WAR 06-27-2015-to-07-03-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

Sorry folks, the meat world took me for a real ride yesterday....

(169) 06-06-2015-to-06-12-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...12-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(170) 06-13-2015-to-06-19-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...19-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(171) 06-20-2015-to-06-26-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...26-2015_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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For links see article source.....
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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150627/eu-iran-us-new-normal-3258704983.html

Once unheard of, US-Iran talks become the new normal

Jun 27, 11:51 AM (ET)
By BRADLEY KLAPPER and MATTHEW LEE

(AP) Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, talks to reporters during a...
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VIENNA (AP) — The top American and Iranian diplomats faced each other across a square table in a 19th century Viennese palace, the room austerely decorated and the atmosphere calm as they started the final push for a generation-defining nuclear agreement on Saturday.

Running up against a Tuesday deadline for a deal, their declarations of optimism and pledges of diligence sounded routine.

After two years of high-pressure gatherings, a sense of predictability has emerged in the negotiations between U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif.

Neither is letting the pressure show even as they and other global powers are at the cusp of an agreement that could redefine security in the Middle East and beyond for decades to come.

(AP) Satellite transmission vans stand in front of Palais Coburg where closed-door...
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Just a short while ago, a snapshot alone of these two enemies engaged in discussions on nuclear and other matters would have been a bombshell felt in capitals around the world. Now, whether or not the U.S. and its negotiating powers can clinch a pact in Austria's capital over the next several days, it's hard to imagine the tentative U.S.-Iranian rapprochement ending anytime soon.

It's become the new normal.

The U.S. and Iran are locked in ideological conflict and regional wars, from Syria's seemingly intractable cycle of violence and instability in Lebanon and Yemen to Iran's support for enemies of Israel. But the U.S. and Iran also have found common cause: aiding Iraq's government and Kurdish militia against the Islamic State group, and committing, at least publicly, to an accord that would remove the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran while ending the Islamic Republic's international isolation.

"I think it's fair to say that we're hopeful," Kerry said as talks began at Vienna's Palais Coburg. "We've a lot of hard work to do. There are some very tough issues and I think we all look forward to getting down to the final efforts here to see whether or not a deal is possible. I think everybody would like to see an agreement. But we have to work through some difficult issues."

Zarif said he agreed. "We need to work really hard in order to be able to make progress and move forward. We are determined to do everything we can to be able to make this effort possible. Of course, that depends on a lot of things and we're going to work on it."

(AP) From left, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry...
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For a relationship that was frozen after the 1979 Islamic revolution and subsequent U.S. Embassy hostage crisis, the long hours spent in nuclear negotiations clearly have helped each side build a grudging understanding of one another. Although neither will use the word trust, for the first time in decades, U.S.-Iranian ties have in some ways "normalized."

The official goal of the nuclear talks is an exchange of decade-long curbs on Iran's nuclear program for tens of billions of dollars in relief from international economic sanctions. Participants say the talks could well drag on past Tuesday's deadline.

Iran says its activity is solely designed for energy, medical and research purposes; much of the world fears it harbors nuclear weapons ambitions.

The U.S.-Iranian engagement started a couple of years ago in much more tentative fashion, with lower-level negotiators meeting in secret in the Gulf kingdom of Oman and elsewhere amid mutual suspicion.

The discussions gained steam after Hassan Rouhani's election as Iran's president behind promises to take his country on a more moderate course and end its isolation. But the outreach in each direction grew slowly, and both sides closely guarded preparations for a historic telephone call in September 2013 between Rouhani and President Barack Obama. Two months later, world powers and Iran reached the first of two interim nuclear agreements.

(AP) US Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz arrives in front of Palais Coburg where...
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Since then, the interactions between Kerry and Zarif, and the two countries' other negotiators, have expanded dramatically. They regularly chat in hotel breakfast halls before their daily discussions, hold regular calls and coordinate schedules.

Beyond nuclear matters, the top officials have included in their discussions matters related to Syria, Iraq, Yemen and other regional hot spots. The status of Americans detained or missing in Iran is another frequent topic of conversation.

At their previous meeting in May, Kerry and Zarif even bantered in front of reporters about democratic progress in Nigeria, another country engulfed by insurgency but one far removed from the battlegrounds of the Middle East.

Kerry, having just arrived in Geneva from the African nation, called the inauguration of a popularly elected president in Nigeria "very good historically for democracy." Zarif, whose government is routinely criticized by other countries and human rights groups for its democracy failings, offered his verdict: "They have serious difficulties."

But the limited snippets of public conversation often have been more personal in nature.

(AP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, left, talks to reporters alongside U.S. Under...
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In March, Kerry began a meeting by offering condolences to Rouhani after his mother died and wished the Iranians a happy Persian New Year with the traditional declaration of "Nowruz Mubarak." Later, he approached Rouhani's brother, a member of the Iranian negotiating team in Lausanne, Switzerland, and hugged him.

On some occasions, the perceived coziness that has emerged has had repercussions for the Iranians.

When Zarif was photographed walking across a Geneva bridge with Kerry, hard-liners accused him of catering to the enemy. Shortly afterward, stories appeared in Iran's press with anonymous officials talking about Zarif losing his temper with Kerry in private meetings, as if to make amends.

They also have spoken about bike riding — a regular pursuit of Kerry's during the nuclear talks until a crash last month in France that broke his leg. Zarif, who was then dealing with a recurring back issue, called Kerry to commiserate.

And the good will has spread to others in the negotiating team.

(AP) A police car passes in front of Palais Coburg where closed-door nuclear talks with...
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For example, U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz and Iran's atomic energy chief Ali Akbar Salehi, both MIT-trained physicists, have struck up their own understanding and, by all accounts, a well-functioning relationship. Salehi isn't in Vienna because of illness.

U.S. allies also aren't entirely pleased as the warming to Iran has coincided with a fraying of some of America's long-standing partnerships in the region. Washington clearly remains light years closer to Middle East allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, but their coolness or outright hostility to the Iran talks has taken a toll. For the Obama administration, it has created the strange dynamic of sometimes finding it easier to discuss nuclear matters with Tehran.

Great tension remains between the U.S. and Iran.

Only last week, many Iranian parliamentarians chanted "Death to America" as they passed legislation that would bar nuclear inspectors from visiting military sites — a key U.S. and international demand.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has delivered a series of speeches sharply denouncing U.S. intentions and tactics in the nuclear talks and on broader geopolitical matters.

In recent days, the State Department has issued reports that included condemnations of Iran for its "undiminished" support of terrorist groups and for human rights violations at home, including hanging people without due process and systematic repression.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150627/as--south_china_sea-7fa24ca5ad.html

Philippine officials say China island-building in full swing

Jun 26, 9:51 PM (ET)
By JIM GOMEZ

(AP) In this photo taken Thursday, June 25, 2015, Western Command deputy commander...
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PUERTO PRINCESA, Philippines (AP) — China is pressing ahead with the construction of artificial islands on at least two reefs that are also claimed by the Philippines in an increasingly tense territorial dispute, Filipino officials said, despite Beijing's pronouncement that some work would end soon.

Mayor Eugenio Bito-onon of Kalayaan islands, which are under Philippine control, said Friday he saw Chinese construction in full swing with many dredgers and huge cranes visible when he flew last week near Subi Reef.

It's one of at least seven reefs and atolls in the South China Sea where the U.S. and the Philippines have expressed concern that China's island-building could be used to base military planes and navy ships to intimidate other claimants, reinforce China's claim over virtually the entire area and threaten freedom of navigation in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes.

"It's full-blast construction. It's massive and incredible," Bito-onon told The Associated Press, adding that it was evident it would take months before the Chinese complete the work.

(AP) Philippine Navy Vice Admiral Alexander Lopez, center, Commander, Western Command,...
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In the mid portion of the emerging man-made island, a 3-kilometer (1.9-mile) -long landfill is taking the shape of a runway, he said.

His comments followed similar findings by the U.S. military and independent defense analysts.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said China's large-scale land reclamation projects threaten peace and stability, and called on Beijing and other claimants to freeze such activities and resolve their difference in accordance with international law.

"In both eastern Ukraine and the South China Sea, we're witnessing efforts to unilaterally and coercively change the status quo — transgressions that the United States and our allies and partners stand united against," Blinken said in remarks Friday at Center for a New American Security in Washington.

Two senior Philippine military officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to talk to the media, said that aside from Subi Reef, China's island-building has also continued on Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, based on recent military surveillance.

Chinese Embassy officials in Manila did not immediately comment.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on June 16 that the land reclamation projects on some islands and reefs "will be completed in upcoming days." However, in a sign that the developments were far from over, the ministry also said on its website that China would follow up by building infrastructure for maritime search and rescue, environmental conservation and scientific research.

Asked when the island-building would be completed, Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman Senior Col. Yang Yujun gave a vague reply to reporters Thursday, saying it "depends on the progress made on the ground."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said island construction projects "do not affect the freedom of navigation and overflight enjoyed by all countries in accordance with international law in the South China Sea."

However, a U.S. Navy plane flying near one of the artificial islands last month was told to leave the area by the Chinese military. In a separate incident several weeks ago, a Philippine air force plane was also ordered by the Chinese navy to leave the area. The incidents raised fears that China was preparing to enforce an air defense identification zone over the South China Sea, similar to one it declared over disputed Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea in 2013.

The U.S. argues that China can't use artificially constructed islands to expand its sovereignty. U.S. officials have said they were considering stepping up patrols to ensure free navigation in the contested region and have defied Beijing's warning for Washington to stay out of the Asian disputes.

"We are committed to operate safely in international waters as we believe every nation has the right to do and we look forward to operating throughout Southeast Asia," U.S. Navy Capt. Fred Kacher, who helped oversee annual exercises between U.S. and Philippine navies that ended Friday on western Palawan island, told AP.

The coastal combat ship USS Fort Worth and a P-3 Orion surveillance plane joined the gunnery and missile defense drills with Filipino counterparts in the Sulu Sea east of Palawan this week after completing patrols in the South China Sea, according to U.S. military officials.

The convergence of a growing number of military vessels from different countries has led to fears of accidental clashes and miscalculations. But a code of unplanned encounters at sea that the U.S. and China observe has helped prevent misunderstandings.

"Not a day goes by ... we don't have an encounter at sea," Kacher said, but he added that "those engagements are professional."

Still, the new strategically located islands would give China more security leeway in the disputed waters and make it difficult for U.S. forces to assert sea control, Carl Thayer of the Australian Defence Force Academy said.

"China has excised the maritime heart out of Southeast Asia," Thayer said. "This is the new normal."

---

Associated Press writer Christopher Bodeen in Beijing contributed to this report.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/ukrainian-village-caught-in-crossfire-of-war-1.354973

Ukrainian village caught in crossfire of war

By Evgeniy Maloletka
The Associated Press
Published: June 27, 2015

KRYMSKE, Ukraine — Few places along the front line in east Ukraine see regular fighting as bitter as the village of Krymske. Roads to the village have all but crumbled away under the weight of military trucks, tanks and armored personnel carriers.

For now, Krymske is in the hands of Ukrainian government forces and the volunteer battalions that fight alongside them. Somewhere in the distance is the enemy: Russian-backed separatists whose stated aim is to double the amount of territory under their control.

The whole front line is mined. Unseen tripwires litter the fields. Wandering unguardedly into the foliage risks attracting heavy machine-gun fire.

The sound of ammunition blasts is heard throughout the night. Everybody uses everything that they have: mortars, rocket launchers and heavy machine guns. These battles usually last no more than two hours, but usually less.

As the Ukrainian soldiers explain, the rebels are probing weak spots in their defensive lines.

Around an hour before light breaks, a new volley of rocket fire flies in from rebel positions. The artillery fire keeps going until 5 a.m., the shells sailing over Krymske and landing with a burst somewhere in the distance.

Ukrainians troops reply in kind, grumbling about the would-be peace agreement signed in February that bans the presence of heavy weapons from the front line.

Later in the day, we learn where the rebel shells have landed: on government checkpoint No. 29, and in the villages of Toshkivka and Novotovshkiske.


The following night, the routine repeats all over again.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.stripes.com/news/europe/marines-to-add-armor-artillery-to-black-sea-force-1.354579

Marines to add armor, artillery to Black Sea force

By Steven Beardsley
Stars and Stripes

Published: June 25, 2015

NAPLES, Italy — The Marine Corps is preparing to deploy a company-size unit equipped with tanks, armored vehicles and artillery to Bulgaria, an expansion of its Black Sea footprint meant to reassure allies and add new crisis-response options.

The first rotation of the Combined Arms Company will bring 150 Marines to the Novo Selo Training Area, Bulgaria, in September. Accompanying the unit will be four Abrams tanks, six Light Armored Vehicles and three howitzers, said Brig. Gen. Norm Cooling, deputy commander of Marine Forces Europe-Africa.

Current plans call for three consecutive six-month rotations, Cooling said, though the presence could be extended with additional funding.

The new unit will incorporate armor and heavy weapons into training the Marines already conduct with local armed forces around the Black Sea. It provides an armor element to the Marines’ crisis-response force in Moron, Spain, Cooling said.

“It will give us the opportunity to train with our NATO allies in ways we have not been able to do so far because we have not had armor,” he said.

The move is part of the broader American effort to support eastern European allies unnerved by Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula last year, its continued support for separatists in eastern Ukraine and Moscow’s growing assertiveness at sea and in air.

The unit’s deployment resembles the Army push to pre-position heavy weaponry at sites in six east European countries. Those plans call for the placement of 250 Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles and artillery in Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the three Baltic nations.

The Marine company will be attached to a battalion-size Marine unit at Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base in Romania. That unit, of about 550 Marines, includes the Black Sea Rotational Force that currently trains with regional militaries.

Marines rotating to the new Combined Arms Company will come from II Marine Expeditionary Force, out of Camp Lejeune, N.C. Funding comes through the European Reassurance Initiative, a roughly $1 billion account aimed at bulking up U.S. presence and exercises in Europe.

The company’s first task will be moving its vehicles and equipment from port in Bremerhaven, Germany, down the Continent to Bulgaria — no small logistical feat, according to Cooling.


“Anytime you’re taking forces from the United States and moving them to Europe, especially heavy forces, that is an event in of itself,” he said. “That is a training objective.”

Marine leaders have established several rotational ground-based units in Europe and the Middle East in recent years, each tailored to training or crisis response. The larger units, known as air-ground task forces, incorporate aircraft like the Harrier jet and MV-22 Osprey, as well as artillery and rifle companies.

The Corps prefers operating from U.S. Navy amphibious warships. But a high demand for those vessels, a lack of new shipbuilding in recent years and concerns over crisis hot spots in regions like North Africa has Marine leaders considering other options.

Those options include the use of tanker-style cargo ships for small Marine detachments and even the warships of several allied nations.

beardsley.steven@stripes.com
Twitter: @sjbeardsley

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
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http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi...ear-deals-alliances-to-counter-iran-1.1541448

Saudi seeks nuclear deals, alliances to counter Iran

If Iran obtains nuclear weapon, Riyadh ‘will have no option’ but to pursue deterrence policy

Published: 16:48 June 27, 2015 Gulf News
AFP

Riyadh: Saudi Arabia is pursuing its own nuclear projects and building alliances to counter Iran, which is days away from a potential atomic deal Riyadh fears could further destabilise the region.

The United States and other major powers were holding weekend talks with Iran in Vienna, aiming to finalise by Tuesday an agreement to prevent Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon.

Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia have concerns that Iran, Riyadh’s regional rival, could still be able to develop a weapon under the emerging deal to end 12 years of nuclear tensions.

They also worry Washington is not taking their concerns about Iran’s “destabilising acts” in the Middle East seriously enough.

On Wednesday, France and Saudi Arabia announced a feasibility study for building two nuclear reactors in the kingdom.

Like its neighbour the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia wants to diversify its energy sources and has plans for 16 reactors.

The Paris pact is the third nuclear accord Riyadh has signed this year.

Last week, it reached a deal with Russia on economic, technical and scientific ties for the peaceful use of atomic energy. In March, the kingdom signed a preliminary deal for nuclear cooperation with South Korea.

“Saudi Arabia is going big with its nuclear project,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a veteran journalist and an analyst who is linked to the royal family.

“Of course officially it is a peaceful project”, but the nuclear know-how could also be used to develop weapons, he said.

In March, Prince Turki Al Faisal, the kingdom’s former intelligence chief, told the BBC that whatever Iran is given under a deal with world powers, Saudi Arabia and others will want as well, potentially sparking a regional nuclear race.

Under a framework pact agreed in April, Iran will reduce the number of its nuclear centrifuges for enriching uranium, in return for a lifting of international economic sanctions.

Iran says its nuclear programme is peaceful but if Saudi Arabia feels the Iranians are continuing their quest for a nuclear weapon, Riyadh will have “no option” but to pursue its own deterrent policy, Khashoggi said.

Riyadh has both “the will and the ability” to produce nuclear weapons, Saudi analyst Nawaf Obaid, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center, wrote on CNN.com last week.

But a Saudi official told AFP the kingdom “won’t take the risk” of seeking an atomic bomb.

He said Iran’s policy of “interfering” in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon poses danger, regardless of the weapons it possesses.

“I believe much of the talk about Saudi interest in nuclear weapons is posturing,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the non-proliferation and disarmament programme at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.

He said their capability is still “rather low” and a better way to enhance Saudi security options is to partner with various Western nations.

“The French reactor deal provides another means of reassurance from Western partners of attention to Saudi interests,” Fitzpatrick said.

The nuclear agreement was among investments totalling about $12 billion finalised during the Paris visit by Deputy Crown Prince and Defence Minister Mohammed bin Salman.

Improved links with France highlight a deepening of ties between the Gulf and major powers beyond the region’s traditional ally the US.

Fitzpatrick said there is still huge distrust between Washington and Tehran but they will now have channels of communication, “which is of legitimate concern to Saudi Arabia.”

Salman’s Paris mission came a week after his trip to Russia where a military pact and several other agreements were reached alongside the nuclear deal.

Russia and Iran support Syria’s President Bashar Al Assad while Riyadh backs Sunni-led rebels in that country’s civil war.

The kingdom “has to pursue its own security independently,” and cannot take American guarantees for granted, Khashoggi said.

“We are very worried about the Iranian expansionism.... The Middle East is falling apart and no one is helping to put it back in order. Saudi Arabia somehow is dancing alone there.”

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.nwitimes.com/news/opinio...cle_3a7fbf28-480a-566c-9c97-b38cab893d4a.html

AUSTIN BAY: Meanwhile, back in North Korea

12 hours ago • Austin Bay

In an interview last year on a Texas radio station, I was asked when China would "finally do something" about North Korea's manic threats to launch a nuclear attack.

Perhaps an uneasy memory of spring 2013's revelation that North Korea had Austin, Texas, on its ICBM target list spurred the question.

Nuclear war in your hometown courtesy of North Korean Stalinists is a legitimate worry, one shared by residents of Seoul and Tokyo. Achieving a political solution that avoids violence is most desirable; a solution that promotes long-term stability and peace, even more so.

However, no one can answer "when" something will happen. The future is the Land of If, inviting speculation but defying prediction.

Washington has worked from the assumption that a nuclear war in northeast Asia, no matter how brief, would kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. The war's economic havoc would extend from cratered Seoul to Texas to Timbuktu to, well, Shanghai and Beijing. Washington assumes intelligent Chinese leaders understand that if war erupts their nation will pay a steep economic penalty. China cannot dismiss the prospect of immense loss of life and material.

The Chinese, however, reject Washington's analysis that pursuing stiff, relentless sanctions will be effective. In fact, they argue that crippling sanctions could be counterproductive. China's leaders insist the U.S. overrates China's power to force North Korea to make concessions.

The U.S., South Korea and Japan all point to the map. An effective economic sanctions regimen requires the sustained cooperation of border nations. South Korea, Russia and China border North Korea. The U.S. insists Russian and Chinese cooperation are essential.

In diplomatic terms, when it comes to North Korea, the unstoppable U.S. force collides with the immoveable Chinese object. So credit the question for expressing a blunt and understandable layman's frustration with a very dangerous and seemingly diplomatically intractable problem.

The six-nation Korean peninsula working group, consisting of Russia, China, the U.S., South Korea, North Korea and Japan, exemplifies this inertia. Though this spring diplomats began discussing a new round of talks, the six-nation group has not held a formal meeting since 2008.

China occasionally restrains North Korean saber-rattling. However, the frozen diplomatic process has allowed North Korea to acquire nuclear weapons and build ballistic missiles with near-intercontinental reach. Pyongyang routinely threatens South Korea, Japan, Hawaii and the western U.S. with nuclear immolation.

History, however, hasn't frozen. Other dangerous security issues have emerged, the most dangerous involving China. China contests Japanese control of islets in the East China Sea. China spars with Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea. The U.S. vigorously opposes China's claim to control shipping lanes in the area.

Russia, under its neo-Stalinist leader Vladimir Putin, is backing its expansionary claims with military action. Russia faces its own set of economic sanctions. Its participation in the six-nation forum is a farce.

In this increasingly suspicious and heavily armed region, it may be too late to use diplomatic means to deny North Korea nuclear weapons. The Japanese and South Korean militaries are improving their offensive capabilities. When will they "finally do something"?


Austin Bay, whose column is distributed by Creators Syndicate, has had two commercial war games published and served for four years as a consultant in wargaming at the Pentagon. He holds the rank of Colonel (Armor), retired, in the U.S. Army Reserve. The opinions are the writer's.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/the-koreas-bastion-of-cold-war-realism/

The Koreas, Bastion of Cold War Realism

A reluctant but pragmatic defense of neorealism in Northeast Asia.

By Morgan Potts
June 25, 2015

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Nuclear crises, propaganda and espionage, a clash of ideologies – the Korean peninsula is the only place in the world where the Cold War lingers. This persistence is the result of the 1953 Armistice Agreement and the apparent neorealist policies employed by North Korea. Despite the problems with neorealism and its appropriately dwindling popularity, it remains a useful lens through which to understand the conflict on the peninsula, and the defensive realist reactions on the part of China and South Korea.

Rather than asserting that realism or its offshoots are the ultimate International Relations grand theories, I suggest that neorealism remains a crucial aspect of IR security theory. The offensive realist behavior of the DPRK and the defensive realist policies of China and the South Korea serve to illustrate the unfortunate but continued significance of neorealism within international relations.

Neorealism, defined by Kenneth Waltz in 1959, holds that states are unitary rational agents acting in their perceived self-interest within a system wherein each state seeks to ensure its perpetuation and maintain a balance of power. Structure is the defining feature of the theory, with states the main actors competing within an anarchic system to maintain their power and stability. The modern East Asian regional complex has security dynamics very similar to those that prevailed in the Cold War during the second half of the 20th century. Because the Korean War concluded with an armistice agreement and not a peace treaty, the Cold War on the peninsula has effectively continued, producing a subsequent nuclear proliferation; the crisis has only escalated since the DPRK announced in May 2009 that it would no longer abide by the armistice. As during the Cold War, foreign relations in the region are based on allegedly rational cost-benefit analyses of war and executing the appropriate policies. The focus of North-East Asian states has been on classic security dilemma proliferation and maintaining a balance of power to avoid war.

Just as during the 20th century Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., the objective of each actor is not to engage in war and suffer its costs and consequences; rather each state is more interested in preventing war and maintaining regional stability and their spheres of hegemony. This loosely follows the balance of power security model, which holds that: all states are power-seeking; states ultimately seek hegemony over their system; and that other states in the system will attempt to block those bids for hegemony. However, the regional system of East Asia is different from the Cold War bipolarity; instead, it has a multi-polar dynamic, in which China, South Korea, and the U.S. compete for regional hegemony. Actors optimally try to have good relations with the other players or minimally try to avoid hostile relations; and actors try to prevent threateningly close cooperation between the other actors. This logic is reflected in the defensive realist policies of China and South Korea, while North Korea has taken a more offensive power-seeking approach.

The DPRK Strategy

Offensive realism is the strategy being pursued by the DPRK, keeping John Mearsheimer’s brand of realism relevant in contemporary IR theory. This theory dictates that states seek to maximize power through increased military capability, as can be seen with North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. While it remains unknown whether or not the DPRK is seeking hegemonic status in the region as an orthodox reading of offensive realist policy would suggest, it is certain that its newfound nuclear capability is the North’s only effective foreign policy tool; without nuclear weapons, North Korea would receive very little attention, which is an international embarrassment given its grave yet largely ignored human rights crises. Yet just as realism suggests, proliferation and security are central to the foreign policy of the region.

The DPRK has acted as a classical realist state in building up its nuclear arms in response to its perceived security threats. Contrary to the popular stance taken by the Western media, the perceived security threat of the U.S. is not all baseless paranoia.

The Korean War, and the U.S. threat to use nuclear weapons in defense of South Korea, understandably pushed Kim Il-sung to pursue nuclear technology early on, and after China’s denial to share its nuclear secrets after its test in 1964 an indigenous DPRK program was pursued. The fear of a U.S. confrontation was exacerbated in the late 1960s as the U.S. placed nuclear weapons on ROK soil, and there was concern in Pyongyang that North Korea’s larger communist allies would no longer provide support as it observed the Cuban missile crisis, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and the Russo-Sino split. North Korea’s security environment deteriorated with the end of the Cold War: It lost funding from the U.S.SR, South Korea flourished economically and militarily, China focused on its own economics and reached out to South Korea, and Russia recognized the ROK. Without being able to lean on the Soviets or their own declining conventional weapons program, nuclear weapons offered the most security and were therefore a logical option. Finally, with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan Iraq and the instance on regime change in Iraq, Pyongyang worried that it might be the next focus of American foreign policy and so built up its nuclear deterrent.

While the perceived security threat is the main motive behind nuclearization, domestic politics and international norms also provide motivations: The focus on external threats distracts from daily grievances and gives the Kim regime power and legitimacy, and the international symbolism of nuclearization gives the DPRK a highly effective diplomatic bargaining chip, along with the international status of a modern state.

The DPRK has not yet developed enrichment capabilities to enrich uranium on an industrial scale, and so is a limited nuclear power in the practical sense. Based on evidence from its May 2009 test, North Korea has approximately enough plutonium for four to eight primitive nuclear weapons; it is also safe to assume that they can only be launched over relatively short distances. Yet, this is enough to aggravate the international community and to concern its neighbors. With its small and militarily useless nuclear arsenal, North Korea has proven that a nuclear program does not need to be large or sophisticated to be politically effective.

Defensive Realism

Defensive realism shares the structural tenets of offensive realism; both emphasize the importance of balancing behavior in a chaotic international system. Yet defensive realism proposes that the unrestrained pursuit of power is counterbalancing and therefore not desirable. The PRC and ROK have reacted to North Korea’s offensive realism with defensive realist foreign policy aimed at balancing the DPRK’s aggressive behavior and calling for restraint. It must be noted that their policy motives also include suspicions about Japan, the U.S., and each other, as well as a wide range of domestic considerations, but that non-proliferation is the driving motive behind the PRC and ROK’s regional foreign policy.

The most pressing concern from the region is a conflict between Pyongyang and Seoul or Tokyo; the desire to avoid such a clash is what drives relations between North Korea and its neighbors. Second to this is avoiding the potential disasters of regime change or collapse: These include a refugee crisis for China and South Korea; an economic crisis for Seoul should it absorb the North in an attempt at reunification; an economic crisis for China as the unstable region experiences capital flight; and the unpleasant realities of dealing with a humanitarian crisis should the human rights abuses occurring in the North be stopped and rectified. Finally, the region is interested in preventing North Korea from expediting nuclear crises around the world by exporting nuclear technology. All parties realize that between the options of engagement, disengagement, and containment, the former is the most appealing because it allows for the greatest potential to control, or at least influence, Pyongyang. This cost-benefit analysis is the framework around which defensive realist policy is formed in both China and South Korea.

China is ultimately concerned with the denuclearization of North Korea. DPRK test facilities are close to the Chinese border and threaten Chinese security should an accident occur, and could already be having a negative ecological impact. More pressingly (as “hard” security concerns always trump “soft,” environmental concerns regardless of the consequential long-term ecological insecurity), the PRC does not want an expanded North Korean nuclear program that might prompt the ROK and Japan to develop nuclear weapons should they lose confidence in the U.S. nuclear umbrella. Further, the implications of accepting a DPRK nuclear program for the future of non-proliferation and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) do not bode well for global security, especially given the possibility of North Korean nuclear exports to non-state actors. Finally, China does not want North Korea to continue to nuclearize because it threatens China’s nuclear monopoly in the region. This follows classical realist security logic: China seeks balance and is most secure when it is the only nuclear power in the region, and therefore opposes attempts at nuclearization by other states.

China is also concerned about the possible collapse of a nuclearized DPRK and the potential security consequences. From a Chinese perspective, a U.S. intervention in North Korea (a likely outcome of regime collapse) would be even less appealing than a more nuclearized DPRK. Haunted by the detriment of the Korean War and bound by the 1961 Sino-DPRK Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance, China seeks to avoid military conflict on the peninsula at all costs. China also has an interest in maintaining the status quo because North Korea acts as a physical buffer by which, under different circumstances, an adversary could launch an invasion of China; Beijing remembers the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and 1940s, and the Korean War during which enemy troops were threatening China’s border. North Korea could possibly be forced to abandon its nuclear aspirations if the PRC were to impose harsh economic sanctions, but China fears that doing so would result in internal collapse of the DPRK regime.

South Korea has taken a similar defensive realist policy as China. Even following the failure of the Sunshine Policy, due in large part to the DPRK’s refusal to cooperate, the ROK has been eager to maintain peaceful if strained relations. This is mostly because South Korea has no interest in a military confrontation of any kind with the North. A conventional military conflict would certainly result in a victory for the ROK, especially with the help of the U.S. (and possibly Japan), but would devastate Seoul, which sits only 40 km from the demarcation line. Accordingly, South Korea has a sufficient deterrent under the U.S. nuclear umbrella, maintaining its defensive realist position of itself themselves without military aggression.

South Korea, like China, doesn’t want the regime in the North to collapse because it would presage a massive wave of migration. South Korea is hesitant to even discuss the possibility of managing a collapsed North Korea for fear that it would invite unwanted intervention, forever thwarting hopes for reunification. The ROK and China also share apprehensions about the potential fate of North Korea’s stockpile of nuclear weapons and technology should the North collapse.

The PRC government’s legitimacy is premised on continued economic growth; therefore the state’s economic interests are also its security interests, and China’s economic interests are deeply tied to stability in Korea. A conflict on the peninsula would damage Chinese production, foreign direct investment, liquidity, and trade, and it would aversely influence the huge Sino-South Korean trade relationship by diverting economic resources into North Korea. The PRC, with pressure from the U.S., agreed to United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions condemning North Korea along with mild economic sanctions against Pyongyang, but even the most scathing of these have been relatively benign.

In its cautious position, China also affirms that the DPRK has the right to pursue peaceful nuclear energy after it returns to the NPT, and maintains that there is no solution available other than continued dialogue between the concerned parties. The PRC is also allied with the DPRK for political reasons, but their historic communist connection has been tested by what Beijing views as Pyongyang’s insolence and incendiary rhetoric: the fraternal relationship is tense as the big brother finds the younger one’s international temper tantrums a treat to the security and prosperity of the region.

Like China, the legitimacy of the ROK government is partially based on economic growth, and the security of the state depends to some extent on continued economic prosperity. Unsurprisingly, the North was adamantly opposed to the Sunshine Policy’s principle of reciprocity though it continued the opportunistic exploitation of it. North Korea desperately needs the economic aid and wants assurance that North-South relations include aid and assured security. South Korean economic concerns have escalated with the increased North-South animosity of the Lee administration, culminating in the March 2010 sinking of the Cheonan in the Yellow Sea and again highlighting the security issues of the region.

China and South Korea have a shared security interest in preventing war on the Korean peninsula and avoiding a DPRK regime change, employing similar policies based on realist thinking. While North Korea behaves in an offensive realist manner as it nuclearizes in an attempt to accumulate and display power, the PRC and ROK have responded with defensive realist policies aimed at maintaining stability on the Korean peninsula with the intention of avoiding undesired conflict. This case study provides evidence that classical realism remains a fundamental aspect of IR and security theory, and has not declined since the end of the Cold War; states continue to act in their perceived self-interest with an emphasis on state security and power relations. The ongoing nuclear crisis also holds significant implications for the future of global non-proliferation and global security as rogue states and non-state actors acquire nuclear technology.

Morgan Potts is an assistant editor at Sino-NK, and a production editor at the British Association for Korean Studies.

 

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http://thediplomat.com/2015/06/chinas-hd-981-oil-rig-returns-to-disputed-south-china-sea-waters/

China's HD-981 Oil Rig Returns, Near Disputed South China Sea Waters

In an unexpected development, China¡¯s Haiyang Shiyou 981 oil rig is back in contested waters.

By Ankit Panda
June 27, 2015

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Reports began emerging in the Vietnamese media on Thursday that China¡¯s Haiyang Shiyou 981 (HD-981) oil rig¡ªthe centerpiece of last summer¡¯s clashes between Vietnam and China¡ªwas being redeployed off the coast of China¡¯s Hainan Island, in waters where the disputed exclusive economic zones (EEZs) of Vietnam and China overlap and west of the disputed Paracel Islands (known as the Xisha Islands in China). Vietnamese reports, citing a China Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) announcement, noted that the rig was deployed to the coordinates of 17¡ã03¡¯75¡¯¡¯ North and 109¡ã59¡¯05¡¯¡¯ East, approximately 120 nm from Vietnam¡¯s coast, 63 nm from China¡¯s Hainan Island coast, and 87 nm from the nearest Island in the Paracels (mapped below).

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Source: Google Maps

According to China¡¯s MSA, the rig will explore for oil and gas from June 25 to August 20. The MSA¡¯s announcement, pictured below, warns nearby vessels that sailing ¡°within 2000 metres of [HD-981]¡± is ¡°prohibited.¡± According to one Vietnamese maritime law enforcement source who spoke to Tuoi Tre, Vietnamese authorities are closely watching HD-981¡äs movement. M. Taylor Fravel, a U.S.-based China scholar, noted that ¡°EEZ overlap at that location is about 100 percent; both have active [oil] blocks on their side.¡± The coordinates given by China¡¯s MSA suggest that HD-981 is closest to Vietnamese oil block 115, but the oil rig remains closer to China than Vietnam. Greg Poling, an analyst working on the South China Sea at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that the coordinates provided by China¡¯s MSA suggest that the rig is not yet within disputed waters (see map below).

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Courtesy: Greg Poling/Center for Strategic and International Studies

China¡¯s move represents a re-ignition of Sino-Vietnamese tensions less than a year after China withdrew HD-981 after a series of clashes with Vietnam. As I wrote last month, in a reflection on the clashes a year after they began, China¡¯s HD-981 deployment set off widespread anti-China protests in Vietnam, leading to attacks on Chinese citizens and business in the country. Additionally, China¡¯s deployment of a mix of civilian, coast guard, and People¡¯s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) vessels with HD-981 inflamed tensions further.


Though it¡¯s often unwise to read too far into the tea leaves on the timing of China¡¯s moves in the South China Sea, this particular incident merits a closer look. Barely two weeks have passed since China began a ¡°charm offensive¡± of sorts prior to the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. East of the Paracels, in the Spratly Islands, China announced that most of its land reclamation work had been completed and would stop (though construction would continue). My colleagues and I here at The Diplomat took that to mean that we would see a period of relative calm, probably due to the presentation of oral arguments at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague on the Philippines¡¯ case against China but certainly given Chinese President Xi Jinping¡¯s scheduled September visit to the United States.

The timing is also telling in the wake of last year¡¯s episode involving HD-981. As some readers may recall, China actually withdrew HD-981 earlier than anticipated last year, moving to deescalate the crisis shortly after Chinese State Councilor Yang Jiechi visited Hanoi. As my colleague Shannon wrote then, the early removal of HD-981 certainly didn¡¯t indicate that China was acquiescing to Vietnam¡¯s demands or that it was relinquishing its right to operate in the disputed waters. One theory was that China may have been taking advantage of the impending typhoon season in the South China Sea to deescalate the crisis. The dates presented for HD-981¡äs exploration this time around seem to align with that reading. Depending on how events proceed between China and Vietnam in the coming weeks, Beijing may see this one out all the way through August 20.

Between China¡¯s continuing construction activities in the Spratlys, the impending oral arguments in The Hague, increasing U.S. freedom of navigation operations, Japan¡¯s increasing involvement, and now renewed tensions off the Paracels, the summer of 2015 could be the hottest one yet in the South China Sea. We¡¯ll be keeping a close eye on the next developments here at The Diplomat.

 

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150627/ml-islamic-state-99f685b6e8.html

Activists: IS fighters kill 200 civilians in Syrian town

Jun 27, 3:46 PM (ET)
By HAMZA HENDAWI

(AP) Medics carry a wounded man that arrived from the Syrian town of Kobani into a...
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BEIRUT (AP) — Islamic State fighters who launched a surprise attack on a Syrian border town massacred more than 200 civilians, including women and children, before they were killed or driven out by Kurdish forces, activists said on Saturday.

Kurdish activist Mustafa Bali, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Kurdish official Idris Naasan put at 40-50 the number of elite IS fighters killed in the two days of fighting since the militants sneaked into the town of Kobani before dawn on Thursday.

Clashes, however, continued to the south and west of the predominantly Kurdish town on the Turkish border on Saturday, they said, although the fighting in the south quietened down by nightfall.

Naasan said 23 of the city's Kurdish defenders were killed in the fighting, but the Observatory put the number at 16. The discrepancy could not immediately be reconciled, but conflicting casualty figures are common in the aftermath of major fighting.

(AP) People standing on the Turkish side of the border with Syria, on the outskirts of...
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"Kobani has been completely cleared of Daesh, and Kurdish forces are now combing the town looking for fighters who may have gone into hiding," Bali, using the Arabic acronym for the IS, told The Associated Press by telephone from Kobani. The official Syrian news agency, SANA, also reported that Kobani has been cleared of IS fighters.

The more than 200 civilians killed in the last two days include some who perished in IS suicide bombings, including one at the border crossing with Turkey, but they were mostly shot dead in cold blood, some in their own homes, the activists said.

"They were revenge killings," Rami Abdurrahman, the observatory's director, told the AP.

Others were caught in the cross-fire as gun battles raged in the town's streets or were randomly targeted by IS snipers on rooftops.

Bali, Abdurrahman and Naasan all said the number of Kobani civilians and IS fighters killed was likely to rise as rescue teams continue to search neighborhoods where the fighting took place.

(AP) People standing on the Turkish side of the border with Syria, on the outskirts of...
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Massacring civilians is not an uncommon practice by the Islamic State group, whose men have slaughtered thousands in Syria and neighboring Iraq over the last year, when its fighters blitzed through large swathes of territory and declared a caliphate that spans both nations.

The Islamic State group often posts on social media networks gruesome images of its fighters executing captives as part of psychological warfare tactics designed to intimidate and inspire desertions among their enemies. Last week, it posted one of its most gruesome video clips, showing the execution of 16 men it claimed to have been spies. Five of the men were drowned in a cage, four were burned inside a car and seven were blown up by explosives.

The killing of so many civilians in Kobani, according to Abdurrahman, was premeditated and meant by the Islamic State to avenge their recent defeats at the hands of Kurdish forces.

The Western-backed Kurdish forces have emerged as a formidable foe of the extremist group, rolling them back in the north and northeast parts of Syria, where the Kurds are the dominant community, as well as in northern Iraq, where they have also made significant gains against the IS.

Kobani has become a symbol of Kurdish resistance after it endured a months-long siege by the Islamic State group before Kurdish forces, backed by U.S.-led coalition airstrikes, broke through and drove the militants out in January.

Thursday's surprise attack on the town and a simultaneous one targeting the remote northeastern town of Hassakeh came two days after the Islamic State group called for a wave of violence during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, a time of fasting and piety that is now in its second week.

"You Muslims, take the initiative and rush to jihad, rise up you mujahideen everywhere, push forward and make Ramadan a month of calamities for the nonbelievers," IS spokesman Abu Mohammed al-Adnani said in an audio message released Tuesday.

In what also appears to be a response to that call, terror attacks took place Friday across three continents: shootings in a Tunisian beach resort that left 39 people dead, an explosion and a beheading in a U.S.-owned chemical warehouse in southeast France and a suicide bombing by an Islamic State affiliate at a Shiite mosque in Kuwait that killed at least 27 worshippers.

The attacks also came after the group suffered a series of setbacks over the past two weeks, including the loss earlier this week of the Syrian border town of Tal Abyad — one of the group's main points for bringing in foreign fighters and supplies.

Fighting is continuing in Hassakeh for the third successive day, with government and Kurdish forces separately fighting IS militants who have seized several neighborhoods in the mostly Kurdish town, according to the Observatory. Forces loyal to embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad have brought in reinforcements from the town of Deir el-Zour to the south while the Syrian air force pounded IS positions inside the town.

 

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150626/af-boko-haram-c698012907.html

Bomber who ran away feeds fears extremists using captives

Jun 26, 12:23 PM (ET)
By HARUNA UMAR and IBRAHIM ADULAZIZ

(AP) In this Monday June, 22, 2015 file photo, People gather at the site of a...
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MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (AP) — A teenage girl strapped with explosives ran away from a crowded mosque this week, killing only herself and cementing suspicions that Boko Haram is using unwilling captives in its terror campaign in northeast Nigeria.

The girl took off after her companion blew up in an explosion that killed 30 people on Monday in Maiduguri, the biggest city in northeast Nigeria, witnesses and a mortuary worker said.

"In the confusion of the blast, the other girl just ran away and only exploded when she was far from the crowd," said fishmonger Idi Idrisa.

It was unclear if the teenager fled in fright, fear or on purpose, but this and other bungled bombings have many believing that Nigeria's home-grown Boko Haram Islamic extremist group is using some of its thousands of kidnap victims as unwilling weapons.

(AP) In this Monday, June 22, 2015 file photo, debris at the site of a suicide bomb...
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A military bomb disposal expert has told The Associated Press that most bombs carried by girls and women have remote detonation devices, meaning the carrier cannot control the explosion.

The U.N. children's agency last month reported an "alarming spike" in suicide bombings by girls and women, saying the number of reported suicide attacks had jumped to 27 in the first five months of this year compared to 26 for all of last year.

On Monday, a girl who looked no more than 12 years old detonated explosives that killed 10 people and injured 30 in a crowded market at Wagir village in northeastern Yobe state, according to truck driver Malam Usaini Jibril.

This past week, at least 85 people have been reported killed in suicide bombings and village attacks blamed on Boko Haram. Hundreds of homes have been burned.

Victims include five villagers killed in a cross-border raid in the Diffa region of neighboring Niger.

Niger's army responded with an attack that killed 16 suspected Boko Haram militants and captured 32, according to a government statement.

"The war against Boko Haram is a non-negotiable political goal," Niger's government said in a statement read on state television Thursday night. "The fight against Boko Haram will give us our collective freedom."

The United States has condemned the attacks and promised support for a multinational army that this year has driven Boko Haram from a large swath of northeast Nigeria where it had set up a so-called Islamic caliphate under its harsh version of Shariah law.

But the multinational fight has been bogged down with Chad claiming it has had to retake some towns two and three times because Nigerian troops have not arrived to secure them.

Underscoring those failures, the U.S. Embassy this week said "We encourage the government of Nigeria to take steps to secure and govern liberated areas by filling in behind military successes with police and civilian administration."

Boko Haram says Western-style democracy has brought only corruption and inequality to oil-rich but impoverished Nigeria and that only Islamic rule offers a just solution in the country of about 170 million people almost equally divided between Christians and Muslims.

---

Abdulaziz reported from Yola, Nigeria. Associated Press reporters Dalatou Mamane in Niamey, Niger and Michelle Faul in Lagos, Nigeria, contributed to this report.

 

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Mali: Gunmen attack military camp near Mauritania border

Jun 27, 3:53 PM (ET)
By BABA AHMED

BAMAKO, Mali (AP) — Gunmen attacked a military camp in western Mali on Saturday, killing two soldiers as residents of a nearby village hid in their homes, officials and witnesses said.

The attack began at around 5 a.m. (0500 GMT, 1 a.m. EDT) at the camp near the village of Nara, which is about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from the border with Mauritania, army spokesman Col. Souleymane Maiga said.

"The army repelled the attackers who had entrenched themselves in the village," Maiga said. "Until around 9 a.m. there were exchanges of fire between the army and the assailants in the streets of the village."

In addition to the two soldiers killed, seven others were injured and the bodies of nine attackers were recovered, Maiga said.

Soldiers were patrolling the village Saturday afternoon looking for assailants hiding out there, said Nara resident Boughambi Traore.

Civilians took shelter as soon as they heard the fighting, said Foussein Keita, another resident.

Maiga said the assailants were unknown. But a source in Mali's intelligence service, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the gunmen were Islamic militants from the Peul ethnic group and were linked to Ansar Dine, one of the groups that took control of northern Mali following a military coup in 2012.

A French-led military intervention launched in 2013 scattered the Islamic extremists, though northern Mali remains insecure and in recent months violence has extended further south. In March a masked gunman opened fire in a restaurant popular with foreigners in Mali's capital, Bamako, killing five people.

Earlier this month Mali's main coalition of Tuareg separatist rebels signed a peace agreement with the government.

 

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http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/how-hypersonic-missiles-push-america-china-towards-war-13205

How Hypersonic Missiles Push America and China towards War[1]

"Hypersonic weapons add to the complexity and elusiveness of the escalatory dynamics and this is something both sides will need to plan for."

Eleni G. Ekmektsioglou [2]
Tweet [3]
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Hypersonic weapons can achieve speeds over five times faster than the speed of sound (Mach 5) and they are the latest version of precision guided munitions (PGM) that make up part of the larger family of long-range strike weapons systems.

In the United States, hypersonic weapons are pursued in the context of the conventional prompt global strike (CPGS) commonly defined by officials [4] as a technology of “high-precision conventional weapons capable of striking a target anywhere in the world within one hour’s time.” Outside the United States, states such as China or Russia have been pursuing this promising technology in secrecy. Therefore, we have little information regarding the stage of development the Russians or Chinese have achieved.

Nevertheless, what became evident from the short period that separated the two Chinese tests [5] is the emphasis given to a rapid-paced development and the strategic value of the new weapon for China. Shorter-range hypersonic weapons appear to be a more feasible technology, while global-range weapons are a goal that is still far from being reached. Nevertheless, states invest heavily in both variants, and it looks like operational capability is only a question of time. That said and given the technology’s almost disruptive potential in terms of both range and speed, can we really claim that we have a deep understanding of the drivers as well as the consequences—operational and strategic—of hypersonic weapons? Probably not.

Starting from the drivers in the United States, the idea of developing a conventional global strike goes back to a RAND report from the 1970s that suggested the mating of conventional warheads to nuclear delivery systems (ICBMs). The program gained traction again during the Bush administration in the highly uncertain strategic environment after 9/11, while the Obama administration has appeared to be equally eager to invest in the new weapons system.

It needs to be noted that no administration explicitly articulated the missions of CPGS. The program’s versatile and multifaceted operational potential allows for funding requests without specifically advocating a concrete mission. Nevertheless, it was mainly the strategic environment that dictated strategic thinking regarding CPGS missions in each period. During the Bush administration, CPGS was primarily directed toward counterterrorism operations targeting counter-proliferation efforts or gatherings of terrorists. Conventional long-range, prompt strikes can more effectively deter terrorists, since the U.S. threat is more capable and materially implementable (deterrence by denial).

With regard to rogue states, CPGS could offer feasible preemptive options that would prevent the adversary from being able to use its forces in the first place. The new term that arose from this strategic thinking is coined “counternuclear” strikes [4]. Counternuclear is broader and more comprehensive than counterforce since it targets nuclear warheads, C4ISR systems as well as production and storage facilities. Finally, CPGS, after the Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test in 2007, was also considered as a plausible option [4] against missile strikes that aim to degrade America’s C4ISR systems (decapitation strategies).

The Obama administration continued the policy as it was articulated in the QDRs of 2001 and 2006 with further investments in Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) and CPGS. However, the focus appears to be shifting from time-urgent and pop-up targets to missions that require the high survivability of weapons that need to travel in environments where access is denied. Hence, the 2010 [6]QDR [6] talks about possible combat scenarios in theaters of operations characterized by A2/AD components.

The Obama administration goes so far as to advocate for the development of a family of long-range systems at the heart of which lies the CPGS program. Setting aside the austere fiscal environment, from the long-range family of systems, hypersonic versions of CPGS appear to be the fastest and most survivable option with no need of forward deployment. It becomes obvious that especially after hypersonic weapons survived sequestration and their plethora of testing failures notwithstanding, U.S. civilian and military circles appear to be deeply invested in the further development of these systems. Any doubt regarding further funding of the program evaporated after the Chinese tests in January and August 2014, which confirmed the pursuit of similar systems by a U.S. peer competitor. Congressmen Buck McKeon (R-CA), Randy Forbes (R-VA), and Mike Rogers (R-AL) expressed their concern in a letter [7] stating that “other competitor nations push toward military parity with the United States.” Following the Chinese testing, Congress prioritized hypersonic weapons programs, with raises in funding [8] and testing. In fact, Congress allocated $70.7 million for FY15, specifically supporting the Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon (AHW).

Moving to China, U.S. policies and investments in BMD and CPGS, even though not directly linked to Chinese capabilities, created gaps in perceptions [9] and exacerbated fears about U.S. intentions to contain China. According to Chinese experts, a few main reasons lurking behind Chinese concerns were the traditionally small size of its nuclear arsenal and questionable second-strike capability. Specifically, Chinese experts talk about the scenario of China being subject to American coercion, a concern that is mainly due to U.S. nuclear superiority, which—married to BMD and a conventional pre-emptive strike enabled by CPGS—puts at risk the Chinese retaliatory capability.

The United States, through numerous consultations and track-two dialogues [10], tried to communicate the details of each program’s development to assuage Chinese fears. Most U.S. documents, in trying to reassure China and Russia, also refer to the development of both BMD and CPGS in small numbers,since a small development is deemed unthreatening to both arsenals. China, on the other hand, felt deeply influenced by U.S. actions, expressing fears regarding the survivability of its nuclear forces in the scenario of a conventional disarming first strike.

Another part of the confusion can be attributed to Chinese fears, which skyrocketed after President Barack Obama’s Prague speech and the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR). The Chinese understood America’s decreasing reliance on nuclear weapons as being tantamount to a greater reliance on conventional weapons—especially CPGS—where the United States enjoys an undeniable superiority. Thus, the Chinese regard President Obama’s vision for a nuclear-free world as a trap that aims at containing China’s rise to power.

With regard to Chinese hypersonic weapons, their development is mainly driven by the objective of penetrating American ballistic missile defenses. For China, hypersonic weapons targeting forces that try to enter its theater of operations, in the event of a regional conflict, breaks the American advantage in both offensive (CPGS) and defensive (BMD) systems. In late 2010, the Chinese test of the DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), with a maneuverable warhead and range at around 1,500 km, took most U.S. experts and high echelon officers by surprise. Pundits characterized the missile as a game changer that will have profound consequences on the regional strategic and diplomatic dynamics. Apart from the missile’s evident mission to target aircraft carriers, the missile is of great importance because it is China’s stepping stone from a ballistic technology to a hypersonic weapon and a CPGS capability, according to a Project 2049 report [11]. China’s tests of its WU-14 hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) in January and August 2014 follow the lines of development as described by Mark Stokes in the above mentioned report. Experts [12] who follow modernization of the Chinese armed forces stressed China’s commitment to hypersonic technology given the short period separating the two tests.

Having referred to the drivers of hypersonic weapons development, the question regarding their impact at the operational and strategic level still begs for an answer. Hypersonic weapons appear to be what both sides are after in terms of seizing the initiative and surgical targeting of key points that lie at the heart of the adversary’s war effort. Surprise at the tactical level as well as preemption in case of an ASAT strike appear to be feasible missions for hypersonic weapons, which could be aimed at crippling the enemy’s C4ISR systems. Thus, hypersonic weapons could be a valuable addition in both A2/AD and counter-A2/AD strategies. In the first option, these systems’ long ranges help the United States avoid entering the contested zone. Strikes from outside the theater of operations would pose no risk for U.S. forces.

For the second strategy, counter-intervention missions could be executed successfully with hypersonic weapons—the accuracy and speed of which penetrate BMDs, adding another layer to the Chinese strategy of keeping U.S. forces outside the theater of operations in accordance with the “using the land to control the sea” concept Andrew S. Erickson and David D. Yang [13] stressed in 2009.

Both strategic perspectives would be based on firm ground if the East Asian context did not lend itself to what Herman Kahn calls “two-sided escalation situations.” In such a situation, no state can sufficiently claim to be capable of achieving escalation dominance where it can credibly negate its adversary’s efforts of escalating further as a response to previous actions. Even though there is a general tendency for military planners to opt for direct escalatory strategies, in a U.S.-China conflict scenario, such predetermined and rigid strategy paths might have deleterious consequences, forcing both parties into a highly escalatory conflict that could otherwise be avoided.

The main drivers behind escalation are two: firstly, hypersonic weapons are escalation prone due to their low levels of responsiveness once they are initiated, and limited capabilities for signaling given their high speed [14]. All these make a surprise attack an eventuality the other side needs to account for pushing both parties to seizing the initiative early which leaves no room for signaling and diplomacy.

Secondly, within the context of China’s “double deterrence,” according to Thomas Christensen, both nuclear and conventional ballistic forces are put under the same command. This strategic move, in essence, “manufactures” an inadvertent escalation scenario where an eventual American surgical strike against conventional systems inadvertently engages with nuclear targets. Put simply, the objective is to deter the adversary from implementing surgical strikes under the “manufactured” threat of inadvertent escalation.

In conclusion, what is the significance of all these questions for U.S. military planning and doctrines? In one sentence, both parties need to embrace the idea of “two-sided escalation situations”. Both the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) and Air-Sea Battle (now called JAM-GC [15]) seem to place the emphasis on a war-fighting concept that seeks to prevent the adversary from escalating (escalation dominance) instead of influencing its decision to escalate. In other words, military thinking so far has been dominated by the use of brute force, as Schelling would call it, instead of coercive force that leaves the final choice to the opponent. The latter would be more expedient in a regional conflict scenario where the United States faces a nuclear force while at the same time the objective at stake does not justify an all-out war effort. That said, any anti-A2/AD strategy must borrow more from a crisis-stability scenario rather than a purely war-fighting one, given that deterrence will be an important part of the war effort. Such an approach comes in tandem with an emphasis on the notion of escalation management to reinforce stability rather than escalation dominance or control, which could come with destabilizing effects. It is difficult for both sides to accept but escalation control is at least wishful thinking if not an illusion in the East Asian regional environment. Hypersonic weapons add to the complexity and elusiveness of the escalatory dynamics and this is something both sides will need to plan for.

Eleni G. Ekmektsioglou is pursuing her PhD at American University’s School of International Service. Her research focuses on the impact of military innovation on crisis management. She is a non-resident fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS.

Editor’s Note: This piece draws from the author’s work in Strategic Studies Quarterly - “Hypersonic Weapons and Escalation Control in East Asia” which can be found here [16].
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Source URL (retrieved on June 28, 2015): http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/how-hypersonic-missiles-push-america-china-towards-war-13205

Links:
[1] http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/how-hypersonic-missiles-push-america-china-towards-war-13205
[2] http://www.nationalinterest.org/profile/eleni-g-ekmektsioglou
[3] http://twitter.com/share
[4] http://carnegieendowment.org/files/cpgs.pdf
[5] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/13/hypersonic
[6] http://www.defense.gov/qdr/qdr as of 29jan10 1600.pdf.
[7] http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140115/DEFREG03/301150044/US-Officials
[8] http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/us-congress-funds-hypersonic-missile.html
[9] http://legacy.armscontrol.org/act/2009_01-02/china_us_dangerous_dynamism
[10] http://csis.org/event/us-china-strategic-nuclear-space-security-dialogue
[11] http://project2049.net/documents/chinese
[12] http://freebeacon.com/national-secu...t-test-of-new-ultra-high-speed-missile/print/
[13] http://www.public.navy.mil/usff/sample/Pages/Using-the-Land-to-Control-the-Sea--Chinese-Analyst.pdf
[14] http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1258.html
[15] http://nationalinterest.org/feature/rip-air-sea-battle-12147
[16] http://www.au.af.mil/au/ssq/digital/pdf/Summer_2015/ekmektsioglou.pdf
[17] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/china
[18] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/america
[19] http://www.nationalinterest.org/tag/hypersonic-weapons
[20] http://www.nationalinterest.org/topic/security

 

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http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20150624-precision-strike.html

Posted: June 24, 2015 11:43 AM

CSBA Analysts: Change in Mix, Employment of Precision-Strike Weapons Needed to Meet Future Scenarios

By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor

ARLINGTON, Va. — The U.S. military will need to change the mix of standoff and direct-attack precision weapons if it is to maintain affordable superiority in strike warfare, analysts said.

Speaking to reporters in a June 23 pre-briefing about a new report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank, defense analysts Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark discussed their new report “Sustaining America’s Precision Strike Advantage.”

The analysts said the traditional U.S. advantage in strike weapon capabilities could diminish unless actions are taken to counter the increasing capabilities of potential nation-state adversaries and even non-state adversaries, who are working to attack every step in the U.S. kill chain: find, fix, track, target, engage and assess.

Gunzinger said that the United States needs to have multiple precision weapons in order “to assure that we achieve the effects that we want.”

The revolution in precision weapons had allowed the U.S. military to reduce the number of strike aircraft and yet achieve a ratio of weapon probability of arrival to target of less than 1.5 to 1. But Gunzinger notes a downturn in that ratio is likely in the future, and it maybe already the case.
He said the United States would need 500 strike aircraft to carry out a 30-day campaign against a near-peer adversary.

“We don’t have the capability to do that today,” Gunzinger said.

He said the United States has alternatives to the current state: new operational concepts such as increasing salvo size and new technologies that increase probability of arrival of the weapon on target.

“Individual weapons are not going to arrive at intended targets,” said Clark, who noted that sophisticated adversaries have or will have the capability to intercept, divert, confuse or decoy precision weapons. “In the past, we assumed that they go there.”

“Increasing the size of the salvo” is one option U.S. planners have, Clark said, in overwhelming enemy defenses. This option would require launch platforms with large payloads of relatively cheaper weapons. Calling the concept “tunneling,” he said waves of cheap weapons or decoys could occupy enemy defenses and allow higher-capability weapons to get through to the target.

Clark also proposed collaboration between precision weapons, noting that “every aim point has to get a large number of weapons launched at it. I can do that more efficiently if the weapons could talk to each other.”

The analysis by Gunzinger and Clark determined that the “sweet spot” for precision strike weapons is the 100 to 400 nautical-mile-range standoff weapon. Currently in the U.S. inventory, the Air Force’s Joint Air-to-Surface Strike Munition is the only one that falls within those parameters, small enough for a weapons bay and “pretty cheap per nautical mile.”

“We’ve got a bad mix of weapons,” Clark said, noting that the direct-attack weapons are of relatively short range and that most standoff weapons have long range but are more expensive. He suggested that some direct attack munitions could be modified with rocket motors to extend their range.

Gunzinger listed other options for precision weapons, such as brilliant submunitions and warheads that used radio frequency energy to neutralize defense systems. Energy-dense explosives or boosted penetrators could take out buried or hardened targets. Small loitering weapons or miniaturized precision-guided munitions on the low end and hypersonic missiles on the high end also could complicate enemy defenses and countermeasures.

Less than 0.5 percent of the defense budget is devoted to precision-guided weapons, the analysts said, and that most of the increase in the 2016 budget submission is dedicated toward direct-attack weapons.

The analysts also saw promise in directed energy weapons such as lasers and high-powered microwaves for offensive purposes.

In the report, Gunzinger and Clark recommend that the U.S. military:

Place greater emphasis on long-range strike operations.
Shift from direct attacks to short-range standoff strikes.
Adopt new priorities for short-range aircraft, such as counter-air and launching small strikes and raids.
Adopt dispersed basing.
Free magazine capacity for offensive strike precision-guided munitions.
Develop the ability to reload vertical-launch systems at sea.
Ensure that precision-guided munitions are capable against land or sea targets.
Modify existing short-range standoff munitions with more standoff range.
Take advantage of miniaturization of seekers and warheads to increase salvo potential.
Add survivability features to precision-guided weapons.
Add self-protective jammers to weapons and develop inexpensive decoys.
Enable more weapons to be redirected while in flight.
Develop weapons that can attack multiple targets.
Develop smaller, more lethal warheads.

 

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http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/28/us-yemen-security-borders-idUSKBN0P804T20150628

World | Sun Jun 28, 2015 2:00am EDT
Related: World, Yemen

Saudi soldier killed in cross-border shelling from Yemen

DUBAI

A Saudi soldier was killed and another wounded by shelling from forces loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh and Houthi rebels near the Yemen border, Saudi state news agency SPA said on Sunday.

The shelling on Saturday morning was directed at security guards in the southwestern Saudi border area of Jizan, according to a statement by the Interior Ministry on SPA.

An alliance of Gulf Arab nations has been bombing Houthi militia and army units loyal Saleh, which control much of Yemen, since March 26 in what they say is an attempt to restore exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Saudi forces and the Houthis have been trading fire across the border since the Arab alliance began its operations.

On Saturday, Houthi fighters fired missiles at storage tanks in an Aden refinery, starting a large fire, and 14 people were killed in clashes between the Houthis and the Saudi-led forces near the southern port city, witnesses and residents said.

(Reporting by Ahmed Tolba; Writing by Rania El Gamal; Editing by Paul Tait)

 

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http://www.todayszaman.com/diplomac...es-at-border-against-isil-advance_392125.html

Report: Turkish gov’t orders military to take measures at border against ISIL advance

June 27, 2015, Saturday/ 15:14:31/ TODAYSZAMAN.COM / ISTANBUL

The Turkish military has been instructed to take measures against possible advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) along a 90-kilometer stretch of Turkey's border with Syria, according to a news report on Saturday.

The report, published in the Hürriyet newspaper, said the government has ordered the military to take “every measure” to prevent ISIL seizure of the territory to the west of the town of Marea, where two strategic border crossings between Turkey and Syria -- Öncüpınar/Bab al-Salam and Cilvegözü/Bab al-Hawa -- are located. The report, quoting unnamed sources, said Ankara now views possible ISIL advances in the area to the west of Marea, a town in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo, as a security threat.

The military, although concerned about potential risks, is now drafting plans that include the dispatch of ground troops to Jarablus, which is on the border with Turkey, and the creation of a 10-kilometer safe zone inside Syria. A further 40-to-50-kilometer area beyond the initial safe zone might also be secured by howitzer fire. At least 12,000 troops might be involved in such an operation, Hürriyet said.

According to Hürriyet, the government gave the order after a series of talks hosted by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the wake of the seizure of the town of Tal Abyad on the Turkish-Syrian border by Syrian Kurdish forces earlier this month. The military, concerned about risks, refused to receive orders verbally and insisted on written instructions.

The military warned that the execution of such an order carries risks, including situations where troop deployment to Syria, bombing ISIL positions or confrontation with the Syrian air forces that support ISIL advances would be inevitable. The Turkish military might also come under attack from ISIL, Syrian Kurds or Syrian government forces, according to the report.

An official said if measures successfully lead to the thwarting of ISIL and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which currently controls the area between Marea and the Kurdish Afrin region to the further west, manages to drive ISIL to Jarablus, the entire Syrian border stretching from Iraq to Yayladağı in Hatay will be under either FSA or Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) control.

“Thanks to this, the fight against both ISIL and [Syrian President Bashar] al-Assad will significantly gather momentum,” the official was quoted as saying. The military, on the other hand, remains concerned about the risks. Military officials insist that Turkey must present strong reasons for a military action in the Syrian territory, not just concerns about possible developments such as the emergence of a Kurdish state in northern Syria, the report said.

They are also worried that military action in Syria could pit Turkey against the United States, Russia and Iran if it is done without prior consultations with them, and could also spark military confrontations with the PYD, ISIL and the Syrian government's forces. They also say the Syrian regime must be consulted so that a possible Turkish operation in Syria does not violate international law. The report comes amid growing speculation that the government seeks a military incursion in Syria to consolidate support ahead of a planned early election.

Twitter whistleblower Fuat Avni wrote in the early hours of Saturday that President Erdoğan is concerned about what the anonymous account alleged to be secret coalition efforts between the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and that a Syrian war appears to be the only way to create chaos that will lead to increased support for the AK Party. Fuat Avni also predicted that there will be a series of police operations against al-Qaeda cells in Turkey on Saturday morning to create the impression that Turkey has embarked on a fight against radical elements and ISIL.

Several people were detained in early morning raids in several districts of İstanbul hours after Fuat Avni's tweets, although the authorities did not announce why the operation, carried out by police anti-terrorism teams, was carried out.

Security wall on border to be erected

Also on Saturday, a separate news report said the Turkish government plans to build a security wall along the Syrian border. The report in the Milliyet newspaper said the 3.5-meter-high concrete wall will be built along the 911-kilometer border to prevent illegal crossings into Turkey from Syria, including those of militants of "terrorist groups," a statement that apparently referred to ISIL.

Wire fences will also be placed behind the wall, along with security lights and cameras. Milliyet said the Interior Ministry has sent a total of TL 20 million (about $7.5 million) to the governors' offices of the border provinces of Gaziantep, Kilis, Şanlıurfa and Hatay for the implementation of the border security plan.

 

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https://en-maktoob.news.yahoo.com/deadly-clashes-erupt-between-houthis-rivals-072343853--spt.html

Deadly clashes erupt between Houthis and rivals
Al Jazeera – 1 hour 6 minutes ago

At least 21 people have died in Yemen after clashes between Houthi fighters and forces loyal to exiled President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi in the cities of Aden and Taiz, reports say.

Witnesses said 14 were killed when Houthi forces launched an assault on a major oil refinery in Aden on Saturday, firing missiles at storage tanks and starting a large fire that billowed over parts of the city, Reuters news agency reported.

Video footage showed black smoke over the facility in Aden's Buraiqah district on Saturday.

Earlier, an Al Jazeera source confirmed the attack, and reported that at least one person - an employee at the refinery - was killed.

Both the port and the refinery in Aden are controlled by pro-government fighters, and the area has seen fierce clashes between rival forces.

To the north in Taiz, fighting left at least seven Houthi fighters dead and 16 others injured, as the Iran-allied group targeted residential neighbourhoods using tanks and heavy artillery.

There were no figures available on how many fighters loyal to the Yemeni government had been killed or wounded after the clashes in the Mount Jarah district of the city.

Houthi shelling also killed a Saudi soldier and wounded another in Jizan province bordering Yemen, according to the Saudi interior ministry.

Meanwhile, a government official told AFP news agency that the Houthis also targeted a Qatari vessel carrying food supplies from Djibouti, a hub for Yemen-bound humanitarian aid, and that the attack forced it to turn back.

The Houthis have been battling the Yemeni government for months, taking control of major cities, including the capital Sanaa, and forcing Hadi into exile in neighbouring Saudi Arabia.

An Arab coalition, which includes Saudi Arabia, has launched air strikes aimed at restoring Hadi.

 

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http://www.wsj.com/articles/iran-nu...trong-political-will-says-official-1435488232

Iran Nuclear Deal Requires ‘Strong Political Will,’ Says Official
EU’s Federica Mogherini arrives in Vienna for talks ahead of June 30 deadline

By Laurence Norman
June 28, 2015 6:45 a.m. ET
1 COMMENTS

VIENNA—A nuclear deal for Iran is “tough” but doable, the European Union’s foreign policy chief said Sunday, as she arrived at the negotiations in Vienna ahead of the June 30 deadline.

Officials from both sides have already warned the talks may drag a few days past the deadline, as they scramble to resolve several important final points on the timing of sanctions relief for Iran and the strength of the monitoring regime Tehran must accept under a deal.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry rejoined the talks Saturday for the first time in a month, meeting for several hours with his Iranian counterpart, Javad Zarif. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius also joined the discussions.

Iran is negotiating a deal with six powers—the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China.

On Sunday morning, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, told reporters outside the Coburg Palais hotel, where the negotiations were taking place, that if there is “strong political will” on all sides “we can get there.”

“They are going to be tough,” she said of the talks. “It has always been tough but not impossible. As I said it’s a matter of political will.”

Ms. Mogherini, who chairs the six-power group, also said there is “flexibility” around the June 30 deadline if the two sides are closing in on a deal.

“If a few days more are needed, we can take them.”

British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier are expected in Vienna later Sunday. Senior Chinese and Russian diplomats will also join the discussions.

The final nuclear agreement is meant to block any smooth Iranian path to nuclear weapons by committing to Tehran to tight inspections and concrete measures to wind back their nuclear program for 10 to 15 years.

In exchange, tight international sanctions on Iran’s finance, energy and commercial sectors will be phased out over time.

The Vienna talks build on a framework agreement that was sealed in Lausanne, Switzerland, on April 2, setting out the main contours of a deal.

While many of those involved in the talks saw the April 2 framework agreement as a major step to solving more than a decade of diplomacy over Iran’s nuclear activities, the negotiations have grown tenser in recent weeks, say people involved in the talks.

Senior Iranian officials, including its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have emphasized a number of red lines that seem to depart from the Lausanne agreement.

Western officials say that, in the negotiating room, Iran has also seemed to draw back on commitments it made to ensure the United Nations atomic agency access to all suspect sites under a deal, including military sites.

As Iran has toughened its rhetoric around what it calls its red lines for a deal, critics of the diplomacy have expressed growing concerns about the shape of a likely deal.

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told his cabinet that the world powers had withdrawn from the red lines they had laid down earlier in the talks.

“There is no reason to rush to sign this bad agreement, which gets worse each day,” he said. “It’s not too late to go back and insist on demands that will truly prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear capabilities.”

—Joshua Mitnick contributed to this article.

Write to Laurence Norman at laurence.norman@wsj.com

 

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http://sputniknews.com/europe/20150628/1023940592.html

Ukraine Masses Troops on Border With Transnistria
Europe
12:28 28.06.2015(updated 12:32 28.06.2015)

Ukraine continues to mass troops and heavy weapons on the border with Transnistria on the pretext that the self-proclaimed republic may launch a military campaign against Ukraine, Russian media reported on Saturday.

“It looks like the Kiev authorities want to picture themselves as encircled by enemies, ready to attack,” a representative of the Transnistrian KGB told Russia’s Zvezda TV channel.

“That we may have a war here tomorrow is hard to say, but we are not ruling out a Ukrainian provocation either…They could use for this purpose one of their many small private armies which refuse to take any orders from Kiev,” the official added.

On June 22, the deputy foreign minister of the Transnistrian Republic, Vitaly Ignatyev, said that Ukraine was moving its troops towards the borders of the self-proclaimed republic, sandwiched between Ukraine and Moldova.

“The situation here is very bad… Economic production is going down, foreign trade is shrinking, the security situation is equally alarming with our Moldovan partners holding military drills with NATO and the Ukrainian pressure mounting every day,” Ignatyev said.

He also mentioned the curbs Kiev has imposed on the transit of Transnistrian nationals and citizens of Russia, almost 200,000 of whom currently live in Transnistria.

“They haven’t been able to travel to Russia via Ukraine for more than a year now. They have to move across Moldova, but Chisinau is creating problems too, along with economic sanctions,” Ignatyev added.

The newly appointed governor of Ukraine’s Odessa region Mikheil Saakashvili earlier announced plans to reinforce Ukraine’s border with Transnistria.

"We have two major tasks — to reinforce the border and curb corruption. Drug and weapons trafficking across this border means nothing good," Saakashvili told a news conference in Odessa.

He also blamed the Transnistrian authorities of destabilizing the situation in Ukraine.

 

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http://apnews.myway.com/article/20150628/eu--iran-nuclear_talks-22fbda7f92.html

Nuke talks to miss target; Iran foreign minister heads home

Jun 28, 4:26 PM (ET)
By GEORGE JAHN

(AP) U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, center, arrives at the Palais Coburg where...
Full Image

VIENNA (AP) — A senior U.S. official acknowledged Sunday that Iran nuclear talks will go past their June 30 target date, as Iran's foreign minister prepared to head home for consultations before returning to push for a breakthrough.

Iranian media said Mohammed Javad Zarif's trip was planned in advance. Still, the fact that he was leaving the talks so close to what had been the Tuesday deadline reflected both that the talks had a ways to go and his need to get instructions on how to proceed on issues where the sides remain apart — among them how much access Tehran should give to U.N. experts monitoring his country's compliance to any deal.

The United States insists on more intrusive monitoring than Iran is ready to give. With these and other disputes still unresolved, the likelihood that the Tuesday target deadline for an Iran nuclear deal could slip was increasingly growing even before the U.S. confirmation.

The dispute over access surfaced again Sunday, with Iranian Gen. Masoud Jazayeri saying that any inspection by foreigners of Iran's military centers is prohibited.

(AP) Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, talks to reporters during a...
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He said the attempt by the U.S. and its allies to "obtain Iran's military information for years ... by the pressure of sanctions" will not succeed.

But German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who joined the talks Friday, said Iran's "nuclear activities, no matter where they take place," must be verifiable.

Officials said they could not speculate on how many days' extension the talks would need. But Zarif told reporters that he planned to come back only on Tuesday, the day the negotiations were originally supposed to end with a deal.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Zarif met in Vienna for their third encounter since Saturday. The foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany came — and then went, or planned to leave, in another reflection that the sides were not yet close to a deal.

For weeks, all seven nations at the negotiating table insisted that Tuesday remains the formal deadline for a deal. But with time running out, a senior U.S. official acknowledged that was unrealistic.

(AP) From left, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry...
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"Given the dates, and that we have some work to do ... the parties are planning to remain in Vienna beyond June 30 to continue working," said the official, who demanded anonymity in line with State Department practice.

Asked about the chances for a deal, Federica Mogherini, the European Union's top diplomat, told reporters: "It's going to be tough ... but not impossible." Hammond spoke of "major differences" in the way of a deal.

Steinmeier told German media: "I am convinced that if there is no agreement, everyone loses."

"Iran would remain isolated. A new arms race in a region that is already riven by conflict could be the dramatic consequence."

Both sides recognize that there is leeway to extend to July 9. As part of an agreement with the U.S. Congress, lawmakers then have 30 days to review the deal before suspending congressional sanctions.

(AP) From left, U.S. Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry...
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But postponement beyond that would double the congressional review period to 60 days, giving both Iranian and U.S. critics more time to work on undermining an agreement.

Arguing for more time to allow the U.S. to drive a harder bargain, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — a fierce opponent of the talks — weighed in on Sunday against "this bad agreement, which is becoming worse by the day."

"It is still not too late to go back and insist on demands that will genuinely deny Iran the ability to arm itself with nuclear weapons," he said.

The goal of the talks involving Iran and the U.S., Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia is a deal that would crimp Tehran's capacity to make nuclear weapons in exchange for sanctions relief. Iran insists it does not want such arms but is bargaining in exchange for sanctions relief.

On Saturday, diplomats told The Associated Press that Iran was considering a U.S.-backed plan for it to send enriched uranium to another country for sale as reactor fuel, a step that would resolve one of several outstanding issues.

---

Associated Press writers Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee in Vienna, Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran and Josef Federman in Jerusalem contributed to this report.

 

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http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...-old_tank_still_fights_everywhere_108132.html

June 27, 2015
61-Year-Old Tank Still Fights Everywhere
By S.K. Au-Yeong

Like the AK-47 but for tanks, T-54 and T-55s endure on battlefields around the world. Simple to operate and maintain, these decades-old Soviet armored beasts are still popular in small nations and with non-state irregular forces — a true “people’s tank.”

If a coup or fratricidal civil war breaks out in one of Moscow’s current or former beneficiaries, there’s good chances T-54 or T-55s are taking part.

When Afghanistan collapsed in the 1990s, the Taliban and Northern Alliance coalition both inherited T-55s formerly belonging to the communist government. The tanks served in Yugoslavia’s multi-sided civil war during the same decade.

Today, captured Iraqi and Syrian T-55s serve under the black flag of Islamic State and other rebel groups fighting in the region. For these insurgent armies, the 60-year old tanks are just as useful as far more modern designs such as the M1 Abrams.

Because most of the time, tanks don’t need to be complicated. Cheap, uncomplicated and deadly enough is sufficient for most 21st century wars.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union’s tank arsenal consisted largely of T-34/85 medium tanks, along with smaller numbers of IS-2 and IS-3 heavy tanks. While the T-34 series had performed outstandingly in the war against Nazi Germany, the Soviets considered its leaf spring suspension and 85-millimeter gun to be outdated.

The later IS-series tanks — standing for Iosif Stalin — had proven themselves more than a match for Germany’s best Panzers. Unfortunately, the crews had to load huge 122-millimeter shells and propellant charges separately into the cannon, giving the vehicle a low rate of fire and ammunition reserve.

The Soviets built the more obscure T-44 — which did not see combat action — in an attempt to reduce the T-34/85’s profile with a squat turret and a sunken hull structure. However, the small size made it impractical for engineers to fit a 100- or 122-millimeter weapon.

The desire for a fresh design led Kremlin weaponeers to create the T-54 and improved T-55 medium tank. Today, these steel monsters remain the most common tanks in the world.

For nearly a decade prior to the more recognizable T-54A’s appearance in 1954, the Soviets had already built predecessor models known as the T-54–1, -2 and -3 in modest numbers. These versions usually had a counterweight on the main gun muzzle rather than the distinctive bore evacuator — a device that keeps noxious fumes from blowing back into the turret.

It’s hard to tell the difference between the different models, but looking for these features is the easiest way. The pre-production turrets had cutaways on their front and rear undersides, but the Soviets gradually eliminated these design quirks, as they could inadvertently deflect incoming rounds into the hull.

In addition to the evacuator on the barrel, the T-54A was the first of the series to have a vertical stabilizer for the main gun. The T-54B went a step further with both horizontal and vertical gun stabilization.

The T-54’s diminutive turret kept the overall height to a mere 2.39 meters, making the tank shorter and harder to hit than the contemporary American M-48 Patton. The curve of the turret also helped to deflect incoming rounds.

Cold War combat

T-54s first saw action in 1956 in Hungarian capital of Budapest, when the Soviets used them to crush rebels who had overthrown the local pro-Soviet regime. But the debut took a humiliating turn when Hungarian rebels drove a captured T-54 into the British embassy, giving Western experts an up-close look at its strengths and weaknesses.

In 1972, North Vietnam launched a major invasion of its southern neighbor — eventually leading to South Vietnam’s capitulation. In a tank-on-tank confrontation at the besieged firebase at Dak To II in Kontum, two South Vietnamese M-41 light tanks fired three 76-millimeter rounds each into a single T-54.

The T-54 took some damage, but easily destroyed the lighter U.S.-made vehicles. After the shooting stopped, the NVA crew calmly exited their T-54 and walked away.

Still, it exposed one vulnerability. The hostile turret conditions reduced the T-54’s practical rate of fire to just four rounds a minute. A competent Western tank crew could shoot off the same number of shells in the first 15 seconds of an engagement.

Even before these outings, Soviet designers had already started working on an improved variant — the T-55.

Obviously, from the outside it’s hard to tell it apart from T-54A and B. Externally, the only reliable clue is the absence of a mushroom shaped ventilation fan on the T-55’s roof.

Most of the new tank’s improvements were internal. The T-55’s PAZ overpressure system helped seal tankers inside and could keep out radioactive dust from a nuclear strike. The Soviets stuffed in another nine rounds for the main gun, too.

Engineers replaced the World War II-era SGM machine gun next to the main cannon with the new PKT. In 1961, the further upgraded T-55A received anti-radiation lining, an air filtration system to scrub out chemical and biological agents and it dispensed with the hull-mounted machine gun.

Another reason why it’s so difficult to tell these tanks apart is because older versions were often rebuilt to the same standards as later ones. For instance, the T-55 originally did not feature an external DShKM heavy machine gun on the loader’s hatch, like the T-54. Soviet commanders found the weapon to be useless against jet fighters.

But these massive automatic weapons returned when the tanks underwent depot refurbishment. Unlike fast-moving jets, new attack helicopters were more likely to engage the tanks at closer ranges and at lower speeds.

Still fighting

While the T-54/55 has become ubiquitous, the tank has typically been on the losing side when fighting comparable or more advanced Western designs. The T-54/55 suffers from abysmal crew conditions, shoots miserably slow, rides bouncily and has a tendency to throw its tracks.

But lackluster training, tactics and leadership — and the superior standards of their Western-backed enemies in the same skills — were more responsible than design faults for the vehicle’s wartime defeats.

North Vietnamese tank crews were often poorly trained, leading to weak cooperation with infantry — and resulting in unnecessary casualties from South Vietnamese tank-hunters armed with portable M-72 rockets.

Likewise, Syrian T-55s in the 1973 Yom Kippur War greatly outnumbered Israeli tanks — but the Israelis shot the Syrians down in droves from the Golan Heights. As for the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq left its tanks in stationary, dug-in positions in the desert.

Iraq’s tactical blunder turned its tanks into sitting ducks for coalition air strikes and advanced Abrams tanks equipped with thermal sights.

Still, the T-55’s major selling points continue to be simplicity and availability. Factories in the USSR built an estimated 50,000 vehicles and that’s a conservative estimate. Poland and Czechoslovakia assembled thousands more locally. Chinese T-59 clones only add to the tally.

Specialist T-55 variants with mine-clearing rollers, bridges, flamethrowers and recovery cranes were produced alongside the gun tanks, too. The Soviets used the same chassis for its ZSU-57–2 self-propelled anti-aircraft gun and the newer BTR-T heavy personnel carrier.

In successive wars with its Arab neighbors during the 1960s and 70s, Israel captured hundreds of T-55s. Israeli troops turned the tank — nicknamed Tiran or “dictator” in Hebrew — against its former owners. Engineers eventually swapped out the Soviet main guns with the superior British-designed 105-millimeter L7. With the replacement cannon, the vehicles could use the same ammunition as any other Israeli tank of the day.

When Israel retired its Tirans, some of the hulls became the basis for the Achzarit — literally meaning “cruel” — heavy armored personnel carriers. Other countries added their own indigenously-manufactured components for both domestic and export use. Some of these local variants, such as the Romanian TR-85M, have little resemblance to the Kremlin’s original design.

And Russia has also produced upgraded T-55M and T-55AM tanks incorporating BDD composite armored “eye brows” on the front of the turret and spaced laminate plates to the glacis. The vehicles’ features include updated laser range finders, ballistic computers and sights.

These refurbished T-55s can launch long-range 9M117 Bastion laser-guided missiles on top of their regular anti-tank shells — giving them extra range and punch. Moscow sent these upgraded tanks to fight in the Second Chechen War alongside similarly improved T-62Ms. Russian commanders felt they were more “expendable” in the brutal guerrilla war than more expensive T-72 and T-80s.

So despite the T-54/55’s combat shortcomings, these tanks promise to remain popular for many decades more. The design’s adaptability and a stable market for upgrades contribute to its longevity.

This article originally appeared at War is Boring.

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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...eapons_are_killing_kurdish_troops_108135.html

June 27, 2015
'Junk Weapons' are Killing Kurdish Troops
By Matt Cetti-Roberts

“When I shoot, the top of the rifle flies off,” Mahd Abdul Basit, a 28-year-old Peshmerga fighter told me while we stood a few hundred meters from Islamic State’s front line.

Unlike many Kurdish troops, who must purchase their own weapons, Mahd’s rifle — a taped-up Kalashnikov appearing to be made from several different rifles— was issued to him, and could still one day cost him his life.

Mahd stood in one of the Peshmerga’s newly-built fortifications, known as “citadels.” The sandbagged position, just 15 days old, is one of many that now punctuates the arid flat land on the front line southwest of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk.

Before January, this was Islamic State territory. A Kurdish offensive drove the militants back several kilometers — and both sides dug in for a long fight. Islamic State fighters are now entrenched about 800 meters away from the position, and still definitely a threat.

Coalition air strikes, advisers and weapons are helping, but the coalition’s strategy for arming the Kurds has been criticized for worsening divisions in the already fractured Peshmerga. During a recent visit to the front line, we had a chance to observe the situation directly.

A trickle of Western weapons have circulated among the Kurdish troops — but they’re still not enough. Most Peshmerga fighters still rely on ancient Kalashnikovs that have suffered through decades of wear and tear. Soldiers are going months without pay.

But if the fighters have few decent weapons, they have fewer good options. If Islamic State breaks through the lines and the Kurdish cities fall, their families would almost certainly be killed or enslaved.

The United States Senate recently blocked direct weapons shipments to the Kurds under the proposed $1.6-billion “train-and-equip” fund. To receive weapons the Peshmerga must go through the Iraqi central government— which hasn’t always seen eye to eye with the Kurdistan Regional Government.

To make it clear, American and German weapons have reached the Kurds, but these stumbling political blocs have left some soldiers unprepared for battle.

When War Is Boring interviewed Peshmerga Gen. Hussein Mansoor in July 2014, he said his troops’ equipment was old and worn out. The situation has changed little since then, and that’s directly affecting the combat performance of soldiers on the ground.

“Each day there is usually a fight with Daesh,” Sheikh Jaffer, a Kurdish adviser to generals on the front line near Kirkuk, said. “Often gunshots are exchanged, sometimes they [ISIS] come close to the front line.”

Peshmerga fighters aligned with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan are the main force in this area — although they’re not the only ones. The PUK is an opposition party that holds power in Iraqi Kurdistan’s eastern regions.

Jaffar said that the MILAN anti-tank guided missile, supplied by Germany, is the best weapon for dealing with Islamic State’s huge explosive-packed armored vehicles. The terror group often sends these vehicles and their suicidal drivers to soften up Kurdish lines before conventional assaults.

But he said they still need equipment to deal with countless explosive devices littering the battlefield. Islamic State typically plants booby traps whenever its fighters retreat. And by far, improvised explosives are the number one cause of Kurdish casualties in Iraq.

When asked about weapons sent by the coalition, Jaffar said they don’t receive enough. “Sometimes the coalition doles out weapons unevenly,” he said.

At the headquarters for the Peshmerga’s 1st Battalion, 6th Brigade, deputy commander Col. Sulaiman Ali held up a rifle in an office that doubled as his bedroom. Numerals inscribed on the left side of the battered and scarred Kalashnikov dated it to 1975 — the rifle has been in use for 40 years.

When Kurdish fighters told me that they fought with weapons from Saddam Hussein’s time … it’s not the type of weapons they were talking about. They literally meant the actual, specific guns they held in their hands.

Islamic State, on the other hand, has seized millions of dollars worth of modern equipment including rifles, tanks and heavy crew-served weapons following victories over the Iraqi army. Some of its suicide vehicles are captured American-made Humvees and mine-resistant armored vehicles.

Not surprisingly, many Peshmerga fighters criticize Western aid to the Iraqi army — that it’s basically the equivalent of just giving it all to Islamic State.

A ZU-23–2 23-millimeter anti-aircraft cannon and 82-millimeter mortar in a platoon position atop on of the Peshmerga’s “citadels” near Kirkuk. Matt Cett-Roberts photo

Sulaiman’s headquarters sat near Maktab Khalid, a Turkmen area southwest of Kirkuk. At one point, the no-man’s land between Islamic State and Peshmerga lines narrowed to around 30 meters, with each side facing off across a small bridge.

Sulaiman was not happy with the battalion’s armaments. “The weapons are old, sometimes they stop shooting,” he said.

The Kurdish fighters also have trouble hitting their targets. That has a lot to do with the fact that Kalashnikovs are the most common weapon here — and they’re not built for fine-tuned precision at a distance.

Many of the Kurds’ rifles have old and worn-out barrels, which further decreases accuracy. The barrels’ conditions have continued to deteriorate after a year of heavy fighting.

Sulaiman’s battalion, like many other Peshmerga units, received some German-donated G36 and G3 rifles — about 40 for for 600 men. But the actual figures for weapons sent to the KRG in total, either directly or through Baghdad, is vague and usually calculated in cost, rather than in definitive per-weapon numbers.

Soldiers like to complain — that’s a fact of military life around the world. But to be sure, the Kurdish fighters have some legitimate grievances.

Universally the Peshmerga fighters I’ve spoken to say they’re fighting to defend their homeland — and there’s no reason to doubt that. They’re willing fight … and die. It’s a major reason why Islamic State hasn’t made it through to Iraqi Kurdistan’s major cities, with the exception of the occasional suicide bomber and even that is rare compared to Baghdad.

But many fighters have families to support, and money worries are taking a toll. The KRG still relies on the Iraqi government in Baghdad for money, and the lack of cash has driven some Kurdish troops into debt. At the time of my June 14 visit, fighters in this part of the front line had not received pay for around 100 days.

“Some Peshmerga have had to leave because they cannot support their families,” Sulaiman said. He pointed to a wedding ring and said that many fighters have had to sell theirs to feed their families.

Back at the citadel, Mahd and his platoon ate lunch beneath a blue tarpaulin held up by wooden posts. It was a moment of respite from the baking heat. A few meters away in a dug-in defensive position, an 82-millimeter mortar and a truck-mounted ZU-32–2 anti-aircraft cannon sat waiting in case of an attack.

“It is the only job I have to support my children,” Sgt. Yaseen Al Rasheem, a 10-year Peshmerga veteran, said. “Jobs are hard to come by these days.”

The war has put pressure on his family, forcing them to cut back expenses. “I asked them to not spend too much money, take less trips to see family and save on food,” he said. “Sometimes they do not eat meat.”

His time away hasn’t made their situation any easier. Since the conflict began, he’s been called back from leave 15 times — sometimes only spending enough time at home to change his clothes before heading back to the front line.

Mahd, the fighter with the taped-up Chinese rifle, has experienced similar financial problems. Like many members of the Peshmerga, he has another job — when he’s off duty — to pay the bills, something unthinkable in many Western armies.

“I am a laborer, mostly moving construction materials in Kirkuk,” Mahd said.

An average 10-hour working day brings in $16. His time away from the front line doesn’t leave much time for relaxing. “When I return home I head straight to work.”

In contrast to Mahd’s battered Kalashnikov, Yaseen has a German-supplied G36 rifle, which he received nine months ago. Despite problems with the weapon that provoked the German army to consider dropping it, the Kurdish fighters love them.

“It is reliable, it does not stop,” Capt. Niqib Yasim said.

Niqib is responsible for the deployment of troops along the 1st Battalion’s defensive line. He credited the G36’s built-in sights for enabling his soldiers to shoot further and more accurately.

Despite potential logistical problems arising from many different types of ammunition in service along the front, for some Peshmerga units the only problem is not having enough bullets to go around, according to Niqib. The Kurds must frequently conserve their ammunition during firefights.

“Sometimes when shooting at ISIS and they are a long distance away, the guys with Kalashnikovs must sit and do nothing,” Niqib said. “Only the G36, G3 and 23-mm [the ZU-23–2] are good enough.”

Making matters more complicated is the Peshmerga’s sheer size — and the question of how big it actually is. Nobody seems to know. Estimates run anywhere between 80,000 to 250,000 soldiers, including volunteer fighters.

The Peshmerga also includes units loyal to two different factions — the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdish Democratic Party. In addition, there are more units answering directly to the Ministry of Peshmerga which comprise around 30 percent of the force’s total strength.

At the moment, everything comes down to the fighters on the front line such as Mahd, with his ancient Kalashnikov. When he said he’s afraid of his rifle failing him, he’s not alone.

This article originally appeared at War is Boring.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://news.co.cr/the-truth-about-the-ayotzinapa-43-will-shake-up-mexico/39834/

The Truth About the Ayotzinapa 43 Will Shake Up Mexico

By The Costa Rica Star – June 28, 2015

Mexico City, Jun 27 (EFE).- Nine months after 43 trainee teachers went missing in the southern Mexican state of Guerrero, their parents said here they will continue their struggle to find them and that the truth of their whereabouts will soon come to light.

“We’re telling this murderous and corrupt government that no matter what they do they won’t succeed in dividing the parents, who are stronger than ever because we know the truth is near and that punishment is coming for the killers,” the spokesman for the family members, Felipe de la Cruz, said at a rally Friday in this capital.

Taking cover amid a pounding rain outside the entrance of the Palace of Fine Arts, one group of parents of the missing students insisted that they are alive and called on the government to hand them over safely.

“We’re demanding that they deliver the boys to us now because we really want these kids to get back to school. We’re saying today that everything this government is doing is crashing down on them and we’re sure the army has them,” one unidentified parent said.

The parents and their supporters reject Mexican authorities’ official account of the events of Sept. 26, 2014, in Iguala, Guerrero.

That night, police attacked students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School near Iguala as they traveled through the town on buses they had seized as part of a protest against a 2013 education overhaul.

Six people – including three students – were killed and 43 other students abducted.

Federal authorities say the incident was the work of corrupt municipal cops acting on the orders of a corrupt mayor who had connections with the Guerreros Unidos drug cartel.

The cops handed over the students to Guerreros Unidos gunmen, who killed the young people after being told they were members of a rival gang and burned their bodies at a dump, according to the official story.

The students’ families reject that version of events and are demanding to know why soldiers of the Mexican army’s Iguala-based 27th Infantry Battalion who witnessed the police attack did not intervene.

In December, respected newsweekly Proceso published a story drawing on a confidential Guerrero state government document that pointed to Mexico’s Federal Police – with the complicity or open collaboration of the army – as the perpetrators of the slaughter of the 43 students.

A respected team of forensic anthropologists from Argentina who were brought in by the students’ families to take part in the probe have also questioned the findings of the official investigation.

“Since (Sept. 26, 2014), we haven’t stopped looking for our children, and we’re going to keep looking for them until we find them. We know they’re alive,” one of the mothers said during Friday’s protest. EFE

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.stratfor.com/analysis/mexico-cartels-rise-and-inevitable-fall

Mexico: A Cartel's Rise and Inevitable Fall
Analysis
June 27, 2015 | 13:00 GMT

Summary

Earlier this year, the Mexican government vowed to dismantle the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, one of Mexico's most powerful crime syndicates. Eventually, the government's efforts will destroy the cartel, and smaller autonomous networks will emerge from its wake. But it is unclear when cracks will begin to appear. For the time being, the cartel will remain the fastest-expanding crime group in Mexico. In 2015, it has been consolidating control in Baja California state, fighting in San Luis Potosi state and beginning to expand into Zacatecas state.

This expansion reflects the gradual breakdown of organized crime in Sinaloa and Tamaulipas states since 2010 that has made way for the spread of groups from the rural region known as Tierra Caliente, including the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion, into other parts of Mexico. As with all organized crime networks facing persistent law enforcement pressure, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion is doomed to one day decentralize. More broadly, however, its current expansion will cement the status and influence across Mexico of criminal groups that originated in the Tierra Caliente region.
Analysis

In Baja California state, the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) has allied with crime groups derived from the Arellano Felix Organization (also known as the Tijuana cartel or the Cartel de Arellano Felix) to seize control of the Tijuana plaza, the Tijuana-based investigative journal Zeta reported June 15. The CJNG and other organized crime groups from Tierra Caliente are not new to Tijuana, as they have long operated in the border city under the control of Sinaloa-based groups. The CJNG itself has maintained a presence in Tijuana since beginning its rapid expansion as an independent organization in 2012. If the report is accurate, the cartel is apparently seeking to end the dominance that Sinaloan groups have had around Tijuana since at least the 1980s.

Meanwhile, in San Luis Potosi state, the CJNG appears to be attempting to wrest control of towns from several other drug trafficking operations: the Velazquez network (also known as Los Talibanes or the Gulf cartel) and possibly Los Zetas. The cartel's expansion into the state makes sense. Controlling the highways and population centers in the towns would facilitate its trafficking activities to the United States, particularly through areas of northeastern Mexico such as Monterrey.

https://www.stratfor.com/interactive/areas-cartel-influence-mexico

The CJNG is also operating in Zacatecas state, near the border with Jalisco, 11th Military Zone Cmdr. Gen. Antelmo Rojas Yanez said June 19. Though there is no indication that the cartel has yet expanded into the cities of Zacatecas, Guadalupe or Fresnillo, the state's main population centers, the group will likely try to do so. The two main groups operating in those locations, the Velazquez network and Los Zetas, have been weakened over the past year by frequent and successful federal troop operations. As in San Luis Potosi state, dominance of Zacatecas provides control over trafficking routes running north to the United States. The value of these routes was demonstrated by Mexican officials' estimation that Los Zetas earned roughly $1.3 million per month from its activities in Zacatecas when the state was uncontested.

Prior to 2010, most crime groups that emerged from Tierra Caliente worked as subsidiaries of powerful Sinaloa- and Tamaulipas-based syndicates such as the Gulf cartel and the Sinaloa Federation. The CJNG, in fact, originates from the organization led by a Sinaloa Federation lieutenant, Ignacio "El Nacho" Coronel Villarreal, who was killed by federal troops in July 2010. After continuous infighting and years of aggressive pursuit by the military and law enforcement, Sinaloa and Tamaulipas groups began to lose control of organized crime in Tierra Caliente, leading to the expansion of independent groups such as La Familia Michoacana, the Knights Templar and the CJNG itself. Though La Familia Michoacana and the Knights Templar are now shadows of their former selves, their expansion left a lasting presence of Tierra Caliente-based criminal elements in Guanajuato, Mexico and Queretaro states, as well as in most regions in southern Mexico. And though the CJNG, still the most powerful and cohesive Tierra Caliente group, will eventually face a defeat at the hands of federal troops, Tierra Caliente organized crime will have a lasting presence wherever the CJNG expands before it is dismantled.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://atimes.com/2015/06/russia-braces-for-euromaidan-in-armenia/

Russia braces for ‘Euromaidan’ in Armenia

By M.K. Bhadrakumar on June 29, 2015 in Asia Times News & Features

Yerevan is seldom in the world headlines except when Turkey works itself into frenzy over a fresh move in an odd western capital to pass a parliamentary resolution naming the massacre of Armenians in the early part of the last century as “genocide”.

But that may be about to change. That is, if the 6-day-old mass protests in the Armenian capital, ostensibly against a hike in electricity prices with effect from August 1, snowball into another “Euromaidan” as in Ukraine last year.

Why Armenia? The short answer is that the country is a vital piece of real estate to hold for both the West and Russia. Consider the following.

Armenia is the only country other than Tajikistan where Russia has a big military base. A few months ago, Armenia under its current leadership of President Serz Sarkisian joined the Eurasian Economic Union, which the United States regards as a Russian project to integrate the former Soviet republics under its leadership.

If Armenia is brought into the western orbit, Russia gets practically shut out of South Caucasus, given the ambivalences in Moscow’s equations with Baku and the unfriendly policies of the pro-western government in Tbilisi.

Equally, Armenia shares a border with Iran and a pro-western government in Yerevan and the consequent shift in the balance of forces impacts regional politics.

Of course, if a regime change such as in Georgia in 2003 were to repeat in Armenia, it has security implications for Russia’s North Caucasus, which is a restive region threatened by extremist Islamist groups, some which enjoy external support.

The current protests can easily take an “anti-Russian” direction. The point is, Russia owns Armenia’s gas and electricity supply networks and the 40 percent increase in electricity prices is seen as part of excessive profiteering by Russian companies at the cost of the Armenian consumer.

A flashpoint arises if the latent popular frustrations against the corrupt government in Yerevan coalesce with the discontent over the steep hike in electricity prices and the disapproval of the government’s perceived kowtowing to Russian pressure. Suffice it to say, the rudiments of a classic “color revolution” seem to be available.

The influential Moscow politician, Konstantin Kosachyov, who heads the Federation Council’s (Duma) International Relations Committee has warned that the crisis is following the script of “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine.

The well-known Russian pundit Sergei Markov wired to the Russian establishment has alleged that the protests in Yerevan are “being directed from an external headquarters” (read Washington). Of course, such allegations are difficult to prove in real time and the US media organs have been plainly dismissive, claiming that the “civil society” in Armenia is spearheading the mass protests and there is no “foreign hand” involved.

If the protests gather momentum, Moscow will be caught on the horns of a dilemma. With hindsight, Moscow has estimated that the deposed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to heed Russian advice to use force to quell the ‘Euromaidan’ protests in a critical period in February last year proved to be his undoing and resulted in his overthrow.

By the same logic, the pro-Russian leadership in Armenia is walking a fine line.

On a broader plane, Armenia becomes a test case of the impact of the Ukraine crisis on the collective psyche of the people in the former Soviet republics in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Are the ‘masses’ in these regions drawing inspiration from the regime change in Ukraine and are they ready for their own ‘Euromaidan’? That is the question.

For sure, a new combative tone has appeared of late in the US’ Central Asia policy, possibly predicated on a reading that the “masses” in the Stans are ripe for revolution.

The recent statement at the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in Washington by the US Deputy Assistant Secretary in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor Robert Berschinski took a noticeably tough line regarding the “heavy-handed policies”, denial of religious freedom and political space, and prevalence of widespread corruption and “systematic abuse and ill-treatment of citizens” by the authoritarian regimes in Central Asia. It pointedly questioned the legitimacy of the recent re-election of the Presidents of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, the two key states in Central Asia.

To be sure, the US’ democracy project in Central Asia seems to be gearing up for action after a decade-and-a-half of hibernation following the American intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 when the accent was on the war on terror and regional stability.

Copyright 2015 Asia Times Holdings Limited, a duly registered Hong Kong company. All rights reserved.

 

[mzkitty]

Oh please !! After how many years?



12m
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss Syrian crisis - @nytimes

JUNE 29, 2015

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said Monday that he would meet Tuesday with Secretary of State John Kerry in Vienna to discuss the crisis in Syria and rising attacks by extremists. The announcement coincided with a visit to Moscow by Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem of Syria for talks with Mr. Lavrov and President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin pledged continued support for Syria, and said all the countries in the region should pool their efforts in “fighting the evil that is the Islamic State.” Mr. Moallem questioned the likelihood of a joint regional effort. “I know that Putin is a man who works miracles,” he said, “but an alliance with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the United States would require a very big miracle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/world/europe/russia-officials-meet-on-syrian-crisis.html

 

[Housecarl]

Oh please !! After how many years?



12m
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry to discuss Syrian crisis - @nytimes

JUNE 29, 2015

Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov of Russia said Monday that he would meet Tuesday with Secretary of State John Kerry in Vienna to discuss the crisis in Syria and rising attacks by extremists. The announcement coincided with a visit to Moscow by Foreign Minister Walid al-Moallem of Syria for talks with Mr. Lavrov and President Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Putin pledged continued support for Syria, and said all the countries in the region should pool their efforts in “fighting the evil that is the Islamic State.” Mr. Moallem questioned the likelihood of a joint regional effort. “I know that Putin is a man who works miracles,” he said, “but an alliance with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and the United States would require a very big miracle.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/30/world/europe/russia-officials-meet-on-syrian-crisis.html

Russian statements about IS, Syria and meetings with the Turks and others by Putin followed by what looks like the Turks preparing to create a "cordon sanitaire" in northern Syria and the Jordanians doing the same along their border with Syria and things are rapidly being taken out of DC's influence.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defensenews.com/story/de...ditorial-fund-us-deterrent-programs/29480719/

Editorial: Fund US Deterrent Programs

Defense News 5:24 p.m. EDT June 29, 2015

The US decision to move 250 tanks, armored personnel carriers and howitzers to the Baltics, Bulgaria, Germany, Poland and Romania is a welcome signal for NATO allies worried about Russia.

While new and existing gear is being moved forward, US troops stationed in Europe will hardly increase. Rather, US soldiers will be rotated through the region for training.

The message would have been more powerful had Washington also said it would stop withdrawing forces from Europe and start meaningfully increasing them. More equipment is reassuring, but more forces indicates a stronger commitment to allies on the borders of a bellicose Russia.

The reality is, stability worldwide often depends on the presence of US forces.

South Korea and Japan just celebrated 50 years of peaceful post-World War II-relations that fostered unprecedented economic growth made possible by US forces in both countries.

On the other side of the world, US forces and diplomats were equally key in forging a prosperous Europe. While NATO's heightened activity in the wake of Russia's Ukraine campaign has been criticized by some as ineffective, even Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he'd be crazy to attack a NATO country and trigger wider war.

Still, Moscow continues to raise tensions, threatening NATO and European nations with nuclear weapons and violating the Ukraine cease-fire even as a new truce is negotiated. NATO's long-term Russia strategy must include more training and equipment, but also more troops. More shoes in offices are welcome, but in this case, there's also a need for more boots on the ground.

And as long as Russia resorts to nuclear intimidation, America and its allies must invest in deterrent capabilities. When Washington confirmed that it would — as it had hinted for months — return a token force of heavy weapons to Europe, Russia countered it would add another 40 nuclear ballistic missiles to its arsenal this year.

As Deputy US Defense Secretary Bob Work recently noted, Russia's willingness to flaunt its nuclear capabilities is a scare tactic to intimidate the United States and its allies. While Russia's aggression is improving NATO solidarity, it also makes it clear the United States must take a far more strategic view of its nuclear modernization needs, given that each leg of America's nuclear triad requires either replacing or upgrade. According to Work, that will cost DoD "an average of $18 billion a year from 2021 to 2035 in FY16 dollars," or about 7 percent of the projected DoD spending in the 2020s when these programs peak.

During that period, the Navy must replace its Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines, and the Air Force will acquire its Long-Range Strike Bomber while upgrading its Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles. That doesn't include the staggering costs of revitalizing the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure that is quite literally crumbling after decades of underinvestment.

DoD's problem is that without relief from budget caps, it will have to cover the cost of these massively expensive programs within a fixed budget. That means the Air Force and Navy will have to gut other ship, aircraft and weapons programs that can manage escalation and deter conventional aggression.

For decades, nuclear systems have underpinned US deterrent capabilities. They will be increasingly important in a world where competing powers are revitalizing their nuclear and conventional capabilities. The key to deterrence is convincing adversaries that America's nuclear arsenal is modern, capable, reliable and formidable enough to avoid a potentially devastating miscalculation. The right message is to properly resource these key programs as a strategic investment in the nation's security.

 

[mzkitty]

Russian statements about IS, Syria and meetings with the Turks and others by Putin followed by what looks like the Turks preparing to create a "cordon sanitaire" in northern Syria and the Jordanians doing the same along their border with Syria and things are rapidly being taken out of DC's influence.

I read somewhere today that now Israel is planning to build a fence/wall around the entire country.

 

[Housecarl]

Well someone's getting a bit froggy even to suggest this....Never mind the US doesn't need to deploy anything "on the ground" in the area considering there's an Ohio SSBN on patrol in the Pacific just about all the time, heck they could even launch from the quay at Bangor, Washington and "reach" what they'd need to if necessary.

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20150630000027&cid=1101

China could deploy nuclear weapons in Cuba, says report

Staff Reporter 2015-06-30 12:02 (GMT+8)

China could risk a repeat of the Cuban Missile Crisis by deploying its DF-31 intercontinental ballistic missile to Cuba if the United States decides to deploy tactical nuclear missiles to the Asia-Pacific, according to Fujian-based news portal Taihainet.

Nuclear non-proliferation laws prevent the US from deploying nuclear weapons to South Korea or any members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The nearest deployment it would be able to get to China would be Japan or Australia, both countries where the public does not want such weapons on their soil. The US government is only able to work with them in secret, according to the report.

The deployment of a nuclear weapon in any shape or form to the Asia-Pacific would most likely backfire in the form of anti-American resentment among strategic allies. The only way the US could inch closer to China's soil and prevent a diplomatic crisis would be to deploy the weapons to Guam.

With its own nuclear arsenal, China has various ways to defend against the deployment of American nuclear weapons to the region. One would be to deploy DF-31 ICBM to Cuba, only 145 kilometers away from Florida's Key West. The DF-31 is reported to have a range of 11,200 kilometers. Armed with either neutron or nuclear warheads, the missiles could devastate targets on US soil, according to the report.

___

Same thing goes regarding an expressed concern on the part of the PLA regarding the US invading the PRC....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?cid=1101&MainCatID=11&id=20150628000072

PLA could use neutron bomb in event of US invasion: Duowei

Staff Reporter 2015-06-28 15:01 (GMT+8)

Unconfirmed reports on various websites in China claim the People's Liberation Army possesses a neutron bomb and would use it as a last resort against a potential US invasion, Duowei News, a news outlet run by overseas Chinese reported on June 26.

One online article said a neutron bomb could take out a US convoy of M1A2 Abrams main battle tank and M2A3 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, killing all military personnel without doing significant damage to the vehicles themselves.

A neutron bomb sends a massive wave of neutron and gamma radiation that can penetrate armor or several feet of earth and is extremely destructive to living tissue. The bomb was developed to counter a potential Soviet invasion of Western Europe during the Cold War.

General Zhang Aiping, former deputy chief of PLA's general staff department, wrote in a poem for the Communist party mouthpiece People's Daily on Sept. 21, 1977, only months after the US tested its first neutron bomb, that it would not be difficult for China to develop the weapon. On Dec. 19, 1984. China tested its first neutron bomb two years after Zhang was appointed defense minister.

China successfully completed a neutron bomb test on Sept. 29, 1988.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.ibtimes.com/ukraine-has-...-says-luhansk-peoples-republic-leader-1988456

Ukraine Has 75,000 Troops In East Ukraine, Says Luhansk People's Republic Leader

By Christopher Harress @Charress c.harress@ibtimes.com on June 29 2015 2:16 PM EDT

Kiev has around 75,000 troops fighting in the contested and war-torn region of eastern Ukraine, said the leader of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) at a briefing in Luhansk on Monday, reported Tass, a pro-Russian news site. Igor Plotnitsky, who become leader of the region after an election in November, made the comments at an open briefing for journalists on Monday.

Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko had said on Friday that the number of Ukrainian servicemen in the region was 60,000. "Judging by what Petro Alexeyevich [Poroshenko] was proudly saying not long ago, the grouping now has more than 60,000 servicemen. However, he shyly withheld information about those ‘private battalions’ that are deployed here," said Plotnitsky. "So, the Ukrainian grouping here is likely to exceed 75,000."

Ukraine’s army consisted of about 250,000 soldiers as of January. A further 50,000 civilians were called up two weeks ago in the sixth and final wave of mobilizations. The private battalions operating in the region could be compared to the U.S. National Guard or reserve units. Those troops are harder to count, but estimates number them at 50 battalions with a total of 7,000 to 15,000 men.

By comparison, there is thought to be around 40,000 pro-Russian rebels fighting in Donbas, including 3,000-4,000 Russian military volunteers, according to Radio Free Europe. A detailed report of Russian military involvement from the London-based think tank Royal United Services Institute puts the figure of official Russian troops that are directly or indirectly involved in the conflict at 42,000.

The author of the report, Igor Sutyagin, says the troops are “either stationed there, delivering artillery fire against Ukrainian territory from Russian soil, or directly participating in combat operations on Ukrainian sovereign territory.”

The report says there are 9,000 to 11,000 Russian soldiers on the ground inside Ukraine at any given moment. There also is estimated to be 26,000 to 28,000 Russian troops and 13,000 Russian sailors operating in Crimea, which was annexed from Ukraine in March last year.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015...witness-in-trial-of-los-zetas-boss-in-mexico/

Cartel Gunmen Silence Star Witness in Trial of Los Zetas Boss in Mexico

by Ildefonso Ortiz
29 Jun 2015

Gunmen acting under orders of a ruthless cartel executed one of Mexico’s star witnesses who played a key role in the prosecution of top capos in Mexico, including the leader of Los Zetas.

While authorities tried to downplay the May 29 shooting where three men having lunch died at a shopping plaza near Mexico City, that country’s Proceso Magazine has identified one of the victims as a protected witness known to authorities by the name “Karen.”

The murder serves as another example of the overwhelming power of the criminal organization that remains one of the most ruthless and powerful syndicates in Mexico and continues to reach deep into the United States far beyond the border cities.

Karen is the name given to a former Zeta hitman who had been testifying about having worked with former top Zeta boss Miguel Angel “Z-40 o El 40, L40” Trevino Morales in the early 2000s which is a time when Los Zetas were still part of the Gulf Cartel and initially set their control over the border city of Nuevo Laredo.

While Trevino Morales is often called Z-40 by news outlets, in the early days of Los Zetas, Trevino was known as an L, Lobo, or Cobra because he was not one of the original military deserters that made up Los Zetas.

The Mexican government has been using women’s names in an effort to help hide the identity of government witnesses that have chosen to testify against their former employers. In the case of Karen, he had been a former Mexican soldier who had joined the ranks of Los Zetas in Nuevo Laredo as a foot soldier and then climbed to being a key member. After his capture, Karen joined Mexico’s witness protection program.

According to Proceso, Karen’s testimony at trial is what led to his execution under orders of Trevino’s defense team. The information is based on the court records filed against one of the two hitmen captured by Mexican authorities.

Jose Bravo Mendez, who drove the getaway vehicle for the hitmen, said that he worked for an attorney named Juan Pablo Penilla Rodriguez, who heads Morales’ defense team.

“From my job I learned that in the case of Miguel Angel Trevino Morales AKA Z-40, the lawyer began to have problems with a witness that they only knew as Karen but not by his name,” Bravo Mendez is quoted by Proceso. “This subject identified Trevino Morales in one of the trials that he is facing.”

The attorney had allegedly bribed Karen to change his testimony but in the following hearing which took place last October the witness went ahead and identified Trevino Morales as a top Zeta and as his former boss.

The suspect then said that the attorney had helped coordinate the hit on Karen and had brought a team of hitmen from Nuevo Laredo to carry out the execution of the witness and in exchange for his help Bravo Mendez was to receive $2 million pesos or roughly about $135,000.

A 2013 article by Mexico’s SinEmbargo.mx identifies Karen as El Gori from Los Zetas. El Gori can be any one out of a group of brothers named Ricardo, Eduardo, Raymundo, and Octavio Almanza Morales who were former military in Mexico before joining Los Zetas ended up taking the nickname Gori. According to Mexico’s attorney general’s office archives, all used the nickname Gori followed by a number such as Gori 1, Gori 2, and so forth.

The brazen assassination of a star witness in a high-profile trial serves as another slap in the face at the Mexican government, which, despite the out-of-control violence taking place in that state continues to praise their own advances public safety.

Follow Ildefonso Ortiz on Twitter and on Facebook.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/29/colombia-farc-rebels-bomb-oil-pipeline

Farc rebels bomb new section of Colombian oil pipeline

Bombing comes a week after another attack that government said may have caused the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history

Sibylla Brodzinsky in Bogotá
Monday 29 June 2015 18.15 EDT
Comments 8

Colombia’s Farc guerrillas bombed a new section of an oil pipeline on Monday, even as cleanup teams struggled to contain a massive oil spill that the government said may be the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history.

A bomb ripped through part of the Tansandino pipeline in southern Putumayo province before dawn on Monday, damaging two homes. Minimal oil was spilled because the pipeline was inactive at the time, officials said.

The attack came a week after another attack by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, Farc, caused more than 10,000 barrels of oil to spill into rivers and streams in Nariño province, threatening to contaminate the Bay of Tumaco on the Pacific Ocean.

The spill left 150,000 residents of Tumaco without access to water and trucks were supplying the port city with water shipped from other parts of the country.

The bombings came amid a spate of attacks launched after the rebels announced in May the end of a unilateral ceasefire they had declared as part of ongoing peace talks with the government of Juan Manuel Santos.

Their main target has been the country’s oil and electricity infrastructure.

The same day as the spill in Nariño, Farc fighters forced oil tanker drivers to dump nearly 5,000 barrels of crude on the road.

In a statement from Havana, where peace talks have been held since 2012, the Farc said the environmental damage was an “undesired” effect of the war they have been waging against the state for more than 50 years. They argued, however, that they were not the ones chiefly responsible for hurting the environment in Colombia.

“There is no greater damage to the environment than the ‘ecocide’ constantly perpetrated by the economic policies of this government that the Farc combats every day,” the group said in a statement.

The resulting oil spills “pose serious threats to people’s lives and health, as well as to the integrity of ecosystems”, a group of environmental organisations said this week in a statement.

They stressed the need for the Farc, “to exclude both local communities and the ecosystem from the armed conflict”.

In a visit to Tumaco, Santos said the extent of the damage was difficult to gauge. “It is incommensurable,” he said. “It is possibly the worst environmental damage in the country’s history.

Santos said that the region’s fragile rainforest affected “may never be able to recover completely”.

Peace talks between the Farc and the government have been strained since the ceasefire was lifted and the rebels have stepped up their attacks. However, they continue to seek agreement on the issues of transitional justice and reparations for victims of the war.

“Spilling oil in the rivers is not an act of war, it is an act of barbarity,” Santos said.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=2391210&CategoryId=12393

Colombia Denies Agreement with FARC on Applying New Post-Conflict Rules

BOGOTA – The Colombian government denied reaching an agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to apply different post-conflict rules than those of the Legal Framework for Peace, a set of guidelines included in the country’s Constitution to regulate aspects such as the demobilization of guerrillas in 2012.

The Executive headquarters, Casa de Nariño, said in a statement it is “absolutely false.”

The armed group’s chief negotiator in peace talks in Havana, Luciano Marin Arango, confirmed too there is no such pact.

“In dialogue with the plenipotentiaries of the government in the talks, we have decided to separate the Legal Framework for Peace and opt for a comprehensive system of justice, truth, reparation and non-repetition to consider the political offense with their broader honesties,” said Arango from Cuba.

The Colombian government recalled the system he was referring to has already been announced by the parties earlier in the month and so far its contents “have only been agreed on the component of Truth.”

The statement also noted in any case the adoption of this model “is fully consistent with the Legal Framework for Peace, without prejudice to any future development there is in justice,” by which integrated system cannot ignore the conglomerate of standards already adopted in Colombia.

The Legal Framework for Peace, which lays down rules to regulate the demobilization of guerrillas and its eventual application processes – if peace is signed with FARC – was included in the Constitution of the country in 2012.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/06/29/birthday-for-a-caliphate/

Birthday for A Caliphate

by Dr. Sebastian Gorka
29 Jun 2015
Comments 8

After Friday’s deadly jihadist attacks in France, Tunisia and Kuwait, Prime Mister David Cameron has stated that ISIS is an existential threat to the West. Today’s anniversary of the re-establishment of the Caliphate give us good cause to assess the threat to America in this, the first part of a two part piece by Dr. Sebastian Gorka.

One year ago, a man unknown to most of the world achieved a feat that has eluded Islamic extremists for the previous 90 years.

On June 29, 2015 Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, after almost a century of absence, formally reestablished the theocratic empire of Islam in a sermon from the pulpit of the Grand Mosque in Mosul. In the last year, his terror group, ISIS, which today we should call by its new name of the Islamic State, has grown to become the most dangerous insurgency of the modern era.

On September 10th, 2001 it would have been impossible to imagine that humans would soon be crucifying each other again, or that there would be an anti-American terrorist group able to capture and hold territory in multiple nations of the Middle East without Washington or her allies and partners being able to stunt its growth. We are now living in such a world. A world where innocent prisoners are burnt or drowned alive, or unbelievably decapitated with the use of detonating cord. A world in which hundreds of thousands have been killed in a civil war in Syria and an insurgency in Iraq, both together driving millions of survivors into refugees camps or into the hands of human traffickers.

The Islamic State that is at the center of this tragedy is a unique threat for four reasons:

Firstly, it is the richest group of its kind in modern history. No other sub-state actor has the resources available to IS. Since capturing city after city in Iraq it has netted close to a billion dollars from state coffers, augmenting this stupendous sum with illicit oil sales, ransoms, and the sale of plundered antiquities. This income will allow IS to continue operations for years to come, and not just in Iraq and Syria. (Note: according to the official 9/11 commission report, that stupendous attack only cost Al Qaeda $500,000).
Second, it is the first ever transnational insurgency. In the modern era of guerrilla warfare, the insurgent force was defined by its desire to defeat an incumbent government and replace it. This was true of Mao Tse Tung in China, or the FARC of Colombia, and all the other insurgencies of the 20th century. The Islamic State is an international insurgency recruiting as it does from Muslim communities all around the world and enjoying the sponsorship of more than one foreign government. However, it is also a transnational insurgency. Not only does it hold territory in both Iraq and Syria, with the intent of displacing both the Assad government and the government in Baghdad, it has the goal of destroying all regimes that it deems to be un-Islamic. The fact that Nigeria’s Boko Haram was recently accepted into IS and subsequently changed its name to The West Africa Province of the Islamic State means that Abu Bakr is now technically the Caliph or emperor of not only all IS land in the Middle East, but also former Boko Haram territory in Africa.
Third, in its ability to recruit jihadi fighters, the Islamic State has out surpassed Al Qaeda in every measure. Exact figures are impossible, but the best estimates are that, in the space of less than a year, the Islamic State has drawn 20,000 foreign fighters from around the globe, including Western Europe, Australia and North America. Al Qaeda, the original jihadi group responsible for the 9/11 attacks, did manage to attract foreign recruits, but never in the tens of thousands.
Lastly, and most problematically for any hope we may have for defeating IS, the Islamic State has built a global Social Media-based propaganda platform that is very sophisticated and effective and that the nations its wishes to destroy – America included – have been impotent to combat.

Alone, these four attributes would make any irregular threat like IS/ISIS a formidable enemy. Where it is located makes it a strategically deadly one.

Just like Judaism and Christianity, Islam has a very deep eschatology. The Sunna, or traditions of Islam, go into great detail about how the world will end and how all humans will be finally judged on the final day by Allah. Before that end comes, the religion is explicit that there will be a great final holy war, or Jihad, in the land of Al Shaam, the Arabic word for Greater Syria and the Levant, or the territory in which Abu Bakr has successfully established his new Caliphate. In fact, between its origins as Al Qaeda in Iraq and its current name of the Islamic State, the group specifically referred to itself as The Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham. As a result, Abu Bakr, the leader of the new Caliphate, has the eschatology of a faith followed by over 1 billion Muslims on his side. He knows that, by being successful on the ground that all Muslims know is the site of the last holy war before judgement day, he can rely on a steady stream of recruits for as long as there is no opposing ground force set against him in Al Sham.

Plainly put, in the last 12 months since he declared the new Caliphate, Abu Bakr has achieved more than Al Qaeda did in the preceding 13 years. Also, instead of being the “JV team” to Ayman al Zawahiri’s professional team, it is America that has presented itself as the amateur foe.

After Abu Bakr and his Al Qaeda in Iraq franchise was kicked out of the original terror group by Zawahiri for disobeying his orders, he took his small terrorist force in Syria from Iraq and used the civil war there to train and expand his force. As the bloodshed mounted both there and in an Iraq increasingly divided by the corruption and brutality of the Maliki regime, hundreds of thousands of local residents fell victim to the depredations of the competing fighting forces. Yet America decided not to respond. Having pulled our forces out of Iraq in 2011, we were unready and unable to respond to the growing threat. At the same time, President Obama made repeated statements about “red lines” that President Assad was not to cross. The lines were crossed but without triggering a US response. Not until thousands of Yazidis were hounded by ISIS up to the top of Mount Sinjar did the President decide to act by deploying air assets to target ISIS units on the ground.

The delay in an American response has cost America’s reputation in the Gulf dearly, perhaps more dearly than anything done by the administration of George W. Bush. As it was recently explained to me by a very senior U.S. General with responsibilities in the region: “Our Sunni allies just don’t trust us anymore. The region already runs on conspiracy theories, but after the Sunni see more than 200,000 of their people murdered in the last three years and we do nothing until a minority sect is attacked, they draw the conclusion that we are on the side of the mullahs and the Shia revival.”

If one agrees with the summary by Prime Minister Netanyahu that the violence on the Middle East and North Africa cannot be understood unless seen as “a game of thrones” for the crown of the caliphate between the Shia and Sunni extremists, then it is obvious that giving the impression that we have already chosen sides will only feed the flames of war. Especially when this impression is apparently confirmed by every additional concession made by the White House to Tehran in the hopes of closing a nuclear deal with the Revolutionary Republic.

Nor can these threats any longer be relegated to events happening far away. As the targeting of Pamela Geller’s free speech event in Garland, Texas by two armed jihadis demonstrates, those who wish to impose a puritanical and violent version of Islam upon America and her citizens are already here. And Garland is not a one-off. The FBI has confirmed that the Bureau already has ongoing IS-related investigations underway in every state of the Republic. Recently, the first IS recruiter was arrested in New Jersey. And in preparation for this article I had a research assistant simply collect all open-source reports of IS arrests and plots uncovered in the US in the last 24 months. We found 56!

When will America take the threat of a hyper-violent organization with tens of thousands of adherents who wish to destroy America seriously? When did we take Al Qaeda seriously? On September 12th, 2001. At the moment, short of a mass-casualty attack occurring on US soil in a way that links the perpetrators directly to the Islamic State, it seems highly unlikely that the Obama administration will truly take the fight to IS. Of the 400+ troops the White House has decided to deploy to Iraq to help train the trainers, less than 150 will in fact work on that mission, with the rest providing security to the trainers. The Islamic State has more than 30,000 active jihadis, more than half of whom were recruited from abroad. And the most powerful nation in the world can only spare an extra 150 trainers? As another senior officer recently commented in front of a meeting of US generals: “Every day that ISIS still exists and the most powerful nation in the world does nothing, we can chalk another propaganda victory up to the jihadis.”

Consequently, it seems unavoidable that IS will continue to grow and spread its barbarity until a new Commander-in-Chief is sworn in. The good news is that in an election campaign that is already underway and which almost each day sees the cornucopia of at least the Republic candidates increase, national security is at last back on the front burner, or rather both front burners. As a result we may have a chance after November 2016 to engage our newest enemy in the way the jihadists deserve.

The details of a possible strategy that could be used to measure the candidates will follow in Part Two.

Sebastian Gorka Ph.D. is the Major General Matthew C. Horner Chair of Military Theory at the Marine Corps University. You can see his briefing from the Global Counterterrorism Summit on Why ISIS is Much More Dangerous than Al Qaeda here and follow him on Twitter at: @SebGorka.

 

[Housecarl]

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.mexidata.info/id4170.html

Monday, June 29, 2015

Cuba and FARC, and their Sinister Presence in Venezuela

By Jerry Brewer

Cuba maintains one of its largest intelligence networks in Venezuela (and in Mexico). The late President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela preferred direct access to Cuba’s security service, as indicated by cables that were released and sent from the U.S. Embassy in Caracas to the State Department.

The Cuban security apparatchik remains a key source of Venezuela’s training for its military, and its domestic and foreign security services, as well as for the development and support of people and groups with terror agendas, and to restrain and inhibit opposition to the repressive leftist governments of Venezuela and Cuba.

Many blind eyes and ears are enraged when offered a peek under the espionage umbrella that reports what some believe are old cold war diatribes designed to punish rogue nations for anti-U.S. sentiments.

One good example is the skillfully exploited situation, the charade, by Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) guerrillas.

The efforts to end more than 50 years of conflict in Colombia, through the latest peace talks that began in November of 2012, in Cuba, clearly demonstrate the terrorist group’s desire to gain power and political office; to be forgiven for their atrocities; and to not surrender their arms.

To simply summarize and give credence to this rebel farce, Ivan Marquez, the lead negotiator of FARC, said that people shouldn't hold high expectations for the peace talks. This as Marquez must see Colombia’s heightened frustrations with the FARC, and its empty words, shenanigans and murderous agenda.

In March, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos agreed to halt aerial bombing in recognition of a unilateral cease-fire called by FARC at Christmastime. However, he subsequently ordered air assaults to resume in response to a rebel attack that killed ten soldiers in April.

Since then both sides have carried out attacks, with the FARC renewing offensive operations and sabotaging roads, pipelines and utilities. Last week four soldiers were killed in northeastern Colombia when a helicopter dropping off troops was destroyed by explosives detonated remotely by the FARC.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, U.S.-based social scientists held a negative view of truces involving violent groups and gangs, believing that those kinds of agreements legitimized gangs, reinforced the authority of their leaders, deepened cohesion among their rank and file, and actually reproduced – rather than reduce – violence. Their perceptions had much merit as evidenced by MS-13 and other gangs in Latin America.

On June 24, U.S. President Barack Obama publicly stated for the first time that the U.S. government “can communicate and negotiate with hostage takers.” This will certainly add many new victims worldwide to at least the minimum of a vast multi-million dollar illicit business of kidnapping and extortion. Kidnap and Ransom insurance (K&R) is growing by leaps and bounds worldwide.

To further complicate the situation and continue the threat, Cuba and Venezuela are joined by Iran with a close and cooperative relationship against the U.S., and in support of terrorist groups and states. Much of this cozy relationship is facilitated though intelligence exchanges, and Cuba’s staunch and highly successful human intelligence network.

This network skillfully and masterfully controls Venezuela’s people via document control and logistics to forge travel documents and facilitate rogue agent travel through borders. Cuba has recently proven to remain adept at harboring terrorists and facilitating weapons movement in violation of UN sanctions.

In an act of profound bewilderment, The White House recently announced that Cuba will be removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism. This “despite its ties to Marxist, jihadist, and other separatist terrorist organizations,” as stated in a Breitbart News lead last April 14.

President Obama said that Cuba “has not provided any support for international terrorism in six months,” despite the presence of almost every senior official of the FARC. President Obama also claimed that the Cuban government had “provided assurances that it will not support acts of international terrorism in the future.”

Regarding Venezuela, as with Cuba, there is a curious amnesia by President Obama and his advisors as to the misery and violent oppression, imprisonment, murder and disappearances in both nations. It certainly must not mean that U.S. intelligence has failed, for the international media is constantly rife with examples.

Estimates are that around 10,000 highly violent militant grassroots groups, called colectivos, have received training by Cuban security officials along Venezuela’s border with Colombia. They define themselves “as the defenders of revolutionary socialism," and are a real threat to citizens that reject revolutionary rule and government abuses.

To demonstrate the reality and importance of this strategic and highly tactical operational training and development venue by Cuba, Raul Castro has sent in high-ranking officers – that include generals, commanders, and officials from Cuba’s Interior Ministry.

Cuba and the rogue Venezuelan government’s facilitation with terrorists must be stopped. Even the U.S. DEA has shown direct and growing criminal drug ties between Colombia's FARC guerrillas and Hezbollah. The Cuban and Venezuelan government’s illicit criminal nexus must be a top priority of astute democratic government’s intelligence in the Western Hemisphere.

——————————

Jerry Brewer is C.E.O. of Criminal Justice International Associates, a global threat mitigation firm headquartered in northern Virginia. His website is located at www.cjiausa.org.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20150630000929

N. Korea patrol ship sent back after crossing inter-Korean

Published : 2015-06-30 15:36
Updated : 2015-06-30 15:36

A North Korea patrol ship was forced back into Northern waters Tuesday after receiving warning shots from the South Korean Navy after the ship crossed the inter-Korean sea border, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said.

The patrol ship came down about 1.5 kilometers south of the Northern Limit Line at 10:22 a.m., the JCS said in a press release, adding that the Navy fired warning shots, along with a warning message before the North Korean ship retreated.

North Korea often trespasses the de facto maritime border, challenging the legitimacy of the NLL drawn by the U.S.-led United Nations Command after the 1950-53 Korean War.

It is the eighth time the North has violated the NLL so far this year.

"The South Korean military stands with full combat readiness, with a close eye kept on the movement of the North Korean military," the statement said. (Yonhap)

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.nst.com.my/node/90283

Coming to terms with a nuclear Iran
By Dr Abdul Wahed Jalal Nori - 30 June 2015 @ 12:00 PM

IN this article I will answer three questions with regard to the Iranian nuclear issue.

FIRST, what are the reasons for Iran wanting nuclear weapons?

SECOND, what threats perceived by Iran are contributing to its nuclear goal?

THREE, what are the international security implications of Iran becoming a nuclear state?

As this article goes to press, the negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China and Russia (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council) and Germany — are due to be concluded soon.

Negotiators are pressing Teheran to freeze key elements of its uranium-enrichment cycle — which can be used to produce nuclear warheads — in return for easing sanctions that have crippled the Iranian economy.

If everything goes well, sanctions on Iran may soon be lifted and that deal will turn out to be the single most lasting foreign policy achievement of President Barack Obama’s eight years in the White House and, even without any final agreement, the framework of the deal has somehow recalibrated the balance of power in the Middle East.

But in a speech broadcast on state television on Tuesday, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei insisted that Iran would only dismantle its nuclear infrastructure if economic sanctions were lifted first, and he ruled out halting sensitive nuclear research and development work for the 10 years agreed under the outline plan.

Some analysts believe that such a deal is unlikely to succeed because technical details have yet to be defined and Iran will not get relief from sanctions before the end of the year in the best of cases.

At the same time, Iran does not appear to be halting its march toward nuclear weapons capability. There is also little sign of domestic debate, as Iranians — regardless of their position as conservatives or liberals, hardliners or reformists on the political spectrum — appear to agree that when it comes to threats to national security, Iran should have the means to defend itself.

Despite attempts lasting more than a decade to resolve the issue, Iran has yet to make significant concessions on its nuclear programme.

The New York Times reported on June 1 that Teheran’s stockpile of nuclear fuel had increased by 20 per cent over the past 18 months. That would deem nonsensical the Obama administration’s contention that Iran had frozen its enrichment operations for the duration of the negotiations.

Iran is almost unique in being in a very strategic and sensitive geographical location. Therefore, the uncooperative and often belligerent stance that it adopts towards the rest of the world needs to be understood in light of Iran’s position as a strategically positioned country.

At the same time, national pride runs deep among Iranians, as the country has been an active centre of cultural, scientific, religious and political thought for many centuries.

The “nuclear Iran” is a way for the country to affirm to itself and the world that it is an advanced and sovereign nation. The motivation behind Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, therefore, should be understood in terms of regime preservation and a deterrent against regional powers, such as Israel’s nuclear power. If Iran crosses the nuclear threshold, deterrence will apply, even if the Iranian arsenal is relatively smaller than Israel’s.

Some scholars, such as Kenneth Waltz, believe claims that Iran’s nuclear programme poses a direct threat to the entire region and constitutes a major source and incentive for nuclear proliferation across the Middle East are an unfounded fear.

When Israel built its first nuclear weapon in December 1966, it was at war with many Arab countries. Its nuclear arms were a much bigger threat to the Arab world than Iran’s programme is today. If a nuclear Israel did not trigger an arms race then, there is no reason a nuclear Iran should now.

For that reason, the US and its allies need not take such pains to prevent the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon. Diplomacy between Iran and the major powers should continue because open lines of communication will make the Western countries feel better able to live with a nuclear Iran. But, the current sanctions on Iran should be lifted as they primarily harm ordinary Iranians, not the state, and have little purpose.

Punishing a state through economic sanctions does not derail its nuclear programme. North Korea, for example, succeeded in building its weapons, despite countless rounds of sanctions and resolutions by the United Nations Security Council.

If Teheran determines that its security depends on possessing nuclear weapons, sanctions are unlikely to change its mind.

In fact, adding more sanctions now could make Iran feel even more vulnerable, giving it more reason to seek protection of the ultimate deterrent.

The writer is a senior analyst (social policy) at the Institute of Strategic & International Studies Malaysia

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.vox.com/2015/6/29/8845913/russia-war

How World War III became possible
A nuclear conflict with Russia is likelier than you think

by Max Fisher on June 29, 2015

It was in August 2014 that the real danger began, and that we heard the first warnings of war. That month, unmarked Russian troops covertly invaded eastern Ukraine, where the separatist conflict had grown out of its control. The Russian air force began harassing the neighboring Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which are members of NATO. The US pledged that it would uphold its commitment to defend those countries as if they were American soil, and later staged military exercises a few hundred yards from Russia's border.

Table of contents
I. The warnings
II. The gamble
III. The drift

How it would happen:
IV. The Baltics scenario
V. A plot to break NATO
VI. The fog of hybrid war
VII. The Ukraine scenario

The nuclear dangers:
VIII. The red line is closer than you think
IX. How Putin is pushing us back to the brink
X. An atomic gun to the world's head
XI. Does Putin believe nuclear war can be "won"?
XII. End games

Both sides came to believe that the other had more drastic intentions. Moscow is convinced the West is bent on isolating, subjugating, or outright destroying Russia. One in three Russians now believe the US may invade. Western nations worry, with reason, that Russia could use the threat of war, or provoke an actual conflict, to fracture NATO and its commitment to defend Eastern Europe. This would break the status quo order that has peacefully unified Europe under Western leadership, and kept out Russian influence, for 25 years.

Fearing the worst of one another, the US and Russia have pledged to go to war, if necessary, to defend their interests in the Eastern European borderlands. They have positioned military forces and conducted chest-thumping exercises, hoping to scare one another down. Putin, warning repeatedly that he would use nuclear weapons in a conflict, began forward-deploying nuclear-capable missiles and bombers.

Europe today looks disturbingly similar to the Europe of just over 100 years ago, on the eve of World War I. It is a tangle of military commitments and defense pledges, some of them unclear and thus easier to trigger. Its leaders have given vague signals for what would and would not lead to war. Its political tensions have become military buildups. Its nations are teetering on an unstable balance of power, barely held together by a Cold War–era alliance that no longer quite applies.

If you take a walk around Washington or a Western European capital today, there is no feeling of looming catastrophe. The threats are too complex, with many moving pieces and overlapping layers of risk adding up to a larger danger that is less obvious. People can be forgiven for not seeing the cloud hanging over them, for feeling that all is well — even as in Eastern Europe they are digging in for war. But this complacency is itself part of the problem, making the threat more difficult to foresee, to manage, or, potentially, to avert.
""There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War""

There is a growing chorus of political analysts, arms control experts, and government officials who are sounding the alarm, trying to call the world's attention to its drift toward disaster. The prospect of a major war, even a nuclear war, in Europe has become thinkable, they warn, even plausible.

What they describe is a threat that combines many of the hair-trigger dangers and world-ending stakes of the Cold War with the volatility and false calm that preceded World War I — a comparison I heard with disturbing frequency.

They described a number of ways that an unwanted but nonetheless major war, like that of 1914, could break out in the Eastern European borderlands. The stakes, they say, could not be higher: the post–World War II peace in Europe, the lives of thousands or millions of Eastern Europeans, or even, in a worst-case scenario that is remote but real, the nuclear devastation of the planet.
I. The warnings: "War is not something that's impossible anymore"

Everyone in Moscow tells you that if you want to understand Russia's foreign policy and its view of its place the world, the person you need to talk to is Fyodor Lukyanov.

Sober and bespectacled, with an academic's short brown beard, Lukyanov speaks with the precision of a political scientist but the occasional guardedness of someone with far greater access than your average analyst.

Widely considered both an influential leader and an unofficial interpreter of Russia's foreign policy establishment, Lukyanov is chief of Russia's most important foreign policy think tank and its most important foreign policy journal, both of which reflect the state and its worldview. He is known to be close to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Fyodor Lukyanov speaks at a 2014 conference in London (Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for The New York Times)

Fyodor Lukyanov speaks at a 2014 conference in London. (Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for The New York Times)

I met Lukyanov around the corner from the looming Foreign Ministry compound (his office is nearby), at a small, bohemian cafe in Moscow that serves French and Israeli food to a room packed with gray suits. He was candid and relaxed. When the discussion turned to the risks of war, he grew dire.

"The atmosphere is a feeling that war is not something that’s impossible anymore," Lukyanov told me, describing a growing concern within Moscow's foreign policy elite.

"A question that was absolutely impossible a couple of years ago, whether there might be a war, a real war, is back," he said. "People ask it."

Read the full interview with Fyodor Lukyanov

I asked how this had happened. He said that regular Russian people don't desire war, but rather feared it would become necessary to defend against the implacably hostile United States.

"The perception is that somebody would try to undermine Russia as a country that opposes the United States, and then we will need to defend ourselves by military means," he explained.

Such fears, vague but existential, are everywhere in Moscow. Even liberal opposition leaders I met with, pro-Western types who oppose Putin, expressed fears that the US posed an imminent threat to Russia's security.

I had booked my trip to Moscow in December, hoping to get the Russian perspective on what were, at the time, murmurings among a handful of political and arms control analysts that conflict could come to Europe. By the time I arrived in the city, in late April, concerns of an unintended and potentially catastrophic war had grown unsettlingly common.

Lukyanov, pointing to the US and Russian military buildups along Eastern Europe, also worried that an accident or provocation could be misconstrued as a deliberate attack and lead to war.

In the Cold War, he pointed out, both sides had understood this risk and installed political and physical infrastructure — think of the "emergency red phone" — to manage tensions and prevent them from spiraling out of control. That infrastructure is now gone.
Use this flowchart to see how a crisis in Estonia could lead to war. Click for full size:

"All those mechanisms were disrupted or eroded," he said. "That [infrastructure] has been degraded since the end of the Cold War because the common perception is that we don’t need it anymore."

That the world does not see the risk of war hanging over it, in other words, makes that risk all the likelier. For most Americans, such predictions sound improbable, even silly. But the dangers are growing every week, as are the warnings.

"One can hear eerie echoes of the events a century ago that produced the catastrophe known as World War I," Harvard professor and longtime Pentagon adviser Graham Allison — one of the graybeards of American foreign policy — wrote in a May cover story for the National Interest, co-authored with Russia analyst Dimitri Simes. Their article, "Russia and America: Stumbling to War," warned that an unwanted, full-scale conflict between the US and Russia was increasingly plausible.

In Washington, the threat feels remote. It does not in Eastern Europe. Baltic nations, fearing war, have already begun preparing for it. So has Sweden: "We see Russian intelligence operations in Sweden — we can't interpret this in any other way — as preparation for military operations against Sweden," a Swedish security official announced in March.

In May, Finland's defense ministry sent letters to 900,000 citizens — one-sixth of the population — telling them to prepare for conscription in case of a "crisis situation." Lithuania has reinstituted military conscription. Poland, in June, appointed a general who would take over as military commander in case of war.

Though Western publics remain blissfully unaware, and Western leaders divided, many of the people tasked with securing Europe are treating conflict as more likely. In late April, NATO and other Western officials gathered in Estonia, a former Soviet republic and NATO member on Russia's border that Western analysts most worry could become ground zero for a major war with Russia.

At the conference, Deputy Secretary General Alexander Vershbow spoke so openly about NATO's efforts to prepare for the possibility of Russia launching a limited nuclear strike in Europe that, according to the journalist Ahmed Rashid, who was in attendance, he had to be repeatedly reminded he was speaking on the record.

One of the scenarios Vershbow said NATO was outlining, according to Rashid's paraphrase, was that Russia could "choose to use a tactical weapon with a small blast range on a European city or a Western tank division."

>A few weeks later, the Guardian reported that NATO is considering plans to "upgrade" its nuclear posture in Europe in response to Russia's own nuclear saber-rattling. One proposal: for NATO's military exercises to include more nuclear weapons use, something Russia already does frequently.

II. The gamble: Putin's plan to make Russia great again

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visit military exercises in Kirillovsky (MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty)

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu visit military exercises in Kirillovsky. (MIKHAIL KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty)

Should the warnings prove right, and a major war break out in Europe between Russia and the West, then the story of that war, if anyone is still around to tell it, will begin with Russian President Vladimir Putin trying to solve a problem.

That problem is this: Putin's Russia is weak. It can no longer stand toe to toe with the US. It no longer has Europe divided in a stalemate; rather, it sees the continent as dominated by an ever-encroaching anti-Russian alliance. In the Russian view, the country's weakness leaves it at imminent risk, vulnerable to a hostile West bent on subjugating or outright destroying Russia as it did to Iraq and Libya.

This is made more urgent for Putin by his political problems at home. In 2012, during his reelection, popular protests and accusations of fraud weakened his sense of political legitimacy. The problem worsened with Russia's 2014 economic collapse; Putin's implicit bargain with the Russian people had been that he would deliver economic growth and they would let him erode basic rights. Without the economy, what did he have to offer them?

Putin's answer has been to assert Russian power beyond its actual strength — and, in the process, to recast himself as a national hero guarding against foreign enemies. Without a world-power-class military or economy at his disposal, he is instead wielding confusion and uncertainty — which Soviet leaders rightly avoided as existential dangers — as weapons against the West.

Unable to overtly control Eastern Europe, he has fomented risks and crises in there, sponsoring separatists in Ukraine and conducting dangerous military activity along NATO airspace and coastal borders, giving Russia more leverage there. Reasserting a Russian sphere of influence over Eastern Europe, he apparently believes, will finally give Russia security from the hostile West — and make Russia a great power once more.

Knowing his military is outmatched against the Americans, he is blurring the distinction between war and peace, deploying tactics that exist in, and thus widen, the gray between: militia violence, propaganda, cyberattacks, under a new rubric the Russian military sometimes calls "hybrid war."
""This was the theory of the Kaiser before World War I: The more threatening you are, the more people will submit to your will. Putin’s going to threaten and threaten and hope that NATO bends. But the long run of international relations suggests that it goes the other way.""

Unable to cross America's red lines, Putin is doing his best to muddy them — and, to deter the Americans, muddying his own. Turning otherwise routine diplomatic and military incidents into games of high-stakes chicken favors Russia, he believes, as the West will ultimately yield to his superior will.

To solve the problem of Russia's conventional military weakness, he has dramatically lowered the threshold for when he would use nuclear weapons, hoping to terrify the West such that it will bend to avoid conflict. In public speeches, over and over, he references those weapons and his willingness to use them. He has enshrined, in Russia's official nuclear doctrine, a dangerous idea no Soviet leader ever adopted: that a nuclear war could be winnable.

Putin, having recast himself at home as a national hero standing up to foreign enemies, is more popular than ever. Russia has once more become a shadow hanging over Eastern Europe, feared and only rarely bowed to, but always taken seriously. Many Western Europeans, asked in a poll whether they would defend their own Eastern European allies from a Russian invasion, said no.

Russia's aggression, born of both a desire to reengineer a European order that it views as hostile and a sense of existential weakness that justifies drastic measures, makes it far more willing to accept the dangers of war.

As RAND's F. Stephen Larrabee wrote in one of the increasingly urgent warnings that some analysts are issuing, "The Russia that the United States faces today is more assertive and more unpredictable — and thus, in many ways, more dangerous — than the Russia that the United States confronted during the latter part of the Cold War."

Joseph Nye, the dean of Harvard University's school of government and one of America's most respected international relations scholars, pointed out that Russia's weakness-masking aggression was yet another disturbing parallel to the buildup to World War I.

"Russia seems doomed to continue its decline — an outcome that should be no cause for celebration in the West," Nye wrote in a recent column. "States in decline — think of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914 — tend to become less risk-averse and thus much more dangerous."

III. The drift: How the unthinkable became possible

The Cold War was a dangerous game, but it was a game in which everyone knew and agreed upon the stakes and the rules. That is not the case today.

The Western side believes it is playing a game where the rules are clear enough, the stakes relatively modest, and the competition easily winnable. The Russian side, however, sees a game where the rules can be rewritten on the fly, even the definition of war itself altered. For Russia, fearing a threat from the West it sees as imminent and existential, the stakes are unimaginably high, justifying virtually any action or gamble if it could deter defeat and, perhaps, lead to victory.

Separately, the ever-paranoid Kremlin believes that the West is playing the same game in Ukraine. Western support for Ukraine's government and efforts to broker a ceasefire to the war there, Moscow believes, are really a plot to encircle Russia with hostile puppet states and to rob Russia of its rightful sphere of influence.

Repeated Russian warnings that it would go to war to defend its perceived interests in Ukraine, potentially even nuclear war, are dismissed in most Western capitals as bluffing, mere rhetoric. Western leaders view these threats through Western eyes, in which impoverished Ukraine would never be worth risking a major war. In Russian eyes, Ukraine looks much more important: an extension of Russian heritage that is sacrosanct and, as the final remaining component of the empire, a strategic loss that would unacceptably weaken Russian strength and thus Russian security.

Both side are gambling and guessing in the absence of a clear understanding of what the other side truly intends, how it will act, what will and will not trigger the invisible triplines that would send us careening into war.
"Today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I"

During the Cold War, the comparably matched Western and Soviet blocs prepared for war but also made sure that war never came. They locked Europe in a tense but stable balance of power; that balance is gone. They set clear red lines and vowed to defend them at all costs. Today, those red lines are murky and ill-defined. Neither side is sure where they lie or what really happens if they are crossed. No one can say for sure what would trigger war.

That is why, analysts will tell you, today's tensions bear far more similarity to the period before World War I: an unstable power balance, belligerence over peripheral conflicts, entangling military commitments, disputes over the future of the European order, and dangerous uncertainty about what actions will and will not force the other party into conflict.

Today's Russia, once more the strongest nation in Europe and yet weaker than its collective enemies, calls to mind the turn-of-the-century German Empire, which Henry Kissinger described as "too big for Europe, but too small for the world." Now, as then, a rising power, propelled by nationalism, is seeking to revise the European order. Now, as then, it believes that through superior cunning, and perhaps even by proving its might, it can force a larger role for itself. Now, as then, the drift toward war is gradual and easy to miss — which is exactly what makes it so dangerous.

But there is one way in which today's dangers are less like those before World War I, and more similar to those of the Cold War: the apocalyptic logic of nuclear weapons. Mutual suspicion, fear of an existential threat, armies parked across borders from one another, and hair-trigger nuclear weapons all make any small skirmish a potential armageddon.

In some ways, that logic has grown even more dangerous. Russia, hoping to compensate for its conventional military forces' relative weakness, has dramatically relaxed its rules for using nuclear weapons. Whereas Soviet leaders saw their nuclear weapons as pure deterrents, something that existed precisely so they would never be used, Putin's view appears to be radically different.

Russia's official nuclear doctrine calls on the country to launch a battlefield nuclear strike in case of a conventional war that could pose an existential threat. These are more than just words: Moscow has repeatedly signaled its willingness and preparations to use nuclear weapons even in a more limited war.

This is a terrifyingly low bar for nuclear weapons use, particularly given that any war would likely occur along Russia's borders and thus not far from Moscow. And it suggests Putin has adopted an idea that Cold War leaders considered unthinkable: that a "limited" nuclear war, of small warheads dropped on the battlefield, could be not only survivable but winnable.

"It’s not just a difference in rhetoric. It’s a whole different world," Bruce G. Blair, a nuclear weapons scholar at Princeton, told the Wall Street Journal. He called Putin's decisions more dangerous than those of any Soviet leader since 1962. "There’s a low nuclear threshold now that didn’t exist during the Cold War."

Nuclear theory is complex and disputable; maybe Putin is right. But many theorists would say he is wrong, that the logic of nuclear warfare means a "limited" nuclear strike is in fact likely to trigger a larger nuclear war — a doomsday scenario in which major American, Russian, and European cities would be targets for attacks many times more powerful than the bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Even if a nuclear war did somehow remain limited and contained, recent studies suggest that environmental and atmospheric damage would cause a "decade of winter" and mass crop die-outs that could kill up to 1 billion people in a global famine.

IV. How it would happen: The Baltics scenario

In September of last year, President Obama traveled to Estonia, a nation of 1.3 million people that most Americans have never heard of, and pledged that the United States would if necessary go to war with Russia to defend it.

Estonia, along with Latvia and Lithuania — together known as the Baltic states — are at the far edge of Eastern Europe, along Russia's border. They were formerly part of the Soviet Union. And they are where many Western analysts fear World War III is likeliest to start.

These small countries are "the most likely front line of any future crisis," according to Stephen Saideman, an international relations professor at Carleton University. Allison and Simes, in their essay warning of war, called the Baltics "the Achilles’ heel of the NATO alliance."

A full quarter of Estonia's population is ethnically Russian. Clustered on the border with Russia, this minority is served by the same Russian state media that helped stir up separatist violence among Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.

But unlike Ukraine, the Baltic states are all members of NATO, whose charter states that an attack on one member is an attack on them all. Whereas a Russian invasion of Ukraine prompted Western sanctions, a Russian invasion of Estonia would legally obligate the US and most of Europe to declare war on Moscow.

"We'll be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again," Obama pledged in his September speech in Estonia.

obama estonia (saul loeb/afp/getty)

President Obama pledges the US will defend Estonia while in the Estonian capital of Tallinn. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty)

Less than 48 hours after Obama's address, Russian agents blanketed an Estonia-Russia border crossing with tear gas, stormed across, and kidnapped an Estonian state security officer, Eston Kohver, who specialized in counterintelligence. Kohver has been held illegally in a Russian prison for nine months now.

It was something like an act of geopolitical trolling: aggressive enough to assert Russian dominion over Estonia, but not so aggressive as to be considered a formal act of war that would trigger a Western counterattack. And it was one of several signs that Putin's Russia is asserting a right to meddle in these former Soviet territories.

The Russian military has already begun pressing the Baltic states. Russian warships were spotted in Latvian waters 40 times in 2014. Russian military flights over the Baltics are now routine, often with the planes switching off their transponders, which makes them harder to spot and increases the chances of an accident. Military activity in the region had reached Cold War levels.

NATO, fearing the worst, is increasing military exercises in the Baltics. The US is installing heavy equipment. And in February, the US military paraded through the Russian-majority Estonian city of Narva, a few hundred yards from Russia's borders.
""Without any intention to create the big conflict, it might happen. One step, another step, and reciprocity can become very dangerous." "

It's a textbook example of what political scientists call the security dilemma: Each side sees its actions as defensive and the other side's as offensive. Each responds to the other's perceived provocations by escalating further, a self-reinforcing cycle that can all too easily lead to war. It is considered, for example, a major contributor to the outbreak of World War I. That it is entirely foreseeable does little to reduce the risk.

Even if Russia in fact has no designs on the Baltics, its bluffing and posturing has already created the conditions for an unwanted war. In early April, for example, a Russian fighter jet crossed into the Baltic Sea and "buzzed" a US military plane, missing it by only 20 feet. It was one of several recent near-misses that, according to a think tank called the European Leadership Institute, have had a "high probability of causing casualties or a direct military confrontation between Russia and Western states."

Meanwhile, Russia has been flying its nuclear-capable strategic bombers along NATO airspace, often with the planes' transponders switched off, making an accident or misperception more likely. As if that weren't dangerous enough, the bombers — hulking, decades-old Tupolev Tu-95 models — have become prone to accidents such as engine fires. What if a Tu-95 went down unexpectedly, say, off the coast of Norway? What if it was carrying nuclear warheads, or it went down during a moment of high tension? Such incidents can lead to misunderstandings, and such misunderstandings can lead to war.

By late April, when NATO officials gathered at the security conference in Estonia's capital of Tallinn, the severity of the danger had become unmistakable. As Ahmed Rashid wrote from the conference:

Baltic presidents and NATO officials were unusually blunt in describing the extent to which the security architecture in Eastern Europe has collapsed, how Russia poses the gravest threat to peace since World War II, and how the conflict in Ukraine and the loss of the Crimea has left the Baltic states on the front line of an increasingly hostile standoff. Amid these tensions, the thought of a plane crash leading to war seems scarily plausible.

It is not just Western officials who fear such an incident could spark war. Fyodor Lukyanov, the prominent Russian analyst who is considered close to the government, worried that the NATO military exercises in the Baltics meant to deter Russia were also contributing to the problem.

"Russia reacts to that because Russia perceives it as a hostile approach to the Russian border," he explained. "And it’s a vicious circle."

It is easy to imagine, Lukyanov said, any number of ways that the powder keg could explode.

"Without any intention to create the big conflict, it might happen," he said. "One step, another step, and reciprocity can become very dangerous. Say a Russian aircraft comes very close to an area that NATO believes is prohibited while Russia believes it’s not prohibited, and then British aircraft respond. It might be manageable, and in most cases of course it will be, but who knows."

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

V. How it would happen: A plot to break NATO

It was Andrei Piontkovsky, a Russian political analyst and frequent Kremlin critic, who first suggested the theory, last August, that Putin's plan for the Baltics was more sophisticated, and more calculated, than anybody realized.

Piontkovsky was trying to answer a question that Western analysts and policymakers had been puzzling over since Russian provocations began in the Baltics last fall: What does Putin want? Unlike in Ukraine, with which Russia has a long shared history, there is little demand among the Russian public for intervention in the Baltic states. They are of modest strategic value. And the risks of Russia's aggression there are potentially catastrophic. Why bother?

His is a theory that is now taken much more seriously by Western policymakers — and appears more plausible all the time.

Amanda Taub

Andrei Piontkovsky at his home in Moscow.
""This is his most cherished objective, to destroy NATO. The risk is big, yes? But the prize is enormous.""

Putin hopes to spark a conflict in the Baltics, Piontkovsky wrote, so as to force Western European leaders into an impossible choice: Fulfill their NATO obligation to defend the Baltics and counterattack, even if it means fighting World War III over a tiny post-Soviet republic most Europeans couldn't care less about — or do nothing.

The implications of doing nothing, Piontkovsky pointed out, would extend far beyond the Baltics. It would lay bare NATO's mutual defense provision as a lie, effectively dissolving the military alliance, ending a quarter-century of Europe's security unification under Western leadership, and leaving Eastern Europe once more vulnerable to Russian domination. In this way, Putin could do what Soviet leaders never came close to: defeat NATO.

"This is his most cherished objective," Piontkovsky told me when we talked in his kitchen, in a leafy Moscow neighborhood across the river from Gorky Park. "It's an enormous temptation. He may retreat at any stage, but the temptation is enormous, to destroy NATO. ... The risk is big, yes? But the prize is enormous."

"To destroy NATO, to demonstrate that Article V does not work, the Baltic republics of Estonia and Latvia are the best place for this," he said. "It's happening now, every day. Intrusions into the airspace, psychological pressure, the propaganda on TV."

He suggested that Putin, rather than rolling Russian tanks across the border, would perhaps seed unmarked Russian special forces into, say, the Russian-majority city of Narva in Estonia, where they would organize localized violence or a phony independence referendum.

A handful of such unacknowledged forces, whom Putin referred to as "little green men" after they appeared in Crimea, would perhaps be dressed as local volunteers or a far-right gang; they might be joined by vigilantes, as they were in eastern Ukraine. They would almost certainly be aided by a wave of Russian propaganda, making it harder for outsiders to differentiate unmarked Russian troops from civilian volunteers, to determine who was fighting where and had started what.

Such an intervention would force NATO into an impossible choice: Are you really going to open fire on some hoodlums stirring up trouble in Estonia, knowing they might actually be unmarked Russian troops? Would you risk the first major European war since 1945, all to eject some unmarked Russian troops from the Estonian town of Narva?

Putin, Piontkovsky believes, is gambling that the answer is no. That NATO would not intervene, thus effectively abandoning its commitment to defend its Eastern European member states.

Piontkovsky's scenario, once considered extreme, is now widely seen by Western security experts and policymakers as plausible. At the end of 2014, the military intelligence service of Denmark, a member of NATO, issued a formal paper warning of precisely that:

Russia may attempt to test NATO’s cohesion by engaging in military intimidation of the Baltic countries, for instance with a threatening military build-up close to the borders of these countries and simultaneous attempts of political pressure, destabilization and possibly infiltration. Russia could launch such an intimidation campaign in connection with a serious crisis in the post-Soviet space or another international crisis in which Russia confronts the United States and NATO.

"The concern is that what Putin wants to do is break NATO, and the best way to do that would be to poach on the Baltics," Saideman, the political scientist, told me on a call from a European security conference where he said the scenario was being taken very seriously.

"And if Germany doesn’t respond to incursions in the Baltics, if France doesn’t respond and it’s just an American operation, then it will lead to the breaking of NATO, is the theory," he said. "That’s the biggest concern."

Saideman described a variation on this scenario that I heard from others as well: that Putin might attempt to seize some small sliver of the Baltics quickly and bloodlessly. This would make it politically easier for Western European leaders to do nothing — how to rally your nation to war if hardly anyone has even been killed? — and harder to counterattack, knowing it would require a full-scale invasion.

"I think they’re very serious about this," Saideman said. "There’s a real concern."

VI. How it would happen: The fog of hybrid war

A Ukrainian soldier stands watch near the front lines with pro-Russian separatist rebels (MANU BRABO/AFP/Getty)

A Ukrainian soldier stands watch near the front lines with pro-Russian separatist rebels. (MANU BRABO/AFP/Getty)

In early 2015, Pew pollsters asked citizens of several NATO states the exact question that analysts and policymakers from Washington to Moscow are gaming out: "If Russia got into a serious military conflict with one of its neighboring countries that is our NATO ally, do you think our country should or should not use military force to defend that country?"

The numbers from Western Europe were alarming: Among Germans, only 38 percent said yes; 58 percent said no. If it were up to German voters — and to at least some extent, it is — NATO would effectively surrender the Baltics to Russia in a conflict.

This poll is even worse than it looks. It assumes that Russia would launch an overt military invasion of the Baltics. What would actually happen is something far murkier, and far more likely to leverage European hesitation: the playbook from Ukraine, where Russia deployed its newly developed concepts of postmodern "hybrid war," designed to blur the distinction between war and not-war, to make it as difficult as possible to differentiate grassroots unrest or vigilante cyberattacks from Russian military aggression.

Putin may already be laying the groundwork.

In March of 2014, shortly after Russia had annexed Crimea, Putin gave a speech there pledging to protect Russians even outside of Russia, which many took as a gesture to the substantial Russian minorities in the Baltics.
""That kind of misperception situation is definitely possible, and that’s how wars start""

Then, in October, Putin warned that "open manifestations of neo-Nazism" had "become commonplace in Latvia and other Baltic states" — repeating the language that he and Russian state media had earlier used to frighten Russian speakers in Ukraine into taking up arms.

This April, several Russian outlets issued spurious reports that Latvia was planning to forcibly relocate ethnic Russians into Nazi-style ghettos — an echo of similar scaremongering Russian propaganda broadcast in the runup in Ukraine.

Martin Hurt, a former senior official of the country's defense ministry, warned that his country's ethnic Russian minority could be "receptive to Kremlin disinformation." Moscow, he said, could generate unrest "as a pretext to use military force against the Baltic states."

In early 2007, Estonia's parliament voted to relocate a Soviet-era military statue, the Bronze Soldier, that had become a cultural symbol and annual rallying point for the country's ethnic Russians. In response, Russian politicians and state media accused the Estonian government of fascism and Nazi-style discrimination against ethnic Russians; they issued false reports claiming ethnic Russians were being tortured and murdered. Protests broke out and escalated into riots and mass looting. One person was killed in the violence, and the next day hackers took many of the country's major institutions offline.

Russia could do it again, only this time gradually escalating further toward a Ukraine-style conflict. NATO is just not built to deal with such a crisis. Its mutual defense pledge, after all, rests on the assumption that war is a black-and-white concept, that a country is either at war or not at war. Its charter is from a time when war was very different than it is today, with its many shades of gray.

Russia can exploit this flaw by introducing low-level violence that more hawkish NATO members would consider grounds for war but that war-averse Western European states might not see that way. Disagreement among NATO's member states would be guaranteed as they hesitated over where to declare a moment when Russia had crossed the line into war.

Meanwhile, Russian state media, which has shown real influence in Western Europe, would unleash a flurry of propaganda to confuse the issue, make it harder to pin blame on Moscow for the violence, and gin up skepticism of any American calls for war.

Germany, which is widely considered the deciding vote on whether Europe would go to war, would be particularly resistant to going to war. The legacy of World War II and the ideology of pacifism and compromise make even the idea of declaring war on Russia unthinkable. German leaders would come under intense political pressure to, if not reject the call to arms, then at least delay and negotiate — a de facto rejection of NATO's collective self-defense.

In such a scenario, it is disturbingly easy to imagine how NATO's European member states could split over whether Russia had even crossed their red line for war, much less whether to respond. Under a fog of confusion and doubt, Russia could gradually escalate until a Ukraine-style conflict in the Baltics was foregone, until it had marched far across NATO's red line, exposing that red line as meaningless.

But the greatest danger of all is if Putin's plan were to stumble: By overreaching, by underestimating Western resolve to defend the Baltics, or by starting something that escalates beyond his control, it could all too easily lead to full-blown war.

"That kind of misperception situation is definitely possible, and that’s how wars start," Saideman said, going on to compare Europe today with 1914, just before World War I. "The thing that makes war most thinkable is when other people don’t think it’s thinkable."

In 1963, a few months after the Cuban missile crisis had almost brought the US and Soviet Union to blows, President John F. Kennedy gave a speech drawing on the lessons of the world's brush with nuclear war:

"Above all, while defending our vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war."

That is the choice that Putin may well force upon NATO.

VII. How it would happen: The Ukraine scenario

Evgeny Buzhinsky has spent much of his professional life with the threat of global nuclear destruction hanging over his head. A lifelong Russian military officer, he earned his PhD in military sciences in 1982, just as the Cold War entered one of its most dangerous periods, and rose to the General Staff, where he remained for years after the Soviet Union's collapse, through periods of calm and of tension.

He retired in 2009 as a lieutenant general and remains active in Russian national security circles, now heading the PIR Center, a well-respected Russian think tank that focuses on military, national security, and arms control issues.

Buzhinsky, when I met him in Moscow, had a warning for me. Those in the West who worried about the possibility of a major war breaking out in the Baltics were missing the real threat: Ukraine. The US, he feared, does not appreciate how far Russia is willing to go to avoid a defeat in Ukraine, and this miscalculation could pull them into conflict.

Read the full interview with former Russian General Evgeny Buzhinsky

"Ukraine, for Russia, is a red line," he warned. "And especially a Ukraine that is hostile to Russia is a definite red line. But the US administration decided that it's not."

This was a concern I heard more than once in Russia. When Fyodor Lukyanov, the Moscow foreign policy insider, warned that Russian foreign policy officials saw a major war as increasingly possible, and I asked him how they thought it would happen, he cited Ukraine.

"For example, massive military help to Ukraine from the United States — it could start as a proxy war, and then ..." he trailed off

Lukyanov worried that the US does not understand Russia's sense of ownership over Ukraine, the lengths it would go to protect its interests there. "It’s seen by many people as something that’s actually a part of our country, or if not part of our country then a country that’s absolutely essential to Russia’s security," he said.

Buzhinsky is one of those people. Like Lukyanov and other Russian analysts, he worried that the United States had wrongly concluded that Putin would ultimately acquiesce if he faced likely defeat in Ukraine. The Americans, he said, were dangerously mistaken.

Gregarious, bear-sized, and clearly accustomed to dealing with Westerners from overseeing arms control treaties during much of the 1990s, Buzhinsky sipped a grapefruit juice when we met in downtown Moscow.

"A year ago, I was absolutely convinced Russia would never intervene militarily," he said about the possibility of a full, overt Russian invasion of Ukraine. "Now I'm not so sure."

The view of the Russian government, he said, was that it could never allow the defeat of the pro-Russia separatist rebels in the eastern Ukraine region sometimes called Donbas. (In August, when those rebels appeared on the verge of defeat, Russia provided them with artillery support and covertly sent troops to fight alongside them, none of which Moscow has acknowledged.)

If Ukrainian forces were about to overrun the separatist rebels, Buzhinsky said, he believed that Russia would respond not just with an overt invasion, but by marching to Ukraine's capital of Kiev.

"A massive offensive on the Ukrainian side" against the rebels, he said, would lead Russia to openly enter the war. "A war with Russia in Ukraine — if Russia starts a war, it never stops until it takes the capital."
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When I asked Buzhinsky if he really believed Putin would launch a full Russian invasion of Kiev in response to a Ukrainian effort to retake Donbas, he answered, "Yes, definitely. He said twice publicly, 'I won't let it happen.' As he is a man of his word, I am sure he will."

Such a scenario, he said, could lead to a larger conflict no one wants. The Americans believe that "Russia will never dare, Putin will never dare, to interfere," leaving the US unprepared in case it should happen. "And then I could not predict the reaction of the United States and NATO."

Buzhinsky outlined another way he feared Ukraine could lead to a larger war. If the US provided sophisticated military equipment to Ukraine that required putting American trainers or operators near the front lines, and one of them was killed, he believed the US might feel compelled to intervene outright in Ukraine.

Would Russia really risk a major war over Ukraine, one of Europe's poorest countries?

For months, Moscow has been suggesting that Western military involvement in Ukraine, even something as mild as providing the Ukrainian military with certain arms, would be taken as an act of war against Russia. Like Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons, this has been shrugged off as bluster, mere rhetoric, just for scoring domestic political points.

What Buzhinsky was trying to underline to me was that the threats are real — that Russia might consider its interests in Ukraine so vital that it would risk or even fight a war to protect them. He was not alone in saying this — I heard it from many others in Moscow, including Russian analysts who are critical of their country's Ukraine policy as too aggressive.

Buzhinsky explained that Russia had set this as a red line out of the fear that a Ukrainian reconquest of eastern Ukraine would lead to "the physical extermination of the people of Donbas," many of whom are Russian speakers with cultural links to Russia. Russian state media has drilled this fear into the peoples of Ukraine and Russia for a year now. It does not have to be true to serve as casus belli; Moscow deployed a similar justification for its annexation of Crimea.
""You don't get to walk this back""

The connection to Ukraine is often expressed by everyday Russians as an issue of cultural heritage; Kievan Rus, a medieval Slavic federation with its capital in the present-day Ukrainian capital of Kiev, is something like Russia's predecessor state.

But this is likely about more than nationalism or kinship with Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Moscow is notorious for its conviction that the US is bent on Russia's destruction, or at least its subjugation. It is paranoid and painfully aware of its isolation and its comparative weakness. A hostile and pro-Western Ukraine, Putin may have concluded, would pose an existential threat by further weakening Russia beyond what it can afford.

Allison and Simes, in their essay on the risk of war, described Ukraine as a potential ground zero for wider conflict because of this.

"Russia’s establishment sentiment holds that the country can never be secure if Ukraine joins NATO or becomes a part of a hostile Euro-Atlantic community," they wrote. "From [Moscow's] perspective, this makes Ukraine’s non-adversarial status a non-negotiable demand for any Russia powerful enough to defend its national-security interests."

It is practically a cliché in international relations: "Russia without Ukraine is a country, Russia with Ukraine is an empire." Putin's Russia appears to believe that reclaiming great-power status is the only way it can guarantee security against a hostile West.

Jeffrey Lewis, an arms control expert, traced this Russian government obsession with Ukraine back to Putin's political weakness at home, as well as Russia's sense of military insecurity against a hostile and overwhelmingly powerful West.

"I suspect that the desire to unite the Russian world and to subjugate the non-Russian neighbors is driven by a fundamental sense of insecurity," Lewis said in a much-circulated September podcast on Putin's nuclear threats. "That, like the Soviet leadership, he has to try very hard to stay in power, and so there’s a tendency as his legitimacy declines to try to blame outside forces. And the problem is that when you try to look at the world in that conspiratorial way, there’s always a justification for subjugating the next set of neighbors."

This means that should the US or other Western countries become sufficiently involved in Ukraine that Russia cannot maintain control of the conflict, then Russia may feel this puts it at such existential threat that it has no choice but to escalate in response. Even at the risk of war.

Russia knows it would lose a full-blown war with NATO, of course, but it has other options. An official with the Russian Defense Ministry's public advisory board told the Moscow Times that should Western countries arm Ukraine's military, it would respond by escalating in Ukraine itself as well as "asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts."

Russian asymmetrical acts — cyberattacks, propaganda operations meant to create panic, military flights, even little green men — are all effective precisely because they introduce uncertainty and risk.

If that sounds dangerous, it is. American and NATO red lines for what acts of "asymmetry" would and would not trigger war are unclear and poorly defined.

Russia could easily cross such a line without meaning to, or could create enough confusion that the US believes it or its allies are under a severe enough threat to demand retaliation.

"You don't get to walk this back," Matthew Rojansky, the director of the Kennan Institute, warned in comments to the New York Times about what could happen if the US armed Ukraine's military, as Congress is pushing Obama to do.

"Once we have done this we become a belligerent party in a proxy war with Russia, the only country on Earth that can destroy the United States," Rojansky said. "That’s why this is a big deal."

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....



VIII. The nuclear dangers: The red line is closer than you think

This August, as the Russian military launched its undeclared and unofficial invasion of eastern Ukraine to defend separatist rebels there against defeat, Putin attended an annual youth conference at Lake Seliger, just north of Moscow. During a Q&A session, a teaching student asked an odd question about the "cyclical" nature of history and concerns that Russia could be "drawn into a new, open global conflict."

Putin, in his answer, did something that the leaders of major nuclear powers generally avoid doing — he rattled the nuclear saber a bit:

Let me remind you that Russia is one of the world’s biggest nuclear powers. These are not just words — this is the reality. What’s more, we are strengthening our nuclear deterrent capability and developing our armed forces. They have become more compact and effective and are becoming more modern in terms of the weapons at their disposal.

There is a certain fear in Russia, never far from the surface, that the only thing preventing the West from realizing its dream of destroying or subjugating Russia is its nuclear arsenal. (Three months later, Putin warned that the West wanted to tame the Russian bear so as to "tear out his fangs and his claws," which he explained meant its nuclear weapons.)

"There is a widespread belief that the only guarantee for Russian security, if not sovereignty and existence, is the nuclear deterrent," Lukyanov, the Russian foreign policy expert, explained. "After the Yugoslavia wars, Iraq War, Libyan intervention, it’s not an argument anymore, it’s conventional wisdom: 'If Russia were not a nuclear superpower, the regime change of an Iraqi or Libyan style would be inevitable here. The Americans are so unhappy with the Russian regime, they would do it. Praise God, we have a nuclear arsenal, and that makes us untouchable.'"

But Russia faced a problem: Its conventional military forces are now so much weaker than NATO's, and its capital city so close to NATO's forces in the Baltics, that it feared NATO tank divisions could push all the way to Moscow and quickly win a war without ever using a nuclear weapon. Both the US and Russia had pledged to use nuclear weapons only to deter one another from nuclear attacks. This kept the Cold War cold. But because the US would not need its ICBMs to win a war, that deterrence is no longer enough to keep Russia safe.

In response, Russia has been gradually lowering its bar for when it would use nuclear weapons, and in the process upending the decades-old logic of mutually assured destruction, adding tremendous nuclear danger to any conflict in Europe. The possibility that a limited or unintended skirmish could spiral into nuclear war is higher than ever.

Russia's nuclear doctrine, a formal document the Kremlin publishes every few years outlining when it will and will not use nuclear weapons, declares that the Russian military can launch nuclear weapons not just in the case of a nuclear attack, but in case of a conventional military attack that poses an existential threat. In other words, if Russia believes that American tanks could be bound for the Kremlin, it has declared it may respond by dropping nuclear bombs.
A Moscow woman watches the March 2015 state media documentary on Russia's Crimea annexation, in which Putin first revealed he had considered preparing nuclear forces (DMITRY SEREBRYAKOV/AFP/Getty)

A Moscow woman watches the March 2015 state media documentary on Russia's Crimea annexation in which Putin first revealed he had considered preparing nuclear forces. (DMITRY SEREBRYAKOV/AFP/Getty)

The danger that this adds to any possible confrontation, particularly along the Baltic states, is difficult to overstate. If an accident or miscalculation were to lead to a border skirmish, all it would take is for the Kremlin to misperceive the fighting as the beginning of an assault toward Moscow and its own doctrine would call for using nuclear weapons. Indeed, it would be the only way to avoid total defeat.

There is another layer of danger and uncertainty to this: It is not clear what Russia would consider a conventional threat worthy of a nuclear response. A few months after he'd annexed Crimea, Putin revealed that during Russia's undeclared invasion of the territory he had considered putting his country's nuclear forces on alert; his government has signaled it would consider using nuclear force to defend Crimea from an attack, something Russian analysts told me was not just bluster.

The United States, of course, has no intention of militarily retaking Crimea, despite surprisingly common fears to the contrary in Russia. But Russian paranoia about such a threat, and a possible willingness to use nuclear weapons to avert it, adds more danger to the already dangerous war in eastern Ukraine and the fears that greater Russian or Western involvement there could spark a broader conflict.

And the Crimea revelation raises a disconcerting question: Where exactly does Moscow place the line for a threat severe enough to use nuclear weapons? Its doctrine says they should be used only against an existential threat, but an attack on Crimea would be far from existentially dangerous. We can only guess where the real red line lays, and hope not to cross it by mistake.

IX. The nuclear dangers: How Putin is pushing us back to the brink

There is a specific moment that arms control experts often cite to highlight the dangers of nuclear weapons, how they kept the world poised, for years at a time, mere minutes away from nuclear devastation. That moment was September 26, 1983.

That evening, a Russian lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov settled in for his shift overseeing the Soviet Union's missile attack early warning system. Petrov had a top-secret network of satellites, all pointed squarely at the United States and its arsenal of nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles, which pointed back at him.

The US and Soviet Union were ramping up development of ICBMs, which could circle the globe in 30 minutes and reduce an enemy city to ash. Both sides were driven by fear that the other could one day gain the ability to launch a preemptive nuclear strike so devastating and so fast that it would start and win the war within hours. Each sought to develop ever more sensitive warning systems, and ever more rapid mechanisms for retaliation, to deter the threat.

Petrov ran one such warning system. If he caught an American attack as soon as it crossed his sensors, it would give the Soviet leadership about 20 minutes of warning time. That was their window to determine how to respond. The space for mistakes was effectively zero.

Five hours into Petrov's shift that night, something he had never encountered in his 11-year career happened: The system went into full alarm. The word "LAUNCH" displayed in large red letters. The screen announced a "high reliability" of an American ICBM barreling toward the Soviet Union.

Petrov had to make a decision: Would he report an incoming American strike? If he did, Soviet nuclear doctrine called for a full nuclear retaliation; there would be no time to double-check the warning system, much less seek negotiations with the US. If he didn't, and he was wrong, he would have left his country defenseless, an act tantamount to treason.

His gut instinct told him the warning was in error, but when he flipped through the incoming imagery and data and he could reach no hard conclusion from it. After a few moments, he called his superiors and stated categorically that it was a false alarm. There was, he insisted, no attack.

Petrov waited in agony for 23 minutes — the missile's estimated time to target — before he knew for sure that he'd been right. Only a few people were aware of it at the time, but thanks to Petrov, the world had only barely avoided World War III and, potentially, total nuclear annihilation.

The US and Soviet Union, shaken by this and other near-misses, spent the next few years stepping back from the brink. They decommissioned a large number of nuclear warheads and signed treaties to limit their deployment.

One of their most important measures was a 1987 agreement called the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which saw both sides conclude that the medium-range, land-based nuclear missiles they'd stuffed across Europe were simply too dangerous and destabilizing to be allowed. Because the missiles could reach Moscow or Berlin or London at lightening speeds, they shortened the "response time" to any crisis — the window in which a Soviet or Western leader would have to decide whether the country was under attack before such an attack would hit — to just a few minutes. They made the danger of an unintended escalation, or of an error like the that one Petrov only barely prevented, far greater.

The risk they posed was deemed, in the 1987 INF Treaty, unacceptable to the world. And the weapons were removed.

Putin has taken several steps to push Europe back toward the nuclear brink, to the logic of nuclear escalation and hair-trigger weapons that made the early 1980s, by many accounts, the most dangerous time in human history. Perhaps most drastically, he appears to have undone the 1987 INF Treaty, reintroducing the long-banned nuclear weapons.

In March, Russia announced it would place nuclear-capable bombers and medium-range, nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad — only an hour, by commercial airliner, from Berlin. Meanwhile, it has been testing medium-range, land-based missiles. The missiles, to the alarm of the United States, appear to violate the INF Treaty.

An undated photo shows a mobile Iskander missile launcher in Siberia (EVGENY STETSKO/AFP/Getty)

A Russian Iskander missile launch system in Siberia. (EVGENY STETSKO/AFP/Getty)

This is far from Putin's only nuclear escalation. He is developing more nuclear weapons, and calling frequent attention to them, as apparent cover for his aggression and adventurism in Europe. There are suspicions, for example, that Russia may have deployed nuclear-armed submarines off of the US Eastern Seaboard.

What makes this so dangerous is that Putin appears to believe, as the scholar Edward Lucas outlined in a recent report for the Center for European Policy Analysis, that he has a greater willingness than NATO to use nuclear weapons, and thus that his superior will allows him to bully the otherwise stronger Western powers with games of nuclear chicken.

This is a substantial, and indeed terrifying, break from Cold War–era nuclear thinking, in which both sides rightly feared nuclear brinksmanship as too dangerous to contemplate and used their weapons primarily to deter one another.

"Russia’s nuclear saber-rattling is unjustified, destabilizing and dangerous," NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in a May speech in Washington.

Putin is acting out of an apparent belief that increasing the nuclear threat to Europe, and as a result to his own country, is ultimately good for Russia and worth the risks. It is a gamble with the lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans, and perhaps many beyond, at stake.

X. The nuclear dangers: An atomic gun to the world's head

The view among many Western analysts is that the nuclear-capable missiles are meant as a gun against the heads of the Americans and the Europeans: You better not mess with us Russians, or who knows what we'll do.

Putin himself endorsed this view in a 2014 speech in Sochi, where he approvingly cited Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's 1960 address to the United Nations, when he hammered his shoe on the podium. "The United States and NATO thought, 'This Nikita is best left alone, he might just go and fire a missile. We better show some respect for them,'" Putin said.

This sort of a nuclear threat could be a perfect way for Putin to attempt the sort of NATO-splitting scenario described by analysts like Piontkovsky. What if, Lucas asked as an example in his report, Putin found some excuse to declare a Russian "military exclusion zone" in the Baltic Sea, thus physically cutting off the Baltic states from the rest of NATO?

"Would America really risk a nuclear standoff with Russia over a gas pipeline?" Lucas asked. "If it would not, NATO is over. The nuclear bluff that sustained the Western alliance through all the decades of the Cold War would have been called at last."

Putin's love of brinksmanship, while perhaps born of Russia's weakness, is also deeply worrying for what it says about the leader's willingness and even eagerness to take on huge geopolitical risk.

"Either he has a very weird theory of nuclear weapons, or he just doesn’t take the West seriously and is trying to cow us with whatever threat he can make," Saideman, the political scientist, said, going on to draw yet another of the many parallels analysts have drawn to the onset of World War I.

"There are two visions of international relations: One is that threats work, and one is that threats don’t, where they cause counter-balancing," Saideman continued. "This was the theory of the [German] Kaiser before World War I: the more threatening you are, the more people will submit to your will. That might be Putin’s logic, that he’s just going to threaten and threaten and hope that NATO bends. But the long run of international relations suggests that it goes the other way, where the more threatening you are the more you produce balancing."

In other words, Putin is hoping to compensate for his weakness by expressing his willingness to go further, and to raise the stakes higher, than the more powerful Western nations. But his actions are premised on a flawed understanding of how the world works. In fact, he is virtually forcing the West to respond in kind, raising not just the risk of a possible war, but the ease with which such a war would go nuclear.

XI. The nuclear dangers: Does Putin believe nuclear war can be "won"?

putin tv presser

(Dmitri Dukhanin/Kommersant via Getty)

There is a corollary in Russia's nuclear doctrine, a way in which the Russians believe they have solved the problem of Western military superiority, that is so foolhardy, so dangerous, that it is difficult to believe they really mean it. And yet, there is every indication that they do.

That corollary is Russia's embrace of what it calls a "de-escalation" nuclear strike. Go back to the scenario spelled out in Russia's military doctrine: a conventional military conflict that poses an existential threat to the country. The doctrine calls for Russia to respond with a nuclear strike. But imagine you're a Russian leader: How do you drop a nuclear bomb on NATO's troops without forcing the US to respond with a nuclear strike in kind, setting off a tit-for-tat cycle of escalation that would end in total nuclear war and global devastation?

Russia's answer, in the case of such a conflict, is to drop a single nuclear weapon — one from the family of smaller, battlefield-use nukes known as "tactical" weapons, rather than from the larger, city-destroying "strategic" nuclear weapons. The idea is that such a strike would signal Russia's willingness to use nuclear weapons, and would force the enemy to immediately end the fight rather than risk further nuclear destruction.

Nikolai Sokov, a nuclear weapons expert and former official in the Russian Foreign Affairs Ministry, explained in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that this is not a far-fetched option of last resort; it has become central to Russian war planning.

"Such a threat is envisioned as deterring the United States and its allies from involvement in conflicts in which Russia has an important stake, and in this sense is essentially defensive," Sokov wrote. "Yet, to be effective, such a threat also must be credible. To that end, all large-scale military exercises that Russia conducted beginning in 2000 featured simulations of limited nuclear strikes."

Buzhinsky, the recently retired member of Russia's General Staff, confirmed in our meeting that this is something the military sees as a viable option. "If Russia is heavily attacked conventionally, yes, of course, as it's written in the doctrine, there may be limited use of nonstrategic nuclear weapons," he said. "To show intention, as a de-escalating factor."

It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous idea in the world of military planning today than of a "limited" nuclear war. Scholars have debated for decades, and still debate today, whether the concept of limited nuclear war is realistic, or whether such a conflict would inevitably spiral into total nuclear war. Put another way, no one knows for sure whether Russia's military planners have sown the seeds for global nuclear destruction.

Seen from the Russian side, it is at least possible to imagine how this doctrine might make sense: The threat of NATO's conventional forces is widely seen as both overwhelming and imminent, making such an extreme step worth considering. Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's strategic culture has increasingly emphasized its nuclear arsenal, the one remaining legacy of its fearsome great-power status. It is a sort of Russian cult of the nuclear weapon, or even a certain strategic fetish. With nukes so central to Russian strategic thinking, it is little wonder Moscow sees them as the solution to its greatest strategic problem.

But when you consider this doctrine from the American side, you begin to see what makes it dangerous, even insane. Imagine that you are an American leader and your forces in Eastern Europe have somehow been drawn into conflict with the Russians. Perhaps, as artillery and planes from within Russia hammer your forces, you counterattack on Russian soil to take them out. The Kremlin, fearing the start of an invasion to take Moscow, drops a tactical nuclear warhead on your forces in Estonia or Latvia. You have no idea whether more Russian nuclear strikes are coming, either on the battlefield, more widely on Europe, or even against Washington or New York. Do you respond with an in-kind tactical nuclear strike, opening the risk of gradual escalation to total nuclear war? Do you, fearing the worst, move to take out the Russian leadership before they can order more attacks? Or do you announce a unilateral ceasefire, drawing your forces back in humiliation, rewarding Russia with a victory?
" It is difficult to imagine a more dangerous idea than "limited" nuclear war"

Russia's nuclear doctrine is betting that any American leader — not to mention the leaders of nuclear-armed France and the UK — would choose the last of those three options. If that prediction turned out to be wrong, it would mean nuclear war, perhaps global nuclear war and thus annihilation. This doctrine, in other words, is gambling with the fate of the world.

Such a scenario, to be clear, is remote, as are all of the nuclear scenarios. It would require a cascading series of events, and for neither side to pull back in time as those events built. The odds of this happening are quite low. But they are greater than zero, and growing. Such a scenario is within the realm of possibility — if it were not, then Russia would not regularly conduct military exercises that imagine exactly this outcome. And recall that Alexander Vershbow, the deputy secretary general of NATO, told a conference in late April that NATO is gaming out exactly such a crisis.

There are yet more worrying implications to this Russian doctrine. Its logical conclusion is that Russia sees itself as able to fight a war with the conventionally superior United States without losing, and that it can do this by using battlefield nuclear weapons. Under this doctrine, Moscow is deeming not only full-blown war against the US as imaginable, but a full-blown war with at least one nuclear detonation.

That, perhaps, can help explain why Putin has seemed so willing to ratchet up the possibility of a real war with the United States, even one involving nuclear threats — he may believe that through his superior will and brinksmanship, he can avoid defeat. Adding a nuclear element to any conflict would also seem to increase the odds of NATO's Western European members splitting over how to respond, particularly if Russian propaganda can make the circumstances leading up to the detonation unclear.

But this also shows the degree to which his entire strategy may rest in part on a shoddy premise — that "limited" nuclear war can be winnable — and one that puts the entire world at risk.

XII. The nuclear dangers: End games

A deactivated Titan II nuclear ICBM launch silo in Arizona (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty)

A deactivated Titan II nuclear missile silo in Arizona. (BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty)

President Dwight Eisenhower held office at a time when the prospect of a nuclear war was relatively new and military planners unsure how to account for the possibility of a conflict with the Soviet Union in which both sides might use nuclear weapons. Though some in his administration urged him to consider plans for nuclear conflict, Eisenhower, no stranger to war, rejected the idea as unthinkable.

"You just can't have this kind of war," Eisenhower said in 1957. "There aren't enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets."

Putin believes he has found a way around this problem, relying on smaller, battlefield-use warheads that could win a war without escalating to a global conflict in which whole cities were sacrificed.

But even a limited nuclear war could be catastrophic, and not just for the nations where the bombs would fall, but for the whole world.

A 2008 study (updated in 2014) on the environmental effects of a "small" nuclear war described what would happen if 100 Hiroshima-strength bombs were detonated in a hypothetical conflict between India and Pakistan. This is equivalent to less than 1 percent of the combined nuclear arsenals of the US and Russia.

The explosions, the study found, would push a layer of hot, black smoke into the atmosphere, where it would envelop the Earth in about 10 days. The study predicted that this smoke would block sunlight, heat the atmosphere, and erode the ozone for many years, producing what the researchers call without hyperbole "a decade without summer." As rains dried and crops failed worldwide, the resulting global famine would kill 1 billion people.

"We escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion," General George Lee Butler of the US Strategic Air Command told the journalist Eric Schlosser for his book on the dangers of nuclear weapons.

We may have escaped the Cold War, but we have not escaped the nuclear threat, which not only remains but is growing. The sense that this danger is resigned to history books, common in Washington and other Western capitals, is precisely part of its danger. It is another echo of the months and years before World War I, when the world drifted unknowingly toward disaster.

In April of last year, just after Russia had annexed Crimea, the London-based think tank Chatham House published a report on the dangers of unintended nuclear conflict. It was not pegged to the events in Ukraine, and at that point few people, including the report's authors, saw Crimea as the potential beginning of a larger conflict. Even still, it was dire in its warnings.

"The probability of inadvertent nuclear use is not zero and is higher than had been widely considered," it stated. "The risk associated with nuclear weapons is high" and "under-appreciated."

Their warnings were widely ignored. As the report itself noted, the world has concluded, wrongly, that nuclear weapons no longer pose an imminent threat. Attention has moved on. But the seeds of a possible war are being sown in Europe. Should the worst happen, which is a remote but real possibility, the consequences will follow all Americans to their homes.

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[vestige]

Post #37 should be mandatory reading for all public officials and school children

Readers can be provided for the illiterates in that group.

A few comments:

"The perception is that somebody would try to undermine Russia as a country that opposes the United States, and then we will need to defend ourselves by military means," he explained.

There is no other way than by military means. (Take a hint pacifists)


“In Washington, the threat feels remote.”


War and annihilation are secondary to fag worship.


“Though Western publics remain blissfully unaware,”


Though they are acutely aware of LeBron James, Kim Kardashian’s ass and Bruceless Jenner along with myriads of other meaningless BS.



“Knowing his military is outmatched against the Americans,”


Unless his minions start a revolution in the U.S. prior to the start of the war (Take a hint all.)


“
"We'll be here for Estonia. We will be here for Latvia. We will be here for Lithuania. You lost your independence once before. With NATO, you will never lose it again," Obama pledged in his September speech in Estonia.”


And they believe this BS? I’ll bet they can keep their same insurance too.



“A handful of such unacknowledged forces, whom Putin referred to as "little green men" after they appeared in Crimea, would perhaps be dressed as local volunteers or a far-right gang; they might be joined by vigilantes, as they were in eastern Ukraine. They would almost certainly be aided by a wave of Russian propaganda, making it harder for outsiders to differentiate unmarked Russian troops from civilian volunteers, to determine who was fighting where and had started what.”


Similar to our SOG boys during the Vietnam era. NO uniforms, no dog tags, oddball weapons etc.



"Either he has a very weird theory of nuclear weapons, or he just doesn’t take the West seriously and is trying to cow us with whatever threat he can make," Saideman, the political scientist, said, going on to draw yet another of the many parallels analysts have drawn to the onset of World War I.”


Or… he is aware that they have the complex in Yamantu and other places in anticipation of nuclear war while we have our astrodomes.


“ Imagine that you are an American leader and your forces in Eastern Europe have somehow been drawn into conflict with the Russians. Perhaps, as artillery and planes from within Russia hammer your forces, you counterattack on Russian soil to take them out. The Kremlin, fearing the start of an invasion to take Moscow, drops a tactical nuclear warhead on your forces in Estonia or Latvia. You have no idea whether more Russian nuclear strikes are coming, either on the battlefield, more widely on Europe, or even against Washington or New York. Do you respond with an in-kind tactical nuclear strike, opening the risk of gradual escalation to total nuclear war? Do you, fearing the worst, move to take out the Russian leadership before they can order more attacks? Or do you announce a unilateral ceasefire, drawing your forces back in humiliation, rewarding Russia with a victory?”


Such is the situation when we have a community organizer who has fired his real generals and kept only the yes men while the Russkies have an ex KGB head calling the shots.





"The probability of inadvertent nuclear use is not zero and is higher than had been widely considered," it stated. "The risk associated with nuclear weapons is high" and "under-appreciated."

Their warnings were widely ignored. As the report itself noted, the world has concluded, wrongly, that nuclear weapons no longer pose an imminent threat. Attention has moved on. But the seeds of a possible war are being sown in Europe. Should the worst happen, which is a remote but real possibility, the consequences will follow all Americans to their homes.”


Superb synopsis…. Perhaps then we can turn to LeBron James, Kim Kardashian and other American heroes for answers.