WAR 06-27-2020-to-07-03-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

(423) 06-06-2020-to-06-12-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****


WAR - 06-06-2020-to-06-12-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
(420) 05-16-2020-to-05-22-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR - 05-16-2020-to-05-22-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (417) WAR - 04-25-2020-to-05-01-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (418) 05-02-2020-to-05-08-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR -...

www.timebomb2000.com

(424) 06-13-2020-to-06-19-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****



WAR - 06-13-2020-to-06-19-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
Sorry for the delay folks...... (421) 05-23-2020-to-05-29-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR - 05-23-2020-to-05-29-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** (418) 05-02-2020-to-05-08-24-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR -...

www.timebomb2000.com



06-20-2020-to-06-26-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

WAR - 06-20-2020-to-06-26-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

Sorry for the delay folks, the meatworld hasn't been kind these last couple of weeks......HC (422) 05-30-2020-to-06-05-2020___****THE****WINDS****of****WAR**** WAR -...

www.timebomb2000.com

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India - China border crisis (Main Thread)

Main Israel/Hamas/Gaza Thread - Ongoing Border Strife, Major Israeli Attacks

Europe: Politics, Economics, Military- June 2020

Latin America and the Islands: Politics, Economics, Military- June 2020

Africa: Politics, Economics, Military- June 2020

REGIONAL CONFLICT BREWING IN THE Mediterranean
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Hummm.....

Posted for fair use.....

HASC Funds Nuclear Modernization, With a Few Questions | Air & Space Forces Magazine

Nuclear modernization concerns are again on the table for fiscal 2021 defense policy negotiations, as House lawmakers raise issues about the path forward.

www.airforcemag.com

HASC Funds Nuclear Modernization, With a Few Questions

June 26, 2020 | By Rachel S. Cohen

Nuclear modernization concerns are again on the table for fiscal 2021 defense policy negotiations, as House lawmakers raise issues about the path forward.

The Air Force’s three major nuclear weapon upgrade programs—the Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent, the Long-Range Standoff Weapon, and the B61-12 bomb—all received the funding they requested in the House Armed Services Committee’s version of the fiscal 2021 defense policy bill. Those programs total $2.9 billion for the upcoming year, split between the Defense and Energy Departments.

That contrasts with last year’s process, when Democrats tried to shrink GBSD funding in a move that irked Republicans and contributed to a broader clash over nuclear issues. Keeping nuclear modernization fully funded and on track is typically an area of bipartisan agreement. Still, some members of Congress last year sought an independent study on whether the Air Force could keep its current Minuteman III missiles around longer, an idea the service opposes because it says refurbishment costs would outweigh the benefits.

Developing more than 600 new land-launched missiles is slated to cost nearly $22 billion, and $4.5 billion for about 1,000 new air-launched missiles. The revamped B61 bomb could cost about $12 billion between DOD and DOE, while the future B-21 bomber’s price tag is classified.

Now that House lawmakers seem to have reached an agreement about the need to fully fund nuclear weapons development (as the Senate Armed Services Committee also wants), they want assurance that the Air Force can pull it off. That has spurred some worry in the arms control arena that Democrats are stepping back from meaningful oversight.

House legislation “raises zero questions about the value of the modernization plan, only its achievability. Deeply troubling,” Stephen Young, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote on Twitter.

More evidence will emerge when the full bill is released next week. But the first signs – with the lackluster first hearing today & the language in the available piece raises zero questions about the value of the modernization plan, only its achievability. Deeply troubling.
— Stephen Young (@StephenUCS) June 22, 2020

The strategic forces subcommittee pointed to a 2019 RAND Corp. report that warned of the difficulties Air Force Global Strike Command, a relatively new organization with a small, young workforce, will have in replacing all of its major systems around the same time. That also includes the B-21, which HASC is offering the full request of $2.8 billion in unclassified money for 2021.

Because of that looming workload, lawmakers want a report from the Air Force by Dec. 1 on how Global Strike is addressing the issues RAND raised.

“The report should also provide the number of unfilled personnel manning positions at the command and the GBSD program office, and the number of and type of personnel required to reduce schedule and technical risks to the major programs that the command and the program office are managing,” lawmakers wrote.

Air Force Magazine reported in February that the service is waiting on Northrop Grumman, the missile’s designer, to decide how many people would need to run the system before reviewing manpower needs.

GBSD won’t be ready to use until 2029 at the earliest, three years after the U.S. comptroller general found that the existing Minuteman III nuclear missiles will no longer be fully capable. That concerns lawmakers whom the Air Force has repeatedly told there is no room for error in the land-launched missile’s development schedule. The House wants a report from U.S. Strategic Command, which oversees the nuclear enterprise, and the Air Force on how the two are planning for a GBSD fielding delay of two years or more, and how to address the risks that slowdown would pose to Minuteman III.

“By 2030, the Department of Defense will develop and deploy a range of new, long-range conventional strike systems, of which some will be under the operational control of [the] commander of [STRATCOM],” the subcommittee added. “Given the strategic implications of these systems, the committee encourages the department to take additional consideration with regard to the strategic and legal implications of such systems.”

HASC also calls for a report on the use of artificial intelligence in the nuclear enterprise.
The strategic forces subcommittee approved its bill June 22; the full committee will begin debating its legislation July 1.

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.....

Posted for fair use.....

Turkey, France: Longtime rivalry on the horizon?

ANKARA: Current tensions between Paris and Ankara — especially over Libya, Syria and the east Mediterranean — risk turning into longtime rivalry, experts say. The conflict began escalating last November when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan advised his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to...

www.arabnews.com

Turkey, France: Longtime rivalry on the horizon?

• France, which accuses Ankara of blocking truce efforts in Libya and breaking the UN arms embargo, also recently urged talks among NATO allies about Turkey’s “aggressive” role in Libya

Updated 32 sec ago
MENEKSE TOKYAY
June 28, 2020 00:06
513
Follow @arabnews

ANKARA: Current tensions between Paris and Ankara — especially over Libya, Syria and the east Mediterranean — risk turning into longtime rivalry, experts say.

The conflict began escalating last November when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan advised his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron to “check whether he is brain dead” after the two leaders traded criticism over Ankara’s cross-border offensive in northeast Syria.

Turkey recently blamed France for “dragging Libya into chaos,” just a day after Macron accused Ankara of being involved in a “dangerous game” in Libya and urged Erdogan to end his activities in the war-torn country.

Turkey backs the Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli and has accused France of favoring GNA’s rival eastern commander Khalifa Haftar, although Paris denies this.

Tensions between the two NATO allies recently escalated after a standoff between Turkish warships and a French naval vessel in the Mediterranean on June 10. France criticized the alleged nuisance to a French ship by Turkish frigates in terms of NATO’s rules of engagement.

Although Ankara denied the accusation, NATO is conducting an investigation into the incident.

Turkey detained four of its nationals on June 22 on suspicion of spying for France through conservative and religious groups.

With all the political and military cards on the table, the crucial question is whether such heated exchanges may escalate to the point of rivalry and change the already fragile balance.

“A supposed competition between France and Turkey in Libya and the Mediterranean is only one angle to a wider geopolitical trend comprising both Russia and Turkey, in more or less coordinated ways,” Marc Pierini, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, told Arab News.

Pierini, a former EU ambassador to Turkey, made a comparison between Russia’s challenge to the Western bloc and Turkey’s recent moves.

“Russia has long started to challenge NATO and the EU with the annexation of Crimea. It pursued its military and political interests by installing or enlarging bases in Syria. In a consistent fashion, Moscow is now extending its military footprint to Libya,” he said. “Turkey is following a similar pattern; following its four distinct military operations in northern Syria it has now unilaterally changed the eastern Mediterranean maritime boundaries with the consent of Libya’s GNA against military support.”

In addition to Ankara’s controversial purchase of the Russian S-400 missile defense system, Pierini thinks that Russia and Turkey have created a new geopolitical reality on the southern flank of Europe.

“For the EU, the UK, the US and NATO, this is a new challenge,” he said.

France, which accuses Ankara of blocking truce efforts in Libya and breaking the UN arms embargo, also recently urged talks among NATO allies about Turkey’s “aggressive” role in Libya.

For Emre Kursat Kaya, a security analyst with the Istanbul-based Center for Economics and Foreign Policy Studies (EDAM), if actors such as Germany or Italy do not manage to bridge the gap, the current situation may turn into a geopolitical rivalry.

“There is a clear need for an arbitrator. The situation is more complicated than simply ideological differences. It is about conflicting interests in the Mediterranean and even sub-Saharan Africa,” Kaya told Arab News.

He thinks that such a rivalry might have structural impacts on NATO.

“The current French government has an agenda to build a stronger European defense initiative. It advances Turkey’s actions as examples of why such an alternative is necessary. In recent events, Paris has opted to side with Ankara’s regional adversaries such as the Syrian Kurdish YPG, Egypt and United Arab Emirates,” Kaya said.

“The Turkish government might use such behavior from one of its allies to legitimize its non-NATO partnerships at home and abroad,” he said.

Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, Ankara office director of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, thinks that the clashing interests of Turkey and France have created a simmering geopolitical competition between the two countries, especially in Libya.

“Both countries are acting based on their perceived national interest although they put forward other arguments. Unless a modus vivendi between Turkey and France is reached, this competition could evolve into rivalry inevitably reflecting on EU-Turkey relations, making even transactional cooperation between the two very difficult,” he told Arab News.

According to Unluhisarcikli, to avoid such a situation the two countries need to implement measures facilitated by a trusted third party.

“One confidence-building measure could be Turkey recognizing France as a negotiating party rather than dealing only with Russia. Germany, a NATO ally that also currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU, has already taken the initiative for a ceasefire in Libya and is therefore well-positioned to facilitate such a process,” he said.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Egypt is prepared to go to war in Libya

Egypt is hellbent on ensuring any remnants of the Arab Spring come nowhere near their borders.

www.jpost.com

Egypt is prepared to go to war in Libya
Egypt is hellbent on ensuring any remnants of the Arab Spring come nowhere near their borders.

By JUDAH WAXELBAUM
JUNE 27, 2020 21:53

After a fourteen-month campaign on Tripoli, forces loyal to the Libyan National Army are in retreat. To those who support the UN-recognized government in Tripoli, this should serve as great news. Since 2012, a power vacuum has consumed Libya following the fall of longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Both sides of the civil war view themselves as the true leaders of Libya. The Government of National Accord is the product of a 2015 UN-brokered agreement, known as the Libyan Political Agreement. This agreement was deemed unacceptable by neighboring Egypt, which originates from their political history with those who make up the GNA.


The GNA has historical ties to the Libyan wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the same organization that participated in the 2011 overthrow of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. In 2014, the Egyptian military overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood, making them illegal, and installed General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as president.

Egypt under Sisi is heavily invested in the success of the LNA. Other than the United Arab Emirates, Egypt is the most committed supporter of Khalifa Haftar and the LNA. They view any advances by the GNA as a direct threat to their western border. Sisi declared a “redline” in Libya, announcing that Egyptian troops could be sent into Libya if the GNA enters the territory of Sirte in the east or Jufra in the south. Sirte holds symbolic value as it is the home town of Gadaffi.

The GNA views Sisi’s comments as hostile and has no plans to back down. Turkey’s backing of the GNA is what led to this crossroad. Earlier this year, Turkey entered several agreements with the GNA, sending drones and supplies. If tensions do not break soon, we are at risk of a direct conflict between Turkish and Egyptian forces in Libya. Sisi proposed a ceasefire, but the GNA rejected, claiming they will liberate all of Libya. To the west, Algeria has taken a neutral stance, offering to host peace talks. The GNA views Algeria’s neutrality as an endorsement of what they call a coup attempt.

Haftar and the LNA had several opportunities to accept a ceasefire during their campaign on Tripoli. They overplayed their hand, which resulted in Turkey storming in to save their allies in the capitol. The GNA has kicked Haftar’s forces out of Tripoli’s outskirts and the LNA stronghold of Tarhuna.

The GNA has no interest in calling off the fighting right as they appear to have the LNA on the ropes. It should be noted that the LNA still holds control of Libya’s oil fields, therein lies the country’s real authority. Oil is the lifeblood of the Libyan economy; without those reserves, the GNA cannot have a legitimate claim to power.


The LNA’s inability to slow down GNA forces puts the entire region in peril. It was one thing when the LNA had the GNA surrounded in a steady stalemate. Now, Egypt, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates cannot sit by and watch their investments go up in flames. Sisi’s red line should not be taken lightly. If Egypt sends troops into Libya to enforce a red line that is 1,000 km. from their border, the GNA has stated they are prepared to engage.

Egypt is hellbent on ensuring any remnants of the Arab Spring come nowhere near their borders. Last month, Russia reduced the presence of Russian mercenaries within the country, meant to convey their disappointment in the LNA. This comes as reports indicate former Syrian guns for hire have arrived in Libya for better pay.

The international community is growing tired of this conflict. Both the US and Russia have echoed the UN’s calls for a political solution to the fighting. It is unclear if a political solution is viable in a civil war where both sides believe the other has no claim. No one wants Libya to become the next Syria, but that ship appears to have already set sail.

Even if one side manages to become victorious, it is hard to imagine stability in Libya’s future. This conflict has the global community on the edge of their seat as the slightest advancement could force a sharp increase in fighting. All we can do now is wait to see if Sisi keeps to his word.

The writer is the western regional vice chair for the College Republican National Committee.

 

[jward]

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

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

By Charlie Savage, Eric Schmitt and Michael Schwirtz

• June 26, 2020Updated 4:35 p.m. ET

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted for fair use

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says (Published 2020)

The Trump administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.

www.nytimes.com

Office of the DNI
@ODNIgov

Statement by DNI Ratcliffe: "I have confirmed that neither the President nor the Vice President were ever briefed on any intelligence alleged by the New York Times in its reporting yesterday." (1/2)
Office of the DNI

Replying to
@ODNIgov
"The White House statement addressing this issue earlier today, which denied such a briefing occurred, was accurate. The New York Times reporting, and all other subsequent news reports about such an alleged briefing are inaccurate.” (2/2)

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
2h

Nobody briefed or told me,
@VP Pence, or Chief of Staff @MarkMeadows
about the so-called attacks on our troops in Afghanistan by Russians, as reported through an “anonymous source” by the Fake News . Everybody is denying it & there have not been many attacks on us.....

..Nobody’s been tougher on Russia than the Trump Administration. With Corrupt Joe Biden & Obama, Russia had a field day, taking over important parts of Ukraine - Where’s Hunter? Probably just another phony Times hit job, just like their failed Russia Hoax. Who is their “source”?

Catherine Herridge
@CBS_Herridge

DEVELOPING: A senior intel official tells
@CBSNews
the GRU/Taliban bounty allegations were not contained in the President's Daily Brief (PDB) which is the highly classified, daily summary of national security issues delivered to the President, key cabinet secretaries + advisers..
The official confirmed the NSC has been doing “due diligence,” and going back through their files since the story broke Friday, and they have not found the “intelligence assessment” described in media reporting. The official said the review is ongoing, but given current...
talks with the Taliban, intel about a GRU operation involving the Taliban, targeting US forces would have risen to the level of inclusion in the PDB.
@CBSNews

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

India is Operating World’s Fastest Expanding Nuclear Weapons Programme

SIPRI has recently launched its annual year book 2020 and assessed the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security.

moderndiplomacy.eu

India is Operating World’s Fastest Expanding Nuclear Weapons Programme

Published 13 hours ago
on June 28, 2020
By Zain Moeed

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has recently launched its annual year book 2020 and assessed the current state of armaments, disarmament and international security. While maintaining its years-long tradition of adding 10 more nuclear weapons in Pakistan’s stockpile, SIPRI estimated that India possesses the smallest numbers of nuclear warheads in the South Asian strategic context. The year book is appeared to be misleading and politically motivated because it did not incorporate other independent sources with higher estimates of Indian nuclear stockpile. SIPRI did not even bother to take notes from a recent report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). The report has deliberated the annual nuclear spending of the nine nuclear-armed states. The most interesting case discussed was that Pakistan’s expenditure on its nuclear forces is about $1 billion, as compared to India which spends twice the amount, i.e. $2.3 billion to maintain almost the same number of nuclear weapons.

Today, India is operating world’s fastest expanding nuclear weapons programme outside safeguards among any other non-NPT nuclear states. India is pursuing a nuclear triad which encompasses nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), dual-use cruise/ballistic missiles and an enormous naval modernization intended to nuclearize the Indian ocean region. Various Indian experts and politicians claim India needs more than 300-400 nuclear weapons for its strategic forces.Dr. Anil Kakodkar, the former Chairman of India’s Atomic Energy Commission, has said in this regards that, “both, from the point of view of maintaining long-term energy security and for maintaining the ‘minimum credible deterrent,’ the fast breeder programme just cannot be put on the civilian list. This would amount to getting shackled and India certainly cannot compromise one [security] for the other.”So, India has intentionally reserved its fast breeder reactors and most of its so-called civil nuclear programme out of the safeguards and surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).In order to acquire the full nuclear triad capability, India will strive to produce many more nuclear warheads without IAEA monitoring.

IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review by Robert Kelley has examined that how several avenues enabled India to achieve the quantity and purity of uranium that are needed in a closed nuclear fuel cycle and New Delhi appears to be interested in atomic vapour laser isotope separation (AVLIS). It further added that reactor-grade plutonium from the unsafe-guarded Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) provides a further strategic military stockpile to India. The IHS Jane also mentioned that India imports Jordanian phosphate in large quantities for fertiliser production. A large stream of phosphoric acid will be processed at the Rare Material Recovery (RMR) Plant at the Pradeep Phosphates Ltd plant near Odisha in the east of the country. Extraction of uranium from imported phosphate fertilisers gives India a source of uranium that is not subject to international monitoring and uranium from phosphate can be used for military activities.

An in depth analysis has shown that India has enough resources and fissile materials to develop between 356 and 492 nuclear warheads. The study titled ‘Indian Unsafeguarded Nuclear Program’ which was published by the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad (ISSI) revealed a recent and detailed evaluation of the capability of India’s nuclear weapons programme. Whereas, a Belfer Center’s study has indicated that India is already installing more than five fast breeder reactors, which will proliferate its production capacities of weapons-grade plutonium 20-fold to 700 kg annually. The analysis of this production capacity demonstrates that New Delhi has the capacity to produce roughly 80 to 90 plutonium-based and 7 to 8 uranium-based nuclear weapons every year. According to the study, if all of the weapons and the reactor-grade Plutonium and the Highly Enriched Uranium stocks are taken into account, India could produce between 2,261 and 2,686 weapons.

Matthew Clements, editor of IHS Jane’s Intelligence Review, in an interview, uncovered the expansion of an Indian clandestine uranium enrichment plant that could potentially support the development of thermonuclear weapons. The facility, located near Mysore in southern India, would yield nearly twice as much weapons-grade uranium as New Delhi would need in its fastest-growing nuclear weapons programme. Whereas, unabated growth in its centrifuge enrichment programme will allow it to intensify the production of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium to 160kg annually. Matthew Clements said that “taking into account all the enriched uranium likely to be needed by the Indian nuclear submarine fleet, there is likely to be a significant excess.”

To complete nuclear triad, India is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons program under many covert projects. Such as, it is operating a plutonium production reactor, Dhruva, and a uranium enrichment facility, which are not subject to IAEA safeguards. India is building South Asia largest military complex of nuclear centrifuges, atomic-research laboratories. This facility will give India the ability to make many large-yield nuclear arms & hydrogen bombs. In the back drop of Indo-U.S. nuclear cooperation agreement, undisclosed plutonium reserves were not inspected and were left with Indian weapons development facilities. Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy investigation reports also specified that India is secretly building a nuclear enrichment complex in Challakere to escalate arms race. It will covertly triple the number of nuclear warheads in the coming years from what India possess today.

India has introduced an ambiguous nuclear separation plan with the IAEA in which it encompassed only those facilities on the civilian list and offered them for safeguards that are not involved in activities of strategic implication. The civilian Plutonium reserves that are outside the safeguards of the IAEA and designated for strategic purposes are the main cause of concern. In a three-stage plan, India is continuing to expand its unsafeguarded nuclear power program. The installation of several nuclear reactors has also been announced by New Delhi. This capability will generate excessive fissile material, other than the fuel necessary for breeder and naval reactors. Over the next few years, India will be capable to replace China, France and the United Kingdom in terms of its abilities to produce nuclear weapons to become the third behind the U.S. and Russia.

India has intensified development and strategic procurement to stockpile weapons-grade material for future usage in military modernization programmes. The increasing stocks of weapons-grade fissile material by New Delhi would have unbearable effects from the South Asian viewpoint of strategic stability.A number of nuclear suppliers, on the assumption of non-factual estimates of Indian stockpile, concluded nuclear cooperation with New Delhi. Although the material from these countries appears to be being reused in arms for the policy of Indian military expansion with respect to aggressive nuclear weapon modernization.

The mere simple facts that the Indian Nuclear programme started well before Pakistan’s, has a bigger capacity than Pakistan with bulk of it outside IAEA safeguards, has 14 nuclear deals under exceptional trade waiver in 2008 by NSG and is actively pursuing a triad of nuclear and space forces being sponsored by leading Western states, are sufficient to prove that Pakistan’s nuclear programme is no match to India’s dangerous and expansionist nuclear quest. It then becomes hard to understand as to why respectable institutions like the SIPRI try to downplay the emerging dangers of massive vertical proliferation carried out by India in the last two decades?

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Fratricidal Clash in West Africa Pits al Qaeda Against Islamic State

Hundreds of militants have been killed as the world’s most-deadly jihadist groups battle for supremacy in a 3,000-mile expanse touching Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast and Chad.

www.wsj.com

Fratricidal Clash in West Africa Pits al Qaeda Against Islamic State
Battle for supremacy between world’s most deadly jihadist groups adds new dangers for civilians in a poor region where terrorist attacks have recently exploded
A Mauritanian army commando emerged from a bunker at a Saharan outpost in February. Michael M. Phillips/The Wall Street Journal

By


in Johannesburg and and


in Washington
June 28, 2020 12:00 pm ET


Islamic State fighters, after a year killing soldiers and villagers along the desert frontier between Mali and Burkina Faso, recently detonated a truck bomb aimed at a new target: al Qaeda.

The strike was part of a May attack that left several al Qaeda fighters dead and prompted a series of al Qaeda reprisals against Islamic State positions, say U.S. and West African security officials. Clerics from each group broadcast sermons denouncing the others as “apostates” and threatening more attacks.....

 

[danielboon]

China calling up Reserves now Russia

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1277584032587530248

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1277584032587530248

 

[jward]

Catherine Herridge
@CBS_Herridge

DEVELOPING: An intelligence official with direct knowledge tells CBS News there was an intel collection report and "NSA assesses Report does not match well established and verifiiable Taliban and Haqqani practices" + "lack sufficient reporting to corroborate any links."
Replying to
@CBS_Herridge
The official said the inteligence collection report reached "low levels" NSC but did not go further, not briefed POTUS, or VP because it was deemed "uncorroborated" and "dissent intelligence community."
@CBSNews

 

[Housecarl]

China calling up Reserves now Russia

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1277584032587530248

View: https://mobile.twitter.com/Liveuamap/status/1277584032587530248

Merde....

 

[jward]

Taiwan warned against ‘wishful thinking’ that US will come to rescue if China attacks

• Su Chi, former secretary general of the island’s National Security Council, says government should not delude itself over America’s ability or willingness to stop a PLA invasion
• Su says proposed Taiwan Defence Act should not create false hopes because it raises the prospect that the US is no longer able to react effectively

Lawrence Chung
Published: 7:00am, 30 Jun, 2020
Updated: 7:24am, 30 Jun, 2020

Two Chinese H-6 strategic bombers entered Taiwan’s air defence identification zone on Sunday. Photo: Handout
China’s increasing belligerence towards Taiwan
has raised questions about whether the US would really come to the island’s aid if it was attacked, with one former senior security official warning against “wishful thinking”.

In the latest incident, two PLA Xian H-6 bombers briefly approached Taiwan’s air defence identification zone from the east on Sunday after flying from the East China Sea through the Miyako Strait between the Japanese islands of Okinawa and Miyakojima, according to the defence ministry in Tokyo.


It was the10th such incursion by the PLA warplanes in the past month and the 16th this year
and observers said it was intended both to practise for any future attacks and send a warning to the US against supporting the island.
In response to the recent PLA incursions, the US has also sent a flurry of warplanes, mostly reconnaissance aircraft through Taiwan’s airspace, including six on Monday.

Beijing steps up presence in ‘military grey zones’ to pressure Taiwan
21 Jun 2020

The SCS Probing initiative, a Peking University think tank, said the US operations were probably intended to monitor Chinese military activity in the Bashi Channel and South China Sea.


Taiwan’s defence ministry has stressed it has full control of movements in the air and sea surrounding Taiwan and asked the public to stay calm, but Su Chi, former secretary general of Taiwan’s National Security Council, said he was concerned about the current situation.

“Given the military imbalance between Taiwan and the mainland, the absence of cross-strait dialogue and no [efficient communication] mechanism in place between the US and the mainland, I am worried about the situation because anything could happen,” said Su, now president of Taipei Forum, a private think tank, said.
Coronavirus Update
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Su said he was particularly concerned about the Taiwan defence act recently proposed by senator Josh Hawley, saying it might give the island authorities false hope about the likelihood of the US coming to their rescue.

Su Chi, a former head of Taiwan’s National Security Council, warned “anything could happen” in the current climate. Photo: AFP
Beijing considers Taiwan a wayward province that must be returned to the mainland fold – by force if necessary.

It has suspended official exchanges with the island, stepped up its war games around Taiwan and poached seven of the island’s allies since Tsai Ing-wen, of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, became president in 2016 and refused to accept the one-China principle.

It has also repeatedly warned Donald Trump’s administration against supplying arms to and forging a closer partnership with the island, including military exchanges.
Hawley’s proposed Taiwan Defence Act calls for the US to live up to its obligations to help the island defend itself under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, which was designed to maintain substantive ties with Taipei after Washington switched formal diplomatic recognition to Beijing.

It also calls for the US Department of Defence to maintain the ability to defeat a PLA invasion – and particularly to guard against a Chinese “fait accompli” – and report regularly on its progress.
But Su, also a former head of the Mainland Affairs Council – Taiwan’s top cross-strait policy body – warned the Tsai administration to pay close attention to the wording. He said the phrase “fait accompli” referred to a situation where the US was no longer able to come to Taiwan’s rescue.

He said this included a takeover by the People’s Liberation Army before the US could respond, which would make any military response too difficult or costly for Washington.
He also warned that it would be “wishful thinking” to be certain that the US would come to the rescue in the event of a cross-strait conflict.

Su, a member of the opposition Kuomintang, said Beijing had given up on dealing with Tsai, saying her anti-mainland policy was leading to growing resentment.
He also warned that in the absence of cross-strait dialogue, the mainland may resort to a conflict strategy to bring about a “fait accompli”.
“The situation today is a lot grimmer than the time when [the DPP’s] Chen Shui-bian and [KMT’s] Ma Ying-jeou were presidents” between 2000 and 2016, Su said.

posted for fair use

Taiwan warned against ‘wishful thinking’ that US will help if China attacks

Su Chi, former head of the island’s National Security Council, says government should not delude itself over America’s ability or willingness to stop a PLA invasion.

www.scmp.com

 

[jward]

France and Sahel leaders mull state of anti-jihad campaign

AFP•June 30, 2020

• 
• 
• 

https://news.yahoo.com/france-sahel-leaders-mull-state-anti-jihad-campaign-052820702.html
1 / 3
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, Idriss Deby of Chad, and three others during an initial summit aimed at stemming jihadists in the Sahel region of Africa
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, Idriss Deby of Chad, and three others during an initial summit aimed at stemming jihadists in the Sahel region of Africa (AFP Photo/Guillaume HORCAJUELO)

Nouakchott (AFP) - Leaders from five West African countries and their ally France meet Tuesday to confer over their troubled efforts to stem a jihadist offensive unfolding in the Sahel.
Meeting in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, presidents will take stock nearly six months after rebooting their campaign in Pau, southwestern France.
Since then, the jihadists have continued to carry out almost daily attacks, although they have also lost a key leader and two rebel groups are said to be at odds.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted the summit in January to secure a public commitment from Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger at a time of deepening concern in France after it lost 13 troops in a helicopter crash.
The insurgency kicked off in northern Mali in 2012, during a rebellion by Touareg separatists that was later overtaken by the jihadists.
Despite thousands of UN and French troops, the conflict spread to central Mali, neighbouring Burkina Faso and Niger, stirring feuds between ethnic groups and triggering fears for states farther south.
Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes and the economies of the three countries, already among the poorest in the world, have been grievously damaged.

- 'Three-border' region -
Macron will make a one-day round trip to Mauritania for the summit.
The talks are expected to last only a few hours, but they will also mark the first time that Sahel allies have gathered since the coronavirus pandemic crimped meetings in person.
One priority will be to assess affairs in the "three-border region," a hotspot of jihadism where the frontiers of Burkina, Niger and Mali converge.
France, which added 500 troops to its Sahel mission after Pau, is co-leading the campaign in this region, targeting an Islamic State-affiliated group led by Abou Walid al-Sahraoui.
Earlier this month, French forces in northern Mali, helped by a US drone, killed Abdelmalek Droukdel, the head of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM).

And in a new development, jihadists respectively linked to al-Qaeda and Islamic State have clashed several times since the start of the year in Mali and Burkina, after long steering clear of one another, according to security experts.
Despite this, problems in the Sahel run deep.
Local armies are poorly equipped and under-funded, rights groups say troops are to blame for hundreds of killings and other abuses of civilians, and in some areas the presence of government has evaporated.
Staunch French ally Chad has yet to fulfil a promise to send troops to the three-border region, and a much-trumpeted initiative to create a joint 5,000-man G5 Sahel force is making poor progress.
In Mali, meanwhile, anger at insecurity has fuelled discontent over coronavirus restrictions and the outcome of elections, creating a political crisis for President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
Both Burkina and Niger are due to hold presidential elections by year's end, fuelling concerns about the outcome.

posted for fair use

France and Sahel leaders mull state of anti-jihad campaign

Leaders from five West African countries and their ally France meet Tuesday to confer over their troubled efforts to stem a jihadist offensive unfolding in the Sahel. Meeting in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, presidents will take stock nearly six months after rebooting their campaign in...

news.yahoo.com

 

[jward]

World News
June 30, 2020 / 3:36 AM / Updated 23 minutes ago
U.S., Taliban say Afghan peace effort discussed in video talks

Abdul Qadir Sediqi
3 Min Read

KABUL (Reuters) - The head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a video conference to discuss the Afghan peace process, the Islamist group and the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday, in a bid to remove hurdles in the path to peace talks.

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gives a news conference about dealings with China and Iran, and on the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Washington, U.S., June 24, 2020. Mangel Ngan/Pool via REUTERS
Increasing violence and a contentious prisoner swap between the Afghan government and the Taliban have delayed talks that were to have begun in March between the insurgent group and a team mandated by Kabul.

On Twitter, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said Monday’s talks between the official, Mullah Baradar, and Pompeo discussed full implementation of the Doha accord and the withdrawal of foreign troops, as well as the release of prisoners, intra-Afghan talks and a reduction in fighting.

The Doha agreement, signed between the United States and Taliban in February, drew up plans for a withdrawal of foreign forces from the war-torn country in exchange for security guarantees from the insurgent group.

“Baradar once again reiterated that the Taliban are committed not to let anyone use Afghan soil (to launch attacks) against any country,” Shaheen said.


Pompeo acknowledged the insurgent group had “lowered the war graph by not attacking cities and major military bases” but said more needed to be done by all parties, the spokesman added.

“The Secretary made clear the expectation for the Taliban to live up to their commitments, which include not attacking Americans,” State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement.

The Baradar-Pompeo conference came amidst U.S. media reports that American intelligence had briefed President Donald Trump about Taliban-linked fighters collecting bounties from Russia to attack foreign troops in Afghanistan.

The White House has said Trump did not receive a personal briefing on the issue but has yet to squarely address whether he had received a written briefing, whether he had read it, and why he had not responded more aggressively if he had.

Shaheen said Baradar told Pompeo the delay in talks was because the Afghan government did not release the agreed number of prisoners.


Kabul and some foreign countries have raised concerns about the release of about 200 prisoners they say are involved in major attacks in Afghanistan.

Since the Doha pact, Taliban fighters have launched 44 attacks and killed or wounded an average of 24 civilians each day, Javid Faisal, the spokesman for the Afghan national security adviser, said on Tuesday.

Baradar told Pompeo the increased attacks were because of provocation by the government in areas under Taliban control, Shaheen added.

Additional reporting by Humeyra Pamuk in Washington and Orooj Hakimi in Kabul; Writing by Gibran Peshimam; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Jonathan Oatis
Our Standards:The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

posted for fair use

U.S., Taliban say Afghan peace effort discussed in video talks

The head of the Taliban's political office in Doha and U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo held a video conference to discuss the Afghan peace process, the Islamist group and the U.S. State Department said on Tuesday, in a bid to remove hurdles in the path to peace talks.

www.reuters.com

 

[jward]

ASEAN finally pushes back on China’s sea claims

Regional grouping fires salvo at China with new insistence South China Sea disputes must be settled as US demands under UNCLOS
by Richard Javad Heydarian June 30, 2020

An Indonesian officer on guard in front of a naval vessel in a file photo. Photo: Twitter



MANILA – In a sign of rising resistance to China’s Covid-19 strategic opportunism, the typically tight-lipped Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc has articulated a tougher stance on intensifying South China Sea disputes.
In a major departure from its notoriously anodyne statements, ASEAN has “reaffirmed that the 1982 UNCLOS is the basis for determining maritime entitlements, sovereign rights, jurisdiction and legitimate interests over maritime zones.”
It marks the first time that the regional body has explicitly identified the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as the sole legal basis to resolve maritime and territorial disputes in the region. Regional leaders participated in the summit remotely online due to Covid-19 related travel restrictions.
Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines all have disputes with China in the contested maritime area. Taiwan is also a rival claimant but is not a member of ASEAN.
The regional body referred to international law more vaguely as a basis to manage the disputes, never ruling out alternative principles and mechanisms to address the issue. By all accounts, China prefers a negotiated agreement that does not rely on UNCLOS.

Vietnam’s Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc addresses regional leaders during the ASEAN Summit, held online due to the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic in Hanoi, June 26, 2020. Photo: AFP/Luong Thai Linh
But now, Southeast Asian countries are openly rejecting any bid by China to adopt alternative legal principles, including its controversial “historic rights” claims, as a basis of negotiating any conflict management regime in the contested sea.
The bloc’s shift is likely due to the determined efforts of current rotating chairman Vietnam, which has sought to mobilize regional unity on the disputes despite the pandemic’s disruption to holding regional summits.
Earlier this year, senior Vietnamese officials told this author that Hanoi is committed to ensuring ASEAN centrality and continued strategic relevance in managing one of the most contentious geopolitical conflicts in the region.
“We have to work with everybody [towards an optimal consensus],” said Ambassador Pham Quang Vinh, former Vietnamese envoy to Washington and a current advisor on the country’s ASEAN chairmanship.
“We can ensure those countries [Cambodia and Laos] participate to ensure peace and stability in the South China,” he added when asked about Beijing’s sway over smaller ASEAN members with no direct stake in the South China Sea disputes.

The senior diplomat, who served as Vietnamese Ambassador to the US until 2018, also underscored the continued importance of ASEAN-US cooperation, stating how “generally we agree that the US is important for this region in terms of security and prosperity…we need the US to engage different ASEAN mechanisms since ASEAN is as strong as how it is engaged by major powers.

“We want to be neutral, but we don’t want anyone (China) to be dominant in the region too,” he added when asked about how Vietnam will balance its national interest with its role as the chairman of ASEAN amid intensified US-China rivalry.
Long exasperated by ASEAN’s perceived acquiescence to China, US President Donald Trump’s administration warmly welcomed ASEAN’s latest statement on the South China Sea.
In a June 29 tweet, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo wrote, “The United States welcomes ASEAN Leaders’ insistence that South China Sea disputes be resolved in line with international law, including UNCLOS.”
“China cannot be allowed to treat the [South China Sea] as its maritime empire. We will have more to say on this topic soon,” he added.

Pompeo’s statement comes as the US deploys a growing number of its aircraft carrier and warships to the South China Sea to check China’s expanding footprint in the area.
Earlier this month, Kelly Craft, the US ambassador to the United Nations submitted a note verbale to the UN where it rejected China’s sea claims as “inconsistent with international law.”
“[The US] objects to China’s claim to ‘historic rights’ in the South China Sea to the extent that claim exceeds the maritime entitlements that China could assert consistent with international law as reflected in the UNCLOS,” the US submission said.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (C) poses with Thailand’s Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai (L), Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh (2nd L), Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah (2nd R) and Laos Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith (R) at the 51st ASEAN-US Ministerial Meeting in Singapore, August 3, 2018. Photo: AFP/Roslan Rahman
In recent years, the Trump administration has actively prodded ASEAN to stand up to China over the sea disputes. Last November, David Stilwell, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, openly called on regional states to emulate Vietnam’s tough stance in the South China Sea.
“This is your turf, this is your place. Vietnam has done a good job of pushing back. I would think that regarding Asean centrality (the grouping) would join Vietnam to resist actions that are destabilizing and effecting security,” he said during a forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

One major area of concern for the US and other major regional players is the ongoing negotiation over an ASEAN-China Code of Conduct in the South China Sea. The Trump administration has warned the negotiating parties that it will reject any final deal that could compromise America’s interests in the region, particularly regarding freedom of navigation for its naval forces.
In its latest statement, ASEAN noted China’s intimidation of smaller claimant states’ vessels in recent months, echoing earlier firm statements made by the Philippines and Vietnam.
The statement “emphasized the need to maintain and promote an environment conducive to the COC negotiations, and thus welcomed practical measures that could reduce tensions and the risk of accidents, misunderstandings and miscalculation.”
Among smaller regional powers, the mood has shifted from despair and helplessness to determined resistance to Beijing’s aggressive actions in adjacent waters, including its sinking of a Vietnamese vessel and harassment of Malaysian oil exploration activities earlier this year.
ASEAN’s emphasis on the UNCLOS is particularly significant in light of Indonesia’s recent verbal note to the United Nations, which directly questioned China’s expansive claims in the South China Sea.

Chinese PLA Navy soldiers on a naval vessel in the South China Sea. Photo: Twitter
“Indonesia reiterates that the nine-dash line map implying historic rights claim clearly lacks international legal basis and is tantamount to upset UNCLOS 1982,” stated Indonesia’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in a late-May note.
Indonesia has tied the UNCLOS to the Philippines’ 2016 arbitration award at an arbitral tribunal at The Hague. The decision nullified China’s expansive ‘historic rights’ claims, which extend into Indonesia’s northern Natuna waters.
Beijing rejected the decision, which lacks an enforcement mechanism.
At the recently concluded ASEAN summit, Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi called on ASEAN countries to finalize the COC negotiations in accordance with the UNCLOS.
“Negotiation among claimant countries is key. Indonesia supports continuing the code of conduct negotiation that was halted due to the pandemic,” the Indonesian diplomat said, underscoring the urgency of negotiating a mutually-acceptable agreement.

“ASEAN states should be solid in their resolve to respect international law, including the 1982 UNCLOS and the decisions made by the UN Permanent Court of Arbitration,” she added, reflecting a growing regional consensus to reject China’s wide-reaching claims in adjacent waters.
Asia Times Financial is now live. Linking accurate news, insightful analysis and local knowledge with the ATF China Bond 50 Index, the world's first benchmark cross sector Chinese Bond Indices. Read ATF now.

posted for fair use

ASEAN finally pushes back on China's sea claims - Asia Times

MANILA - In a sign of rising resistance to China’s Covid-19 strategic opportunism, the typically tight-lipped Association of Southeast Asian Nations

asiatimes.com

 

[jward]

We Don’t Have Enough Cash to Build New Nuclear Weapons, Says Air Force Chief

• 
  By Marcus Weisgerber Global Business Editor Read bio

July 1, 2020

Nukes or conventional weapons, “the current budget does not allow you to do both,” says Gen. Dave Goldfein, suggesting Congress create a separate account.

The Pentagon’s budget is not large enough to buy new nuclear weapons and conventional forces simultaneously, the U.S. Air Force’s top general said Wednesday.
Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein gave a blunt assessment of the Pentagon’s growing list of bills amid a growing US deficit, on Wednesday, suggesting nuclear expenses have grown so great they may require a separate account of their own.
“I think a debate is that this will be the first time that the nation has tried to simultaneously modernize the nuclear enterprise while it’s trying to modernize an aging conventional enterprise,” Goldfein said during a Brookings Institution appearance. “The current budget does not allow you to do both.”

The Trump administration’s $705 billion fiscal 2021 budget request for the Pentagon — which Congress is reviewing — calls for nearly $29 billion in nuclear weapons spending. The money would go toward new stealth bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic missile submarines, a new nuclear cruise missile and upgrades to the global nuclear command, control and communications network. The stealth bomber is the only weapon that could be used for nuclear or conventional strikes. The Energy Department, which oversees nuclear warheads, has requested $15.6 billion in fiscal 2021.
In January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending plan would cost $494 billion between 2019 and 2028, an average of about $50 billion per year.

Pentagon officials today argue they need 3 to 5 percent annual spending increases to fund weapons projects of all kinds, however defense spending is expected to flatten or slightly decline in the coming years regardless who wins November’s presidential election.
“There are either going to be some significant trades made or we’re going to have to find a fund for strategic nuclear deterrence, that we can use to modernize,” Goldfein said.
In recent years, Pentagon officials, including former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and lawmakers have considered creating a nuclear weapons fund separate from the military services budgets. Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis and the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, questioned the rationale for moving those funds.

“It doesn’t make new money appear,” he said.
During the Obama administration, the Pentagon began the decades-long process of updating its nuclear arsenal with new ICBMs, bombers, submarines and missiles. Some independent estimates say the price tag could reach nearly $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. How to pay for it is still debated in the Defense Department, but the need for nuclear weapons is not.
“I would just offer that in my mind, I could never advise anybody to unilaterally disarm or give up second strike capability,” Goldfein said. “I do believe we have to have a debate about the way we’re going to fund this essential part of our military going forward.”

• Marcus Weisgerber is the global business editor for Defense One, where he writes about the intersection of business and national security. He has been covering defense and national security issues for more than a decade, previously as Pentagon correspondent for Defense News and chief editor of ... Full bio

posted for fair use

We Don’t Have Enough Cash to Build New Nuclear Weapons, Says Air Force Chief

Nukes or conventional weapons, “the current budget does not allow you to do both,” says Gen. Dave Goldfein, suggesting Congress create a separate account.

www.defenseone.com

 

[jward]

Germany far right: Elite KSK commando force 'to be partially disbanded'

• 8 hours ago

The elite KSK has the job of carrying out complex foreign operations such as hostage rescues
Germany's defence minister says she has ordered the partial dissolution of the elite KSK commando force, which has come under growing criticism over right-wing extremism in its ranks.
Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told a newspaper it had become partly independent of the chain of command.
In May, police seized explosives and weapons at the home of a KSK soldier.
In January, military intelligence said there were almost 600 suspected far-right supporters in the army last year.
They also said the KSK (Special Forces Command) was seen as a particular problem, with 20 members of the elite force suspected of right-wing extremism.
The KSK had "become partially independent" from the chain of command, with a "toxic leadership culture", Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper.
The minister set up a working group in May to examine the problem, and the group presented a report on its findings on Tuesday.
The KSK "cannot continue to exist in its current form" and must be "better integrated into the Bundeswehr [German army]", said the report, seen by the AFP news agency.

• How far right caused earthquake in German politics
• German military orders Nazi material hunt

One of the force's four companies, where extremism is said to be the most rife, will be dissolved and not replaced, the minister said.
"Anyone who turns out to be a right-wing extremist has no place in the Bundeswehr and must leave it," she told German radio.
KSK operations will be moved to other units as far as possible, and it will not take part in international exercises and missions until further notice.

Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer said the latest findings - including the disappearance of 48,000 rounds of ammunition and 62kg (137lb) of explosives - were "disturbing" and "alarming".
An internal investigation is due to determine whether those items were stolen or are missing due to sloppy bookkeeping.
The unit was founded in 1996, and has some 1,000 soldiers trained for crisis situations such as freeing hostages abroad, which had not been possible until then without assistance from other countries' forces.

The military's problem with far-right supporters emerged in 2017.
Inspections were ordered on all military barracks when Nazi-era memorabilia was found at two of them. Many of those suspected of far-right links are thought to be sympathetic to Germany's main opposition AfD party.

posted for fair use

Germany far right: Elite KSK commando force 'to be partially disbanded'

The KSK commando force has been criticised for right-wing extremism in its ranks.

www.bbc.co.uk

 

[Melodi]

We Don’t Have Enough Cash to Build New Nuclear Weapons, Says Air Force Chief

• 
  By Marcus Weisgerber Global Business Editor Read bio

July 1, 2020

Nukes or conventional weapons, “the current budget does not allow you to do both,” says Gen. Dave Goldfein, suggesting Congress create a separate account.

The Pentagon’s budget is not large enough to buy new nuclear weapons and conventional forces simultaneously, the U.S. Air Force’s top general said Wednesday.
Chief of Staff Gen. Dave Goldfein gave a blunt assessment of the Pentagon’s growing list of bills amid a growing US deficit, on Wednesday, suggesting nuclear expenses have grown so great they may require a separate account of their own.
“I think a debate is that this will be the first time that the nation has tried to simultaneously modernize the nuclear enterprise while it’s trying to modernize an aging conventional enterprise,” Goldfein said during a Brookings Institution appearance. “The current budget does not allow you to do both.”

The Trump administration’s $705 billion fiscal 2021 budget request for the Pentagon — which Congress is reviewing — calls for nearly $29 billion in nuclear weapons spending. The money would go toward new stealth bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic missile submarines, a new nuclear cruise missile and upgrades to the global nuclear command, control and communications network. The stealth bomber is the only weapon that could be used for nuclear or conventional strikes. The Energy Department, which oversees nuclear warheads, has requested $15.6 billion in fiscal 2021.
In January 2019, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons spending plan would cost $494 billion between 2019 and 2028, an average of about $50 billion per year.

Pentagon officials today argue they need 3 to 5 percent annual spending increases to fund weapons projects of all kinds, however defense spending is expected to flatten or slightly decline in the coming years regardless who wins November’s presidential election.
“There are either going to be some significant trades made or we’re going to have to find a fund for strategic nuclear deterrence, that we can use to modernize,” Goldfein said.
In recent years, Pentagon officials, including former Defense Secretary Ash Carter, and lawmakers have considered creating a nuclear weapons fund separate from the military services budgets. Todd Harrison, director of defense budget analysis and the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, questioned the rationale for moving those funds.

“It doesn’t make new money appear,” he said.
During the Obama administration, the Pentagon began the decades-long process of updating its nuclear arsenal with new ICBMs, bombers, submarines and missiles. Some independent estimates say the price tag could reach nearly $1.7 trillion over the next 30 years. How to pay for it is still debated in the Defense Department, but the need for nuclear weapons is not.
“I would just offer that in my mind, I could never advise anybody to unilaterally disarm or give up second strike capability,” Goldfein said. “I do believe we have to have a debate about the way we’re going to fund this essential part of our military going forward.”

• Marcus Weisgerber is the global business editor for Defense One, where he writes about the intersection of business and national security. He has been covering defense and national security issues for more than a decade, previously as Pentagon correspondent for Defense News and chief editor of ... Full bio

posted for fair use

We Don’t Have Enough Cash to Build New Nuclear Weapons, Says Air Force Chief

Nukes or conventional weapons, “the current budget does not allow you to do both,” says Gen. Dave Goldfein, suggesting Congress create a separate account.

www.defenseone.com

Oh, good grief, there are at least 23 trillion missing dollars in the Pentagon budget, what was it used for? That's a lot of dancing girls and bribes for foreign leaders and other trivia...

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

Drone-Era Warfare Shows the Operational Limits of Air Defense Systems

While most countries struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the civil wars in Syria and Libya have become battlegrounds for foreign states backing different local sides. External powers have intervened

www.realcleardefense.com

Drone-Era Warfare Shows the Operational Limits of Air Defense Systems

By John Parachini & Peter Wilson
July 02, 2020

While most countries struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic, the civil wars in Syria and Libya have become battlegrounds for foreign states backing different local sides. External powers have intervened in both civil wars supplying advanced conventional weapons that have intensified the conflicts, but not all the weapons have performed as claimed. Perhaps the most startling example of this is how ineffective modern Russian air defense systems have been at countering drones and low-flying missiles. In the face-off between expensive air defensive systems and lower cost offensive drones and low-flying missiles, the offense is winning.

In recent weeks, drones supplied by Turkey in support of the internationally recognized Government of National Accord have reportedly destroyed the Russian Pantsir short-range air defense systems (SHORADS) that the opposition Libyan National Army (LNA) used to protect their forces. The inability of the LNA to protect their forces has turned the tide of the conflict and is a reminder of how difficult effective air defense is in an era of comparatively inexpensive armed drones and precision guided low-flying cruise missiles.


The LNA is not alone in having difficulty employing air defense systems effectively. The Syrian regime is protected by several Russian-origin air defense systems, including the S-300, S-400 High Altitude Air Defense Systems (HIMADS), Buk-M1 medium-range surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems, and Pantsir SHORADS. The Israeli Air Force has regularly defeated these systems through the combined use of electronic warfare, anti-radiation missiles, and stand-off precision guided munitions. Many of the tactics, techniques, and procedures used to defeat SHORADS in Libya were tested during the Turkish military’s brief 2020 winter campaign in Idlib Province during which Turkey destroyed Pantsir SHORAD and Buk-M1 medium-range SAM systems operated by the Assad Regime. Some of the destroyed Syrian and Libyan Pantsir systems appeared to be operational in the field, while others were being moved on flatbed trailers or hiding under sheds at the time they were knocked out. This shows how good intelligence aiding offensive attackers can easily neutralize defensive systems.

Not all of these systems were defeated due to inherent technical shortcomings. The tactical and strategic situation in which these air defense systems are employed also affects their performance. For example, as part of a United States government foreign assistance-funded project, RAND has examined open source reporting that highlights how Syrian personnel operating newly-acquired advanced Russian air defense systems lack the training time that is needed to effectively operate these complex systems. The repeated success of forces using drones and low-flying missiles to destroy or suppress multiple air defense systems on the battlefield is a cautionary note about the effectiveness of these systems against modern air threats. In both Libya and Syria, lower cost offensive drones and low-flying missiles have bedeviled more expensive, complex, and difficult to operate air defense systems.

Even well-equipped countries like Saudi Arabia know from the drone and missile strikes on its oil facilities during the late summer of 2019 by Houthi rebels or Iranian operatives that effective air defense against armed drones or low-flying missiles is very difficult. Similarly, as Iran knows from its own tragic misfires of its Russian-supplied Tor air defense system that shot down a Ukrainian passenger airliner, operating sophisticated precision guided missile systems requires extensive training, and even then tragic errors can occur.

Russian defense company and government officials have marketed their advanced HIMADS and SHORADS as highly effective against aerial threats. However, as the recent fighting in Libya and Syria has demonstrated, the acquisition and operation of a modern integrated air defense system is a challenging military enterprise. Even technically, effective weapons can and have been defeated. Unfortunately for the air defenders around the world, an offensive attacker has a wide range of electronic and kinetic weapon options to degrade if not defeat that air defense. National decisionmakers would be wise to carefully weigh offense and defense trade-offs to meet their security needs before spending national treasure on expensive and complicated systems that are hard to operate and do not always work as advertised in the field.


John Parachini is a senior international defense researcher and Peter Wilson is an adjunct international defense researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation.

 

[Housecarl]

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Free Access to Selected Content

Visit the post for more.

north-africa.com

Niger: Insurgents release kidnapped aid workers
Posted On July 2, 2020

Ten Niger humanitarian workers abducted by suspected jihadists as they were distributing food have been released a week after they were taken in the southwest of the country, a local governor said on Thursday. The workers for local group APIS, a partner of the UN World Food Programme, were taken by gunmen in Tillaberi region near the borders with Burkina Faso and Mali where jihadists are active. “They were released yesterday,” said Tillaberi region governor Tidjani Ibrahim Katiella told AFP, without giving further details. “I can not say anything, we have not seen them yet,” said Kadidiatou Harouna, the manager of APIS.

Circumstances of the release of the hostages have not been confirmed. The NGO said the workers had been abducted by suspected jihadists on motorbikes June 24 while distributing food free of charge in a hamlet of the commune of Makalondi. It was the first kidnapping of humanitarian workers reported in the area, where attacks by jihadist groups are becoming more regular and increasingly deadly.

Tillaberi is located in the “three borders” area between Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, which has become a hideout for Sahel jihadists, including fighters from the Islamic State in the Grand Sahara (EIGS). Motorcycles have been banned day and night since January in an attempt to prevent the movement of jihadists. A German humanitarian worker and an Italian priest were kidnapped there in 2018.

Gunmen have stolen several vehicles of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in the region. One of the MSF vehicles was used in May 2019 in a failed attack on a high-security prison near the Niger capital Niamey where jihadists were being held. The entire Sahel region, but especially Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, is seeing ever more brazen attacks by Islamist groups despite the strengthening of national armies and the deployment of 5,100 French anti-terrorism troops. Jihadist attacks claimed some 4,000 lives in the three poor, mainly desert countries last year, according to the United Nations.
AFP

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

ISCAP Ambushes UN Peacekeepers in the DRC, Exploits Coronavirus | FDD's Long War Journal

The Islamic State's Central African Province in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has seen a rapid expansion in claimed activity in recent months. At the same time, it has tried to exploit the global coronavirus pandemic to recruit individuals.

www.longwarjournal.org

ISCAP Ambushes UN Peacekeepers in the DRC, Exploits Coronavirus
By Caleb Weiss | July 1, 2020 | weiss.caleb2@gmail.com | @Weissenberg7

Screengrab from an internal April 2020 video in which ADF/ISCAP ideologue Abu Qatada al Muhajir [The Emigrant] defends the Islamic State and its new emir, Abu Ibrahim al Hashimi al Quraishi.

On June 22, an Indonesian peacekeeper from the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO) was killed in an ambush near the northern city of Beni. The Islamic State has claimed the attack.

According to local media, a MONUSCO contingent was patrolling the area near Makisabo, a small town between Beni and the Ugandan border, when it fell under attack by militants of the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). A mounting body of evidence suggests that the ADF is the force behind the Islamic State’s DRC operations.

The UN has confirmed that one peacekeeper was killed, and another was injured.
Behind the peacekeeping operation in Mali, the UN’s mission in the DRC is the second most dangerous active peacekeeping operation in the world. In December of 2017, MONUSCO suffered the deadliest attacks on UN troops in almost 25 years.

In its statement claiming the June 22 attack, the Islamic State reported that the ambush was carried out by its Central Africa Province (ISCAP), which encompasses jihadists in both the DRC and Mozambique.

“Thanks to God,” the Islamic State’s message begins, “soldiers of the caliphate targeted members of the Crusader UN forces on the road linking the Ugandan borders with Beni city yesterday.”

The group then inflates the total number of deaths by adding that the ambush resulted “in the death of five of them [UN troops].”

This is not the first Islamic State-claimed attack on UN forces in the DRC. The group has claimed assaults on MONUSCO on three other occasions, including the deadly November 2018 clash near Beni that left 7 peacekeepers and 12 Congolese soldiers dead.

The battle was carried out by the ADF and retroactively claimed by the Islamic State in a May 2019 issue of its weekly Al Naba newsletter.

Since April 15, ISCAP has claimed 25 attacks inside the DRC. This represents a significant increase, as from its emergence in April 2019 through March 2020, it only claimed a total of 33 operations in the country. At this current rate, ISCAP is set to surpass its first year of claims in just over two months.

ISCAP’s current rate of claims has already outpaced that of every IS branch in Africa save for the group’s West Africa Province in Nigeria and the Sahel. This uptick in violence tracks with the wider expansion of the ADF’s activities since November 2019.

Following the start of a Congolese military offensive on October 30, 2019, the ADF launched attacks that have left over 600 killed in villages and towns that have expanded beyond their traditional operating area in Beni territory in North Kivu province into parts of southern Ituri province.

ISCAP exploits coronavirus for recruitment

Screengrab from internal ADF/ISCAP Swahili-language video from April 2020 regarding the coronavirus.
In addition to increasing its attacks on civilians, the ADF appears to be taking advantage of panic in the region to recruit new fighters. In multiple indoctrination and recruitment videos shared in April 2020 via Whatsapp, the group encouraged people negatively affected by the global coronavirus pandemic to join the extremist group.

These videos, shared with FDD’s Long War Journal courtesy of the Bridgeway Foundation, are the latest in a series of dozens of propaganda videos that have increased in quantity and improved in quality over the past five years.

The videos were disseminated with speakers using a mix of Arabic, Luganda, and Swahili, indicating that they are likely intended for a broad audience.

In one three and a half minute video, an interviewer off camera starts by asking, “All praise is to Allah, do you have any appeal you’d make to the outside world during this corona pandemic?” The ADF member, whose face is blurred, responds as follows:

Even this virus is Allah’s army, which will kill all the infidels, Allah willing! My appeal to you all that are in countries headed by Infidels is that you should come and join us because the medicine for that virus is here with us. All you have to do is emigrate from infidel-led countries to this Islamic State here such that you can fight to save Islam.

A minute later, the interviewee continues:

…you only have one option to be safe from the coronavirus, you must emigrate to Jihad…there is no virus that is out there that is capable of invading us here in our camps. This is an assurance that there is no safer place on earth than this place where we are!

Screengrab from an ADF/ISCAP Luganda-language video from April 2020 regarding the coronavirus.
In a separate video shared in April, the interviewer asks, “Mzee [Sir], is anyone here in the camp infected with corona?” The ADF insurgent responds, “Corona! No one is infected with the coronavirus.”

He goes on to provide assurance that in the ADF camps, they have no such virus, no need to even wash their hands, and full freedom to congregate for prayers, lectures, and all other activities. His conclusion: “Allah is keeping us safe here from the corona pandemic.”

The ADF and ISCAP
Originally dedicated to overthrowing the Ugandan government, the ADF fled to eastern Congo in the mid 1990’s and began aligning itself with other groups operating in the area and forging relationships with local communities.

Over time, and notably after a shift in leadership around 2014-2015, the ADF further radicalized, dramatically escalating attacks on Congolese civilians. It soon became clear that this radicalization accompanied efforts by the group to align itself with the Islamic State.

In 2016, the ADF began releasing a series of videos in an apparent attempt to publicly declare its radical ideology. Many of the videos demonstrate clear jihadist messaging, including mantras of establishing a caliphate, calls for violence against “infidels,” and a declaration of their intention to impose a strict interpretation of Sharia in the DRC and Uganda.

Anasheed [Islamic a cappella songs] produced by both al Qaeda and the Islamic State were also used in the group’s videos.

The following year, the ADF received financing from Waleed Ahmed Zein, an East Africa-based terrorist who was later sanctioned by the US Treasury for his role within the Islamic State. Treasury noted that his network was able to move money to Islamic State fighters in “Syria, Libya, and Central Africa.”

Zein’s partner, Halima Adan Ali, was also sanctioned by the US Treasury for providing support to the Islamic State. In its press release, Treasury reiterated that Ali and Zein moved money for the Islamic State to fighters in Central Africa.

In February 2018, Congolese troops found Islamic State material and books during a raid on an ADF camp near Beni. One of these books was published by the Islamic State’s Maktabah al Himma, an important wing of the group that once produced theological and ideological treatises.

The book in question, for example, dealt with proper ways to implement hudud [punishments under Islamic law] and how to provide social services to local populations. The book was a hardcover copy, indicating that the militants had received it through personal connections rather than printing it locally.

These links appear to have progressed such that, in April of 2019, the Islamic State claimed its first attack in the DRC under the “Central Africa Province” moniker.

Since then, the group has claimed more than 50 operations in the Congo according to data kept by this author. The majority of these can be tied to verified ADF attacks based on reporting by the Kivu Security Tracker (a project that maps violence in eastern Congo) and by local media.

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

Are you a dedicated reader of FDD's Long War Journal? Has our research benefitted you or your team over the years? Support our independent reporting and analysis today by considering a one-time or monthly donation. Thanks for reading! You can make a tax-deductible donation here.

 

[Housecarl]

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The Case for a Different Approach to Confronting North Korea | Small Wars Journal

The United States needs a different North Korea approach that addresses American national security interests but limits the danger of strategic weapons use and does not default to hostilities, forceful subjugation, or occupation by the United States. This paper proposes an alternative path for...

smallwarsjournal.com

The Case for a Different Approach to Confronting North Korea
by Shawn Creamer | Wed, 07/01/2020 - 7:57pm | 0 comments

Introduction
It has been more than two years since the United States and North Korea deescalated major tensions over the operationalization of the North Korean nuclear weapon and ballistic missile programs. While direct leader-to-leader dialogue can prove extremely valuable when diplomacy stalls over key issues, in the case of the United States – North Korea rapprochement, the sides are just too far apart on the subject of denuclearization. North Korea under Kim Jong Un will never voluntarily give up or trade away its nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

The United States has a history, after a brief period of disapproval, of accepting nations into the nuclear club. The case against such a situation occurring with a nuclear-armed North Korea, is that the Kim family dominance of the North Korean state makes it a fundamentally different situation than other breakout nations such as France, China, Israel, India and Pakistan. Hyper-aggression and extreme violence, domestically and regionally makes the specter of a nuclear-armed North Korea down right forbidding to peace and stability in Northeast Asia.

So, ultimately the United States – North Korea rapprochement will fail, as we are now witnessing it fracture considerably over the last few weeks. In time, North Korea will reopen its tried and true toolbox of violence and aggression, but now armed with a reliable nuclear weapons arsenal and a delivery system of an intercontinental range. The current United States President or one of his successors may one day be forced to face down a far more dangerous Kim Jong Un and North Korea. Should that day come, the United States needs a different plan than those previously tried for how to address American national security interests, one that limits the danger of strategic weapons use, nor defaults to hostilities, forceful subjugation, and occupation by the United States. This paper offers insights on North Korea and its Kim family regime, a discussion of past approaches and their risks, and proposes an alternative path for America’s leadership to consider.

Background​

Since the end of the Korean War, the United States has encountered only bad and worse options when it comes to dealing with North Korea and its aggressive, violent behavior. For decades risk was contained regionally, with no direct threat to the American Homeland or to its vital national interests. During much of the Cold War the United States had more pressing problems to address, namely the strategic competition with the Soviet Union, its multi-decade involvement in Indo-China, and more recently repetitive, small wars in Southwest Asia. In the post-Cold War era the United States deferred, hoping for and ultimately basing its policy on a soft collapse to provide the answer to its North Korea problem. Absent a full-scale attempt by North Korea to conquer its southern neighbor, subjugating North Korea was not viewed as worth the expenditure of American blood and treasure.

While North Korea’s decision-making calculus and view of the world is foreign to the majority of the international community, their leaders are remarkably astute in their dealings with the outside world. Since 1953, North Korea has shrewdly operated inside the trade-space of American power - precarious to confront, high cost to clean up, little to offer post-facto to the national interest, and at risk to becoming an expanded conflict. North Korea’s bombastic threats to escalate military action to the level of total war has convinced every President since Eisenhower to conclude that direct confrontation with North Korea was to be avoided.

For decades North Korea had little operational or strategic reach beyond their immediate borders. However, by at least 1992 it was obvious that North Korea was heartily pursuing nuclear weapons and a beyond region delivery capability. Five American Presidents have watched North Korea’s quest to change calculations of power vis-a-vis the outside world. All five underestimated North Korean determination and capability to master the complex task of developing an intercontinental capable nuclear arsenal.

There is little, if any road left for the United States and the international community to kick the proverbial North Korea can down. For North Korea either already has, or in the very short future will possess a reliable capability to directly threaten the American Homeland with their nuclear weapon arsenal. The inflection point in their efforts has already been breached, with adverse ramifications for American power and world stability in the balance.

Should the United States elect or be forced to confront the threat posed by North Korea, it is incumbent to discard past approaches and old responses. They either never worked or stopped having any semblance of effectiveness long ago. Moreover, previous assumptions of what constituted acceptable risk when dealing with North Korea would need to be reexamined, so that new and previously discarded approaches can be studied and pursued based on their merits, along with sober calculations of the risks and rewards.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

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The Strategic Problem​

At the end of the day the four most discussed options for confronting North Korea – a negotiated solution, a freeze, accept-contain-deter, and military strikes – all are inherently problematic and harmful to the national interests of the United States.
First and foremost, diplomacy is unlikely to resolve this strategic impasse as neither the United States nor North Korea possesses the domestic political trade-space to compromise. The core positions of both parties are just too far apart. Furthermore, many authorities on North Korea view diplomacy as a quixotic pursuit that has no chance of yielding a meaningful compromise.

Moreover, such diplomatic options, even if they did yield some type of negotiated solution, are without merit for actually offering a solution the United States could rationally live with. The simple, cold fact is North Korea has repeatedly and blatantly demonstrated that it will not abide to terms it subscribes to. It is just not in their nature to bind themselves to such western notions of legally binding, contractual relationships.[1] In addition to the lack of American trust when dealing with the North Koreans, they likewise do not trust the United States, believing America to be deceitful and not one to keep its word.[2]

The only virtue to diplomacy at this and some future stage is that it might demonstrate to the world that America really tried to peacefully reach a negotiated solution with North Korea. Although this particular feature is comforting, it does not address the United States’ national interest. For by choosing diplomacy, the United States Government is defaulting to acceptance of a North Korean intercontinental nuclear arsenal and everything that will come with it.

Secondly, the 2017-2018 Chinese freeze proposal, was sadly, just too late. The window for a negotiated freeze solution probably passed 3-5 years earlier, for by 2018 North Korea had already achieved the majority of their nuclear weapons program benchmarks. Moreover, a freeze flies in the face of countless United Nations Security Council Resolutions, demonstrating the international body to be a forum of empty talk and great power paralysis, leaving in place a bona fide regional, if not fully operational intercontinental nuclear weapons capability.

Furthermore, the cost to gain North Korean concurrence to freeze their program would be exceedingly high, bordering on caving into extortion. Even if one assumes a freeze deal could be reached, what compliance mechanisms are realistically possible to verify that work has actually stopped? A negotiated freeze arrangement only rewards North Korea for flagrant deceit, and giving the regime time and space, in addition to significant financial rewards, to overtly and covertly cheat, even as the ink is drying. Regrettably, the Chinese freeze proposal, if attempted now or in the future, would be a preamble to an eventual implementation of an Accept-Contain-Deter policy.

Third, by choosing to not deal with the North Korean nuclear weapons program and defaulting to a mistaken belief in the viability of an Accept-Contain-Deter policy only defers the problem for a future Administration to ultimately address. Containment and Deterrence worked in the Cold War. Rebranding this strategy to address the unique circumstances of North Korea has not worked out as hoped. Continued pursuit of a failed policy will not change the results observed to date. A future serious crisis with North Korea over its nuclear weapons program, should it occur, would be serious business for the United States and its future as an Indo-Pacific power, requiring rigorous analysis, not superficial comparisons to past experiences. Three major points need to be made for decision-makers to consider with respect to soberly examining Accept-Contain-Deter:

1) North Korea is not the Soviet Union or China, nor does the recent India or Pakistan inclusion into the nuclear club provide a close rationale to assert that deterrence and containment will work. Proponents fail to understand Kim Jong Un, the North Korean state, or its long-term strategy to decouple the United States and South Korea, get the United States military off the Korean Peninsula, coerce American non-involvement in inter-Korean affairs, and bring about Korean reunification on its terms.[3]

2) American decision-making and options available will evolve over time. While deterrence is and will be a moving target, North Korean numbers and capabilities matter. The challenges the United States must overcome to protect the Homeland only become more difficult as the months and years tick by. Efforts by the United States to protect itself and its allies from North Korean capabilities, will drive corresponding capabilities in both China and Russia, generating a strategic weapon and counter-measure arms race.

3) Moreover, defaulting to this policy through inaction only sets in motion the collapse of nuclear arms control regimes, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), just as we’ve seen the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty evaporate before our eyes.[4] The NPT is already under significant strain, and we are at risk for losing control of what is left of the gains that were made in the last two and a half decades of the Cold War. Unless action is taken by the United States and the other great powers to address the North Korean nuclear weapons breakout on other than North Korean terms, it is probable that within a decade the world could see additional nuclear armed nations.[5] The dark fears of a limitless multipolar nuclear armed world which drove the creation of these treaties will likely be the new reality.

Last, but not least, reactive or preemptive military strike options, are more problematic than advocates fully appreciate. Believers in one-time or limited strikes typically operate on one of two misplaced assumptions. The first being that the core of the North Korean strategic weapons capability (warheads, ballistic missiles, and production facilities) can be destroyed in one period of darkness; and second, that by firmly demonstrating American resolve, North Korea will come to its senses and compromise. A military option to address the impasse and to resolve the ongoing crisis with North Korea will probably become the defining military campaign affecting world order since the Second World War. Decision-makers should not delude themselves into believing there are quick or low-cost solutions to disarming North Korea of its nuclear weapons arsenal. Ten key elements on the efficacy of the military option and the adversary should be clearly understood by decision-makers, and those offering advice:

1) Champions of the strategic strike have continually over-promised and under-delivered.

2) Military options without South Korea fully on board incurs prohibitive political and military costs to the viability of whether such an operation can be successful.

3) A decision to conduct a military strike of the size and scope required to neutralize the North Korean nuclear arsenal is unlikely to be carried out in secret.

4) North Korea will not stand idly by as America prepares to execute a military strike, for the United States does not have a monopoly on preemption.

5) North Korea has other capabilities beyond its strategic weapons that provide it strategic options, giving them unique leverage in a contest of wills up the escalation ladder that the United States does not.

6) For North Korea, fighting the United States is an existential fight, and their decision-making calculus of what constitutes legitimate weapons or targets in war is markedly different to those held by the majority of the international community.[6]

7) North Korean decision-making calculus likely includes the underlying assumption that America will be unable to mobilize its people to bear a costly war on the Korean Peninsula.[7]

8) The United States has little chance of gaining any veneer of international legitimacy within the United Nations framework for initiating a military action to disarm North Korea due to continued fallout from the 2003 Iraq invasion.

9) America’s strategic adversaries will actively work to make a military conflict with North Korea as costly as possible for us, and likely would risk intervention to ensure we are delivered an incomplete victory.

10) There is a troubling lack of discourse or analytical rigor to understanding the substantial downstream economic costs to a major conflict with North Korea, nor are there adequate military mechanisms which can mitigate the damage to the region or the world economy.

Policy makers are being dishonest with themselves if they believe North Korea can be denuclearized with Kim Jong Un remaining in place as the Supreme Leader, or Suryong, of the North Korean state.[8] By accepting this as a fact and not as an assumption, fundamentally then, if it becomes required to confront North Korea, American decision-makers must ask themselves what costs and risks are they prepared to pay to realize a denuclearized North Korea.

An Alternative Approach​

A negotiated settlement, pursuing the Chinese freeze proposal, acceptance of North Korea’s nuclear fait accompli, and pursuing kinetic military options are untenable destinations for the United States. When national interests are faced with nothing but terrible options, higher risk thresholds and pursuit of non-traditional options become necessary. The more vital the interest, the more leaders must be willing to embrace the unknown.

One such higher-risk, alternative option worthy of further study is to aggressively use American overt and covert elements of national power to purposefully facilitate a change in North Korean leadership. Facilitating a “transformed regime” is not regime change emanating from an external decapitation strike or the forcible removal of the Kim family regime by outside powers, and all the associated baggage that comes with a military campaign, occupation and nation-building.[9] Rather, this alternative approach is pursuit of a deliberate policy to foment instability within the regime, and encouraging regime elites to change their leadership. Stimulating internal forces to alter the direction North Korea is moving is probably the least bad option available that has a remote chance of constructively serving the national interests of the United States.

North Korea’s impending collapse has been consistently forecasted for decades, shaping much of the bad American and South Korean decision-making to wait the Kim family regime out. While the regime has proven incredibly resilient, opportunities have presented themselves over the years to exploit and exacerbate North Korea’s inherent weaknesses. Highly authoritarian regimes are proven to be tough, but inherently fragile at specific points and times.

Most conversations about the inherent weakness within the North Korean state incorrectly posits the end of the regime arising from a popular uprising, that once the masses get enough information about the outside world the shackles of slavery will be cast off. Promoters of this fallacious line of thinking display an underlying ignorance of Korean history, North Korean society, and forget that revolutions without leadership are at best mobs with expiration dates. For outside of the regime elites, there are no leaders or pressure groups amongst the North Korean masses.

While purges have been a fact of life for regime members since the earliest days of the North Korean state, their intensity and scope have markedly increased under Kim Jong Un. When Kim Jong Un came into power in late 2011, the Kim family position as the chief executive for the North Korean state had not been this fragile since the great purge of 1956-1960.[10] Much has been said of Kim Jong Un and his ascension to Suryong, but it is important to remember that he came into power held up on a borrowed support network. Over the last nine years Kim Jong Un has instituted his own support network and solidified his power through cunning, determination and extreme ruthlessness, silently leaving many regime elites with low levels of allegiance.

Despite Kim Jong Un being on much firmer ground, Kim Jong Un’s familial link to power remains weak. For what is often overlooked is the fact that there are other Kims that have more direct bloodline linkages to the North Korean patriarch, Kim Il-Sung. While a member of the family, Kim Jong Un is considered by traditional Korean society as an illegitimate son of Kim Jong-il.[11] This inherent vulnerability is most likely the reason why he started targeting family members and their personal support networks. Recent high level defectors have communicated that these “royal family” purges have struck a particular nerve within the elite community.

Being a member of the regime has always been dangerous, but under Kim Jong Un it probably has become incredibly more hazardous, particularly for those whom are over 40 years of age. North Korea remains in a weakened state since their near collapse to famine in the 1990s, with much of the state’s infrastructure eroding due to time and lack of care, leaving the regime in a precarious position that does not appear will get better with time. Internal troubles lead to two solution sets for the regime, finding external threats and purges.

The regime historically leverages external threats, in particular stoking fears of the United States, to unify the populace and those within the regime. So when the next internal stability crisis happens, we should expect Kim Jong Un will switch back to generating a crisis with the United States, just as his father and grandfather did. Simultaneously, while looking for external threats to deflect the attention of the country from their troubles, Kim Jong Un and the regime security apparatus will intensify purging of the incompetent, those perceived disloyal, or those becoming too influential.[12]

In addition, Kim Jong Un is progressively growing ever more unhealthy over time, and the perception of him and his health internally and externally likewise makes his position more fragile as witnessed in April 2020 when Kim Jong Un was widely reported to have suffered major complications following a surgical procedure. The absence of any bona fide succession plans is likely to make those within the regime uneasy, compounded by an environment where any discussion of post-Kim Jong Un realities is particularly frowned upon and dangerous for those suspected of even thinking this way.[13] Fissures such as these will be present within the regime for the United States to exploit, by unambiguously and directly communicating to the regime elites that their future is best served sans Kim Jong Un.[14]

Fears of instability and the unknown fallout of what comes next are legitimate concerns, and probably why such an approach has not been actively pursued. Kim Jong Un and his inner circle will likely not give up power quietly. Instability within the regime or struggles for power could produce bloodshed, with factions fighting for control, with perhaps a succession of leaders assuming executive authority. Should the United States and its allies remain disciplined, and avoid appearances that it intends to intervene and capitalize on North Korean weakness, it can probably contain the worst effects of instability inside North Korea.

It goes without saying, that inducing instability could go awry for the United States. North Korea could initiate military action to stave off rebellion, hoping to unite the nation behind a weakened Kim Jong Un or another successor. Under the best circumstances, North Korea would already have undergone some form of instability and be in a fractured and weakened condition, making a military campaign easier. Second, by initiating the military campaign North Korea would be the unambiguous belligerent and the aggressor in the world’s eyes, thereby providing both international and national legitimacy needed for the United States and its allies to fully prosecute a military campaign.

Arguably, some international and domestic actors will accuse the United States of goading North Korea into attacking by deliberately attempting to destabilize the North Korean regime. While absolutely true on deliberate American actions to destabilize, it is false on the account that North Korea was coerced or forced into war. For ultimately, they have a distinct choice to make in that regard. Moreover, North Korea has engaged in far worse destabilizing behavior against South Korea for over 70 years. North Korea must patently understand that the United States can play inside the grey zone of conflict just as well, if not more effectively than they can.[15]

The United States should not mislead itself either, a post-Kim regime will most likely not turn out to be a liberal, democratic republic on the other end.[16] The United States should be prepared to find a regime leader of some disrepute at the helm, most likely with another Kim in some type of ruling or reigning capacity when the dust settles.[17] However, anyone but Kim Jong Un offers far greater prospects for a negotiated settlement on the future of the North Korean nuclear weapons arsenal than the present. A new leader offers greater chance, over time, for North Korea to be less authoritarian, more prosperous, and one day become a responsible member within the community of nations.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

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There is likely little doubt that the average North Korean citizen will suffer increased hardships under such a pathway. While the suffering and loss of life could be high, it will likely pale in comparison to that which might be expected in a major war on the Korean Peninsula. Moreover, the future prospects for the average North Korean citizen, more than 19 million living a life no better than a slave, can only improve absent Kim Jong Un from the equation.[18] Future generations of North Koreans are apt to look back on the removal of Kim Jong Un as a cost worth bearing, just as those in the United States look back on our own Civil War to exterminate the evils of slavery.
Lastly, while it is not necessarily politically apropos to state, as it comes across as unsympathetic to the plight of the average North Korean soul, it must be said – lives lost will be North Korean, not American, South Korean or Japanese. Empathy as a human being is important, but it has little place in a policy where the stakes are so high. American obligations are to its citizens first, allies second, and lastly to the plight of adversaries. The United States can show its humanity and extend its historically unparalleled generosity afterward.

Transition to a Post-Kim Jong Un Regime​

Under optimal circumstances, an individual from within the regime will capitalize on both opportunity and access to dispatch Kim Jong Un and perhaps a few others within the inner circle. After such an event, an internal struggle for power will likely ensue due to the absence of succession plans. Ultimately a leadership dynamic will arise, either in a single individual, but more likely a junta of regime officials wielding executive power for not one single individual will likely possess the power base necessary to singularly control executive power as Kim Jong Un or his father Kim Jong Il possessed. For even the Eternal Leader and family patriarch, Kim Il Sung, did not fully consolidate executive power until 1960.
Under less than optimal circumstances the regime will begin to lose control, and the regime will begin to demarcate along personal, organizational or regional lines. Kim Jong Un, or another inner circle successor, will attempt to reassert control through the state mechanisms that he retains control or influence over, resulting in an attempt to reconsolidate power and control over the Korean Workers Party, the military and the country.[19] Factionalism may lead to divided rule and inter-regime conflict, with North Korea possibly degenerating into a scenario comparable to what is observed now in Libya or Syria.
Once a transformed regime circumstance begins to occur, the United States, to remain credible to any future post-Kim Jong Un regime, should explicitly follow-through on a policy of non-intervention, and economic and diplomatic enticements to new leadership. A transformed regime approach will require the United States to adopt certain pragmatic measures that likely would receive criticism within certain domestic and international circles. As an example, such a policy may include key positions such as, the United States of America:
1) accepts North Korea as a sovereign state in the international system, but no longer finds any prospect in negotiating with its current leader.
2) will utilize the full extent of its national power to encourage the North Korean people to adopt new leadership, to better their future as a responsible member of the international community.
3) will not militarily intervene or support other third party intervention, under any circumstances, in the domestic affairs of North Korea.
will defend itself and its allies against any and all threats utilizing the full resources of its national strength.
will, without condition, progressively lift economic sanctions on North Korea when Kim Jong Un is removed from power.
will offer a new North Korean regime an economic and humanitarian aid package.
will initiate dialogue with the new North Korean state to conclude a peace and friendship treaty and begin the process of establishing diplomatic relations.
will, only after the new North Korean state achieves stability, begin discussions without conditions, in conjunction with other international stakeholders, to realize a gradual denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
The United States should welcome with open arms any follow-on regime within North Korea, regardless of their past actions (and crimes) within the former regime. Furthermore, the United States approach to the new regime should be focused forward on its future potential, and not on past sins or to proselytize western notions of justice. Ultimately, reconciliation for past crimes within North Korea is a Korean issue to be addressed by them alone, over time. If the new regime is disparaged, shunned or fears the gallows are in their future, then the entire enterprise will have been for naught. Simply, it is hard to motivate or inspire one to change, if they face a victor’s justice if they do. The primary, overriding goal would be to disarm the new North Korean state leadership of all their preconceived notions of the United States by demonstrating uncharacteristic patience, altruism and mutual respect of the highest order. The new regime must accept that the United States would let bygones actually be bygones.
United States policy should be designed for facilitating incremental gains over a 20 year period, and avoid the pitfall of attempting to push instant change. The North Korean people have never in their entire recorded history, outside of the roughly 60 days of United Nations Command occupation in the fall of 1950, experienced anything remotely analogous to a liberal democratic society. Change will take a very long time and North Korea will need a steady hand, not overbearing arrogance.

Conclusion​

North Korea is counting on continued divisions and inaction by the international community to achieve its national objectives. Sadly, if North Korea must be confronted, America is by and large alone to carry the burden; the days of European active involvement in managing Indo-Pacific affairs are long gone, the distance being too great and for most, their convictions hollow on really tough problems that may involve use of force. The South Koreans, despite their tough talk, prefer to wish away the problem by buying off North Korea, naively believing that it can have coexistence, and an eventual peaceful reunification. While the Japanese Government is politically the most solidly aligned behind the United States, weak popular support and lingering pre-1945 historical issues significantly limit any active role they can provide. For the three great powers in the Indo-Pacific, the issue is outside the national interest of the Indians, while it is in the Chinese and Russian national interest to not solve America’s North Korea problem, despite the risks to stability and future of the NPT.
Should the United States face a final confrontation with North Korea, there will be no room left for talk or strategic patience. Time will be the limiting factor in the equation. Continued inaction and pursuit of failed policies will only increase the risk to the United States should it be forced to take action. However, rather than immediately default to a high cost military solution, it would be to the United States’ benefit to perhaps take another proactive pathway to achieve its national interests, while still respecting those of its allies and the other regional stakeholders.
While the risks of the alternative approach posited here may be higher than what one might normally assume, it offers better odds of successfully meeting the national security goals of the United States than diplomacy or acquiescence. Should the United States have to go further and conduct a major military campaign to disarm North Korea of its nuclear arsenal, this pathway would aid such an endeavor by weakening the regime prior to hostilities, and thereby lower the blood and treasure expended.

The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the United States Army, the Department of Defense, or the United States Government.

​

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[Housecarl]

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[1]A recent high level defector conveyed in 2018 that North Korea’s approach to negotiations is to gain money and time, and that cheating on agreements is foundational, asserting that it is “the strong player is the one who cheats.”
[2] North Korean officials conveyed to American officials following the Agreed Framework’s implementation that they knew the United States made false promises during the negotiations based on the belief North Korea would collapse, and the terms would not have to be honored. Likewise, North Korean officials also observed American and European assurances tossed aside to Libya’s Gaddafi in 2011, concluding that if a country gives up its weapons of mass destruction, then even the French will bomb you. Atsuhito Isozaki, Understanding the North Korean Regime, (Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, April 2017) 35-36.
[3] Stephen Bradner, North Korea’s Strategy, http://npolicy.org/userfiles/file/Planning for a Peaceful Korea-North Koreas Strategy.pdf (accessed February 5, 2020). While long-time students of the region like Stephen Bradner still are convinced North Korea’s grand strategy includes designs for forcible reunification, others believe it is focused on a campaign of gradual coercion and subversion to win without fighting.
[4] Joe Gould, “Kissinger: If North Korea keeps nukes, other nations will seek them,” Defense News, January 25, 2018, Kissinger: If North Korea keeps nukes, other nations will seek them (accessed February 5, 2020).
[5] The most likely countries include, South Korea, Japan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Ukraine. Additional nations which are possible include Australia, Vietnam, Poland, Indonesia and Taiwan. Peter Layton, “Why Australia Should Consider Sharing Nuclear Weapons,” The Interpreter, January 17, 2018, Why Australia Should Consider Sharing Nuclear Weapons | RealClearDefense (accessed February 5, 2020); Reuters Staff, “Poland may have first nuclear power plant by 2029,” Reuters News Service, September 6, 2017, Poland may have first nuclear power plant by 2029 (accessed January 19, 2018); Frank Chen, “Idea of Taiwan-made nukes has historical resonance,” Asia Times, October 17, 2017, Idea of Taiwan-made nukes has historical resonance (accessed February 5, 2020); Kyle Mizokami, “Inside Taiwan’s Secret History of Trying to Obtain Nuclear Weapons,” The National Interest, January 27, 2020, Inside Taiwan's Secret History of Trying to Obtain Nuclear Weapons (accessed February 5, 2020).
[6] Paul Bracken, Fire in the East: The Rise of Asian Military Power and the Second Nuclear Age, (New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers, 1999), 43-45 and 50.
[7] Director of the University of Maryland Critical Issues Poll Shibley Telhami, “Confronting North Korea’s Nuclear and Missile Programs,” briefing slides, Washington, DC, The Brookings Institute, January 8, 2018, Confronting North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs: American and Japanese views of threats and options compared (accessed January 18, 2018). Poll data was conducted November 1-6, 2017.
[8] Robert Collins, Kim Jong Un’s Hats: the Concept of Authority in North Korea, October 6, 2016, Kim Jong-un’s Hats: the Concept of Authority in North Korea (accessed January 11, 2018).
[9] A “transformed regime” is one “where the governing authority has either replaced its leadership or adopted new policies while still retaining political control.” Paul B. Stares, “Assessing the Risk of Regime Change in North Korea,” The United States – Korea Institute Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), The North Korea Instability Project, December 2016, http://www.38north.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/NKIP-Stares-Assessing-Risk-of-Regime-Change.pdf (accessed January 24, 2018), 8-9.
[10] The post-1945 North Korean state originally consisted of four separate factions, a Domestic faction, a Chinese faction, a Soviet faction and the Kim Il Sung guerrilla faction. The Kim faction was probably the weakest at the start. Kim Il-Sung was able to engineer the elimination of the Domestic faction by 1953, and the Chinese and Russian factions were eradicated in the great purge of 1956-60, leaving Kim Il-Sung’s faction in sole control of the North Korea state. Andrei N. Lankov, “Kim Takes Control: The Great Purge in North Korea, 1956-1960, Korean Studies, 26, no. 1 (2002).
[11] North Korea retains far more conservative features representative of traditional, feudal Korean society than South Korea or the Korean diaspora observed elsewhere in the world. In traditional Korean society, the children of a second marriage are lower in status to the children of a first marriage. Kim Jong Un is the result of a Kim Jong Il’s second marriage, while his father Kim Jong Il was the product of Kim Il Sung’s first marriage. Kim Il Sung’s children from his second marriage lost their connections to power within the North Korean regime when Kim Jong Il was formally elevated as Kim Il Sung’s successor.
[12] Robert Collins and Amanda Mortwedt Oh, From Cradle to Grave: The Path of North Korean Innocents, (Washington, DC: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2017), 15-17.
[13] There are no succession plans in place, because the concept implies, in regime leadership eyes, that there are alternatives to Kim family rule. No foundational document within North Korea - the constitution, the Korean Workers Party charter, nor the legal code - addresses succession. The only place succession is addressed is in Korean Workers Party ideology - the Kim family “Paektu line” linkage to Dangun, the mythological founder of the first Korean state in 2333 BC.
[14] The Kim family regime’s control logic is simply, that by controlling leaders, the institutions they lead are likewise controlled. The regime is most vulnerable when the internal security services and political watchdogs are at their weakest, particularly after purges gut these institutions.
[15] Grey zone attacks are feared by the Kim regime, which is evident by their virulent reactions to perceived slander against the Kim family, their emphasis on loyalty above all other considerations, and their focus on internal propaganda to that effect.
[16] Studies have repeatedly proven this point, for “since World War II, only about 45% of leadership changes [in autocratic regimes] led to regime change, and more than half of regime breakdowns were transitions from one autocracy to another.” Digging deeper, the facts show “only 20 percent of autocratic leaderships existing from 1950 to 2012 led to democracy.” Barbara Geddes, Joseph Wright, and Erica Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set,” Perspectives on Politics 12, no.2 (June 2014), 313 quoted in Stares, “Assessing the Risk of Regime Change in North Korea,” 12.
[17] The United States should be pragmatic on this highly emotional issue for North Korea, just as it was at the end of the Second World War when it allowed Japan to retain their Emperor. Public rationale for the new leadership would be critical, and as long as they can demonstrate a linkage to the Kim Family “Paektu line.”
[18] While the population of North Korea is above 25 million, the 19 million figure is the population that is categorized within the hostile and wavering classes of the Songbun social classification system. Robert Collins, Marked for Life: Songbun, North Korea’s Social Classification System (Washington, DC: Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, 2012).
[19] The “likelihood of a violent counterreaction by forces loyal to the regime appears high.” Stares, “Assessing the Risk of Regime Change in North Korea,” 12.

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About the Author(s)
Shawn Creamer
Shawn Creamer is an active duty U.S. Army Colonel. He was commissioned through ROTC as an Infantry Officer in 1995 when he graduated from The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina. He has served in a wide variety of command and staff assignments over the course of his now 25 year career, which include eight years of service on the Korean Peninsula. He is currently in Brigade Command.

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[Housecarl]

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A New Superpower Competition Between Beijing and Washington: China’s Nuclear Buildup (Published 2020)

The Trump administration is portraying the small but increasingly potent Chinese arsenal — still only one-fifth the size of the United States’ or Russia’s — as the big new threat.

www.nytimes.com

A New Superpower Competition Between Beijing and Washington: China’s Nuclear Buildup
The Trump administration is portraying the small but increasingly potent Chinese arsenal — still only one-fifth the size of the United States’ or Russia’s — as the big new threat.

DF-41 intercontinental nuclear missiles rolled through Tiananmen Square during a military parade in Beijing last year.Credit...Roman Pilipey/EPA, via Shutterstock
By David E. Sanger and William J. Broad

• June 30, 2020

阅读简体中文版閱讀繁體中文版
When negotiators from the United States and Russia met in Vienna last week to discuss renewing the last major nuclear arms control treaty that still exists between the two countries, American officials surprised their counterparts with a classified briefing on new and threatening nuclear capabilities — not Russia’s, but China’s.....(rest behind pay wall.)

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm.....reminds me of that article I posted a long time ago regarding such missiles.....THE ULTIMATE STANDOFF WEAPON, LtCol John R. London111, USAF, Air Power Journal Summer 1993, pages 58 to 68

https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASPJ/journals/Volume-07_Issue-1-4/1993_Vol7_No2.pdf

Posted for fair use.....

When it Comes to Missiles, Don’t Copy Russia and China — Leapfrog Them - War on the Rocks

Nearly five years ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster dropped tail first from the night sky, igniting one of its nine liquid oxygen/RP1 engines and

warontherocks.com

When it Comes to Missiles, Don’t Copy Russia and China — Leapfrog Them

Jeff Becker

June 30, 2020
Commentary

Nearly five years ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster dropped tail first from the night sky, igniting one of its nine liquid oxygen/RP1 engines and softly touching down at a landing zone eight kilometers north of its launch site at the Kennedy Space Center nine minutes after delivering a communications satellite to low-Earth orbit. Everyone in the world could see that rockets designed to prioritize affordability and reusability rather than raw performance were possible. They also promised to put humans in space sustainably by completely transforming the economics of reaching orbit.

A short three months later, another Falcon 9 — serial number B1021 — also landed, this time on a robotic ship hundreds of kilometers from the launch site deep in the Atlantic Ocean. B1021 would fly again less than a year later, marking the first time a first-stage rocket would be used twice for an orbital mission. By 2020, the upgraded Block V versions of the Falcon 9 have re-flown as many as five separate times for orbital missions, and can even be reused for manned missions — an unparalleled series of triumphs in space launch technology.

Meanwhile, China and Russia were making large strides in space exploration’s darker twin: missile warfare. The mass production and fielding of highly mobile medium- and intermediate-range ballistic missiles have transformed the armed forces of China, Russia, and other American adversaries. Over the past two decades, China has built the largest intermediate-range ballistic missile force in the world. In fact, it constructed a new and independent service — the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force — to operate its missile forces as a “buttress for its position as a major power and a cornerstone for defending national security.” Over the same period, Russia set about restoring the intermediate-range missile capabilities denied to it since implementing the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty — bringing the whole of Europe under threat of both nuclear attack and conventional precision strike from cruise and ballistic missiles from deep within Russian territory.

China’s new DF-26 is a good example of the type of advanced and highly capable theater-range missile the U.S. military can expect to face over the next decade. Launched from road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers from within China, the DF-26 is able to carry a 1,800-kilogram nuclear or conventional payload as far as Guam, perhaps doubling the range of the current, shorter range DF-21, which itself has been fielded in relatively large numbers. In 2019, during a joint exercise in the disputed South China Sea, the People’s Liberation Army may have tested an anti-ship variant, firing from the mainland to strike simulated targets at sea for the first time. Out to 2030, these weapons will deploy hypersonic glide and powered hypersonic cruise missiles in addition to their current mix of conventional warheads, further complicating the threat.

China intends to operate these missiles in conjunction with over-the-horizon battle networks designed to find, track, and defeat the U.S. military 1,000 to 3,000 kilometers distant from its borders. With a little imagination, one can envision hundreds of Chinese missiles attacking American runways, ports, and logistics infrastructure throughout the Western Pacific, extending a defensive perimeter over which the core attack capability currently in the U.S. military’s inventory — land- and maritime-based strike aircraft — must flee eastward beyond their effective combat range while simultaneously inflicting a catastrophic, Tsushima-like defeat on the fleet at sea.

Building a Post-INF Treaty Missile Force

The United States is unlikely to convince China and Russia to both agree on a new arms control treaty to ban missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Instead, it should join both in fielding new weapons — particularly in Asia — to offset their large and growing arsenals. As the United States gets back into this competition, the U.S. military should consider several strategic factors before selecting new intermediate-range missile systems too early.

First, a future aerospace strike capability should be forward-looking. The United States should not simply restore a capability that existed 30 years ago in the Pershing II and Gryphon ground-launched ballistic and cruise missile systems. Many current efforts to re-establish intermediate-range strike options from land, sea, and air provide an interim capability to fill an urgent gap. However, none of these approaches would be unfamiliar to a missileer from the 1960s, and they do not provide the leap-ahead advantages the United States will need to deter and defeat peer adversaries over the next two decades.

Second, a future aerospace strike capability should minimize risks that political or operational challenges will render them ineffective. Most Army missile systems under consideration today rely heavily on forward basing and are dependent on the use of allied territory. This requires difficult and often-fraught forward-basing agreements with host nations. Submarine-based weapons like conventional prompt strike take up valuable payload module space that could be used for maritime strike and other sea control missions. Additionally, they represent a potential opportunity cost to the submarine force. Submarine-launched ballistic missiles tend to have large infrared and radar signatures and should be fired from long range, thus not making the most of submarines’ stealthy ability to get close to the adversary. A family of new air-launched missiles such as the Air Force AGM-183 Air Launched Rapid Response Weapon or the Hypersonic Air-Breathing Weapon Concept are highly capable, but still need to be flown by relatively slow bomber aircraft — usually the venerable B-52. Although the weapons are very fast, it takes hours for the bombers to reach their launch locations, and still come with their own access, overflight, and escort protection requirement challenges.

Third, the U.S. military should not symmetrically mirror Chinese and Russian approaches to theater-range missile warfare and engage in a losing competition to build more missiles. The family of new American intermediate-range weapons will almost certainly be more expensive than adversary counterparts. As a think tank report noted, “If the United States wanted to develop an [intermediate-range ballistic missile] with a 4,000-km range equivalent to China’s DF-26, such a missile may cost $21 million apiece and $1.1 billion to develop.” The cost of Chinese and Russian systems is unknown. However, they will almost certainly be able to expand their missile forces faster and more cheaply than the United States can construct new production facilities and field new systems through its antiquated and outdated acquisition system. Once again, the U.S. military will find itself on the wrong side of a cost curve, emphasizing expensive and exquisite capabilities and ceding the advantage of mass firepower to adversaries.

Washington should consider how it can best convince Beijing and Moscow that their missile forces will be effectively answered, deterring them from pursuing regional objectives by force. A strategic examination of this expanded competitive space suggests that a future advanced aerospace strike capability should present U.S. adversaries with novel military problems. It should be grounded in emerging operational requirements while imposing significant costs on adversaries. Most importantly, it should avail of the unique and growing American technological advantage in advanced and hard-to-replicate reusable rocket technology.

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[Housecarl]

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Towards an Advanced Aerospace Strike Capability

What should an advanced aerospace strike concept that successfully addresses this military competitive space look like? A symmetric response, relying on evolutionary — or even backward-looking — concepts based on single-use missiles is anchored in several outdated assumptions about the state of rocket and additive (3D printing) technologies, limiting the U.S. military’s perspective on what is really possible. To illustrate this point, in 2016, I wrote here about the possible use of reusable booster technology for maritime operations, but noted the fact that private rocket companies had not actually reused a recovered rocket. It was not knownat the time if they could in fact be relaunched at all.

Since that time, not only has SpaceX demonstrated the ability to land an orbital-class rocket on its tail, it proved that it can do it again, and again, and again. With “flight proven” reusable rockets now a reality, range hypersonic weaponry may not be as expensive, exquisite, and rare in the future. This opens up the possibility to develop an entirely new class of weapon over the next decade.

An advanced aerospace strike capability should consist of hundreds of reusable first-stage boosters, evolved from, but far smaller than, today’s Falcon 9 rocket. A first stage built around reusable rocket engines like SpaceX’s Merlin, its more advanced Raptor, or Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-22 (a Space Shuttle main engine derivative) would accelerate a second-stage “bus” to hypersonic speed — Mach 5 and above. At high altitude, but still within the atmosphere, the booster would release the bus carrying one or more munitions, including unitary warheads, unpowered glide bodies, multiple gliding reentry vehicles with a range of submunitions, aerial drones, powered missiles, or — more advanced and (as we shall see) cost effective yet — a bundle of maneuverable scramjet-powered cruise missiles. After deploying the bus, the first stage would return the launch site (or pre-planned divert sites), landing tail-first, to be reloaded and refueled with another pre-packaged payload bus for another sortie.

At Mach 5 and above, scramjet propulsion is possible. Using the first-stage boosters to get scramjet-powered munitions to operational speed would create further opportunities for low-cost hypersonic strike. Scramjet engines only operate at these high speeds and do not need the complex spinning turbines typical of their jet-powered counterparts. The shape of the engine inlet and ramps to the combustion chamber as well as complex cooling pipes within the body of the vehicle that are required to ignite the fuel air mixture and cool the engine are very difficult to manufacture with today’s techniques.

However, 3D printers and additive manufacturing techniques are now capable of constructing complex components out of advanced metals. This technology may allow for the production of scramjets far more cheaply in the future. A reusable first stage could provide the energy to accelerate 3D-printed scramjet ‘rods’ to hypersonic speed atop the boosters, reducing the cost of intermediate-range hypersonic strike — perhaps comparable to the 30 to 95 percent reduction in the cost per pound to orbit that SpaceX is demonstrating in space lift. This combination of reusable rockets and hypersonic scramjet munitions would effectively combine the speed, range, and penetrating power of missile systems with the flexibility and cost-effective reuse of aircraft.

Don’t Stop Firing Until the Enemy’s Defenses Are Gone

Robert Rubel noted (albeit in a maritime context), that missile-centric warfare “requires … new ways of ‘feeding the fight’” and that the number of missiles fired is central to the outcome. He goes on to note that in missile warfare “It is critical to get missiles into shooting positions as economically as possible, to maximize their number.”

Once the U.S. military is able to refuel, rearm, and reuse booster stages repeatedly, intermediate-range missile forces in the inventory become more airpower-like in their ability to deliver higher volume and weight of fire more efficiently. Hundreds of these systems could potentially rain continuous hypersonic blows against an adversary from 5,000 or more kilometers distant. This ‘missile treadmill’ would set about delivering weapons, sensors, and other capabilities into the fight, largely immune from current and projected air defense systems.

Heavy theater bombardment allowed by advanced aerospace strike is a significant enabler for the rest of the U.S. military, allowing:

… other forces to fulfill their missions in a high-threat environment. By defeating or suppressing key adversary systems, theater-range missiles can create more favorable conditions for other forces to enter the operating area and conduct operations at lower levels of risk.

In addition to their obvious theater-strike and bombardment roles, such systems could be used in a variety of other missions across the range of military operations. Because they return to base, reusable boosters could be used in competition to conduct demonstration flights, much like bomber aircraft conduct deterrence missions today. They could quickly deliver aerial drones or other sensors and communications nodes into a denied area of interest, seeding a battle network at theater ranges in order to improve strike capabilities against moving targets.

Most importantly, an advanced aerospace strike capability based on reusable boosters would begin to place the U.S. military on the right side of the salvo competition with Chinese and Russian missile forces. SpaceX’s Merlin engine price remains a mystery, but external analysis shows the unit cost to be somewhere between $1 and $2 million each. Engines generally make up 65 percent of the cost of the first stage of an orbital vehicle, resulting in a unit cost of $1.5-$3.7 million for the booster stage. Reusing the booster 10 times means the cost of delivering a payload would be roughly $150,000-$370,000 per mission, dropping even more for every successful mission after that. A reusable American analog to the DF-26 might conduct a mission with a cost comparable to between three to seven F-35 flight hours today, but with dramatically greater speed, range, and payload, and without putting a pilot at risk.

Transforming Theater Strike

For the foreseeable future, the United States will have significant advantages in strategic nuclear forces. However, this may not be enough to deter China and Russia from projecting conventional military power under cover of intermediate-range missile salvos. Decades-old skepticism of whether Washington would really go nuclear and risk Boston for a Baltic capital or perhaps Richmond for a reef in the South China Sea might feed Russian or Chinese adventurism. As such, without an American answer to conventional missile forces, the United States and its allies are inviting instability.

In the short term, the U.S. military should not slow or cancel the missile experimentation, development, and fielding efforts now underway. Each represents a critical step in deploying a class of weaponry that closes a significant gap that adversaries are intent to exploit. China, Russia, and others show little sign of slowing down.

The same technologies and capabilities that are transforming the ability of the United States to get to orbit cheaply have the potential to transform the competitive dynamics of the intermediate-range missile competition. A nudge now might ensure that the future intermediate-range/hypersonic capabilities of the U.S. military are not expensive, exquisite, and few, but provide sustained, mass firepower that will be needed to deter — and if necessary, win — a large-scale conflict with one of these two great-power adversaries.

The convergence of reusable rocket technology and additive manufacturing for hypersonic engines may mean that intermediate-range strike may no longer be too expensive and too difficult, but far cheaper and more responsive than we fully appreciate today. In this way, an advanced aerospace strike capability, especially when coupled with newly arriving directed energy defensive systems, could together tip the salvo competition in the U.S. military’s favor.

Jeff Becker is a consultant to the U.S. Joint Staff J7, Joint Futures and Concepts. The views expressed here are the author’s alone and do not represent the official policy or position of the Joint Staff, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.

 

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Cartels Target Top Cop as Killings Soar in Mexico

The bold assassination attempt against a high-ranking police officer in the heart of Mexico City highlights a rising tide of cartel violence under the pandemic.

www.thedailybeast.com

Cartels Target Top Cop as Killings Soar in Mexico

CARTEL WATCH
The bold assassination attempt against a high-ranking police officer in the heart of Mexico City highlights a rising tide of cartel violence under the pandemic.

Jeremy Kryt
Updated Jul. 02, 2020 11:00PM ET / Published Jul. 02, 2020 4:33AM ET

CALI, Colombia—There was a time, not so long ago, when Mexico City remained a safe haven from the deadly cartel violence plaguing the rest of the country. A place where El Narco dared not tread.

That time is no more.

Shortly after sunrise on Friday, June 26, Mexico City Police Chief Omar García Harfuch was ambushed near his home in an upscale residential community. The unprecedented attack was carried out by a paramilitary force of more than two dozen men armed with automatic weapons, grenade launchers, and .50 caliber sniper rifles.

“Last year was Mexico’s most violent year on record, with some 35,000 documented homicides—the true number is likely much higher as many murders go unreported”
Twenty-eight sicarios (hitmen) divided into four separate estacas (kill squads) had set up roadblocks on the Paseo de la Reforma, the most famous boulevard in the capital, which leads to neighborhoods full of sprawling mansions and embassy compounds. The police chief survived the barrage fired at his armored SUV, but he took three bullets and two of his bodyguards and a bystander were killed.

García Harfuch, who is expected to recover, tweeted from his hospital bed that: “Our nation must continue to confront those cowards of organized crime.”

The assassination attempt has been blamed on the Jalisco New Generation Cartel—CJNG in Spanish—one of Mexico’s fastest-growing and most powerful crime groups.

Mike Vigil, formerly the DEA’s chief of international operations, called the attack “brazen” in an interview with The Daily Beast.

“We’ve had other attacks in Mexico City but nothing like this,” Vigil said. He described CJNG as a “hyper-violent” and “supersized cartel” capable of shooting down army helicopters and attacking military convoys.


The cartel’s operation against García Harfuch “was committed with absolute impunity and no regard for the rule of law,” Vigil said.

• Mexican Narcos Are More Brazen by the Day
  CARTEL WATCH
  Jeremy Kryt
  

The attack comes at a time when violence stemming from organized crime is spiking across Mexico. Scores of bodies have been found in mass graves or dumped on roadsides, and federal officials and law enforcement officers are increasingly under attack. Last year was Mexico’s most violent year on record, with some 35,000 documented homicides—the true number is likely much higher as many murders go unreported—and 2020 is already on pace to eclipse those numbers. Nationwide at least 226 police officers were murdered between January and May of this year, or one-and-a-half dead cops each day.

“People in Mexico City thought they lived in this nice, safe bubble,” Manny Gallardo, a Mexican journalist who specializes in covering the cartels, told The Daily Beast.

“But now the war has come home to them.”

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INSIDE THE ATTACK
Wiretaps obtained a few weeks ago by Mexico’s National Intelligence Center [CIN] had hinted that CJNG was planning to target a government official, according to Mexican press reports. The leak didn’t reveal who the mark would be, but CIN analysts had speculated García Harfuch could be one of the intended victims, according to Vigil.

CJNG’s leader, a former police officer named Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho, had been looking to strike back after authorities froze cartel assets and arrested certain high-ranking gang members—including Mencho’s son, Rubén Oseguera, aka Menchito, who was extradited to the U.S. in February.

Journalist Gallardo said Mencho may have chosen Police Chief García Harfuch because he’d played a role in the government’s recent crackdown. García Harfuch arrested some of Mencho’s top lieutenants, including the commander of CJNG’s Mexico City cell and the leader of the powerful Union de Tepito gang, which was the cartel’s principal ally in the capital.

The chief rolled up gangsters at least as far away as the city of Guadalajara, where he arrested a ruthless CJNG assassin who murdered two Israeli citizens last July, according to Gallardo.

“Experts say part of the rise in criminal activity is due to the coronavirus pandemic.”
Robert Bunker, a security specialist at the University of Southern California, called the attack against the police chief a declaration of war against the Mexican state that “has further undermined federal authority.”

“Another firebreak has been crossed in the criminal insurgency raging across Mexico,” Bunker told The Daily Beast.

Authorities have made more than two dozen arrests, including the alleged mastermind behind the plot, CJNG’s José Armando Briseño, or Vaca (Cow), El Universal reported.

But Gallardo said those captured were in essence fall-guys or patsies—deliberately chosen for what he calls a “suicide mission” because they were expendable. “CJNG has highly trained commandos but they didn't want to risk them,” he said, and added that the failure to use elite shock troops is likely what led to a botched mission and the chief’s escape.

“The pandemic has erased many jobs, and a lot of people are desperate. That makes for easier recruitment by the cartels. So they hired some untrained newbies for the [hit on Harfuch] . This is how organized crime takes advantage of poverty and ignorance in Mexico.”

BEHIND THE VIOLENCE
In the run-up to the ambush in the capital, the last couple of months have been particularly bloody. Some of the more high-profile incidents include:

• On Sunday of this week at least 20 people, including Mexican Marines, were killed during a clash between rival gangs in the Michoacán region.
• In mid-June a federal judge and his wife were gunned down by CJNG sicarios in the state of Colima—the first time in more than 15 years that a national-level judge has been murdered in Mexico.
• A few days later a caravan of police vehicles was ambushed in western Guerrero state, leading to the deaths of eight officers with three wounded.
• Also in June, some 30 bodies were found dumped on roadsides across two northern states, apparently casualties of a power struggle within the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, formerly run by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
• In early June, seven cops were abducted and later found dead in the CJNG-controlled territory of Colima.

Experts say part of the rise in criminal activity is due to the coronavirus pandemic. Mexico has been one of the hardest-hit countries in Latin America, with 220,657 confirmed cases and more than 27,000 deaths at the time of this writing. The health crisis has diverted the attention and focus of security forces, while the cartels capitalize on the chaos to take over new turf, settle old scores, and even provide food and medical supplies to strapped communities in order to build their brand.

But the outbreak has also impacted both supply and distribution chains for narcotics, forcing drug lords and their minions to expand operations to diversify their revenue streams.

Slowed commerce between China and Mexico means the narcos have reduced access to vital precursor chemicals needed to produce drugs like crystal meth and fentanyl. Meanwhile the closed U.S. border has limited their ability to move what product they do have stockpiled. That scarcity is leading to ever more violent struggles between rival crime syndicates.

“With the pandemic negatively impacting illicit narcotics trafficking routes, cartel profits are down, which is resulting in criminal organizations fighting over dwindling profits,” said USC’s Bunker.

“Also with Mexican state and federal forces increasingly strained [by the pandemic] more opportunities exist for the stronger cartels and criminal gangs to move against plazas [drug shipping and production corridors] and regions held by weaker opposing groups,” he said.

Crime groups are also flexing their muscle in new directions since the pandemic, turning to other black-market options to fill their coffers, such as extortion, kidnapping, fuel theft, even taking over the regional avocado trade.

“The cartels have to have huge revenue streams to pay sicarios and money launderers, and to bribe public officials. Otherwise those people might go to work for a rival group,” said Vigil. “Nobody works for free.”

NEW TECH AND TERROR TACTICS
Another factor behind the rising tide of violence is that the cartels have adopted new tech and weapons systems for use against each other and government forces.

Crime groups are increasingly using anti-personnel car bombs, attack drones, and improvised armored fighting vehicles [AFVs], according to Bunker. The AFVs can range from bullet-proofed tactical trucks with machine guns mounted in the cargo bay, all the way up to the so-called “narco-tanks”—semis or dump trucks with welded sheet metal armor and multiple gun ports.

“The use of assault rifles, grenade launchers, body armor, .50 caliber sniper rifles, and rocket propelled grenades [RPGs] is pretty standard now in many of the cartel tactical units, along with caltrops and burning vehicle blockades for area denial, channeling, and kill-zone creation purposes,” Bunker said. (Caltrops are those spikes laid down across roads to blow car tires.)

Journalist Gallardo agreed that cartel capabilities are on the rise:

“I've interviewed sicarios trained by Colombian paramilitaries to fly drones and drop C4 on targets. They’re well trained in small-arms and infantry tactics, as well as how to dismember and torture people. That's how [the cartels] work today.”

Growing power and increasingly sophisticated methods of warfare often intimidate poorly funded local police, making cartel rule absolute in regions with little state presence.

“In isolated areas they can act without fear of government reprisal,” Vigil said, and in fact often serve as the de facto authorities, settling quarrels, and dispensing food and medicine.

As part of a comprehensive solution, Vigil said, “security forces need to provide a government presence throughout the country, especially where they have these voids that are filled by organized crime groups.”

 

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An Iranian nuclear facility was apparently sabotaged, and a mysterious dissident group called the Homeland Cheetahs claimed responsibility

The incident at Iran's largest uranium-enrichment facility occurred amid historic tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.

www.yahoo.com

World
An Iranian nuclear facility was apparently sabotaged, and a mysterious dissident group called the Homeland Cheetahs claimed responsibility
insider@insider.com (John Haltiwanger)
July 2, 2020, 2:22 PM PDT

A view of a damage building after a fire broke out at the Natanz Nuclear Facility in Isfahan, Iran, on July 2.
Reuters

• An important Iranian nuclear facility was damaged in a fire on Thursday that appears to have been the result of sabotage.
• A previously unknown group calling itself the Homeland Cheetahs, apparently a dissident group, claimed responsibility for the incident.
• The incident, which happened at Iran's largest uranium-enrichment facility, occurred amid historic tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iran's nuclear program.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

An Iranian nuclear facility appears to have been the target of sabotage, and a previously unknown self-declared dissident group calling itself the Homeland Cheetahs claimed responsibility, The New York Times and BBC News reported on Thursday.

A fire on Thursday dealt extensive damage to a building at the nuclear complex at Natanz, Iran's largest uranium-enrichment facility.

An unnamed Middle Eastern intelligence official told The Times the blast was the result of an explosive placed in a part of the facility where centrifuges are balanced before going into operation. Centrifuges are tube-shaped machines that help enrich uranium.

Though sabotage is suspected, it's also possible the explosion on Thursday was an accident. Given that the complex is not known to hold combustible materials that could lead to that type of blast, however, experts cautioned against accepting either conclusion too soon.

David Albright, the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, told The Times that the assembly facility "wouldn't be prone to these kinds of accidents."

"They get subcomponents and put them together. You wouldn't have a lot of flammable liquids. The assembly operations are not dangerous per se," Albright said. "It seems like it could be sabotage. It's a high-value site for the Iranians. It's a very important building."

The Atomic Energy Agency of Iran (AEOI) acknowledged there was an incident at the facility but did not deem it sabotage. Behruz Kamalvandi, an agency spokesman, said there was an incident in "one of the industrial sheds under construction." No fatalities were reported, and no concerns were raised about radioactive contamination.

A group calling itself the Homeland Cheetahs sent a statement to BBC Persian journalists before the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran publicly announced the incident. The previously unknown group described itself as an "underground opposition with Iran's security apparatus" and said it attacked the building. Very little is known about the group, including whether it genuinely exists.

The building that was damaged is working on advanced centrifuges that allow for more rapid uranium enrichment.

The incident came months after President Donald Trump ordered a drone strike that killed Iran's top general, Qassem Soleimani, sparking fears of a new war in the Middle East.

The Trump administration has been hammering Iran with sanctions as part of a "maximum pressure" campaign designed to pressure Tehran, the country's capital, into negotiating a more stringent version of the nuclear deal the president pulled the US out of in May 2018. As part of the deal, Iran agreed to reduce its number of centrifuges by two-thirds. It also agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 98% and limit uranium enrichment to 3.67%.

Iran has insisted that its nuclear development is solely for civilian purposes, but the US and Israeli governments have repeatedly expressed skepticism, which is part of what inspired Trump to withdraw the US from the Iranian nuclear deal. With that said, the UN's nuclear watchdog continuously found Iran to be in compliance with the 2015 nuclear accord, which was designed to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, including well after Trump withdrew the US from the deal.

Trump's decision to pull away from the deal, which was orchestrated by the Obama administration, was controversial and met with criticism from US allies. The decision raised tensions between Washington and Tehran to historic heights and led Iran to begin stepping away from the stipulations of the landmark pact.

After Trump's decision to kill Soleimani in January, Iran announced it would no longer comply with any of the deal's limitations on its nuclear program, including restrictions on uranium enrichment, its amount of stockpiled uranium, and research and development.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as recently as Tuesday warned the US Security Council about Iran's centrifuge work.

As he pushed for the extension of an arms embargo on Iran set to expire in October, Pompeo said Iran was "accumulating dangerous knowledge"

"Late last year Iran announced that its scientists were working on a new centrifuge — the IR-9 — that would allow Tehran to enrich uranium up to 50 times faster than the IR-1 centrifuges allowed under" the 2015 nuclear deal, Pompeo said before calling on the council to hold Iran "accountable."

Thursday's incident came less than a week after an explosion close to the Parchin military complex. Iranian authorities dismissed the incident as a gas explosion at the base. But satellite photographs showed the blast occurred at a missile production facility near Parchin, The New York Times reported.

Read the original article on Business Insider

 

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Italian police confiscate $1 billion worth of ‘Islamic State-made’ drugs

The 84 million Captagon tablets were stashed inside three containers investigators discovered at the Salerno port.

www.al-monitor.com

Italian police confiscate $1 billion worth of ‘Islamic State-made’ drugs

The 84 million Captagon tablets were stashed inside three containers investigators discovered at the Salerno port.

Jul 1, 2020

In what's being described as “the biggest seizure of amphetamines in the world,” police in southern Italy have confiscated over $1 billion worth of drugs believed to be produced by the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.

The 84 million tablets bearing the Captagon symbol were discovered by police on Wednesday in the port of Salerno, south of Naples. Investigators say the 15-ton haul was stashed in three containers containing large cylindrical paper rolls.

A Twitter video published by Italy’s finance police, known as Guardia di Finanza, showed the pills pouring out of the rolls as agents cut into them with chainsaws.

Guardia di Finanza said IS planned to sell its synthetic drugs on the European market where coronavirus lockdowns have hampered domestic sales. Given the shipment's $1.2 bililion value, investigators believe a consortium of criminal groups were involved in its purchase.

"Many smugglers, even in consortiums, have turned to Syria where production, however, does not seem to have slowed down," the police statement read.

Known by its brand name Captagon, the stimulant fenethylline was once used to treat depression, narcolepsy and ADHD, but the United States and other countries have since banned the drug for its addictive nature.

Usually sold as a blend of amphetamines, caffeine and other substances, the stimulant remains popular in much of the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia. The amphetamine-based drug’s ability to inhibit tiredness and fear has also made it popular on Syria’s battlefield, where IS militants and other armed groups are known to use it.
“We know that the Islamic State finances its terrorist activities mainly by trafficking drugs made in Syria, which in the past few years has become the world’s largest producer of amphetamines,” police said Wednesday.

In May 2018, the US-allied Maghawir al-Thowra militia in eastern Syria seized $1.4 million worth of Captagon during an anti-IS raid with coalition forces.

More from Al-Monitor Staff


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Jul 2, 2020

Read more: Italian police confiscate $1 billion worth of ‘Islamic State-made’ drugs

 

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Forgetting Counterinsurgency, Again: Lessons from Reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom - Modern War Institute

The Pentagon is engaged in a strategic transformation that may imperil the future of American national security. According to a 2018 independent bipartisan commission appointed by Congress, the United States’ […]

mwi.usma.edu

Forgetting Counterinsurgency, Again: Lessons from Reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom

Alexandre Caillot | July 2, 2020

The Pentagon is engaged in a strategic transformation that may imperil the future of American national security. According to a 2018 independent bipartisan commission appointed by Congress, the United States’ preoccupation with counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterterrorism has enabled near peers and rogue states to shrink the capability gap between their militaries and that of the world’s only superpower. Policymakers and the defense community must recognize that great-power competition is not only a test of conventional military strength; it also demands mastery of actions below the major-war threshold that include counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, hybrid threats, stability operations, and the “gray zone.” A COIN capability is critical to American competition and conflict with other states, and war with nonstate actors. The US Army should be careful lest it commit too many resources to high-intensity war. This article surveys the service’s changed approach to readiness and the threat landscape. It then compares the transition from official hostilities to stability operations early in post–Civil War Reconstruction (1865–1866) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2004) to demonstrate that counterinsurgency requires a heavy commitment to manpower and training.

The Army has not completely abandoned COIN. It retains the capability through doctrine, education, and assistance it provides to other armed forces. The 2018 Army Strategy and 2019 Army Doctrine Publication 3-0, Unified Land Operations affirm that irregular warfare is important—a view echoed by Pentagon officials and an officer self-study webpage. A 2019 article in War Room, the online journal of the Army War College, actually criticizes the counterinsurgency emphasis of the training.

The general trend, however, has been a course correction. Congress and the defense community doubt American readiness for a major conflict. In January 2017, for example, the Army reported only three of fifty-eight brigade combat teams ready for immediate deployment. The result is a growing emphasis on the dangers that China and Russia pose. The 2018 National Defense Strategy declares that “inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” More evidence of this shift can be found in the 2018 National Military Strategy, the 2019 Army Modernization Strategy, and the Pentagon purchase of new vehicles and weapon systems. Articles in Military Review, Small Wars Journal, and War on the Rocks note the Army pivot to conventional warfare. The approval of some senior officers and the decreased size of the service facilitate this trend, as does limited funding that adds pressure to prioritize the greatest threats. Given the Army’s renewed emphasis on major war, its response to insurgencies will depend on security force assistance brigades and special operations forces. Its stability operations will involve small deployments, reliance on partners, and prioritizing aid to civilian agencies.

The Army risks forgetting past experience. Comparable doctrines emerged from Vietnam and Iraq, reflecting the Army’s tendency to avoid preparing for occupations, grudgingly adapt to them, and discard the knowledge afterward. Illustrative of growing disinterest in counterinsurgency are generals who regard irregular tasks as a lesser aspect of conventional duties. The Army’s history with irregular operations reveals that COIN requires more resources, but as Capt. Justin Lynch warns, the Pentagon may “acknowledge the importance of counterinsurgency, but not provide enough training or resources to produce an effective force.”

The Department of Defense formally defines COIN as “comprehensive civilian and military efforts designed to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes.” This article uses it more generally to denote Army activities that promote stability and defeat insurgents. They range from kinetic operations, to enforcing law and order, to winning hearts and minds. These capabilities must remain an Army priority. Navigating the transition from conflict to a condition of stable governance is central to modern warfare. Maintaining a counterinsurgency capability is essential for this mission and reflects the fact that the defense community cannot remove this option from the ones available to policymakers. Concentrating exclusively on conventional fighting implies that America can choose its conflicts, an assumption disproven by history. Irregular operations have imposed a heavy toll in casualties, money spent, and reputation lost. Roughly four-fifths of global conflicts since 1815 have been either civil wars or insurgencies; there were 181 of the latter from the Second World War to 2015. Between 1798 and 2018, nearly three-quarters of American operations abroad were irregular, while one-fourth were conventional. Being unable to wage such campaigns reduces the service’s deterrent effect and American influence in unstable, strategic regions.

Critics of this view might argue that many of these counterinsurgencies were wars of choice as opposed to wars of necessity. The problem with this thinking is that states choose to wage war in order to advance their interests. A conflict may appear unnecessary in hindsight, but policymakers at the time regarded it as a national imperative. As military historian Sir Michael Howard wrote, the primary motivation for warfare over the past two centuries has been the ability of humans to “discern, or believe that they can discern, dangers before they become immediate.” Focusing solely on unavoidable wars deprives the Army of capabilities, giving the initiative to hostile actors and thus weakening American foreign policy. The service will struggle to shape the threat environment if it is unable to intervene short of large-scale combat operations.

The ability to win a high-intensity conflict does not produce victory in a counterinsurgency, which frequently involves unique challenges. Army preparations must account for the fact that it will operate among civilians, and that rivals will combine regular and irregular warfare. Moreover, they will support insurgencies to avoid confronting America’s conventional overmatch. China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, and Russia have either fostered such conflicts or can do so. Nonstate actors, with improved access to information and technology, form globally connected insurgencies that elude defeat by moving from one country to another. Articles in Foreign Policy, Military Review, Small Wars Journal, and War on the Rocks affirm the relevance of COIN; insurgencies will be strategically important to great-power competition.

A comparison of Reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom informs Army planning by revealing that ample manpower and consistent conduct are critical to success . The service will not have enough appropriately trained officers and soldiers if it sidelines counterinsurgency in favor of conventional war.

Troop Numbers

The Army during Reconstruction formed “a patchwork of sovereignties” across the South due to limited manpower. There were approximately one million Federals in uniform as of April 1865, the month the Civil War ended, but that number would drop quickly and dramatically. The number of troops overseeing Reconstruction shrank from about 190,000 in September of that year to roughly twenty-five thousand by December 1866. Available data indicates that this was a demanding assignment. In 1867, for example, the service numbered fifty-seven thousand, and over two-fifths of its companies were stationed in the South in the winter of 1867–1868. The Army force level for Reconstruction was too small for two reasons. First, it was attempting to control a population of nine million people in a territory that equaled the combined size of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Second, it ruled by martial law for most of this period, functioning as “a relief agency, a police force, a court, a public works bureau, and a school system.” The service’s constrained military means were a poor fit for its sweeping political powers. Stability crumbled with troop reductions, and resistance developed in areas devoid of Federals. Whereas soldiers once deterred violence by occupying county seats and towns located at major crossroads, shrinking numbers forced them to cede many rural areas to planters, and left civilians vulnerable to criminals. Many Southern whites engaged in terrorism that targeted the economic and political activity of freedpeople and loyal whites. They burned churches; attacked, sued, and killed soldiers; intimidated and assaulted loyal whites to expel them; seized the property of former slaves; and unleashed violence on them, resulting in hundreds of murders. By the end of 1866, much of the South collapsed into “near-statelessness.”

A century and a half later, the issue of insufficient troops likewise hindered the Army from quashing the insurgencies in Iraq, a country larger than California with a population of twenty-five million people. Force levels dropped from nearly 153,000 at the close of fiscal year 2003 to around 102,000 in September 2004.The Army numbered just under five hundred thousand in total between 2003 and 2004; hence, Operation Iraqi Freedom imposed a heavy burden by absorbing between 20 and just over 30 percent of the service’s available manpower. Soldier density varied widely, which frustrated efforts to defeat the enemy as well as to secure the borders, perform constabulary duties, seize weapons caches, handle detainees, and train Iraqi soldiers. There were shortfalls of interrogators, military police, Arabic linguists, interpreters, military intelligence assets, construction units, civil affairs personnel, and engineers. The dearth of combatants limited face-to-face interactions with Iraqis and helped drive some units to act on emotion rather than conducting the careful efforts required to build popular support and minimize collateral damage. Perhaps most importantly, there was usually no operational reserve in theater. It was impossible to balance troop distribution between the center of Iraq and its border areas, which enabled the insurgencies to grow. Units occupied areas until enemy activity faded and then moved on, which allowed the latter to retake those locations. Filling gaps, moreover, required pulling forces from elsewhere, so there were too few soldiers in key zones. Small units lost control of some hostile areas, other communities without large bodies of troops witnessed a decline in Iraqi security capability and greater Sunni-Shia tensions, and towns fell to insurgents due to inadequate protection. In at least one instance, it proved necessary to draw on a corps reserve that could not be reformed for lack of manpower.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

Ground-Level Practice

The Army’s ground-level conduct was uneven during Reconstruction, an issue for which officers were largely responsible. Some suspended civil courts yet did not establish military ones for several months. They had flexibility in writing their own rules for legal appeals, and in creating provost courts that at times dealt with the cases of freedpeople. There were disagreements within the Army about the meaning of freedom for former slaves; while officers favored written labor contracts for them, another idea was for them to buy land over time. Support for the creation of area militias was not universal. Lenient officers allowed local authorities to remain in office, worked so that ex-Confederates could serve in that capacity, promoted elections, established police companies, and distributed instructions to facilitate interaction between ex-slaves and their prior owners. Other examples of this behavior included the offering of transport for ex-Confederate soldiers, loaning of draft horses to impoverished farmers, providing shelter and food to white and black refugees, and establishing an affairs bureau for former slaves. Heavy-handed officers repressed newspapers, forbid the continued service of ex-Confederates in local offices, chose new authorities, suspended biased laws, determined election outcomes, and ordered militias to obey Army commands. They even tested civilian loyalty, arrested the unpatriotic, and forbid the public’s use of the word “Confederate.”

The Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom also had an inconsistent approach to counterinsurgency. Some units focused on destroying the enemy by adopting relaxed rules of engagement and performed nighttime cordon-and-search operations that detained large numbers of suspects. Other outfits, however, emphasized nation building. This conciliatory approach involved improved interaction with locals and concentrated on safety, employment, economic recovery, essential services, and governance. It featured more precise operations, less obtrusive cordon-and-search operations, a greater reliance on civil affairs teams, and the fielding, sustaining, and use of new Iraqi army and police units as well as Iraqi Civil Defense Corps outfits. Further inconsistencies occurred in the use of artillery. Approaches ranged from counterbattery fire to the combination of counterfire, intelligence collection, and encouraging locals to ensure enemy forces did not take up position on their land.

The True Cost of COIN

The examples of Reconstruction and Operation Iraqi Freedom demonstrate that counterinsurgency imposes a heavy burden in terms of force levels and preparation. Special operations forces and security force assistance brigades are too few in number to occupy an extensive territory akin to the American South or the smaller yet more populous Iraq. Restricting COIN capability to situations in which the Army supports a host government—rather than leading the effort—ignores fragile states that struggle to ensure effective rule and their citizens’ safety. A large-scale conflict would leave such countries in disarray, necessitating massive counterinsurgency operations.

This raises the question: How should the service commit most of its funding, time, and resources? The answer depends on the assessment of future threats. High-intensity conflict with China or Russia is the most dangerous outcome, since defeat in the worst case might imperil the American homeland. And yet, this observation could be made of any substantial military rival that the United States faces, past or present. In a more probable scenario, those countries would wage wars so costly that America would allow them freedom of action in their areas of influence. The most likely situation, however, is the recurrence of insurgencies, since they have been more common historically than conventional wars. The Army should prepare for future conflict based on this reality rather than falling into the cyclical trap of retreating intellectually from its most recent COIN experience.

America has an expensive track record with counterinsurgency, suggesting a weakness that China and Russia could exploit. The post-9/11 conflicts—in Afghanistan and Iraq—cost the United States about $1.5 trillion as of 2015. This is slightly more than its financial burden in the First World War and the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars combined. It may appear that the country can afford such conflicts for years to come, as defense spending only represented 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product in 2018. And yet, the staggering reality of a $984 billion national deficit and $22 trillion national debt in 2019 will surely temper excessive military expenditures. Likewise, the current coronavirus pandemic presents the risk of a major economic downturn that could curb defense spending. The financial cost of COIN is a reminder that a failure to prepare forces the Army into the expensive and time-consuming process of adapting on the fly. Long conflicts are expensive ones, and shortening future counterinsurgencies will only be possible if the service has a well-honed capability.

Assessing near-peer threats requires thinking outside the conventional warfare box. Why would China and Russia risk conventional conflict with America when they could foment insurgencies or perpetuate existing ones in places of strategic significance? The Soviet Union and the United States did so in Vietnam and Afghanistan, respectively, to weaken one another during the Cold War. Now, the leaders of China and Russia enjoy the advantage of being able to craft a long-term strategy, one that could depend on the attritional effect of counterinsurgency campaigns to reduce the military strength of the United States. Chinese president Xi Jinping can rule indefinitely and Russian president Vladimir Putin is working to do so. Americans elect a new president every four years, however, which can complicate the efforts of US policymakers to craft an enduring strategy.

The Army must balance the national security issue of the moment and the areas that will be most important over the coming years. It should hone its COIN capacity as part of a comprehensive effort to ensure readiness for missions below the major-war threshold. Failing to do so makes counterinsurgency an American vulnerability that near peers will exploit for asymmetric advantage. Restricting Army readiness to conventional war limits the military options available to policymakers, increasing the risk of escalation with a belligerent adversary. The service needs to be prepared for everything from conventional war to COIN, irregular warfare, hybrid threats, stability operations, and the “gray zone.” The ability to engage America’s enemies across the full spectrum of warfare is the only way that the Army can rightfully claim to be the premier land-fighting force in the world. As a superpower, the United States has global commitments. It must be able to deter, and if necessary, defeat a broad array of adversaries with wide-ranging means of aggression. A strong counterinsurgency capability will be essential.


Alexandre F. Caillot is a PhD Candidate at Temple University specializing in American military history. His dissertation examines the Civil War, namely the combat performance of Union soldiers who entered the Army of the Potomac in time to serve during the Overland Campaign. He is a Junior Fellow, Program on National Security, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

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

The author would like to thank the following individuals for unofficial conversations that do not represent the official views of the US Army: Dr. Conrad C. Crane; Brig. Gen. (ret) Duke DeLuca; Col. (ret) Paul C. Jussel, PhD; Dr. Christian B. Keller; Col. Jon Klug; Maj. Mark Morrison; Col. Matthew D. Morton; Col. Dave Raugh; and Col. (ret) Frank Sobchak. The author would also like to thank Dr. Michael Noonan for offering statistical information from a forthcoming publication on the number of US irregular and conventional operations abroad between 1798 and 2018.

 

[Housecarl]

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Nuclear submarines, non-nuclear weapons and the search for strategic stability | The Strategist

The decision to deploy nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) in the years to come will be a product of the major paradigms and concepts used to manage nuclear dangers more broadly. Recently, an emerging literature ...

www.aspistrategist.org.au

Nuclear submarines, non-nuclear weapons and the search for strategic stability

3 Jul 2020 | Benjamin Zala
Undersea deterrence

The decision to deploy nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) in the years to come will be a product of the major paradigms and concepts used to manage nuclear dangers more broadly. Recently, an emerging literature has pointed to a change in the way that at least the major powers plan to mitigate nuclear threats to their interests. This shift in thinking can be summarised as involving a greater reliance on strategic non-nuclear weapons—weapons and enabling systems that can be used to compromise an adversary’s nuclear forces using both kinetic and non-kinetic means that don’t involve nuclear weapons—and a decreased commitment to mutual vulnerability as the basis of strategic stability between nuclear-armed adversaries.

Strategic non-nuclear weapons include ballistic missile defence, conventional precision-strike missiles, anti-satellite weapons and anti-submarine weapons. When combined with advances in enabling platforms and systems such as elements of cyber, artificial intelligence and quantum technology, they can, in principle, be used to compromise an adversary’s nuclear capabilities, with serious implications for issues of deterrence and stability.

Traditional approaches to deterrence based on the threat of punishment now compete with policies based instead on deterrence by denial. Stability based on rational calculations under conditions of mutual vulnerability appears set to be even harder to maintain.

The potential for conventional counterforce strikes makes future scenarios involving ‘use them or lose them’ logic more likely for states that face adversaries armed with more sophisticated capabilities.

The current challenge to traditional nuclear deterrence relationships has a dual but paradoxical effect on the incentives to deploy sea-based nuclear weapons. In general, as missile silos (and even, over time, mobile land-based missiles), air fields, satellites, and command, control and communications stations become more vulnerable to counterforce attacks, the incentives to diversify a state’s nuclear force structure increase. In particular, SSBNs still remain the most secure form of second-strike capability, meaning that the further spread of strategic non-nuclear weapons is likely to result in ever more nuclear weapons being deployed at sea.

On the other hand, one of the key technologies that falls under the banner of strategic non-nuclear weapons is anti-submarine weapons themselves, and much analysis now is focusing on whether advances in this area may in fact undermine the perceived invulnerability of SSBNs. It’s important to note that growing concerns over the effects of new anti-submarine capabilities on strategic stability are, at least in part, based on projections about the future. Little serious analysis or commentary predicts that the oceans are going to become effectively transparent overnight. However, advances in sensing and signal processing in particular mean that it’s a serious possibility that the oceans will become significantly more transparent than they are today. And when it comes to nuclear force structure planning, serious possibilities are enough to keep decision-makers up at night.

As the development of strategic non-nuclear weapons and the associated shift in thinking about stable deterrence based on mutual vulnerability continues, policymakers and analysts will need to give serious attention to what might become the new determinants of stability in the global nuclear order.

The development of countermeasures will play an important role in mitigating the destabilising effects of disruptive technological breakthroughs in anti-submarine weaponry. The role of countermeasures is already evident in other domains. For example, as a reaction to US missile defence, both China and Russia today are placing increasing emphasis on hypersonic missiles because their combination of speed and manoeuvrability makes them extraordinarily difficult to defend against.

Countermeasures for anti-submarine weapons need not rely on kinetic effects. The development both of ever quieter SSBNs with smaller acoustic signatures and of new techniques of deception (for example, unmanned underwater vehicles designed to produce tonals that match those of SSBNs that are thought to have been identified by an adversary) can increase a state’s confidence that at least some of its SSBNs can remain undetected and uncompromised in a crisis.

Developments in anti-submarine weapons aimed at compromising SSBNs and developments in countermeasures aimed at mitigating those breakthroughs will take on a tit-for-tat dynamic in the years to come. This is not a new phenomenon, but as rapid increases in things such as sensing techniques and data processing allow for technological leaps in anti-submarine capabilities, countermeasures should be expected to take on a new and much greater importance.

Defensive measures for SSBNs aimed at increasing their reliability in the face of technological breakthroughs in anti-submarine weaponry are unlikely to solely rely on new technologies themselves. For example, James Holmes has suggested that both ‘bastion’ strategies for SSBNs (vessels constricted to a much smaller, actively defended area for patrols) and SSBNs being accompanied by convoys of ‘skirmisher’-type defensive units (adopting a similar principle to aircraft carrier battle groups) may be necessary to regain confidence in the survivability of SSBNs.

Stability needs to be seen as the most important goal and that will require a degree of what has been termed ‘security dilemma sensibility’ among the nuclear-armed powers. Leaders that develop security dilemma sensibility display an openness to the idea that, as Nicholas Wheeler has put it, ‘an adversary is acting out of fear and insecurity and not aggressive intent, as well as a recognition that one’s own actions have contributed to that fear’.

For example, future Chinese breakthroughs on quantum computing and their application to SSBN communication technology could be a positive development in the US–China strategic relationship. The more confidence Beijing has in the security of its second-strike capability, the less likely it is that a crisis between the US and China will inadvertently escalate.

Beyond unilateral measures, it may be possible, over the longer term, to negotiate, and design, limited multilateral efforts aimed at restoring stability between adversaries, including in relation to sea-based nuclear deployments. History suggests that confidence-building measures can play as important a role as formal arms control measures in reducing nuclear dangers, meaning that finding avenues for dialogue, even at a low level, should now be a top priority.

In the short term, the increasing salience of strategic non-nuclear weapons and the abandonment of deterrence strategies based on mutual vulnerability, is likely to continue to encourage states to deploy more SSBNs. Simultaneously, these forces will intensify the pressures to better protect SSBN fleets that are already deployed from technological breakthroughs in the anti-submarine weapons domain. Restraint in the deployment of anti-submarine capabilities may need to become a substitute for the more traditional tools used to instil stability in nuclear-armed relationships—restraint in defensive technology (such as missile defence) and negotiated limits on arms.

This piece was produced as part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy: Undersea Deterrence Project, undertaken by the ANU National Security College. This article is a shortened version of chapter 20, ‘Strategic non-nuclear weapons, SSBNs, and the new search for strategic stability, as published in the 2020 edited volume The future of the undersea deterrent: a global survey. Support for this project was provided by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Author
Benjamin Zala is a research fellow in the Department of International Relations at the ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, and has published widely on the politics of great powers, nuclear weapons, and international relations theory. Image: US Department of Defense.

 

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Iraq sets up border posts to try to prevent Turkish advance

Iraqi troops were enforcing positions along the border with Turkey, officials said Friday, to prevent Turkish forces from advancing deeper into Iraqi territory after two weeks of airstrikes as Ankara continues to target Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. Security officials said Ankara has...

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World
Iraq sets up border posts to try to prevent Turkish advance
SALAR SALIM and SAMYA KULLAB
July 3, 2020, 8:02 AM PDT

In this photo taken Friday, June 19, 2020, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar, fright wearing a face mask to protect against coronavirus, visits Turkish troops at the border with Iraq, in Hakkari province, Turkey. Turkish army's operation continues after it said Wednesday it has airlifted troops for a cross-border ground operation against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq. (Turkish Defense Ministry via AP, Pool)

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — Iraqi troops were enforcing positions along the border with Turkey, officials said Friday, to prevent Turkish forces from advancing deeper into Iraqi territory after two weeks of airstrikes as Ankara continues to target Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq.

Security officials said Ankara has established at least a dozen posts inside Iraqi territory as part of a military campaign to rout members of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, or PKK, who Turkey says have safe havens in northern Iraq. The airborne-and-land campaign, dubbed “Operation Claw-Tiger,” began June 17 when Turkey airlifted troops into northern Iraq.

Since then, at least six Iraqi civilians have been killed as Turkish jets pound PKK targets, and several villages in Iraq’s northern Kurdish region have been evacuated.

The invading Turkish troops set up posts in the Zakho district in northern province of Dohuk, about 15 kilometers (9 miles) inside Iraqi territory, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the military operations.

Zerevan Musa, mayor of Darkar, said there were five Turkish posts close to his town, including two on the nearby Mt. Khankiri. He said Turkish airstrikes have hit Sharanish and Banka villages in the area.

“We demand from both sides, the Turkish government and the PKK, to keep their fight away from us,” said Qadir Sharanshi, a resident from Sharanshi village. He said his village has been hit several times.

Iraqi border guards erected two posts along the Khankiri range, said Brig. Delir Zebari, commander of the First Brigade of the Iraqi Border Guards, tasked with securing a 245-kilometer (153-mile) stretch of border territory.

Speaking from the brigade base, he told The Associated Press that his troops' task is to “eliminate attacks on civilians in the area."

Turkey regularly carries out air and ground attacks against the PKK in northern Iraq. It says neither the Iraqi government nor the regional Iraqi Kurdish administration have taken measures to combat the group. The recent incursion into Iraqi territory has drawn condemnation from Baghdad, which has summoned Ankara's ambassador to Iraq twice since the campaign was launched.

Turkey maintains that until the Iraqi government take actions against the PKK, it will continue to target the Kurdish group, considered a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union for its decades-long insurgency within Turkey.

Turkey's latest campaign poses a dilemma for the semi-autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq, which relies on Turkey for oil exports through a pipeline running from Iraq's Kirkuk province to the Turkish port of Ceyhan.

Kaiwan Kawa, a 30-year-old store owner displaced with his family from the area, said a Turkish airstrike last month struck his mini market in the village of Kuna Masi in Sulaymaniyah province. The airstrike targeted a pickup truck with PKK members who had stopped by his store to buy some eggs. At least one of the fighters was killed, his body torn to pieces, Kawa said.

Kawa's wife, Payman Talib, 31, lost a leg in the bombing while their 6-year-old son, Hezhwan, had shrapnel wounds to the head. Doctors say it's too dangerous to remove the shrapnel.

Kawa said he had opened the shop just a month before. Now he can never go back.

“I will always carry the fear in my heart,” he said. “It will never be the same.”

 

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The Post-INF European Missile Balance: Thinking About NATO's Deterrence Strategy - Texas National Security Review

The demise of the INF Treaty in 2019 raises questions about the future of deterrence in Europe. For more than a decade, Russia has sought to leverage the potential of precision-strike technologies to strengthen its missile arsenal, having developed systems that either violated INF range...

tnsr.org

Vol 3, Iss 3 Summer 2020



Arms Control Europe

-
The Post-INF European Missile Balance: Thinking About NATO’s Deterrence Strategy



Luis Simón, Alexander Lanoszka
The demise of the INF Treaty in 2019 raises questions about the future of deterrence in Europe. For more than a decade, Russia has sought to leverage the potential of precision-strike technologies to strengthen its missile arsenal, having developed systems that either violated INF range regulations or were just below the threshold. As the termination of the treaty removes any outstanding legal barriers to the deployment of ground-based, “theater-range” systems, questions related to the missile balance become central to European security. Of particular importance is the Baltic region, where Russia appears to have acquired a position of “local escalation dominance” that could drive a strategic wedge within NATO. In this essay, we assess what a post-INF Treaty context may mean in light of recent NATO efforts to deter Russia. We argue that the introduction of ground-based, theater-range missiles could help NATO restore the local strategic balance in the Baltic region, thereby strengthening deterrence and helping to create the necessary leverage to get Russia back into meaningful arms control talks in the future.

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Precision-guided technologies, once confined to the United States and its allies, have become increasingly available to other countries, including Russia and China. Those specific countries have leveraged such technologies to acquire military capabilities like precision-guided anti-ship, anti-aircraft, land-attack, and anti-satellite cruise and ballistic missiles.1 Accordingly, many observers and analysts worry about the sustainability of U.S. deterrence in Europe and East Asia. In Europe specifically, ever since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, a debate has unfolded around Moscow’s short- and medium-range missiles, and their potential to undermine regional deterrence.2 Russia has been consistently investing in precision-strike systems since the mid-2000s. In so doing, it has added to its growing arsenal of advanced land-based missiles in Kaliningrad and its Western Military District, as well as several sea- and air-launched missiles assigned to the Kaliningrad-based Baltic Fleet and elsewhere. Complementing these capabilities are Russia’s efforts to modernize and expand its missile defense system, aimed at both strengthening Russian defenses in case of Western retaliation and securing a missile architecture that can perform offensive functions. Critically, the termination of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 2019 — which had prohibited land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers — removes any possible barriers to Russia fully exploiting its technological advances to deploy more theater-range missiles on land.3

Theater-range missiles constitute the centerpiece of what many observers describe to be Russia’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy in the Baltic region.4 The purpose of Russia’s short- and medium-range missile architecture in this area — and the broader A2/AD strategy it purportedly supports — is to interdict efforts by the United States and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies to enter and to operate in the air and maritime space across the region. Put differently, if Russia were to try to take the Baltic countries, NATO would have to pay a prohibitively high price in trying to burst the Russian A2/AD bubble.5 Russia thus aims to undermine the credibility of the deterrence guarantees that the United States and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe have extended to Eastern European allies, while shifting the local strategic and political balance in its favor.

Some experts have raised skepticism about Russian capabilities and strategy, whereas the broader utility of the A2/AD concept has been subject to mounting criticism in both Asia and Europe.6 To be sure, Russia’s A2/AD bubble is not impenetrable.7 The promise of NATO — and, in particular, U.S., British, and French — air-to-ground and ship- and submarine-launched missiles partly offsets any local advantages Russia may have in the Baltic region. Moreover, NATO’s recent decision to deploy multinational battalions in the Baltic states and Poland demonstrates that older NATO members have “skin” in the local deterrence game.8 Nevertheless, bringing those combat aircraft and long-range missiles to bear could be profoundly escalatory because Russia will almost certainly reject NATO precision-strikes in its territory. Moreover, that the local missile balance favors Russia raises questions about NATO’s ability to bring air power into the theater. At worst, the evolving missile balance in the Baltic region gives Russia local escalation dominance, thereby undermining deterrence. At best, the perception of Russian local escalation dominance — and Moscow’s sustained efforts to decouple local, regional, and global levels of deterrence — will drive a wedge within the alliance, enabling Russia to behave more aggressively even without engaging in traditional military operations.9 Simply put, Russia can leverage its improved missile capabilities not only to sever Europe from North America in security terms, but also European countries from each other. How should NATO respond?

We make two claims in this essay. First, whatever our feelings regarding the A2/AD concept, Russian advances in deploying theater-range missiles mean that the Baltic region is likely to remain a contested environment. NATO countries would pay dearly in defending against conventional aggression if deterrence were to fail. The three Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania might receive reinforcements in the event of war, but they still have incentives to prepare for contingencies lest those reinforcements are slow to arrive or suffer high attrition rates. Second, and critically, NATO defense planners should reconsider the missile balance, which is likely to become the center of gravity of deterrence and security in Europe in a post-INF and maturing precision-strike context. Our main contribution is to examine how theater-range missiles could help strengthen deterrence in NATO’s northeastern flank — that is, Poland and the three Baltic countries — by giving NATO more intermediate options on the deterrence ladder. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has ruled out nuclear-tipped missiles, but has implicitly allowed for the possibility of conventional missiles being deployed.10 We specifically make the case for the deployment of ground-based, land-attack, theater-range, road-mobile conventional missiles in Europe.11 These missiles can hold at risk Russian assets, whether in Kaliningrad or elsewhere, while pushing Russia to make costly investments aimed at trying to improve its own capabilities. Such a move would help restore the local strategic balance in a post-INF context, thus creating leverage to get Russia back into meaningful arms control talks in the future. Moreover, as COVID-19 will likely take a toll on defense spending, NATO will be compelled to look for cost-efficient solutions to deterrence. Ground-based, theater-range missiles may be cheaper than existing alternatives such as additional F-35s or Rafales.

The fact that Washington has begun to think about the potential role of ground-based, theater-range missiles in strengthening deterrence in East Asia could lead to important synergies, in that some of the technologies and systems developed could also be used in a European context. For example, upgrading U.S. Army programs like the Multiple Launch Rocket System and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System with longer-range missiles such as the U.S. Army’s Tactical Missile System could offer relatively fast and cost-efficient solutions to close the local missile gap in the Baltic region. However, any NATO response to Russia’s local missile advantage should be as collective and widely distributed as possible. In this regard, Poland’s plans to introduce the above systems means that upgrades to them could pave the way for a European contribution to NATO’s theater-range missile capabilities.12 Moreover, allies located within range of Russian missiles can also play an important role by hosting missiles in their territories, ensuring their own security and, in the case of Germany and Poland at least, even taking part in the future development of theater-range missile systems. Beyond such measures, those more capable Western European allies that are eager to assert their strategic and technological autonomy should think harder about developing ground-based, theater-range missile capabilities.

This essay proceeds as follows. We begin with a discussion of how missiles matter for deterrence, arguing that their importance will grow in Europe (and, for that matter, East Asia) given the proliferation of precision-strike technologies and the demise of the INF Treaty. We then examine the evolution of the European missile balance since the end of the Cold War, focusing mainly on NATO’s northeastern flank, and assess how the local missile balance affects NATO’s deterrence posture in that region. We go on to propose several measures that are now available to NATO and the United States for addressing existing deterrence gaps in the new post-INF environment. Specifically, we argue in favor of deploying ground-based, theater-range missiles in Europe and discuss their advantages vis-à-vis other missiles and how they may relate to other elements of NATO’s deterrence strategy. We also address potential counterarguments to their deployment. In the conclusion, we discuss how the debate over ground-based, theater-range missiles may tie in to the debate over transatlantic burden-sharing and identify a number of relevant questions going forward.

Deterrence Theory, Missiles, and the INF Treaty
Because our argument centers on how ground-based, theater-range missiles can enhance deterrence, it is helpful to review what is the theoretical motivation underpinning this mission. Put plainly, deterrence aims at preventing an adversary from using military force to revise the status quo. The scholarly literature on deterrence can be broken down into three waves.13 The first wave grappled with the advent of nuclear weapons following the end of World War II. In this period of nuclear unipolarity, deterrence theory was largely detached from policy discussions. The second wave of deterrence theory — its purported golden age — ran until the end of the 1960s. Building on the problems and assumptions identified during the previous wave, the second wave became inextricably tied to policy discussions, as the Soviet Union’s development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems compelled U.S. decision-makers to think about deterrence in a bipolar context characterized by parity or near parity. Scholars like Bernard Brodie, Thomas Schelling, or Hermann Kahn assumed a rational actor model and applied game theory to nuclear strategy. With the focus mostly on the deterrence relationship between the two superpowers, deterrence revolved around the threat of punishment, and — more specifically — that of mutual assured destruction.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

The third wave developed in reaction to the second by trying to remedy its perceived gaps. It challenged the assumption of rationality and emphasized the psychological, cultural, and other real-life factors that make deterrence inherently complex. In doing so, it focused on empirical analysis rather than abstract modeling. Importantly for our purposes, this wave of deterrence theory sought to address the problem of extended deterrence — that is, those situations aimed at deterring an adversary from attacking one’s allies.14 Because the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States by the early 1970s, the association between successful deterrence and having intermediate options between doing nothing and declaring all-out war gained traction in U.S. strategic circles.15 This consideration produced the notion of limited nuclear war and other warfighting doctrines, thus heralding a shift in deterrence thinking toward denial strategies that are based on the ability and willingness to fight effectively against adversaries.16 Of course, punishment strategies remained in place as the ultimate threat at the top of the escalation ladder. Yet, theorists paid more attention to escalation at lower levels of conflict that might arise from adversaries probing extended deterrence commitments. Deterrence-by-punishment thus co-exists with deterrence-by-denial:17 The former threatens to inflict unacceptable costs in one fell swoop, whereas the latter implements measures that would make a given action operationally difficult to execute and prohibitively costly. Denial is often the default option for the weaker party in a deterrence relationship because the weaker party presumably has fewer options for counter-escalation, encouraging it to use asymmetric means to raise the perceived costs of an attack.

To simplify the theory in light of these waves of scholarship, deterrence is operative when several conditions hold.18 First, the deterring state communicates which actions involving military force are unacceptable. Second, the deterring state indicates its ability and willingness to impose prohibitively high costs only if the adversary engages in those unacceptable actions. Third, the adversary judges that the likely costs for using force are unacceptable and so refrains from the proscribed behavior.

Deterrence theory has been subject to intense criticism on analytical grounds, not least because it hinges on the adversary having certain intentions regarding the status quo despite intentions being extremely difficult to divine.19 Just because nothing happened does not mean deterrence worked. For example, some scholars argue that deterrence was not operative in Europe during the Cold War because the Soviet Union never contemplated launching a surprise invasion of Western Europe.20 Nevertheless, because we do not know whether the Soviet Union would not have attacked Western Europe in the absence of NATO and any forward-deployed military forces, we cannot dismiss the possibility that deterrence was psychologically in effect. From a planning perspective, deterrence theory thus remains a guide for thinking about crisis prevention and management under circumstances of profound uncertainty.

Ultimately, deterrence rests on the promise that any of the parties can engage in some form of escalation, which means that all the capabilities possessed by the United States and its allies (both in Europe and globally) should be considered when examining their deterrence relationship with Russia.

The military balance factors into the cost-benefit analysis that underpins deterrence. In this essay, we address the missile balance in Europe, focusing specifically on how it may affect deterrence in NATO’s northeastern flank. The missile balance refers to the missile capabilities — both offensive and defensive — of two states or coalitions. Since missiles pertain to the air domain, the missile balance is intimately linked to the air power balance, which, in turn, affects the broader military balance that underpins deterrence relationships.21 Yet, the particularities of missiles warrant giving the missile balance a separate treatment. Likewise, the specificities of NATO’s northeastern flank — buffered from the southeastern flank by Belarus and Ukraine and delimited in the north by the Baltic Sea and non-NATO partners Sweden and Finland — makes it deserving of individual analytical treatment, especially given its proximity to Russia’s power base.22 However, the military balance, much less the missile balance, in NATO’s northeastern flank cannot be isolated from the broader regional or even global balance of power between NATO and Russia. Ultimately, deterrence rests on the promise that any of the parties can engage in some form of escalation, which means that all the capabilities possessed by the United States and its allies (both in Europe and globally) should be considered when examining their deterrence relationship with Russia.23 And so, in assessing the missile balance in NATO’s northeastern flank, we highlight its broader functional and geographical connections.

Missiles and missile defense systems come in many forms. Missiles vary on the basis of their means of propulsion, type of trajectory, range, and payload. With respect to propulsion, three different types of missiles exist. Ballistic missiles are rocket-propelled before following a largely unpowered, parabolic, and free-falling trajectory toward their target. Jet engines propel cruise missiles, which, although they are normally slower, are more maneuverable than ballistic missiles because of their constant propulsion. Hypersonic boost-glide weapons are initially powered by a ballistic missile or a rocket booster but largely glide on a non-parabolic trajectory. They are also more maneuverable than ballistic missiles, although slower. Missiles can be ground-launched (delivered from a silo or mobile platform), air-launched (delivered from an aircraft), or sea-launched (delivered from a submarine or destroyer). Regarding range, there are four different categories of missiles: short range (less than 1,000 km), medium range (between 1,000–3,000 km), intermediate range (between 3,000–5,500 km), and intercontinental (traveling more than 5,500 km). Missiles can also vary in their guidance systems, especially if they are directed at moving targets. A final, relevant category relates to payload and yield. Missiles are capable of delivering conventional or nuclear payloads, or both. Warheads themselves can also vary by yield, with some new high-yield conventional missiles now being developed in the United States.24 Missiles that have trouble overcoming enemy defenses are less effective for deterrence, whereas those that do not are more effective because they potentially hold at risk assets that the adversary values. Accordingly, missile defense systems themselves feature different characteristics with regard to the type and range of the missile it is intercepting (strategic, theater, or tactical), the trajectory phase where the interception occurs (boost, mid-course, or terminal phase), and whether the interception takes place inside or outside the Earth’s atmosphere.25

Throughout the Cold War, the missile balance was central to the East-West competition and to deterrence in Europe. Although missiles favor offense over defense, the notion that defending against them would be too costly and difficult meant that they posed an effective deterrent. Indeed, the Soviet Union decided early in the Cold War to develop ballistic missiles rather than bombers for its nuclear deterrent.26 Its deployment of the intermediate-range ballistic SS-20 missile caused tensions with NATO because the intermediate-range missile exclusively posed a risk to targets in Europe, thereby threatening to decouple NATO allies from the United States. Beseeched by allies like West Germany, which worried about the quality of U.S. extended nuclear deterrence, and after much intense debate within the alliance, the United States and NATO adopted the Dual-Track Decision in 1979. The Dual-Track Decision called for deploying the ground-based Pershing II ballistic missiles and the longer-range BGM-109G Gryphon cruise missiles while pushing for a mutual limit on such intermediate forces.27 This decision was hugely controversial among European publics at the time. Nevertheless, thanks to the effective integration of their technological advantages in electronics, computing, the global positioning system, and stealth, the United States and its allies were able to develop precision-strike systems, thereby outpacing the Soviet Union in military-technological terms.28 These developments worried the Soviet Union: The progressive consolidation of precision-strike technologies underscored the growing importance of conventional military power for deterrence and, more specifically, that of missiles.29 The Soviet leadership feared that U.S. modernization efforts could lead to a first-strike capability.30 That NATO went forward with its missile deployments despite domestic opposition demonstrated a strong political will on the part of the alliance’s leaders to pursue deterrence.31 In the end, the pressure of Western precision-strike capabilities on the Soviets helped pave the way for the signing of the INF Treaty between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1987, subsequently making the missile balance much less important in European security discussions.

The INF Treaty prohibited the signatories from developing and fielding medium- and intermediate-range, land-based missiles regardless of whether they were armed with a nuclear weapon. Air- and sea-launched missiles, however, were still permitted. Moreover, by excluding intercontinental missiles from its prohibitions, the INF Treaty preserved mutual deterrence while removing Europe’s status as a key battleground or bargaining chip in U.S.-Soviet relations. From Moscow’s perspective, the INF Treaty made strategic sense.32 The Soviet Union could not keep pace with the U.S.-led precision-strike revolution given the economic difficulties and bureaucratic paralysis it was experiencing in the 1980s. It became too vulnerable to the precision-strike systems that would allow the United States to “see deep” and “strike deep” into Eastern European territory.33 With the INF Treaty, the United States would no longer be able to target Soviet (and later Russian) territory with missiles positioned on European soil. The extended nuclear deterrence mission never went away, even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Still, in subsequent years, thanks largely to advances in precision-strike technologies and capabilities, the United States became so vastly superior to its potential adversaries in terms of conventional military power that deterrence could be assumed.

The Evolving Missile Balance in Northeastern Europe
Despite the so-called peace dividend of the 1990s that the INF Treaty helped bring about, concerns about the missile balance slowly regained salience in the early 2000s. Because that agreement was confined to the United States and Russia, China was able to develop the capabilities covered by the INF Treaty in order to strengthen its strategic position in East Asia. And so, beginning in the late 2000s, U.S. defense experts started to worry that China’s exemption from the INF Treaty and its efforts to incorporate precision-strike systems into its military were allowing the country to develop an A2/AD envelope in East Asia, thereby undermining America’s strategic position in the region and eroding regional deterrence.34 In Europe, relations between Russia and the West worsened over the course of the 2000s, with each side blaming the other for causing tensions. Russian leaders protested NATO enlargement and decried the decision of the Bush administration to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 — a move that the United States said was necessary for confronting new missile threats from countries like Iran. For their part, the United States and its NATO allies saw in Russia an increasingly authoritarian, revisionist power willing to weaponize energy supplies in neighborly disputes and perpetuate frozen conflicts in territories that were once part of the Soviet Union.35

Most alarmingly, at a time when European defense budgets remained low, Russia used its natural gas revenue to fund major increases in its military spending in the 2000s. This uptick in defense expenditures facilitated Russian advances in precision-guided missiles, including the 9K720 Iskander and the Kalibr cruise missile family. The land-based Iskander was already being designed in the 1990s, finally entering into service in 2007, and has since featured prominently in military exercises.36 The Iskander-M variant is mounted on ground-based transporter erector launchers and has a range of up to 500 km, thereby extending Russia’s missile reach to cover the Baltic states in their entirety as well as much of Poland. Ground, air, and sea platforms could launch Kalibr missiles to ranges up to 1,500 km, reaching almost as far as the United Kingdom if those platforms are based in Kaliningrad.37 The recent deployment of the 9M729 Iskander-M variant in brigades belonging to Russia’s Western Military District deepened concerns about the country’s capabilities, partly because this nuclear-capable missile does not follow a ballistic flight path, instead pursuing an evasive flight path that could allow it to defeat missile defense systems.38

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These developments have impacted European security in two ways. The first is that, according to many observers, these new missiles have enabled Russia to erect an A2/AD bubble around Kaliningrad. As Stephan Frühling and Guillaume Lasconjarias note, “By emplacing highly capable and long-range anti-air, anti-shipping and surface-to-surface missiles in … the Kaliningrad enclave … Russia can deny NATO forces the use of large areas of the sea and air surrounding, and even within, the Alliance’s territory.”39 For the Baltic countries, this development raises the prospect of a fait accompli much like what Russia was able to achieve with its annexation of Crimea in 2014. NATO reinforcements would find defending the Baltic countries simply too difficult of a proposition. The second is that by violating the INF Treaty and developing the 9M729 missile (NATO codename: SSC-8 “Screwdriver”), Russia acquired an even greater missile advantage and pushed the United States to withdraw from the treaty. Russia had already developed the 9M720 missile (the SS-26 “Stone”) from the earlier OTR-23 (the SS-23 “Spider”) design — missiles which were just under the threshold of the INF Treaty.40 The concern surrounding the SSC-8 is that it enables Russia to strike military reinforcement-related infrastructure and European capitals at a greater distance, thereby increasing Russia’s ability to intimidate NATO members into accepting faits accomplis on the alliance’s northeastern flank.41 Controversy over whether the SSC-8 could use the ground-based Iskander-M launcher in Europe has thus stoked fears that Russia could threaten NATO allies with INF-prohibited weapons.42

Despite concerns about Russia’s theater-range missiles, scholars and analysts increasingly doubt whether the A2/AD bubble is as robust as often alleged.

To be sure, the United States and its European allies do bring some missile and missile defense capabilities to bear in the Baltic region. In September 2009, President Barack Obama announced the European Phased Adaptive Approach — a plan designed to protect Europe against Iranian medium- and intermediate-range missiles.43 It consists of sea- and land-based configurations of the Aegis missile defense system, the centerpiece of which is the Standard-Missile 3 (SM-3).44 The Integrated Air and Missile Defense system can also help address the Russian missile threat more directly, but it largely comprises radar facilities of varying quality that serve to augment military surveillance over NATO airspace. Because the European Phased Adaptive Approach was not explicitly designed with Russia in mind, and the Integrated Air and Missile Defense system helps primarily with detection and tracking, Poland has strengthened its own missile defense capabilities to contribute to NATO missile defenses in theater. In April 2015, Warsaw announced it would acquire eight Patriot batteries by 2025, with two delivered within three years of a final deal.45 The Polish Ministry of Defense announced in March 2018 a $4.75 billion deal to purchase and co-produce a mix of air and missile defenses comprising two layers, known as Wisła and Narew. Currently in its first phase of development, Wisła would include a version of Raytheon’s SkyCeptor missiles and several Patriot Advanced Capability-3 MSE missile interceptors. The exact system to be used for the Narew short-range air defense program is yet to be decided, but, if approved, it could involve lower-cost interceptors that would replace Poland’s Soviet-era missile systems.46 Poland’s capabilities constitute an important foundation for NATO’s efforts to respond to Russia’s theater-range missiles. Still, missile defense is very costly and may have limited effectiveness against the SSC-8. Non-NATO member Finland has also invested in short-range anti-ship missile capabilities, whereas Sweden has expanded its air missile defense system coverage to extend over the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea.47 Finally, NATO also relies on U.S., British, and French conventional air-to-ground and ship- and submarine-launched missiles in order to deter Russia from using its theater-range missiles in northeastern Europe.

Despite concerns about Russia’s theater-range missiles, scholars and analysts increasingly doubt whether the A2/AD bubble is as robust as often alleged. Indeed, whether analysts focus on Europe or East Asia, an emerging consensus holds that the very concept of A2/AD is deeply problematic. With regard to Europe, a recent Swedish Defense Research Agency report shows that Russian air defense systems are limited in their ability to detect, track, and shoot down aircraft at high altitudes and long ranges.48 Alexander Lanoszka and Michael Hunzeker, as well as Keir Giles and Mathieu Boulegue, argue that Kaliningrad is more of a liability for Russia than an asset precisely because the exclave can be isolated.49 NATO could develop its own A2/AD capabilities to complicate Russia’s ability to reinforce Kaliningrad. Michael Kofman directly challenges the very notion that the development of A2/AD capabilities is central to Russian military planning.50

Nevertheless, even if NATO can burst the A2/AD bubble does not mean that the price of doing so would be low or even politically acceptable. Giles and Boulegue observe that Russian A2/AD systems are vulnerable to saturation, but acknowledge that “casualty-averse Western forces must expose themselves to risk and the likelihood of losses.”51 Still, this scenario assumes that escalation will remain under control despite the possibility of nuclear exchange. Amid concerns that Russia has an escalate-to-de-escalate strategy, whereby it would threaten limited nuclear use in order to deter military intervention, NATO countries might become reluctant to get involved in a major crisis with Russia.52 As such, the Baltic countries still have incentives to invest in deterrence-by-denial capabilities — specifically, insurgency tactics that can attrite Russian forces over a protracted period — rather than assume that reinforcements would come quickly.53Kofman admits that “the [A2/AD] concept has utility when looking at a maritime theater involving Russia or China,” but argues that Russia faces a deeper naval challenge than NATO.54 If Kofman is right that Russia’s war plans involve theater-strike weapons that could destroy critical nodes in adversaries’ command-and-control structures, then war over the Baltics would still be ugly, however unlikely. The A2/AD concept certainly should not imply impenetrability and immobility — indeed, military competition has always been about denying access and movement to an adversary. Instead, the A2/AD concept should denote that costs must be paid in order to operate in a particular theater.55 For a state implementing an A2/AD strategy, these costs serve to deter external aggression. Alternatively, if a state has offensive motives, systems that have A2/AD characteristics raise the costs for states that are otherwise expected to defend allies that fall within the very range of those systems.

From a force planning perspective, an improved understanding of Russia’s capabilities and approach to war does not fundamentally alter the strategic needs and problems facing NATO and the Baltic countries. The same strategic dilemma remains: NATO may have global escalation dominance, or even regional escalation dominance if we consider Europe as a whole, but Russia still has local escalation dominance in the Baltic region. Indeed, with its missile strategy, Russia’s aim is to decouple local deterrence from regional and global deterrence.

The Potential Role for Ground-Based, Theater-Range Missiles in Current NATO Strategy
Recognizing the growing strategic importance of missiles, the U.S. Army has set to rebuild its artillery arm for large-scale warfare after decades of neglect.56 Indeed, the demise of the INF Treaty has sparked intense debate in the United States about the potential role of theater-range missiles in strengthening deterrence in key regions.57 East Asia has so far been the main focus of this debate: China’s growing theater-range missile arsenal and North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs have raised questions about U.S. extended deterrence guarantees.58 Many U.S. officials and experts contend that long-range strike capabilities underscore Washington’s global escalation dominance, offsetting China’s theater-level advances and guaranteeing deterrence.59 Yet, others worry that the lack of in-theater capabilities to balance Chinese (or North Korean) military power may lead some U.S. allies to fear decoupling and alliance abandonment.60Unsurprisingly, the debate over theater-range missiles in East Asia is mixed up with political considerations. Though some experts and policymakers in the region understand the strategic logic of deploying these missiles, domestic political opposition remains high, especially in Australia, Japan, and South Korea.61 But as the European experience from NATO’s 1979 Dual-Track Decision suggests, these attitudes may yet change or prove to be surmountable.

In Europe, the debate over the possible deployment of theater-range missiles is much less advanced. This lack of serious discussion may be due to diverging European perceptions about the Russian threat as well as the fact that Russia’s arsenal of theater-range missiles is more limited than China’s and that NATO enjoys much greater strategic depth in Europe than the U.S.-led alliance system does in East Asia. Nevertheless, the worsening of NATO-Russia relations, growing awareness about Russia’s newer military capabilities and their impact on the Baltic region, and the termination of the INF Treaty call for greater debate within NATO on how theater-range missiles may enhance deterrence. Additionally, the ongoing discussion about the potential and pitfalls of theater-range missiles in an East Asian context is likely to spill over to Europe, not least because the development and fielding of such systems might encourage their deployment in multiple regions.

How can ground-based, theater-range missiles serve NATO’s deterrence strategy in the Baltic region?

Despite the lack of discussion about new ground-based, theater-range missile deployments, Europe has not been idle since 2014. In the past six years, NATO has adopted several measures to reassure its Central and Eastern European members in addition to enhancing deterrence in the Baltic region.62 Such measures have included the Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, an uptick in joint military exercises, a bolstering of the Baltic Air Policing mission, and the multinational battlegroups that make up the enhanced Forward Presence in Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. More recently, NATO has revamped its command structure following the April 2019 adoption of its new military strategy (MC400/4).63 This military strategy emphasizes horizontal escalation and the imperatives of a theater-wide approach so as to further improve the alliance’s readiness, responsiveness, and reinforcement capacity for addressing the challenge from Russia. In adopting such measures, NATO has sought to signal that it will consider any attack on a single or a few of its allies as an act of aggression against the entire alliance, and will respond to it with a wide variety of actions across the entire Euro-Atlantic area. Notwithstanding these improvements, Russia’s widening missile advantage creates major gaps in NATO’s deterrence posture and could foster the perception in the Kremlin that it can aggress with relative impunity in the Baltic region.

How can ground-based, theater-range missiles serve NATO’s deterrence strategy in the Baltic region? To begin with, relying on theater-range missiles poses fewer problems than relying largely on air and sea combat assets based in Western Europe or on U.S.-based ICBMs. The reason is simple: A gap exists between NATO capabilities already in theater (i.e., four multinational battalions and an embryonic missile-defense architecture) and the promise of long-range air and missile power. The extreme downsizing of military forces in post-Cold War Europe has hobbled conventional deterrence in part because the alliance has few counter-attack options. For example, a U.S. brigade could take at least two weeks to arrive in Europe from the United States, thereby leaving allies vulnerable to territorial faits accomplis.64Given the lack of a serious military footprint in northeastern Europe, this gap means that NATO has no intermediate options, forcing the alliance to take a significant escalatory leap in order to deter further aggression by Russia in a crisis. An additional problem concerns the assumption that air reinforcements based in Western Europe would be able to get into theater. Unfortunately, they may encounter sufficient resistance from Russia’s theater-range missiles so as to discourage them from being dispatched in the first place. This problem may be mitigated as F-35 fighter jets come online, but Russia could potentially learn to identify these stealth aircraft with data collected from S-400s sold to Turkey if those air-defense systems become activated.

Ground-based, theater-range missiles would also close the gap in another way. Current NATO deterrence measures have largely been premised on “contact warfare” with Russia. Shortly after the annexation of Crimea, the United States began to pre-position military hardware in the region for possible use by ground forces in some future contingency. Following the 2016 Warsaw Summit, NATO countries agreed to create the enhanced Forward Presence, deploying a multinational battalion-sized battlegroup to each of the Baltic countries and Poland. The United States also rotates an armored brigade combat team and additional forces in Poland while pouring money into various infrastructure projects aimed at improving logistical links between local allies. Yet, some critics argue that such measures are too tethered to land. As Kofman writes, “proposing to engage Russian forces in contact warfare, a metal-on-metal ground fight, is not a good strategy. Russia holds a lot of advantages in land warfare near its borders. This plan does not hold at risk what Russia values, and misses important changes in how Moscow sees the character of modern warfare.”65 Though Kofman overlooks the assurance that ground forces can provide to allies that host them, his critique does highlight gaps in NATO’s deterrence posture.66

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Deploying ground-based, theater-range missiles could complement the NATO ground presence in northeastern Europe. As one recent report highlights, “ground-launched theater-range missiles could hold high-value enemy targets at risk while helping U.S. air and naval forces obtain access to hotly contested battlefields, thereby contributing to military operations in challenging warfighting scenarios.”67 Ground-based missiles have certain advantages over sea-launched and air-launched missiles. If dispersed and well-hidden, road-mobile transporter erector launchers can complicate targeting by creating uncertainty about their location, thereby requiring Russia to track and monitor their movements. Russia cannot simply target airfields or naval bases. Moreover, the European theater offers much more territorial depth for ground-based missiles than East Asia, where the maritime environment is more of a constraining factor to their deployment. To be sure, sea-launched missiles can be effective deterrents, especially if very quiet submarines carry them. The problem with these missiles is not so much the so-called discrimination problem, whereby Russia would be unsure whether an incoming missile is carrying a conventional weapon or a nuclear one, but that surface warships armed with them can be tracked once deployed to the region. For their part, surface warships carrying sea-launched missiles need to be outside the range of opposing defenses in order to be most effective. Finally, strategic bombers by their nature do not represent an intermediate option: Countries may be reluctant to deploy theater-bombers and other delivery aircraft lest they suffer high attrition rates due to anti-aircraft systems positioned in Kaliningrad and elsewhere in Russia’s supposed A2/AD bubble. We make the case specifically for land-attack missiles because it is in the land domain where Russia’s missile advantage is clearest and most relevant to the local balance. That said, anti-ship missiles still have much value in holding Russian naval assets in the Baltic Sea at risk.68

Ground-based, theater-range missiles complement NATO’s ground presence in another way. NATO countries are unable and unwilling to provide the conventional forces in Poland and the Baltic region needed to deny Russian armed forces victory on the battlefield. Meanwhile, the Baltic countries themselves are dwarfed by Russia’s capabilities and face massive manpower and budgetary limitations such that they cannot develop a suite of denial capabilities against Russia.69 Western European countries may be larger and much richer, but their own militaries have been hollowed out by underspending in the post-Cold War period, overstretched across multiple missions around the globe, or both.70Ground-based, theater-range missiles offer a deterrence solution that can be strategically attractive and, comparatively speaking, politically feasible since it would not involve Western European governments paying for a forward ground presence. Moreover, the fact that the United States is going to develop such missiles suggests that there will be significant economies of scale, making them relatively attractive from a cost perspective. For NATO allies in Europe, these missiles represent a solution that is cheaper than alternatives such as the F-35 or Rafale fighters. Indeed, cost-efficiency is likely to be an increasingly important consideration in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impact. Although it may be too early to assess the implications of the novel coronavirus, it is relatively safe to assume that the question of trade-offs between policy priorities (including in defense) will become increasingly acute. With cuts to defense spending possible, there will be growing pressure to find cost-efficient solutions to deterrence.71

NATO ought to deploy just enough missiles to threaten those critical elements of Russia’s missile and A2/AD architecture…

Ground-based, theater-range missiles also have a useful role to play in the strategic competition presently unfolding between the United States and Russia. The biggest worry revolving around the enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups is their impermanent nature. Russia will always be a neighbor and so may be biding its time for complacency to develop within NATO. It can simply wait out these deployments. However, a deployment of ground-based, theater-range missiles in northeastern Europe could address this issue in two ways. The first is that missiles can complement existing deterrence measures in a more durable manner and at a relatively low cost. Depending on the force package, a missile force — based, for example, in western Poland — could have a small footprint yet boast an outsized punch. NATO could then range and hold at risk Russian targets on a perpetual basis. Even if the United States prioritizes China and prepares to fight only a single major war against that great-power competitor, these missiles could help the United States address key deterrence challenges that persist in the European context.72 The second is that these deployments can pressure Russia to invest in costly missile-defense and targeting systems, rather than power projection capabilities.73 Such deployments could help improve the current strategic balance by forcing Russia to move from a largely offensive strategy toward a more defensive one and increasing U.S.-NATO bargaining leverage in future arms control talks. At present, Russia has no incentives to engage in such negotiations, whereas NATO itself has few concessions it can make since its eastern members will never agree to a deal that could directly jeopardize their security. A new dual-track process may thus be helpful.74

The operational value of ground-based missiles is twofold in the Baltic region. The first is that, in the opening phases of a military confrontation, theater-range missiles can knock out air defense systems located in Kaliningrad and other missile hubs in Russia’s Western Military District so as to allow NATO reinforcements to have more freedom to maneuver. The second is that local allies — especially the Baltic states — will not be forced to exhaust their combat power quickly by trying to burst the A2/AD bubble from within. It is in this regard that surface-to-ship missiles can, for example, also punch through any blockade that Russia might try to impose on a Baltic city from the sea. None of this is to imply that NATO must match Russia capability for capability with regard to the missile balance.75 However, NATO can mitigate the risk of decoupling and thus strengthen deterrence in the Baltic region. It should prioritize the missile balance in-theater and complement its missile defense efforts with the deployment of theater-range, ground-based, land-attack, road-mobile conventional missiles in northeastern Europe, as well as anti-ship missiles that can hold off the Russian navy in the Baltic Sea. Doing so would help create a layered series of defensive fires that would make the Baltic region a difficult target for conventional aggression or military coercion.

NATO ought to deploy just enough missiles to threaten those critical elements of Russia’s missile and A2/AD architecture, including missile nodes as well as relevant command-and-control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. Indeed, the quantitative requirements may not be very high if the missiles can disrupt Russia’s war plans.76 Critically, if the positioning of NATO theater-range, ground-based, land-attack conventional missile batteries overlapped with U.S. and Polish Patriot surface-to-air missile deployments in Poland, then those batteries would be less vulnerable to a Russian first strike. A broader question relates to whether NATO theater-range missiles could be linked to an upgrading of the Multiple Launch Rocket System and High Mobility Artillery Rocket System with longer-range missiles, such as the U.S. Army’s Tactical Missile System.77 Currently, the Block 1A missile that this last system uses has a 300 km range, but the U.S. Army is funding development of a version that could exceed 500 km.78 Linking such systems together would make clear that the upgrade is tactical and non-nuclear in nature, thereby increasing the chances of the deployments being politically acceptable to NATO members. To be sure, any such upgrades would require examining the associated surveillance, targeting, cueing, command-and-control, and communications capabilities. It would also require determining which level of NATO command would have authority to engage such missiles following decisions by the North Atlantic Council, be it the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the Joint Force Commander, or NATO Air Command, as part of an integrated air campaign.

European allies are far behind in the development of ground-based, theater-range missiles, with relevant programs in France and the United Kingdom having been suspended decades ago. Accordingly, a U.S.-led solution appears to be the only realistic way for NATO to close the local missile gap with Russia in the short term. Several NATO allies (including France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom) have the Multiple Launch Rocket System, but only Greece, Turkey, and the United States have the Army Tactical Missile System. For their part, Poland and Romania plan to introduce both the Multiple Launch Rocket System and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System launchers with Army Tactical Missile System missiles.79 Whether France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, or Spain would consider procuring the current or extended range version of the Army Tactical Missile System remains unclear. Nevertheless, European allies that are procuring the Multiple Launch Rocket System and the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System with Army Tactical Missile System missiles, like Poland or Romania, would benefit from any potential upgrades. Additionally, those European allies located within range of Russian missiles can also play an important role by hosting missiles on their territories so as to enhance their own security. Such hosting arrangements could be analogous to existing nuclear-sharing arrangements in Western Europe — arrangements that serve to reassure those partners while enhancing NATO’s deterrence and war-fighting capabilities.80 Allies like Germany and Poland can also participate in the (co)development of theater-range missile systems. Moreover, given how the post-INF and maturing precision-strike context highlights the centrality of the missile balance for European security, European allies with greater technological expertise and aspirations of strategic autonomy should think harder about the potential of theater-range missiles. Thus, for instance, France, the United Kingdom, or even Germany may need to think about developing European theater-range missiles in order to lessen their technological dependency on the United States.

Rebutting Potential Counter-Arguments
Critics might advance at least two sets of objections to our argument. The first is that missiles would undermine strategic stability and so further worsen relations with Russia, and that new missile deployments would unleash an arms race that would destabilize European security. The second is that new missile deployments would severely damage NATO cohesion at a time when discord already characterizes the alliance.

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First, consider the argument that missiles would undermine strategic stability.81 According to Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin’s formulation, strategic stability is a situation in which neither side in a conflict has the ability to launch a disarming first strike against the other.82 This fear of attack can be especially dangerous if war seems likely. However, many analysts worry about Russian intentions precisely because Russia might have the ability to launch such an attack on those NATO members located on the alliance’s northeastern flank. Even if Russia may not go so far as launching such an attack, its suite of missile capabilities could give it the confidence to behave aggressively at levels that would not trigger Article 5.83 Far from granting NATO the ability to launch a bolt-out-of-the-blue strike, new missile deployments in Europe would complicate Russia’s ability to undertake faits accomplis by creating new sources of risks and expanding the set of liabilities that Russia would incur. Indeed, the deployment of conventional missiles will not dramatically affect the nuclear balance, if at all. One 2019 estimate holds that “Russia has a stockpile of roughly 4,490 nuclear warheads assigned for use by long-range strategic launchers and shorter-range tactical nuclear forces” in addition to having over 1,800 warheads assigned to nonstrategic and defensive forces.84 Conventional military deployments of the sort we propose would thus not undermine Russia’s ability to deter NATO at higher levels of violence. Theater-range missiles could even enhance strategic stability because they would ensure mutual vulnerability — something that arms control advocates themselves endorse. Russian missiles are already enveloping large swaths of NATO territory within their ranges — theater-range missiles would simply level the playing field.

Some critics may similarly worry that an arms race would be destabilizing. Yet, Russia is already building up its arsenal. It may be doing so for defensive purposes, but NATO defense planners cannot be certain of this in light of Russia’s behavior in recent years.85 Still, arms races are an inherent feature of strategic competition: If one party refuses to counter a move, it gives the other party an edge, thereby endangering strategic stability.86 Accordingly, NATO’s failure to respond to Russia’s INF Treaty violation could lead to instability in the European system and endanger the security of Eastern European states. A decisive — while still proportional — response on the part of NATO could, in fact, help lead to an arms control agreement because of the added pressure it would put on Russia. As noted above, one reason why the Soviet Union agreed to the INF Treaty was because the United States and its NATO allies had leverage over it. Accepting an unfavorable missile balance deprives NATO of the ability to even attempt to recover that lost leverage while making arms control agreements tantamount to unilateral disarmament.

Still, some critics may argue that new missile deployments would further undermine, if not antagonize, relations with Russia. They could cause Moscow to fear escalation even more, in a manner that destabilizes European security. Moscow would likely argue that any stated restrictions placed on the new missile deployments — whether in terms of their range, payload, or some other characteristic — lack believability. To prevent such deployments from happening, Moscow could engage in a campaign of political warfare against members of NATO. However, worries about how Russia might respond should not be overblown. The fear of nuclear escalation remains an effective deterrent mechanism such that the existence of viable intermediate options in the form of conventional theater-range missiles lends greater credibility to the threat of nuclear war. In current NATO strategy, however, a yawning gap exists between the tripwire-like forces represented by the enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups at the tactical level and the possibility of full conventional or nuclear retaliation at the strategic level. This gap exists precisely because Russia has already been developing an arsenal of theater-range missiles, some of which were prohibited by the now-defunct INF Treaty. Finally, NATO countries should assume that Russia would wage political warfare to forestall any new measures implemented by the alliance. Russia began broadcasting disinformation with the goal of damaging public support for the enhanced Forward Presence battlegroups when they were first set up in the Baltic region, albeit with little effect thus far.87 To counter such narratives in the future, NATO should remind its public that Russia was responsible for violating the INF Treaty, and that any new deployments are intended to rectify the imbalance that currently favors Russia. Still, to echo the Dual-Track Decision of 1979, NATO should pledge that it is open to reversing the deployments provided that Russia returns to arms control negotiations in good faith.

A second objection that critics might raise is that new missile deployments would damage NATO cohesion at a time when it is already under major duress from within. With President Donald Trump exhibiting an aversion to NATO amid an intense dispute over collective burden-sharing, NATO can ill afford another controversy.88 The reasoning here is that new missile deployments will be controversial because even frontline allies will not want them deployed in their country and might, in fact, resist them, while those less concerned by Russia would fear being dragged into a war that they do not want to fight. Even though some frontline allies like Poland might be reluctant to accept missile deployments initially, they might feel compelled to in order to enhance deterrence of Russia. After all, an ally cannot complain of being vulnerable to a Russian attack while rejecting measures that would help reduce that very vulnerability. To do so could lead the United States to doubt the sincerity of its ally’s threat assessments. Still, threat perceptions within NATO do vary. Not every member considers Russia to be the alliance’s main threat. Some might even value Russian cooperation and so would reject measures that could be seen as provocative. But blaming missiles for any intra-alliance discord would put the horse before the cart since divergent threat perceptions already exist. Alliance cohesion might still unravel if certain members feel that they cannot get the strong security guarantees they need and must remain vulnerable because the sensibilities of other allies would be otherwise offended. Simply put, Russian missiles are what drive disagreements within NATO — not U.S. missiles.

That said, new missile deployments on NATO soil would ideally have alliance consensus. Absent such a consensus, however, states interested in theater-range missile deployments could seek out extra-alliance solutions that limit the damage to NATO’s cohesion. After all, many of the deterrence and defense measures currently being implemented on the northeastern flank do not have a NATO stamp. These measures include U.S. rotational deployments to Poland, growing security linkages between Poland and the Baltic states, increased security cooperation between Sweden and Finland, and an expansion of Nordic-Baltic ties.89 Ground-based, theater-range missile deployments could reinforce NATO’s agenda even if done outside of the alliance’s remit, while giving political cover to those allies that would have rejected such measures. Any NATO allies that decline to support the deployment of ground-based conventional missiles may have to consider expanding their own arsenal of air-to-surface missiles that would be compatible with the F-35 and other similar platforms. Still, even these capabilities cannot be acquired in isolation from others. Countries going down this path would still have to contemplate the implications this sort of strategy would have for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; suppressing enemy air defenses; and air-to-air refueling. Moreover, they would still have to wrestle with the arms control implications of the dual-capable nature of some of these systems, to say nothing of their questionable appropriateness for dealing with Russian ground missiles.90

Conclusion
The missile balance has become central to deterrence and security in contemporary Europe. The demise of the INF Treaty and Russia’s embrace of the precision-strike paradigm have allowed Moscow to consolidate a position of local escalation dominance in the Baltic region. In order to remedy that situation, we make the case that NATO ought to deploy ground-based, land-attack, theater-range, road-mobile conventional missiles in Europe. Such a move would enhance deterrence and help restore strategic stability between NATO and Russia in a post-INF Treaty context, with the chance to give NATO the necessary leverage to force Russia back into arms control negotiations.

The deployment of ground-based, theater-range missiles in Europe should be limited and proportional. It ought to be confined to the conventional domain so as to eliminate any misunderstandings that the missiles could be nuclear-tipped.91 In terms of targeting, these missiles should be restricted to those critical elements of Russia’s missile and A2/AD architecture, including both missile nodes as well as relevant command-and-control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets. Further research should examine what kind of posture would provide the right balance between restoring stability and avoiding an escalation spiral. Greater attention should also be paid to questions related to the appropriate mix of defensive and offensive missile capabilities in NATO’s strategy, corresponding changes to the alliance’s command-and-control architecture, how these debates relate to Europe’s contribution to its own security, and questions of transatlantic burden-sharing.

Indeed, U.S. defense planners and analysts have already been thinking about the potential strategic role of ground-based, theater-range missiles in East Asia. How these policy discussions unfold will have implications for U.S. defense strategy in Europe. For these and other reasons, an upgrade of existing U.S. Army programs would arguably constitute the fastest and most reliable way for NATO to develop a theater-range missile capability. However, greater involvement from other European allies would make NATO’s response to Russia’s missile advantage collective and more widely distributed across the alliance, thereby increasing the shared risk and by extension enhancing deterrence. European allies located within range of Russian missiles can also play an important role by hosting missiles on their territories so as to improve their own security. Moreover, their participation in current U.S. missile programs means that allies like Poland or, potentially, Germany, could collaborate with the United States on the (co)development of theater-range missile systems. More broadly, for initiatives regarding European strategic autonomy to have any impact, both Western and Central European states should invest in the development of advanced theater-range missile capabilities, perhaps even drawing on the European Defence Fund to finance their development and to demonstrate that E.U. defense initiatives are in line with NATO’s deterrence needs.92

Luis Simón is professor of international security at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels and director of the Brussels office of the Elcano Royal Institute. He is also an associate fellow at the Baltic Defense College, and a member of the editorial board of Parameters: The US Army War College Quarterly. Luis received his Ph.D. from the University of London and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Saltzman Institute for War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His research has appeared in journals such as Security Studies, International Affairs, the Journal of Strategic Studies, Geopolitics, and Survival.
Alexander Lanoszka is assistant professor of international relations at the Department of Political Science and the Balsillie School of International Affairs at the University of Waterloo. He is the author of Atomic Assurance: The Alliance Politics of Nuclear Proliferation (2018), policy monographs on Taiwan and the Baltic region, as well as articles in journals such as International Security, International Affairs, Security Studies, and the Journal of Strategic Studies. He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Acknowledgements: A previous version of this article was presented at an expert workshop convened by the Swedish Defense Research Agency in Stockholm on Dec. 6, 2019. The authors would like to thank Raul Nuevo for his research assistance and Rimas Alisauskas, Jordan Becker, Robert Dalsjö, Darrell Driver, Jacek Durkalec, Michael Jonsson, Karl Mueller, Diego Ruiz Palmer, Elie Perot, Toshi Yoshihara, two anonymous reviewers, and the Texas National Security Review editors for their suggestions and feedback.

 

[danielboon]

This will get China's attention

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