His sway had extended throughout the region.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Iran has also concluded that escalating tensions with the United States could provoke armed conflict which, aside from being painful for Iran, could benefit Mr. Trump politically, improving his re-election chances, according to people familiar with the policy. Since taking office, Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the nuclear agreement with Iran and imposed crippling economic sanctions that have devastated Iran’s economy.
An adviser to Iran’s foreign ministry said that even the powerful Quds Force — the branch of the Revolutionary Guards that runs proxy militias from Iraq to Lebanon — had been ordered to “act conservatively” and remain in “a holding pattern” until November.

In addition to the American election, Iran has its eyes on a United Nations Security Council decision in October that will determine whether an international arms embargo against it is extended. Until then, Iran wants to avoid alienating members of the Security Council, analysts said.
The Trump administration credits its “maximum pressure campaign” against Iran, including sanctions and military threats, for forcing the country to rethink its strategy.

“Pressure works,” Brian Hook, the State Department’s special representative for Iran policy, said Tuesday. “For over three years we have contained and countered Iran through deterrence and diplomacy. The regime is also broke because of our sanctions. Iran’s leaders today face a choice: either negotiate with President Trump or manage economic collapse.”

The attacks in the Persian Gulf dropped off, the Americans point out, after Mr. Trump ordered the Navy to sink any Iranian vessels harassing American ships. On Tuesday, the Navy warned boats not to come within 100 meters of an American naval vessel in international waters.
At the same time, despite the all-or-nothing statements, the United States has engaged with Iran indirectly.
After Iran accepted the American-backed nominee for Iraq’s prime minister, Mustapha al-Kadhimi, the United States granted Iraq a four-month waiver from American sanctions on Iran so that Baghdad could buy gas from Tehran. The waiver — longer than the usual 30- to 45-day waiver — gives Iran access to much needed cash.

Image

Prime Minister Mustapha al-Kadhimi of Iraq, who is backed by the United States. Iran acceded to his selection and helped put him in office.Credit...Iraqi Prime Minister Media Office, via Reuters
Another outreach between the two foes has involved discussions about a possible prisoner swap involving an American Navy veteran, Michael White, and an Iranian doctor in U.S. custody. The talks seem to have stalled in the past few days but neither side appears to have given up on them.
In another possible gesture, Iran’s Central Bank governor, Abdolnaser Hemmati, said in March that the United States had allowed some frozen Iranian funds in third countries to be released to Iran. The payments were widely understood to be for oil purchases.

United States officials deny that they allowed any frozen funds to be paid to Iran.
Western analysts characterize Iran’s shifts as adapting to changing situations.

“What we’ve been seeing coming out of Iran over the past couple of months is more easily explained as a tactical shift in each theater that makes sense in that theater, rather than a strategic change,” said Jarrett Blanc, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
In Iraq, where the back and forth with the United States was most transparent, Iran was ultimately more concerned with stabilizing Iraq than installing its preferred candidate, Iranian officials said.
Anti-government protests in Iraq last fall that led to the resignation of the previous prime minister also condemned Iran’s influence and the virtually unchecked power of its proxy militias.
By March, with Parliament still unable to agree on a new prime minister, Iraq was facing a host of other problems as well: Plummeting oil prices had deprived the government of its main source of revenue, and restrictions imposed to fight the coronavirus pandemic had shut down the economy.

merlin_165192834_4e8b5d8f-e830-414d-a8b3-f0cc7431f816-articleLarge.jpg

Image

Iraqi security forces clashing with protesters in Baghdad last November.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times
Iran relies on Iraq’s economy as a market for its goods and as an illicit source of revenue through the Iranian-backed militia groups.
“Iran considers Iraq one of its two most important countries in terms of its security because it knows that what happens in Iraq is not going to stay in Iraq,” said Ariane Tabatabai, a Middle East fellow at the German Marshall Fund.

In April, Gen. Ismail Qaani, who replaced General Suleimani as the Quds Force commander, came to Baghdad with a clear message. He told senior Iraqi political leaders that Tehran was troubled by Iraq’s economic disarray: “Things are not good in Iraq and they can’t go on like this because Iraq will become a burden on Iran,” he said, according to a senior Iraqi political leader who met with General Qaani.
With Iraq on the verge of falling apart and the Americans threatening to end the sanctions waivers for Iraq and refusing to aid its struggling economy, Iran blinked.
“Iran overplayed its hand and they were overstretched — in Lebanon, in Syria and then the protests in the fall — and the fact that Shiites protested against Iran, that shook them,” said a senior Iraqi politician who asked not to be identified in order to discuss delicate diplomatic issues.

Iran not only accepted Mr. al-Kadhimi, the American choice, but also lobbied its allied parties in Iraq to support him.
Western officials took that as a victory.
“The narrative since 2003 is that the West has allowed Iraqi politics to shift toward Iran,” said a senior Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But actually here, this time, the Americans and the British supported Kadhimi from the beginning and Iran did not, and it was Iran who moved a little.”
Alissa J. Rubin reported from Baghdad, and Farnaz Fassihi from New York. Falih Hassan contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Lara Jakes from Washington.
posted for fair use

Iran Quietly Lowers the Temperature With U.S. (Published 2020)

Despite the heated rhetoric on both sides, Iran has toned down its approach to the West on several fronts, and the U.S. has reciprocated.

www.nytimes.com

Housecarl · May 20, 2020

Posted for fair use.....

Taiwan president rejects Beijing rule; China says 'reunification' inevitable

Taiwan cannot accept becoming part of China under its "one country, two systems" offer of autonomy , President Tsai Ing-wen said on Wednesday, strongly rejecting China's sovereignty claims and likely setting the stage for an ever worsening of ties.

www.reuters.com

World News
May 19, 2020 / 7:27 PM / Updated 25 minutes ago
Taiwan president rejects Beijing rule; China says reunification inevitabile

Yimou Lee, Ben Blanchard
5 Min Read

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan cannot accept becoming part of China under its “one country, two systems” offer of autonomy, President Tsai Ing-wen said on Wednesday, in a strong rejection of China’s sovereignty claim, but called for talks so that both sides could coexist.

In a speech after being sworn in for her second and final term in office, Tsai said relations between Taiwan and China had reached an historical turning point.

“Both sides have a duty to find a way to coexist over the long term and prevent the intensification of antagonism and differences,” she said.

Related Coverage

China's Taiwan affairs office says reunification is natural trend

Tsai and her Democratic Progressive Party won January’s presidential and parliamentary elections by a landslide, vowing to stand up to China, which claims Taiwan as its own and says it would be brought under Beijing’s control by force if needed.

“Here, I want to reiterate the words ‘peace, parity, democracy, and dialogue’. We will not accept the Beijing authorities’ use of ‘one country, two systems’ to downgrade Taiwan and undermine the cross-strait status quo. We stand fast by this principle,” Tsai said.

China uses the “one country, two systems” policy, which is supposed to guarantee a high degree of autonomy, to run the former British colony of Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997. It has offered it to Taiwan, though all major Taiwanese parties have rejected it.

China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, responding to Tsai, said Beijing would stick to “one country, two systems” - a central tenet of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Taiwan policy - and “not leave any space for Taiwan independence separatist activities”.

“Reunification is a historical inevitability of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” it said. “We have the firm will, full confidence, and sufficient ability to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

China views Tsai as a separatist bent on formal independence for Taiwan. Tsai says Taiwan is an independent state called the Republic of China, its official name, and does not want to be part of the People’s Republic of China governed by Beijing.

TAIWAN OPEN TO DIALOGUE
China has stepped up its military drills near Taiwan since Tsai’s re-election, flying fighter jets into the island’s air space and sailing warships around Taiwan.

Tsai said Taiwan has made the greatest effort to maintain peace and stability in the narrow Taiwan Strait that separates the democratic island from its autocratic neighbour China.

“We will continue these efforts, and we are willing to engage in dialogue with China and make more concrete contributions to regional security,” she added, speaking in the garden of the old Japanese governor’s house in Taipei, in front of a socially-distanced audience of officials and diplomats.

Tsai said that Taiwan will continue its fight to participate in international organisations, and “bolster ties with the United States, Japan, Europe, and other like-minded countries”.

Taiwan has accused China of exerting pressure to keep Taiwan out of the World Health Organization (WHO). China says Taiwan is a Chinese province with no right to the trappings of a state.

The Trump administration has strongly backed Taiwan with arms sales and diplomatic support, even though the United States recognises only China’s government, becoming another source of already deep tension between Washington and Beijing.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sent his congratulations to Tsai on Tuesday, praising her “courage and vision in leading Taiwan’s vibrant democracy”, in a rare high-level message from Washington direct to Taiwan’s government.

China cut off a formal talks mechanism with Taiwan in 2016 after Tsai first won election.

Slideshow (15 Images)
Yao Chia-wen, a senior adviser to Tsai, told Reuters the chance of talks with China was not likely given ongoing tensions.

“We are ready to engage with them any time, but China is unlikely to make concessions to Taiwan,” he said. “In the next four years there’s little chance for the cross-strait relationship to improve.”

Reporting by Yimou Lee and Ben Blanchard; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Michael Perry

Housecarl · May 20, 2020

Hummm......

Posted for fair use.....

'It's up to us': how Merkel and Macron revived EU solidarity

It took a courtroom of scarlet-robed judges to spur Angela Merkel to make one of her boldest moves in 15 years as German chancellor: propose huge cash handouts to the European Union's weaker economies.

www.reuters.com

World News
May 19, 2020 / 10:09 PM / Updated 24 minutes ago
'It's up to us': how Merkel and Macron revived EU solidarity

John Chalmers, Gabriela Baczynska
4 Min Read

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - It took a courtroom of scarlet-robed judges to spur Angela Merkel to make one of her boldest moves in 15 years as German chancellor: propose huge cash handouts to the European Union’s weaker economies.

Merkel was already worried about the future of the Union after the coronavirus pandemic struck Europe in February, triggering a wave of deaths and crippling lockdowns.

But it was Germany’s own Constitutional Court that tipped her hand, sources said. Its bombshell ruling on May 5 challenged the EU’s reliance on European Central Bank (ECB) money-printing to keep its weaker members’ economies afloat - and the EU’s governance.

Until then, Merkel had opposed a proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron for a Recovery Fund that would, for the first time, bind all 27 member states to raise debt jointly.

“Initially they were on quite different positions,” said one senior diplomat. “They reviewed the risk of a split in the EU. But then the Constitutional Court decision came and Merkel ... said: ‘It’s up to us, the governments’.”

A series of video calls between Merkel and Macron led to a plan for the European Commission, the EU executive, to borrow 500 billion euros ($550 billion) as common debt and transfer it to the regions and industries hit hardest.

It would be a top-up to the EU’s 2021-2027 budget, already close to 1 trillion euros.

Diplomats in Brussels, Paris and Berlin familiar with the discussions said Merkel had dropped Germany’s long-held opposition to mutualising debt to fund other member states - when it became clear the EU itself was in peril.

The court ruling in effect put the onus on EU governments themselves to fund any fiscal response.

European leaders agree that, if they fail to rescue economies now in freefall, they risk something worse than the debt crisis 10 years ago - which exposed faultlines, fanned euroscepticism and almost blew up the eurozone.

UNION IN NAME ONLY?
The pandemic has derailed the recovery of the EU’s most indebted countries. Italy’s debt is shooting towards 170% of national output, Greece is losing gains wrung from years of belt-tightening and, across the south, a collapse in tourism threatens millions of jobs.

Surely the moment for the Union to live up to its name.

But members’ initial slowness to share medical equipment, and readiness to close their borders, seemed to demonstrate Brussels’ irrelevance when national interests are at stake.

Divisions erupted at an all-night videoconference of EU leaders on March 27 as fiscally conservative northern countries resisted pressure from a “Club Med” group to raise a splurge of mutual EU debt to tackle the effects of the pandemic.

Finance ministers agreed on April 9 to an EU-wide rescue plan worth half a trillion euros, but it was too little to fund long-term recovery, and the feud festered on. Berlin insisted any recovery plan must consist of short-term, repayable loans.

Then Merkel and Macron began talking.

“Merkel became increasingly aware that it was making Europe look really bad,” said an EU official familiar with Macron and Merkel’s consultations with the Commission.

Just when it seemed that this latest in a series of traumas, from sovereign debt crisis to a chaotic wave of migration to Brexit, could finally tear the bloc apart, the deal hints that the two founder members can still provide the EU’s steady core.

Slideshow (2 Images)
It may also boost Macron’s standing and his vision of more integration as Merkel ends her long tenure.

The Commission, which presents its own proposal on May 27, warmly welcomed the initiative, but the deal is not yet done.

To pass, it needs backing from all 27 capitals, and Austria’s leader has already said that he, along with the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden, will offer only loans, not grants.

Additional reporting by Michel Rose in Paris and by Andreas Rinke in Berlin; Editing by Kevin Liffey

jward · May 20, 2020

Defense Minister warns US of crushing response if action taken against Iran's tankers

May 20, 2020 13:54 Asia/Tehran [Updated: May 20, 2020 14:42 Asia/Tehran]

Tehran (IP) - Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami warned that any act of aggression against the country's oil tankers will receive a rapid, decisive and crushing response from the Islamic Republic.
Iran Press/Iran news: Speaking on the sideline of the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Brigadier General Hatami said disrupting the course of Iranian tankers by Americans will draw a reaction from Iran.
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, warning the US about sending troops to the Caribbean Sea with the aim of interfering with the transfer of Iran’s fuel to Venezuela.
Zarif has stressed that the US must give up bullying on the world stage and respect the rule of international law, especially free shipping in the high seas.
Following Zarif's letter, Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Abbas Araqchi summoned the Swiss envoy, whose country represents US interests in Tehran, to voice the country's vehement protest at US provocations.101
Read More:
Iran FM warns UN over US persecution of Iranian oil-tankers

Defense Minister warns US of crushing response if action taken against Iran's tankers

Tehran (IP) - Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Amir Hatami warned that any act of aggression against the country's oil tankers will receive a rapid, decisive and crushing response from the Islamic Republic.

iranpress.com

---------------------

CNW
@ConflictsW
2h

Venezuelan Defense Minister, Vladimir Padrino says that the Venezuelan Navy and Venezuela Air Force will escort the Iranian tankers into Venezuela #Venezuela #Iran

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1263221344453476353

View: https://twitter.com/ConflictsW/status/1263221344453476353?s=20

1:44
61.6K views

From
Gabriel Bastidas

CNW
@ConflictsW

In case anyone is interested in Venezuelan firepower that could *in theory* be used.Venezuela has a couple of Otamat anti ship missiles still available and a few KH-31 ship missiles that are launched from their Su-30s. Although it’s unknown how many missiles are still operational
____________________________

jward · May 20, 2020

US Air Force ramps up flyovers near China in sign of rising tension and risk of conflict between world powers

B-1B Lancer bomber flyovers accompany US Navy and Air Force operations in region
South China Sea grows ‘tense and turbulent’ with military actions linked to political and diplomatic issues, says analyst

Wendy Wu
Published: 5:15pm, 20 May, 2020
Updated: 11:00pm, 20 May, 2020

Why you can trust SCMP

2.5k

Flyovers by B-1B Lancer bombers over waters off China are a sign of increasing tension between China and the United States. Photo: Handout

The United States Air Force has ramped up flyovers of B-1B Lancer bombers over waters near China amid growing bitterness between the two powers on all fronts.
The flyovers came with increased military operations by both the US Navy and Air Force in the
South China Sea
, East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the Yellow Sea this year, while China’s military observers warned of rising risks of military conflict between the two countries.
In the latest announcement, the US Pacific Air Forces said on Twitter on Tuesday that B-1 bombers conducted a mission in the South China Sea, just days after training with the US Navy near Hawaii, “demonstrating the credibility of US air forces to address a diverse and uncertain security environment”.

Beijing and Washington remain locked in a war of words over each other’s handling of
the Covid-19 crisis
and the origin of the virus that has killed more than 324,000 people and infected nearly 5 million people around the world.

The blame game has caused rifts in an already strained relationship, affecting a range of activities, including journalism, trade, technology and the military.

The US Air Force deployed four B-1B bombers and about 200 airmen from Texas to the Andersen Air Force Base in Guam on May 1, saying the mission was to support Pacific Air Forces and to conduct training and operations with allies and partners.

The US Air Force sent two B-1B Lancers for a 32-hour round-trip flight over the South China Sea on April 29. Photo: Handout
Li Jie, a military specialist based in Beijing, said the deployments showed that the US was trying to keep up strategic deterrence, with the US Air Force conducting 11 flights in March and 13 in April over the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea.
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“Obviously, decision makers in the Pentagon are trying to use the bombers as a new tool in its strategic deterrence against China. We will see intensified B-1 interference into airspace over the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea in May,” Li said.

He noted that soon after the dispatch to Guam, two B-1B bombers flew over the
East China Sea
and also flew over the waters off the coast of northeast
Taiwan
on May 6 which he said was an indication to Taiwan that the US had not given up its military influence in the region.

The US Air Force sent two B-1B Lancers for a 32-hour round-trip flight over the South China Sea on April 29. It rotated B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers, the three strategic bombers in the US air force fleet, among other military aircraft to fly over the contested waters near China.

On May 14, the Chinese navy
started an 11-week military exercise
in waters off the northern port city of Tangshan in the Yellow Sea. The US sent a warship through the Taiwan Strait on the same day, marking the sixth passage of the strait by a US Navy vessel this year.
The US Indo-Pacific Command said on Wednesday that the US Navy had conducted a mine warfare training exercise in the East China Sea.

China is also on the way to upgrade its military strength. It put two new upgraded nuclear-powered strategic submarines into service last month and it is also considering the launch of a new generation of strategic bomber,
the Xian H-20 supersonic stealth bomber
, possibly within this year,
as previously reported by the

South China Morning Post
.
Zhu Feng, director of international studies at Nanjing University, said tensions in the South China Sea had become increasingly “tense and turbulent” in the past three months and were closely linked to political and diplomatic conflict between the two countries.
The US military is concerned that the coronavirus may offer a window of opportunity for China to increase military presence in the South China Sea, or even increase the odds of a military operation against Taiwan, he said.
“China’s tough response may further fuel the Trump administration’s push to contain China on other fronts, pressing ahead with the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy, an important tactic for the US to draw allies in the region over to its side and further alienate China,” Zhu said.

Song Zhongping, a Hong Kong-based military affairs commentator, said the frequent flyovers of B-1 and B-52 jets were not only to display the US military presence but were exercises looking ahead to potential battles of the future.
“The B-1, replacing B-52, needs to fly around the waters to know the battlefield conditions well,” he said.
“China and the US are entering into a full-fledged competition and the situation is grimmer than the US-Soviet Union Cold War. Risks of military conflict cannot be ruled out in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait. And they are increasing,” Song said.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: US steps up bomber flyovers near China

Comments

Wendy Wu
Wendy Wu is a Beijing-based reporter focusing on international finance and diplomacy. Her journalism career spans a decade and she has been reporting for the Post since 2015. Wendy has a master's degree in finance from Germany's University of Freiburg.

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US Air Force ramps up flyovers near China in sign of rising tensions

South China Sea grows ‘tense and turbulent’ with military actions linked to political and diplomatic issues, says analyst.

www.scmp.com

jward · May 21, 2020

The US and Iran are inching toward another showdown, this time much closer to the US
Christopher Woody

11 hours ago

Grace 1 tanker Iran Gibraltar Royal Marines

The Iranian oil tanker Grace 1, seen off Gibraltar on July 4, 2019. AP Photo/Marcos Moreno

Iranian tankers carrying gasoline are a few days from Venezuela, which is struggling with crippling gasoline shortages.
The US has sanctioned both countries, and the tankers' looming arrival could set up another confrontation with Iran just a few months after exchanging fire in Iraq.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

A few months after coming to blows in Iraq, the US and Iran face a possible confrontation in the Western Hemisphere, where several tankers carrying gasoline are heading from Iran to Venezuela.
As of Tuesday, four of the tankers had sailed out of the Mediterranean, with the fifth close behind. The first ship, the Iranian-flagged Fortune, is set to arrive early next week, according to Argus Media, citing ship-tracking services.
The shipments would ease a crippling gasoline shortage in Venezuela, where years of neglect and mismanagement have undercut refining capacity. It'd also draw down the glut of fuel in Iran caused by collapsing oil demand.
US officials have said Iran is receiving Venezuelan gold in exchange for the fuel. Aiding Venezuela would also allow both countries to needle the US, which has levied strict sanctions against them, targeting oil sectors and high-ranking officials.

Javad Zarif Iran Nicolas Maduro Venezuela

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif meet in Caracas, July 20, 2019. Miraflores Palace via REUTERS
A US official told Reuters on May 14 that the US was "looking at measures that can be taken," and that the shipment was "not only unwelcome by the United States" but also "unwelcome by the region."
The Nour news agency, which is close to Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Saturday that if the US "intends to create insecurity on international waterways, it would be taking a dangerous risk and that will certainly not go without repercussion."
The following day, Iran's government summoned the Swiss ambassador, who represents US interests in Iran, and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres complaining of "hegemonic gunboat diplomacy," describing potential US action against the tankers as "a dangerous escalation."
Iran "reserves its right to take all appropriate and necessary measures and decisive action ... to secure its legitimate rights and interests against such bullying policies and unlawful practices," Zarif wrote.

The US is still weighing how to respond to the tankers
US officials are still debating how to respond, according to The Wall Street Journal, which reported Wednesday that some were arguing the US should only intervene if Iranian fuel shipments to Venezuela become a regular occurrence.
The US could try to confiscate the shipments, as it tried unsuccessfully to do to an Iranian tanker bound for Syria last year. Officials could also sanction the tankers and their crews to deter future deliveries, the officials said.
The US Navy has already deployed a number of ships to the Caribbean as part of a counter-narcotics operation announced earlier this year. Military personnel aboard those ships could also intervene against the shipments, officials told The Journal.

Admiral Craig Faller, commander of U.S. Southern Command, speaks with the news media following a commissioning ceremony for the U.S. Navy's guided missile destroyer, the USS Paul Ignatius, Saturday, July 27, 2019, at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
In comments on Monday, the top US military commander in the region declined to comment on the shipments but described Iran's activity as a concern.
Iran is seeking "positional advantage in our neighborhood in a way that would counter US interests ... We're tracking that closely and sharing intel with our partners," Adm. Craig Faller, head of US Southern Command, said during an online conference hosted by Florida International University.
"I've seen those same news reports that the tankers are en route. I won't comment any further on those news reports, but I view the Iranian activity globally and in Venezuelan in specific as a concern," Faller added.
Asked on Wednesday about potential action against the tankers, US Southern Command referred to Faller's remarks. The US Treasury Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

Navy littoral combat ship destroyers Caribbean P-8A

US Navy littoral combat ship USS Detroit in formation with the guided-missile destroyers USS Lassen, USS Preble, USS Farragut, and a P-8A patrol aircraft during maritime security operations in the Caribbean, May 11, 2020. US Navy/MCS 2nd Class Anderson W. Branch
Faller has warned before about Iran's activity in the region, as have other US officials. Tehran's relationship with Caracas has been described as an axis of narco-terrorism, but there are doubts about whether their ties represent a meaningful threat to the region and US interests there.
Juan Cruz, a former Trump administration National Security Council official, said his concern about Iran was "very limited."
"I don't like to overstate it because it's very convenient to do so," Cruz said Tuesday during another conference hosted by Florida International University. "People play around with it, and it's like a Boogeyman — when you want people to get nervous you pull out Iran."
Iranians are "clearly" in Venezuela and play a role there, but the US needs to "right-size our worries," added Cruz, now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
"Faller's words give us an expectation that probably confrontation won't be the way forward, but maybe it will be anyway, maybe the situation pushes that in that direction," Cruz said. "So that's the only piece that would worry me in the short-term, and I think that concerns with Iran are real, but they tend to be overstated."

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The US and Iran are inching toward another showdown, this time much closer to the US

Iranian tankers carrying gasoline are just days away from arriving in Venezuela. What, if anything, the US does to stop them remains to be seen.

www.businessinsider.com

jward · May 21, 2020

Saudi Atomic Reactor Progresses With Inspectors Still Frozen Out
By
Jonathan Tirone
May 21, 2020, 1:55 AM CDT

Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead to complete its first nuclear reactor, according to satellite images that have raised concern among arms-control experts because the kingdom has yet to implement international monitoring rules.

Satellite photos show the kingdom has built a roof over the facility before putting in place International Atomic Energy Agency regulations that allow inspectors early verification of the reactor’s design. Foregoing on-the-ground monitoring until after the research reactor is completed would be an unusual move normally discouraged under regulations to ensure civilian atomic programs aren’t used to make weapons.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly pledged that its nuclear program is strictly for peaceful purposes, but Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman also said the kingdom would develop a bomb if its regional rival Iran did so. Those statements made in 2018 raised a a red flag within the nuclear monitoring community which is uneasy that it has more ability to access nuclear sites in Iran than it does in Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia’s ministry of energy didn’t respond to a request to comment.

King Abdulaziz City of Science and Technology, Riyadh
A new satellite image shows that the almost-completed roof now conceals the cylindrical reactor vessel, which was still visible through roof beams in March

Source: Google Earth (March 2020), Planet Labs (May 2020)

While Saudi Arabia has been open about its ambitions to generate nuclear power, less is known about the kinds of monitoring the kingdom intends to put in place. President Donald Trump’s administration sent a letter to Saudi Arabia last year setting requirements to access U.S. atomic technology. The baseline for any agreement is tougher IAEA inspections.

“Saudi Arabia is aware of what their obligations are,” IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi said Feb. 5 in Washington after meeting with U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Grossi dismissed Saudi suggestions that it would acquire nuclear weapons if Iran did.

The situation hasn’t changed since Grossi spoke, an IAEA spokesperson said by email, adding that other countries have completed the transition to stricter monitoring after scaling up nuclear programs.

IAEA inspectors who account for gram-levels of uranium worldwide verify the designs of facilities to ensure that nuclear material is contained within and can’t be smuggled out via trap doors or hidden tunnels, said Robert Kelley, a former IAEA director who led inspections in Iraq, Libya and South Africa.

“They’re going to have to work with the IAEA forever if they want to move toward nuclear power and this would be the time to establish that relationship,” Kelley, a nuclear engineer, said of Saudi Arabia.

Background on Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear Ambitions
Why Oil Rich Saudi Arabia is Turning to Nuclear Power: Quicktake Saudi Arabia Pressed by Trump Envoy to Allow Nuclear Inspections Saudi Nuclear Reactor First Images Show Work Near Complete As Saudis Go Nuclear, U.S. Seeks an Edge Over Great-Power Rivals

At issue is the weak and outdated set of IAEA safeguard rules, called the “Small Quantities Protocol,” or SQP, that Saudi Arabia continues to follow, according to Laura Rockwood, the IAEA’s former chief lawyer who drafted stricter inspection guidelines to which the vast majority of countries adhere.

“The problem is that design-information verification has to be carried out while it’s being constructed,” said Rockwood, who now directs the Open Nuclear Network in Vienna.

Satellite images show that a thick lattice of roof beams is now covering the 10-meter (33 feet) high steel reactor vessel. Argentina’s state-owned INVAP SE sold the low-powered research reactor to Saudi Arabia.

While Saudi Arabia adheres to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the bedrock agreement that regulates the spread of material needed to induce fission, it still has to implement monitoring rules in line with its nuclear program development.

“Saudi Arabia’s agreement right now is completely minimal, out of date, and unequal to the task of providing the kind of transparency that the IAEA and other member states need about Saudi Arabia’s nuclear program,” said Sharon Squassoni, a researcher and former diplomat on non-proliferation issues at George Washington University.

— With assistance by Verity Ratcliffe

posted for fair use

Saudi Atomic Reactor Progresses With Inspectors Still Frozen Out

Saudi Arabia is pushing ahead to complete its first nuclear reactor, according to satellite images that have raised concern among arms-control experts because the kingdom has yet to implement international monitoring rules.

www.bloomberg.com

jward · May 21, 2020

Grand Strategy Is No Silver Bullet, But It Is Indispensable
Andrew Ehrhardt and Maeve Ryan

May 19, 2020

Is grand strategy too “grand” to be good? Criticisms of the concept are not new, but in recent months, several articles have sounded the death knell. Particularly concerning is that the diagnosis comes from the United States and the United Kingdom — countries with overlapping strategic cultures and where grand strategy has, to varying degrees, succeeded in the past. Far from a wasteful or futile undertaking, however, the practice of grand strategy is a worthwhile endeavor. But crucially, for it to be effective, there needs to be a fundamental change in the way in which it is understood and what is expected of it.
In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Daniel Drezner, Ronald Krebs, and Randall Schweller come to “bury” grand strategy. For these self-proclaimed undertakers, it is not simply that the concept is “dead,” but rather that the domestic and international environment is no longer conducive to any attempt at its use. Grand strategy, they claim, “works best on predictable terrain — in a world where policymakers enjoy a clear understanding of the distribution of power, a solid domestic consensus about national goals and identity, and stable political and national security institutions.” In place of grand strategy, a more ad hoc and “case-by-case” approach to policy is now needed, they argue — ideally one based on the way in which “smart corporations” decentralize and incrementalize their innovation and decision-making processes.
Though the article is only the latest in a line of critiques, its arguments are somewhat striking, both for their idealized version of the past and their narrow conception of the purpose and essence of grand strategy. The idea that grand strategy requires entirely “predictable terrain” is a limitation built on illusion. Rarely, if ever, do the international system, domestic political debates and a complex network of bureaucratic institutions align to give policymakers an ideal canvas on which to craft a grand strategy. Indeed, the concept itself is most useful — and often most necessary — in moments when national populations, feeling the international order to be shifting in new and unpredictable directions, begin to question their own first-order assumptions about the nature of the international system and their country’s place within it.

Become a Member

Now is not the time to “bury” grand strategy altogether, but to understand that its practical application rests in a humbler and less rigid understanding of the concept: one which sees it more as a habit of mind and a way of thinking, rather than the deliverable product of an all-encompassing blueprint or road map for policymaking. Vital to this conception is an understanding that the term itself represents a practice with a long intellectual and historical lineage, aspects of which must be grasped in order for policymakers and the public to find value in the concept going forward.
To reconnect policymakers and the policy-minded with this vision of grand strategy, we offer a number of historical antecedents in 19th and 20th century British statecraft, arguing that certain aspects of this tradition of grand strategic thinking, while undervalued in the present day, should be revitalized going forward. This is no silver bullet, of course. It takes time to look beyond the recent past, and time to process its significance. But thinking carefully about history is not an esoteric indulgence. It is a humble recognition that the past offers something to the present, and is a smart investment of time for a policymaker seeking to build a robust and innovative toolkit to tackle the daunting challenges of the coming decade.

Too Grand to be Good?
It is hard not to question the merits of grand strategy. The very adjective “grand” does it no favors, as many conjure up images of beard-stroking elites hovering over quills and maps. The academic attention on grand strategy in recent decades has been expansive but at the same time, has produced a cacophony of conceptual frameworks. Talk to policymakers today and many look at those who advocate grand strategy as out-of-touch academics, ignorant of the bureaucratic processes of government and the reality that much of what constitutes a day atop the policymaking establishment is filled with “fire-fighting” and leaping from one crisis to the next. In a world of rapid communication, 24-hour news cycles, lone-actor terrorist attacks, volatile financial markets, and now a global pandemic with profound social, economic and demographic consequences, events demanding government response are more plentiful and challenging than they ever have been. Diplomacy operates at a level of complexity scarcely imaginable a hundred years ago. Sitting back and thinking about — much less planning for — all-encompassing strategies of how countries can achieve a range of medium- and long-term domestic and international objectives might seem unnecessary if not impossible under modern circumstances.

It is their perception of the daunting complexity of this environment which leads Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller to question the contemporary relevance of grand strategy — or more specifically, to question the capacity of the United States to engage in effective grand strategy and maintain its global preeminence under conditions so different to the world in which that preeminence was first achieved. Interestingly, the past decade has also seen a similar process of questioning on the other side of the Atlantic. A British parliamentary inquiry in 2010 — originally titled “Who Does UK Grand Strategy?” — concluded that the term “grand strategy,” though seen by some as “hubristic,” remained “a concept intrinsic to good governance” and synonymous with national strategy. However, the “profoundly disturbing conclusion” of the committee was that such “strategic thinking has atrophied.” Ten years later, the National Security Advisor at the time of that report, Lord Peter Ricketts, wrote that the British foreign policymaking establishment had “lost the art of grand strategy:”

I am sceptical about the capacity of modern governments to produce grand strategy… amid the maelstrom of contemporary politics and the new media. …Today’s pressures push ministers to short-term crisis management. Policies are sound-bite simple, while deferring awkward choices has become a more tempting option. The distinction between campaigning and governing has all but disappeared, reducing the space for longer-term thinking.

Underlying both the 2010 parliamentary report and Lord Rickett’s recent article is a nostalgia for a past excellenc
e in grand strategy — something lost along the way. But what exactly was this art, and crucially, is it recoverable?

Towards a Humbler Conception
Much of the problem with grand strategy is that, as a concept, it suffers from people over-claiming what it can achieve — it is often thought of as a “silver bullet,” “master plan,” or a “road map to match means with ends.” Seeing it as such a panacea for policymaking only sets it up for failure, since no fixed, tidy, and decided plan on the scale required could ever withstand the unpredictable onslaught of international politics.
Instead, grand strategy is best understood not as a process (leading to the production of plans) but as a habit of mind: a conscious attempt to look beyond the confines of short-term requirements of national defense or day-to-day, immediate foreign policy, and to the pursuit of national interests in a more systematic and synchronized way. It remains conscious of first-order assumptions and first-order principles within a nation’s policymaking culture, and importantly, the ways in which these should be altered in the context of a changing international order. As David Morgen Owen writes in the Strategy Bridge, “grand strategy is a concept rooted in the demands of making strategy in the real world.” Indeed, an appreciation for the nature and pace of change in the international environment, and a country’s place within that system, is central to grand strategic thinking. In formulating such a position, it creates what Hal Brands refers to as “the intellectual architecture” from which more detailed policies flow.

At no other time is grand strategic thinking more useful than in moments when the international order seems to be shifting in unpredictable directions. To suggest that grand strategy is only possible in predictable and harmonious environments is short-sighted. It is difficult to think of many periods in the past two hundred years when statesmen and women anywhere in the world have enjoyed such conditions. Their worlds, like ours, were of ever-increasing interaction and complexity. The planet today is not the first “disordered, cluttered, and fluid realm” that has challenged policymakers, and it would come as quite a surprise to certain statesmen and civil servants of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, to be told otherwise.

Understanding Rooted in History
It is well known that the term “grand strategy” was first used in the mid-19th-century Britain to describe the scale of the military activity during the Napoleonic Wars, and has evolved since then through thinkers such Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett, who used the term in the context of maritime strategy, eventually coming to mean something bigger and more all-encompassing than the military sphere. As Basil Liddel Hart described it, grand strategy was a way of thinking that “looks beyond the war to the subsequent peace.” Others, including the historian Michael Howard later spoke of grand strategy as not simply being about “war fighting” but “war avoidance.”
Yet this approach to statecraft — what is essentially a way of thinking about the international system and a country’s place within it — had been in practice for much longer. One could look to Castlereagh, Canning, or Palmerston and find that for them, good statecraft meant conceiving of national interests in a more systematic and synchronized way than the day-to-day business of foreign affairs. Despite their individual differences, all shared an understanding of British national interests as being both shaped by the international environment, and — with good leadership — constitutive of it. They did not set down strict rules of conduct or “roadmaps” to achieve this, but reflected, in broader terms, about the international context in which the state operated and the type of environment that was best suited to its pursuit of prosperity and security. Good statecraft for them, in other words, meant taking the time to think grand strategically. At the core of this was what might be called a “historical sensibility” — an understanding of the nature and pace of change in the international environment — and an effort to craft a foreign policy around the big picture and the long term.

jward · May 21, 2020

continued

Understanding Rooted in History
Similarly, when the Fifth Marquess of Lansdowne became Foreign Secretary in 1900, he found the British Empire in danger of being subsumed by a rapidly changing international environment, and rather than retreat into incrementalism, he advocated a strategy suited to present realities. The fallout from the Boxer Rebellion in China, the Fashoda Incident with France in the Nile River Valley, and the Spanish-American War were indicative of an international order that was edging towards an uncomfortable reset. The increases in naval power among the French, Russians, Germans, Americans, and Japanese led the Director of Naval Intelligence to remark that British superiority in the West Indies, Pacific, and Atlantic had “passed away.” As one journalist wrote, “The Empire stripped of its armour, has its hands tied behind its back and its bare throat exposed to the keen knife of its bitterest enemies.” Within this context, the Boer War, which began in 1899, was becoming both a highly public humanitarian catastrophe and an embarrassing quagmire for the country, which exposed an under-trained and ill-equipped military. Thus, Lansdowne did not inherit a “shared worldview among key political constituencies,” which Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller consider a requirement for grand strategy, nor even a shared understanding of the nature and purpose of the empire. Both within and without parliament, the government was challenged by strong opposition to the Boer War and by fierce debates about the future of the imperial project. Was Britain a “benign hegemon” or an illiberal imperial behemoth which needed to be restrained or even dismantled? And what did this mean for the policy of non-alignment which had served the country well for decades? The Cabinet was deeply divided, riven by debates that questioned the first-order principles governing national strategy. In this context, Lansdowne reflected on the precariousness of world order, and the startlingly high stakes modern policymaking had created: “In these days, war breaks out with a suddenness which was unknown in former days, when nations were not, as they are now, armed to the teeth and ready to enter on hostilities at any moment.”

Yet these conditions did not paralyze grand strategic thinking — instead they catalyzed it. The “prejudice against alliances,” which for so long had existed in the highest ranks of British foreign policy, would have to be replaced by a more innovative approach, one based on repairing and developing strategic partnerships. For Lansdowne, the pace of armament and the frequency of international conflicts meant that Britain’s traditional approach — which some referred to as “splendid isolation” — was no longer viable. The remedy, in his view, was a dramatic break with the policy of non-alignment in order to develop a strategic alliance with Japan, and by the end of 1905, Britain’s position on the high seas, as Paul Kennedy has noted, was “more favorable than it had been for the previous two decades.” Closely related was Lansdowne’s desire to repair relationships considered to be of strategic value to the United Kingdom. The Anglo-French agreement of 1904, known as the Entente Cordiale, helped lay the foundation for a cross-channel alliance which would develop in later years, one which had profound effects on the course of World War I. Added to this was an understanding that an agreement with France, as Lansdowne put it, “would not improbably be the precursor of a better understanding with Russia,” a country which was France’s alliance partner and viewed by some in the British government as the preeminent long-term threat. Further afield, Lansdowne initiated a rapprochement with the United States — our “brothers across the ocean,” as he worded it — which resolved longstanding differences between Washington and London concerning the construction of an Isthmian canal and the boundary of the Alaskan territory. The agreements provided a “clean slate,” as Lansdowne put it, which would give way to a “new chapter” in Anglo-American relations.

Nearly four decades later, British statesmen and diplomats, in a fashion similar to their predecessors at the turn of the century, engaged in efforts to assess and shape the country’s place in a future international order. Should Britain — as Secretary of State for India Leo Amery argued in 1942 — forego any interest or commitment on the European continent and instead focus on the Empire? Or would the future international order be structured around regional systems and overseen by a “supreme world council” made up of the great powers, as Minister for Aircraft Production Sir Stafford Cripps outlined in a paper? The Atlantic Charter was fundamentally a product of debates such as these, on both sides of the Atlantic, taking place not from a position of unified strength or certainty, but from its exact opposite. For Britain, grand strategy in these years was not viewed as some kind of intellectual exercise or a form of starry-eyed idealism, but a way of breaking out of thinking about the immediate urgencies of the war in order to ensure the state was able to muster some kind of international influence and relevance in a post-war period in which all but the most optimistic (or deluded) knew Britain would occupy a significantly diminished global role.

Indeed, the history of British foreign policymaking during World War II is one in which diplomats in particular, as products of a historic strategic culture, thought about the future in grand strategic terms. Importantly, this did not mean that documents outlining a “grand strategy” littered the inbox of the Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister. Instead, grand strategic thinking was on display in official and personal correspondence and even in the margins of documents, as diplomats exchanged views, sometimes heatedly, on first-order principles which should guide their policymaking. The goal, as one senior official laid out, was to formulate a “grand strategy of peace.” Among the individuals taking up the task was Orme Sargent, one of the most senior officials within the Foreign Office, who, during a debate in 1940 over a response to Hitler’s announcement of a “New Order” in Europe, wrote that,

Whatever may be the future evolution of modern civilisation, I am convinced that it is essential that we now should stand forth as the champions of individual liberty in thought and action as against the tyranny of the state, economic autarky and totalitarianism.

Or there was Frank Roberts (later George Kennan’s British counterpart in Moscow), who, in commenting on a paper, wrote that “If we are to regard ourselves purely as a European nation, we cannot possibly hope to maintain ourselves even as the first among equals.” British power, he believed, would be ensured by maintaining an overseas empire and acting as “a bridge” between the United States and Europe. Such thinking, far from a beard-stroking intellectual exercise, constituted day-to-day business. As such, grand strategy was not the product but the essence of foreign policymaking.

Crucially, the idea that senior policymakers, even during wartime, would allow international politics to run their course was anathema to those responsible for British diplomacy. When one official warned that the United Kingdom was becoming “a nation somewhat devoid of vision, or of courage for the future of our civilisation,” colleagues responded in turn. Arguably the most consequential diplomat of the period was Gladwyn Jebb, who went on to play a crucial role in the founding of both the United Nations and later NATO. Britain, he wrote in 1942, needed to be “inspired with a sense of its own importance in any world order” and plan proactively to prevent a wholesale abdication of influence within the international system. “What above all we want to avoid is creating the impression that we are a sort of ramshackle Empire … devoid of ideas, and overcome by the difficulties inherent in every proposal,” he said. “Only by making up our minds as to what it is that we really want can we hope to be the master and not the victim of events.”

Long Live Grand Strategic Thinking
The concept of grand strategy has come a long way since it was first used to describe events during the Napoleonic Wars. Originally understood as a way to think about military strategy on a large scale, it came to be seen as a way of thinking about the nature of the international system, a nation’s place within that order, and the way in which national resources might be aligned and utilized to achieve desired ends.
But in recent decades, scholars and practitioners have, at times, over-stated its capabilities while driving at ever-more complex theories about its definition and application. As a result, policymakers have come to think of it as too grandiose and too ambitious for practical purposes. Indeed, if we are to think, as Drezner, Krebs, and Schweller have argued, that grand strategy requires a “common national narrative” uncomplicated by the politics of multicultural states or postcolonial legacies, and if it can only succeed on “predictable terrain” then, by this characterization, the concept should be buried.
Grand strategy, however, is recoverable as an essential practice of statecraft provided that two fundamental changes occur.

First, the term should not be thought of as a noun, or a product. It is a way of thinking about the world that amounts to much more than the writing of elaborate strategic blueprints or the search for neat “containment”-esque slogans easily packaged for public approval. Instead, grand strategic thinking should be the very essence of foreign policymaking, an approach that emphasises the need to first reflect on the nature and pace of change within the international environment and a country’s place within that system, and second, to act in a way which values initiative and innovation, as opposed to reaction and listlessness. Its crucial ingredient is a “historical sensibility” — that is, an informed understanding of the nature and pace of change in the international environment — because only with this deep foundation is it possible to craft a set of durable policies that are suitably responsive to the changeability of any present set of conditions, but without being thrown off long-term goals by the gusts and eddies of short-term crises.

Second, and crucially, senior policymakers, especially those who are elected, must see value in the process of grand strategic thinking. The realities of modern policymaking which Lord Ricketts has highlighted — crisis management, the focus on campaigning rather than governing, and the rapid and devolved state of political communication — must not negate the benefits which come from longer-term thinking. Importantly, to forego such focus and replace it with “incremental” or “decentralised” approaches is to sacrifice a degree of agency which, for leading countries such as the United States, will subject its foreign policy to the will of other powers. It was a logic which British statesmen and diplomats of the past — from Castlereagh to Lansdowne to Jebb — understood at their core. Perhaps more consequential, however, was an innate understanding that at no time is an abdication of influence more dangerous for a leading power than in moments of perceived upheaval, when the sands of international order begin to shift in uncertain directions. Thus, for commentators and policymakers alike: bury grand strategy if you choose, but understand that, in doing so, you bury with it the very essence of statecraft.

Maeve Ryan is Lecturer in History and Grand Strategy and Co-Director of the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College London.
Andrew Ehrhardt is a postdoctoral fellow with the Centre for Grand Strategy at King’s College London.
Portions of this article have been adapted from a forthcoming chapter by John Bew, Maeve Ryan and Andrew Ehrhardt titled “Tracing the Origins of British Grand Strategy” in the Oxford Handbook of Grand Strategy, edited by Thierry Balzacq and Ronald R. Krebs.

posted for fair use

Grand Strategy Is No Silver Bullet, But It Is Indispensable - War on the Rocks

Is grand strategy too "grand" to be good? Criticisms of the concept are not new, but in recent months, several articles have sounded the death knell.

warontherocks.com

Housecarl · May 21, 2020

If they're trumpeting such a move, you have to wonder what's being kept close to the vest.....

Posted for fair use.....

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Navy Sends Subs to Sea as Message to China

The Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Alexandria (SSN 757) prepares to depart Apra Harbor as part of regularly scheduled operations in the Indo-Pacific, May 5, 2020. (U.S. Navy photo/Derek Harkins)
19 May 2020
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser | By William Cole

The Pacific Fleet Submarine Force took the unusual step this month of announcing that all of its forward-deployed subs were simultaneously conducting "contingency response operations " at sea in the Western Pacific--downplaying the notion that Navy forces have been hampered by COVID-19.

The sub force said the missions were mounted in support of the Pentagon's "free and open Indo-Pacific " policy aimed at countering China's expansionism in the South China Sea.

At least seven submarines, and likely more--including all four Guam-based attack submarines, the San Diego-based USS Alexandria and multiple Hawaii-based vessels--are part of the effort.

The action also highlights the Pentagon's desire to be flexible and unpredictable in "great power " competition with China and Russia.
"Our operations are a demonstration of our willingness to defend our interests and freedoms under international law, " Rear Adm. Blake Converse, Pacific sub force commander, who is based at Pearl Harbor, said in a May 8 release.

Attack submarines maintain an outsize stealth capability to sink ships with torpedoes, fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and conduct covert surveillance while keeping adversaries guessing their location.

The Navy recently has maintained a flotilla of warships in the Western Pacific as a show of force and proof that COVID-19 hasn't significantly degraded its capabilities, with the United States and China long trading barbs over military activities in the South China Sea and increasingly so over each other's pandemic response.

China has been accused of intensifying its occupation of man-made islands and bullying other nations in the region while much of the world has been focused on the pandemic.

Geopolitical intelligence platform Stratfor said that the U.S. and China have maintained a "robust operational pace in the South China Sea " amid heightening tensions and COVID-19--signs that point to continued escalation after the virus wanes.

When the Navy advertises the presence of its usually unseen submarines, it's often to make a point with an adversary. The Navy released a photo of the Los Angeles-class sub Alexandria transiting Apra Harbor in Guam on May 5.

As the U.S. military addresses COVID-19 at home, "we remain focused on our national security missions around the world, " Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the same day.

"Many countries have turned inward to recover from the pandemic, and in the meantime our strategic competitors are attempting to exploit this crisis to their benefit at the expense of others, " Esper said.

He accused the Chinese Communist Party of ramping up a "disinformation campaign " to shift blame for the virus and burnish its image. All the while, "we continue to see aggressive behavior by the PLA (People's Liberation Army ) in the South China Sea, from threatening a Philippine navy ship to sinking a Vietnamese fishing boat and intimidating other nations from engaging in offshore oil and gas development."

Esper said two Navy ships conducted freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea the week before "to send a clear message to Beijing that we continue to protect freedom of navigation and commerce for all nations large and small."

The guided-missile cruiser USS Bunker Hill conducted a "FONOP " in the Spratly Islands, and the destroyer USS Barry sailed twice through the Taiwan Strait and through the Paracel Islands in disputed territory that China claims as its own.

"These provocative acts by the U.S. side ... have seriously violated China's sovereignty and security interests, deliberately increased regional security risks and could easily trigger an unexpected incident, " the South China Morning Post quoted a Chinese military command saying after the Barry's Paracel passage.

The aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt has been sidelined in Guam since late March after experiencing an outbreak of the new coronavirus among its 4, 800-member crew.

U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor has been quick to note the ongoing deployment of other assets in the region, including transits of the South China Sea by the littoral combat ship USS Gabrielle Giffords, the destroyer USS Rafael Peralta sailing in the East China Sea and the destroyer USS McCampbell passing through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday.

This article is written by William Cole from The Honolulu Star-Advertiser and was legally licensed via the Tribune Content Agency through the NewsCred publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@newscred.com.

Read more: Navy Cruiser Commanding Officer Fired After 4,000-Gallon Fuel Spill
Related Topics
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WAR 05-16-2020-to-05-22-2020___THEWINDSofWAR