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Sorry for the delay....HC

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Reuters | Breaking International News & Views

Find latest news from every corner of the globe at Reuters.com, your online source for breaking international news coverage.

af.reuters.com

Top News
August 29, 2020 / 2:08 AM / Updated 13 hours ago
Mali's neighbours tell junta to transfer power to transitional govt

Felix Onuah, Arouna Sissoko
4 Min Read

ABUJA/BAMAKO (Reuters) - Mali’s West African neighbours on Friday told the military junta which seized control 10 days ago that it must transfer power to a civilian-led transitional government immediately and hold elections within a year.

Niger's President Mahamadou Issoufou (C) walks with Mali's ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita (R) at the Bamako-Senou International Airport September 18, 2013. REUTERS/Thierry Gouegnon/File Photo
In exchange, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) committed to lifting sanctions gradually as the coup leaders complied with its demands, the bloc’s chairman said.

ECOWAS suspended Mali from its institutions, shut borders and halted financial flows with the country following the overthrow of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita on Aug. 18.

On Friday, the 15-member group reinforced its hard line because of concerns about prolonged instability in Mali and its potential to undermine the fight against Islamist militants there and in the wider Sahel region.
It outlined four main points it wanted to see progress on before sanctions could be gradually lifted.

Niger President Mahamadou Issoufou, who currently chairs ECOWAS, said Mali’s transitional president and prime minister must be civilians, and would be banned from running in the next legislative and presidential elections.

“No military structure should be above the transitional president,” Issoufou said.

ECOWAS also called for the quick establishment of a government that will tackle the various challenges Mali is facing, and in particular prepare for legislative and presidential elections within 12 months.

A spokesman for the junta, Djibrila Maiga, said its leaders were still studying the bloc’s decisions.

The junta issued a statement on Friday evening inviting Mali’s political parties including Keita’s ruling coalition and civil society groups to a meeting on Saturday to discuss the organisation of the transition.

Some members of Mali’s opposition coalition, the M5-RFP, which held several demonstrations calling for Keita to resign before the coup, said the regional leaders were misreading the situation.

“ECOWAS needs to revise its position,” Clement Dembele, a member of the coalition and a former presidential candidate, said in Bamako.

“The question, today, is that Mali needs statesmen. Mali doesn’t need a civilian or a soldier but a statesman,” he said.

The junta leaders said after taking power that they acted because the country was sinking into chaos, insecurity and corruption, blaming poor leadership.

The soldiers behind the coup are anxious to get the sanctions lifted and, as a gesture of goodwill, released Keita on Thursday and allowed him to return home.

They also cut their proposed duration of a transition to democracy to two years from three.
Mountaga Tall, another member of the M5-RFP coalition, said Mali’s needs must be identified first before fixing the deadline for a transition.

“It would be more rational, more reassuring to establish the tasks for the transition and, relative to the immensity of these tasks, to then decide if it will be three months, two years or three years,” he said.
Two diplomats who attended the conference said there was room for the transition to be extended for a couple of months beyond the ECOWAS deadline.

Regional leaders are scheduled to meet again on Sept. 7 in Niger’s capital Niamey, where they will assess the situation in Mali and take other measures, if necessary, Issoufou said.

Mali has struggled to regain stability since a Tuareg uprising in 2012 was hijacked by Islamist militants.
A French intervention drove back the insurgents but since 2018 the country has seen a sharp increase in violence and insecurity that has driven more than half a million people from their homes.

Reporting by Felix Onuah in Abuja and David Lewis in London and Tiemoko Diallo in Bamako; Writing by Hereward Holland and Bate Felix, Editing by John Stonestreet, Angus MacSwan and Daniel Wallis

 

[Housecarl]

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Pakistan Sees Taliban as Buffer to India in Future Afghanistan, Experts Say

Pakistan has said that it is only facilitating the peace process, but experts say that Islamabad, by bringing the Taliban to the table, aims to increase its influence in Afghanistan

www.voanews.com

Pakistan Sees Taliban as Buffer to India in Future Afghanistan, Experts Say

By Roshan Noorzai

August 28, 2020 10:32 PM

WASHINGTON - As Afghanistan’s warring sides prepare to hold long-awaited negotiations next week to establish peace, Pakistan is trying to push the Taliban to come to the table in a move that experts say is an attempt by Islamabad to increase its influence in postwar Afghanistan and counter its rival India.

Pakistan, however, claims that it is only facilitating the peace process in its neighbor to the west and that it is up to the Afghans to decide their future. The claim has been received with suspicion by Afghan officials given Islamabad’s history of alleged interference in the country and support for the Taliban.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi met with a group of Taliban representatives in Islamabad on Tuesday to discuss the latest efforts to begin talks between the group and the Afghan government. It comes as negotiations between the two sides have been hampered by a dispute over a prisoner swap and rising violence.

Following the meeting with the Taliban team, Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry in a statement said Qureshi emphasized the importance of a peace settlement in Afghanistan for regional stability and “highlighted the importance of Pakistan-Afghanistan ties based on amity, shared history and geography, and reaffirmed Pakistan’s abiding solidarity with the brotherly people of Afghanistan."

Pakistani officials have repeatedly said that they do not care who rules in Kabul as long as there is peace in Afghanistan. Despite the publicly announced position, Pakistan actually wants the Taliban to “emerge in some sort of position” by having a stake in the future power-sharing arrangement, according to Madiha Afzal, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Afzal told VOA that having a friendly government on its western border is “crucially important” for Pakistan, adding “an Islamist government ... will be more friendly towards Pakistan than it would be towards India.”

Pakistan was the main supporter of the Taliban during the Afghan civil war in the 1990s. It was one of only three countries that recognized the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001.

Afghan and Western officials have charged Pakistan, particularly its military establishment, of supporting and sheltering the Taliban since the group’s collapse in 2001.

The U.S. Defense Department in a report released in May said that Pakistan harbors Taliban militants, including the Haqqani network, which can plan and conduct attacks inside Afghanistan. It said that Islamabad’s strategic objective was to “mitigate spillover of instability into its territory.”

However, Pakistan has rejected those accusations, saying it has suffered human and financial losses in the war against terror groups crossing Afghan borders.

Ashley Tellis, a senior fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said Pakistan at this point considers the Taliban an instrument to control Afghanistan’s choices with respect to “whom it allies with and whom it partners with.”

“Pakistan gives the Taliban leadership sanctuary in Pakistan, and it has become an advocate for the Taliban’s peace process,” Tellis said, adding that Pakistan’s contribution at the operational level has been insignificant, as the Taliban have enough resources of their own.

He charged that Pakistan hopes Taliban control or a significant presence in the new government in Kabul could help Islamabad “to keep the Indians at bay.”

Indian factor

With more than $3 billion in development funds, India is the largest regional donor to Afghanistan.

Shanthie Mariet D'Souza, president of India-based Mantraya research forum, told VOA that India insists that bypassing Kabul would undermine the elected government of Afghanistan. India is, therefore, “not directly involved in any kind of peace talks with the Taliban.”

The country in the past has labeled the Taliban an instrument of the Pakistani army and blamed their major faction, the Haqqani group, for attacking Indian assets in Afghanistan.

In return, Pakistan has accused India of supporting anti-Pakistani politicians in Kabul and funding Pakistani separatists and militants in Afghanistan.

Homayoun Khan, a former Pakistan ambassador to Afghanistan, told VOA that Pakistan wants “a government in Afghanistan that does not favor India.”

“There is a security phobia in Pakistan – having India on one side and an unfriendly Afghanistan on the other side would not be good,” Khan said.

Risks for Pakistan

Some experts maintain that Pakistan’s alleged support to the Taliban does not come risk-free for the country. They say the group in the future could very well support anti-Pakistan Islamist militants.

Marvin Weinbaum, the director of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Program at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, told VOA that a future Taliban rule in Afghanistan may end with the group giving sanctuary to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) that has been mainly targeting Pakistan since 2007.

According to the U.N. there are 6,000 to 6,500 Pakistani militants operating as foreign fighters in Afghanistan. It said that the majority of these militants are affiliated with the TTP, a U.S. designated terror group.

Weinbaum said that unlike the 1990s when Pakistan wanted the Taliban to fully control Afghanistan, it now “wants those Taliban who it trusts to have a piece of power, but it does not want to see the Taliban dominate the government.”

VOA’s Afghanistan service contributed to this report.

 

[Housecarl]

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Amid peace talks with Taliban, ISIS is gaining strength

In the last 10 days, violence in Afghanistan has spike despite U.S.-led peace talks with the Taliban. New reports suggest ISIS is filling the void.

sofrep.com

Expert Analysis
Amid peace talks with Taliban, ISIS is gaining strength

by J. W. Sotak 1 hour ago

On February 29th, President Trump announced a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The deal came after nearly two decades of American presence in the region. The provisional agreement hinges on three major points: complete withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from the region; open talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban; and a pledge from the Taliban that they would prevent al-Qaeda from operating within regions that they controlled.

The agreement also called for the U.S. to close five major military bases within 135 days, and to commit to ending economic sanctions against the Taliban by the end of August. Additionally, according to the agreement, the Afghan government has to release 5,000 Taliban fighters currently incarcerated in Afghan jails.

While the peace talks struggle to find their footing, recent violence across much of the country suggests that Afghanistan remains precariously poised to slide into the hands of ISIS.
The Islamic State – Khorasan
IS-K (the Islamic State of Khorasan) is an ISIS faction whose purpose is to gain ground in Afghanistan to destabilize the Afghan government, erode trust in democracy, and sow sectarianism and instability across the region. Over the past few years, IS-K has cemented a foothold in the region by exploiting the porous borders with Pakistan and Tajikistan. It has siphoned off fighters, arms, and resources from the Taliban and the Afghan government forces alike.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), IS-K is “responsible for the deaths of 338 civilians in neighboring Pakistan since January of 2017 largely [as] a result of attacks targeting electoral and sectarian institutions.” In a 2018 report, CSIS estimated that IS-K had grown to roughly 800 fighters.


Recent events suggest that IS-K has grown and is gaining in confidence. Over the past several weeks, Afghanistan has been pockmarked by nearly daily attacks across nine different provinces. While some have been claimed by the Taliban, several have been linked to IS-K.

Reported attacks across Afghanistan since August 18th, 2020.
One of the most daring and complex attacks attributed to IS-K took place on August 3 when a group of fighters stormed a prison complex in Jalalabad in the eastern province of Nangarhar on the border with Pakistan. According to several reports, the prison was holding upwards of 1,700 prisoners at the time of the attack, most of whom were known Taliban and IS-K fighters. The battle lasted some 20 hours and resulted in more than 1,000 inmates attempting to flee. The BBC reports that an estimated 300 fighters remain at large.

Raids of this type are a common tactic among terrorist groups in the region. But the August 3 prison raid points to two troubling truths: IS-K is growing more brazen; and it’s recruiting.
Peace Talks and the Loya Jirga
The tripartite talks between the Afghan government, the Taliban and the U.S. are widely seen as a step toward bringing peace to the region after decades of conflict and instability. But the proposed release of 5,000 former Taliban fighters as a precondition has been contentious. Further concerns were raised about 400 prisoners on the list owing to the high-profile nature of their crimes.

According to reporting by TOLO News, Afghanistan’s premier news outlet, “[out of the] 400 prisoners in question, 156 of them have been sentenced to death, 105 of them are accused of murder, 34 of them are accused of kidnapping that led to murder, 51 of them are accused of drug smuggling, 44 of them are on the blacklist of the Afghan government and its allies, 6 of them are accused of other crimes, 4 are unknown.” Roughly half of the prisoners are accused by the Afghan government of masterminding attacks on embassies, public squares, and government offices.

The outcry about the release of these remaining 400 prisoners led to the calling of a national Loya Jirga, a centuries-old special legal assembly rooted in traditional Pashtun tribal custom.

Though not used regularly, the Loya Jirga is called upon in times of crisis. It is an honored method of resolving large-scale disputes. The Loya Jirga has convened eight times since 2001. In some instances, it was used to settle political matters such as ratifying the Afghan Constitution in 2003. But of those eight, the majority concerned how to deal with the Taliban.


On August 7, President Ashraf Ghani presided over the ninth Loya Jirga to determine the fate of the remaining 400 Taliban fighters. After two days of talks, Ghani announced that the council, consisting of over 3,200 Afghan delegates, had approved the release of the remaining 400 Taliban captives.




Potential Fallout
The release of these Taliban fighters is, on its own, a highly contestable move. In a statement on August 6, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acknowledged that the release of Taliban prisoners was an “unpopular,” but a necessary move to “lead to an important result long sought by Afghans and Afghanistan’s friends: reduction of violence and direct talks resulting in a peace agreement and an end to the war.”

He continued in saying that “the Taliban have also committed to significantly reduce violence and casualties during the talks” and that the United States “intends to hold the Taliban to these commitments.”

But the peace talks could have the opposite effect on the ground. Rumblings from the region suggest that ISIS has appointed Shahab al-Muhajir as the new leader of IS-K. Al-Muhajir, an Iraqi Haqqani operative who has previously been linked to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, appears to have joined ISIS. If the reports are true, this suggests that IS-K is being revitalized by ISIS. And as the Taliban gain legitimacy from the negotiations, there is a likelihood that IS-K will recruit fighters from the organization, further increasing their numbers and operational capabilities.

In an August 3 tweet, Masoud Andarabi, acting Minister of Interior of Afghanistan and form Deputy Director of the National Directorate of Security, confirmed al-Muhajir’s appointment and connection to the Haqqani network.

Shahab Almahajir, the newly appointed leader of Islamic State of Khorasan Province-ISKP is a Haqani member. Haqani & the Taliban carry out their terrorism on a daily basis across Afg & when their terrorist activities does not suit them politically they rebrand it under ISKP.

— Masoud Andarabi (@andarabi) August 3, 2020

A special investigative report by the BBC connected al-Muhajir to the August 3 prison raid in Nangarhar. The report suggests that he masterminded the operation, likely to quickly amass trained fighters. The mountainous border region between the two nations has always been an unruly and largely porous, allowing the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and now IS-K, fighters to pass freely from one country to the other.

The nature of this border raises further fears. A report submitted to the United Nations Security Council in July indicated that there are more than 6,000 Pakistani fighters among the ranks of the Taliban. Afghan government forces engaged in skirmishes in the region have reported finding Pakistani ID cards among the belongings of the casualties.


The recent Loya Jirga edict seemed to acknowledge that foreign fighters may have been included in the contested 400 prisoners it elected to release. It stated that if foreign fighters were discovered among them, “they must be handed over to their countries with valid guarantee.” Whether any Pakistani fighters could return to Afghanistan through the porous border region in support of IS-K after their release is unknown.
A New Silk Road
While the immediate role of IS-K is to sow violence and chaos, its long-term goal is to carve out access to natural resources inside the country. Afghanistan is rich in precious metals, copper, chromite, natural gas, and petroleum. Destabilization of the government through kinetic attacks will fragment security and open opportunities for ISIS to harvest these resources.

To extract the resources, ISIS needs tactical intelligence and viable footholds in contested provinces. To continue the raids, the growing IS-K faction needs the logistical support of ISIS and access to weapons, money, and additional fighters. Afghanistan’s location means that ISIS will be able to attract major global players — China and Russia are obvious benefactors — as well as more local organizations in neighboring Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.

In addition to gaining access to valuable resources, an ISIS resurgence in Afghanistan could prove to be crucial to recruitment in other regions. Still, continued U.S. investment in the country comes at a price — about $50 billion a year. That is far too high.

As the Taliban peace talks press onward and U.S. forces in Afghanistan are drawn down in keeping with the agreement’s preconditions, questions about Afghanistan’s future linger, begging the question: Will a peace agreement with the Taliban mean the rise of ISIS in Afghanistan?

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About J. W. Sotak View All Posts


J. W. Sotak is Editor-in-Chief of SOFREP. He is a former U.S. Army Civil Affairs Staff Sergeant. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a BA in Arabic Literature and the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (Arabic). He previously worked on the National Desk of the New York Times, as Editor-in-Chief of SHIFTed Magazine and as Commerce Director of Gear Patrol.

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The status of America's forever wars in the Middle East


And so it begins, U.S. troops start to withdraw from Afghanistan

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[Housecarl]

Hummm.....

Posted for fair use.....

Pakistan nurturing ISIS in Afghanistan to gain access to Central Asia: Faizi

<strong> AT-KABUL: </strong> Following conflicting reports on presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters in Afghanistan, spokesm

menafn.com

Pakistan nurturing ISIS in Afghanistan to gain access to Central Asia: Faizi

Date
8/29/2020 2:23:40 PM


(MENAFN - Afghanistan Times) AT-KABUL: Following conflicting reports on presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) fighters in Afghanistan, spokesman to the ex-President Hamid Karzai said that the terrorist group operating under the label of the ISIS or Daish is the creation of Islamabad aimed to gain access to the energy-rich Central Asia, China and Russia.

Aimal Faizi in an article published recently by the BBC, said that some of local media outlets without differentiating news from propaganda are promoting the terrorist group.

Some officials including General Murad Ali Murad and General Mahmoud Khan confirmed the emergence of Daish without following the standard procedure outlined by the Ministry of Defense regarding media briefing, he said.

He added that domestic media quoted local people and official sources saying that they have seen masked men carrying black flags and speaking a language that they could not understand. 'If, we go few years back, when one could not even imagine about ISIS in Afghanistan, Panjabi Taliban and other militant groups wearing masks were operating in Nuristan, Kunar, Logar, Badakhshan and other provinces,' Faizi argued.

Faizi further added that foreign hands were involved in creating ISIS-like terrorist groups to spread militancy to Central Asia, Russia and China through Afghanistan. 'Islamabad had several times asked ex-President Hamid Karzai to give the country access to Tajikistan through Afghanistan,' he said, adding that Hamid Karzai rejected the demand as he believed it would bring insecurity to the region.

He stressed that Pakistan was using terrorist groups as a tool of foreign policy. 'Pakistani military would never give up its policy of using terrorist groups as tool of foreign policy. It has strategic alliance with some particular terrorist groups and it supports them to wage war in Afghanistan,' the article added.

Fiazi in the article urged President Ashraf Ghani to exercise more caution in his foreign policy with regard to Pakistan.

MENAFN2908202001690000ID1100714642



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[jward]

Drug Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones
The tactic has become widespread on battlefields overseas and now appears to be proliferating to organized crime.
By Joseph TrevithickAugust 28, 2020

• The War Zone

video capture via Mexico News Daily

Mexico's drug cartels are notoriously well armed and equipped, with some possessing very heavy weaponry, including armored gun trucks sporting heavy machine guns. Now at least one of these groups appears to be increasingly making use of small quadcopter-type drones carrying small explosive devices to attack its enemies. This is just the latest example of a trend that has been growing worldwide in recent years, including among non-state actors, such as terrorists and criminals, which underscores the potential threats commercially-available unmanned systems pose on and off the battlefield.



Cartel "Narco Tanks," Heavy Weapons On Full Display During Battle Over El Chapo's SonBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
The First Narco Submarine Ever Seized Off A European Coast Is A MonsterBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
Captured Narco Jet Loaded With 69 Bales Of Cocaine Is Biggest Bust In Belize HistoryBy Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
Gutsy Guatemalan Air Force Pilot Deserves A Raise For Flying Out This Stranded Narco JetBy Tyler Rogoway Posted in The War Zone
This Is How The U.S. Military Is Already Patrolling And Working On The BorderBy Joseph Trevithick Posted in The War Zone
A civilian self-defense militia in the city of Tepalcatepec, in Mexico's southwestern Michoacan state, reportedly recovered two dozen explosive-laden quadcopters from a car that a team of sicarios – cartel hitmen – had apparently abandoned, possibly after a failed or aborted hit, on July 25, 2020. The bombs attached to the drones consisted of Tupperware-like containers filled with C4 charges and ball bearings to act as shrapnel.

video capture via Mexico News Daily
One of the armed drones reportedly recovered in Tepalcatepec.

The vehicle and its contents were said to be tied to the Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG), or Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which has its main hub in neighboring Jalisco state, but exerts control over a wider swatch of territory. This includes areas much further down Mexico's southwestern Pacific coastline and along the Gulf of Mexico on the opposite side of the country.
CJNG first emerged in 2009 as an offshoot of the Milenio Cartel and has since waged a particularly violent campaign against many of Mexico's other drug cartels, as well as Mexican authorities and civilian self-defense organizations, growing in size and scope in the process. As of July, American authorities estimated that CJNG was responsible for the movement of approximately one-third of all drugs from Mexico into the United States. It has also been working to expand its operations into Europe and Asia.

DEA
A map of cartel areas of control as of 2015, with the CJNG in yellow.
That revenue has clearly translated into new weapons, vehicles, and equipment for the CJNG's sicarios and other footsoldiers. In July, the cartel released a particularly striking video of a convoy of camouflage-painted trucks, pickups, and SUVs, some with mounted weapons and very visible add-on armor, together with heavily armed personnel in tactical gear, that all looked more like a military unit than a criminal gang.


These personnel, who all shouted of the nickname of their top boss, Nemesio "El Mencho" Oseguera Cervantes, throughout the footage, reportedly belong to a "special forces" contingent within the cartel's overall force structure. This video followed a failed CJNG assassination attempt against Mexico City's police chief Omar Garcia Harfuch in June. Harfuch was wounded in the shootout and two of his bodyguard's died.
CJNG's growing resources have also translated into its new aerial capabilities. There were reports in April that CJNG had been dropping improvised explosive devices from small, conventional manned aircraft in attacks on members of the Tepalcatepec self-defense militia. The cartel apparently dropped this tactic quickly after Mexican authorities stepped up aerial surveillance in the region and has since shifted to using the diminutive drones.
Quadcopters with explosives believed to belong CJNG were recovered in the city of Puebla, in the state of the same name, southeast of Mexico City, in April, as well. Mexican officials said they believed those had been destined for attacks on the Santa Rosa de Lima Cartel in Guanajuato state to the northwest. The discovery of those drones led to raids that found more quadcopters, as well as various electronics and bomb-making supplies, including more C4.

Mexican Federal Police
One of the armed drones recovered during a raid earlier in the year.
It's not surprising at all that CJNG, especially, has turned to small unmanned systems as a means of carrying out its various violent campaigns throughout Mexico. Mexican cartels, among other criminal groups, have already been using them to carry drugs over walls and past other barriers, as well as conduct surveillance. There have been more sporadic reports of other cartels using small explosive-armed drones since at least 2017, too.
The barrier to entry when it comes to crafting small bomb-carrying quad and hexcopter-type drones is notably low, in general. This is something The War Zone has highlighted on multiple occasions in the past, which makes the concept particularly attractive to non-state actors.

In 2018, a group opposed to dictatorial Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro attempted to assassinate him at a public rally using a commercially available multi-rotor drone system. This came years after ISIS terrorists had very much brought the concept to an actual battlefield in Iraq.
Small drones of various kinds of improvised munitions had steadily proliferated among terrorists and other armed groups in Iraq and Syria since then. Russia's Syrian outpost at Khmeimim Air Base has been subjected to a regular stream of drone attacks since 2018.
In July, authorities in the Iraqi capital Baghdad recovered a quadcopter drone with a very purpose-built-looking looking bomb underneath in a neighboring near the heavily fortified Green Zone area that is home to various government buildings and Embassies, including that of the United States. Iranian-backed militias often use these adjacent areas to stage rocket attacks on the U.S. Embassy compound.

#Breaking#Iraqi security forces finding a drone with a mortar in #Baghdad’s Al Jadiriyah neighborhood.
The drone was ready to use against #US embassy in #Iraq. pic.twitter.com/MhieL4XtL9
— Blesa Shaways (@Bilesa_Shaweys) July 23, 2020​

These are just a small number of the readily available examples of this tactic being employed. In fact, when it comes to the danger of drones being used for gangland assassinations, Japanese authorities warned back in 2015 about Yakuza families doing exactly what CJNG is doing right now in Mexico.
Even larger nation-state militaries are starting to leverage the relative simplicity of hobby-like quadcopter drones as a starting place for more complex weaponized systems, including designs capable of operating cooperatively in autonomous swarms. Turkey is now putting such a drone system into production, which you read all about here.
This reality has left the United States, among others, scrambling to catch up when it comes to developing countermeasures. The U.S. military, as a whole, has been investigating a wide array of different counter-drone technologies to handle these lower-tier threats, ranging from jammers to directed-energy weapons, including both lasers and high-power microwave beams.

"I argue all the time with my Air Force friends that the future of flight is vertical and it's unmanned," U.S. Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, said at a public event in June. "I'm not talking about large unmanned platforms, which are the size of a conventional fighter jet that we can see and deal with, as we would any other platform. I'm talking about the one you can go out and buy at Costco right now in the United States for a thousand dollars, four quad, rotorcraft, or something like that that can be launched and flown," he added. "And with very simple modifications, it can make made into something that can drop a weapon like a hand grenade or something else."
CJNG's recent activities only underscore that there is a serious need for countermeasures off the battlefield to safeguard VIPs, critical infrastructure, and more from spying and potentially dangerous harassment, as well as deliberate lethal attacks. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified the need for some kind of mobile counter-drone capability as an "emerging requirement" just this week.
If this cartel successfully adds small armed drones to its already significant arsenal, and shows that they can be useful on a more regular basis, it could easily lead to an explosion of other criminal groups in the country, and elsewhere, adopting this tactic, as well.

Contact the author: joe@thedrive.com
video at source
posted for fair use

Drug Cartel Now Assassinates Its Enemies With Bomb-Toting Drones

The tactic has become widespread on battlefields overseas and now appears to be proliferating to organized crime.

www.thedrive.com

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use....

Beijing’s Strategic Ends: Harmony through Hierarchy and the End of Choice

To be sure, foreign criticism does whip up Chinese patriotism and nationalism as it can elsewhere, but for Beijing, these criticisms cut to the core of the Chinese Communist Party’s innate vulnerabilities.

thestrategybridge.org

Beijing’s Strategic Ends: Harmony through Hierarchy and the End of Choice

George Bartle

September 1, 2020

At a 2010 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Foreign Ministers meeting, China’s chief diplomat, Yang Jeichi made clear Beijing’s perspective on China’s Southeast Asian neighbors when he bluntly stated, "China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that is just a fact." [1] Yang’s statement likely rankled many of the Southeast Asian leaders in attendance. Yet, unlike their Western counterparts, those same leaders likely understood the assertion through the prism of historic East Asian international relations and were probably unsurprised by a Chinese official uttering what many see as a traditional approach to regional power politics.

Response from the U.S. audience was quite different, with a frenzy of criticism and some congratulatory backslapping amongst Western observers who interpreted the statement as a perceived gaffe that they framed as a belligerent affront to the principle of sovereign equality.[2] The disconnect between America and its ASEAN partners illustrates a deeper problem in how the United States has approached Communist China for decades: foreign policy experts have often used Western political science frameworks to understand and interpret China’s approach to international relations. This article offers a framework outside the Western prism to help strategists create effective competitive tactics through a better understanding of Sino-centric approaches to power.

Understanding China’s Global Ambitions Through a Neo-Tributary Framework
Returning U.S. analytical models to a historically grounded understanding of China’s goals and methods refocuses efforts along a path that accepts China as being Chinese, not something that can be molded into a Western partner or that can be fully understood through Western political science theories. According to the neo-liberal and neo-realist theoretic perspectives guiding U.S. foreign policy, Chinese paradigms of empire, tribute, and vassalage had been relegated to the past, and therefore could be sublimated through a rules-based order governed by U.S.-created and led multilateral institutions. However, neo-liberal ideology failed to grasp that while the People’s Republic of China is a modern nation-state, it also maintains attributes of an ancient empire. This is not to say that China wants to abolish the current system or upend a rules-based order. Rather, Beijing seeks to bend global rules so they conform to its own worldview in an effort to define and direct international behavior, norms, and rituals.

Neo-liberal ideology failed to grasp that while the People’s Republic of China is a modern nation-state, it also maintains attributes of an ancient empire.

Ultimately, a Stalinist-infused neo-tributary approach to international relations, particularly in the Indo-Pacific, seeks an end state where smaller countries are locked into a hierarchical relationship with Beijing—managed not just through hard power, but also deference and ritual—where freedom of choice and the ability to pivot between great powers give way to Beijing’s preferences. While Chinese academics have yet to coalesce around a single Sino-centric theory of international relations, one way of conceptualizing how Beijing achieves its strategic ends was articulated in a 2015 article by Su-Yan Pan and Joe Tin-Yao Lo, two scholars from the Hong Kong Institute of Education, who argued that China’s foreign policy is best understood through a neo-tributary framework that takes into account four core imperial concepts that continue to shape the Chinese Communist Party’s worldview:

1. Chinese exceptionalism as motive;
2. Trade and diplomacy as means;
3. Cultural assimilation as political strategy;
4. Image building as legitimacy defense.[3]

Chinese Exceptionalism as Motive
Beijing has long pursued a belief in Chinese exceptionalism, which has recently morphed into a more ethnocentric exceptionalism tied to Han Chinese identity.[4] Language, history, and culture all contribute to Beijing’s Sino-centric worldview, and the longevity of Chinese civilization feeds into perceptions of Han exceptionalism. While Imperial China was a hodgepodge of different ethnic groups tied together through Chinese language and cultural institutions, Han Chinese were more often in positions of power and influence within the bureaucracy.

Despite these privileged positions, prior to the fall of Imperial China in 1912, there was little concept of a Han Chinese race. Early 20th century Chinese revolutionaries helped promote a sense of Han identity through anti-Manchu campaigns and other forms of revolutionary zeal, but it was only in the past 40 years the concept of a Chinese race began to permeate widely throughout Chinese society.[5] This has allowed China’s post-Mao leadership to take historical views of Sino-centrism and co-opt it with ethno-nationalist rhetoric that identifies Han Chinese people and culture as exceptional, irreplaceable, and synonymous with China.[6] In modern foreign policy, Friend & Thayer found “the racism, xenophobia, and nativism embedded within the Han centric narrative have made possible a strong ‘us versus them’ mentality that the [People’s Republic of China] uses to promote its national interests.”[7]

Trade and Diplomacy as Means
Although trade was a driving force behind the Roman, British, and American empires, the Ming and Qing Dynasties viewed trade differently. Whereas the British recognized overseas trade was critical to generating wealth and strengthening the empire, China’s rulers were suspicious of foreign trade, viewing it more along the lines of the ancient diplomatic practice of gift exchange and believing trade was something vassal states and barbarians needed from China. As Pan and Lo note, “Trade followed diplomacy and, to Chinese thinking, subdued foreigners and ‘barbarians’ through cultural assimilation” and the performance of Confucian rituals.[8]

Although China now recognizes the importance of trade for its national development and foreign heads of state no longer physically kowtow before Chinese rulers, the link between trade and diplomacy is still an important component of Beijing’s worldview. Much of China’s post-Mao era foreign policy initiatives, such as Good Neighbor, Going Out, and the Belt and Road Initiative are clear examples of how trade and investment remain a unidirectional endeavor—flowing out of China rather than into it from foreigners.

The Belt and Road Initiative includes includes 1/3 of world trade and GDP and over 60% of the world's population.(Image: World Bank)

Rituals of respect also played an important role in trade and diplomacy, and continue to shape how the People’s Republic of China conducts international relations. Although Xi Jinping has called for the creation of a “community of common destiny” that values “equality among sovereign nations regardless of regime type,” Xi and much of the Chinese leadership still see international relations through a hierarchical lens where power determines the pecking order.[9] This view demands China be seen as a great power, and that small states, particularly those in Asia, recognize the asymmetrical differences they have with Beijing. Beijing’s insistence on deference, ritual, and acceptance of China as East Asia’s hegemon manifests in its relationships with Indo-Pacific countries through the pageantry of high-level visits, participation in regional Chinese-led initiatives, avoidance of public disagreements with Beijing, and the repetition of Chinese Communist Party slogans.[10] Using similar methods, Beijing also sees multilateral institutions as important venues for shaping modern-day rituals and deference. Within the United Nations, Beijing has made concerted efforts to inject Chinese slogans into official documents.[11] This includes seemingly innocuous resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council that included terminology closely identified with Beijing such as “win-win cooperation” and “a community of shared future for humankind.”[12] Beijing has made similar attempts at inserting Belt and Road Initiative related slogans into UN documents and statements.

Drawing on the imperial and Stalinist traditions, the Chinese Communist Party wields words not “as vehicles of reason and persuasion,” but as “weapons for defining, isolating, and destroying opponents'' and as a tool to “distinguish friends from enemies.”[13] Domestically, the Chinese Communist Party expects loyal citizens to parrot back its slogans in ritualistic acts of political loyalty known as biaotai or “declaring where one stands.”[14] Like Confucian rituals of deference to the emperor, the Chinese Communist Party’s attempt to shape modern diplomatic ritual through the inclusion of slogans in joint statements or UN documents is an attempt to force smaller powers to make deferential and ritualistic statements of conformity with the People’s Republic of China in exchange for what are viewed as economic and political gifts.

Cultural Assimilation as Political Strategy
Beijing’s attempts to co-opt modern-day rituals are not limited to perfunctory statements. For China, gaining influence over culture through ceremony and ritual is key to maximizing power.[15] By making concepts, objects, and values sacred, Beijing takes them out of the political, and therefore debatable realm, and into an untouchable realm more akin to religion than international relations. Like mantras and prayers, the ritualistic repetition of slogans and physical acts of deference eventually have the effect of shifting perceptions and realities over time. Therefore, while it is easy to see how power grows out of the barrel of a gun, less obvious is how power is wielded through control of culture, language, rituals, norms, and institutions. While the process of assimilation can be coercive, smaller states often voluntarily adopt linguistic, political, philosophical, or institutional features of a more dominant state to gain benefits. In Imperial China, “court rituals, Chinese language, and associated cultural assimilation were the means through which Beijing exercised its power and influence.”[16]

Image Building as Legitimacy Defense
The lynchpin in China’s ability to create a neo-tributary system is its ability to maintain and project its image as a benevolent hegemon that seeks to preserve social and political harmony through peaceful hierarchy. In this sense, China’s image has historically gone hand in hand with more traditional elements of national power in legitimizing its position atop the East Asian order.[17] This also helps explain the often-visceral reaction Beijing has to criticism.

To be sure, foreign criticism does whip up Chinese patriotism and nationalism as it can elsewhere, but for Beijing, these criticisms cut to the core of the Chinese Communist Party’s innate vulnerabilities.

As with Chinese imperial dynasties before it, the Chinese Communist Party needs to be seen as moral, responsible, and benevolent in order to maintain its governing legitimacy. So, while the Chinese Communist Party does use image building to maximize its international power, it is important to remember that its main motivation is inward-focused self-preservation.[18] In the United States on the other hand, governing legitimacy is determined through elections, laws, and Congress, not through the morality, benevolence, or economic performance of an imperial court or ruling clique. As such, foreign criticism of the United States might damage the reputation of a political party or politician, but it does not pose an existential threat to the broader government.

By contrast, and critically for Beijing, undermining China’s international image could eventually threaten the leadership’s domestic power. Therefore, if foreign countries counter Beijing’s assertions that China’s rise under the Chinese Communist Party is benign and will contribute to social harmony and economic prosperity, it also undermines the same foundations the Chinese Communist Party uses to assert its control within China. To be sure, foreign criticism does whip up Chinese patriotism and nationalism as it can elsewhere, but for Beijing, these criticisms cut to the core of the Chinese Communist Party’s innate vulnerabilities.

The Legacy of Marxist-Stalinist Ideology
The Stalinist influences on the Chinese Communist Party can be seen in its paranoid belief of a perpetual battle against internal enemies and western liberalism where struggle is itself a political end.[19] While there are many obvious and subtle examples of how Marxist-Stalinist ideology influences Beijing’s strategic thinking, the concept of contradictions deserves special attention.

In his October 2017 marathon speech at the 19th National Party Congress, Xi Jinping hearkened back to Maoist-era rhetoric when he proclaimed, “realizing our great dream demands a great struggle. It is in the movement of contradictions that a society advances; where there is contradiction there is struggle.”[20] While Marx originally assessed that contradictions would be resolved through “the practical and violent action of the masses,” Stalin added the theme of perpetual struggle to contradictions theory, saying that the only way for the Communist Party to remain strong was by continuously “purging itself.”[21] As a student of Stalin, Mao Zedong, in his famous 1937 essay On Contradictions, wrote that “changes in society are due chiefly to the development of the internal contradictions...it is the development of these contradictions that pushes society forward and gives the impetus for the supersession of the old society by the new.”[22]

That Xi Jinping still focuses on resolving contradictions today is a marker of how embedded this strand of thinking remains within the Chinese Communist Party. Within China, contradictions generally take the form of factions, forces, or ideas that could threaten Chinese Communist Party rule. Outside China, contradictions could be anything that threatens China’s image, questions Beijing’s place near the top of an international hierarchy of power or calls the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy into question. Rather than follow traditional Chinese philosophy, which recognizes contradictions as a naturally occurring phenomenon that can be managed and even celebrated, the modern Chinese Communist Party sees contradictions as something that must be resolved as part of a greater struggle to achieve “national rejuvenation.” As Xi said in a 2015 speech, “History has told us that, the cause of the Chinese nation’s rejuvenation, which history and the people have chosen the [Chinese Communist Party] to lead, is correct, must be upheld, and can never be doubted.”[23]

Empathizing with a Sino-Centric Worldview
Like most states, Beijing seeks to maximize Chinese power and influence. While the Chinese Communist Party’s approach to maximizing power relies on traditional tools of statecraft such as military and economic might, its tactics and desired end states differ from those conceptualized in Western political science models. Motivated by a strong sense of Han Chinese exceptionalism, Beijing wields trade, diplomacy, and cultural assimilation alongside its hard power tools to chip away at the Indo-Pacific’s freedom of choice and replace it with a hierarchical power structure managed not just through military and economic might, but also deference and ritual. The injection of Chinese Communist Party slogans into international documents and co-opting the structure and diplomatic rituals of multilateral institutions is Beijing’s attempt to bend regional rules and norms towards its preferences through slow—almost imperceptible—change. Too often, U.S. strategists frame great power competition through Western-centric theories that discount levers of influence such as ritual, language, and deference. An appreciation for, and a better understanding of, Sino-centric approaches to power will better inform strategy and sharpen the diplomatic tools available to practitioners as they work to prevent Beijing’s attempts to impose “harmony” through a People’s Republic of China dominated hierarchy.


George Bartle is a U.S. Foreign Service Officer. The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Department of State or U.S. Government.

 

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China's Military Has Surpassed US in Ships, Missiles and Air Defense, DoD Report Finds

China's military is already superior to the U.S. in several respects and is aiming for total dominance.

www.military.com

China's Military Has Surpassed US in Ships, Missiles And Air Defense, DoD Report Finds
1 Sep 2020

Military.com | By Richard Sisk

China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) has already surpassed the U.S. in missile development and its number of warships and air defense systems under the Chinese Communist Party's plan to achieve dominance by 2049, the Defense Department said in a sobering report Tuesday.

The ultimate goal of the People's Republic of China, or PRC, is to "develop a military by mid-Century that is equal to -- or in some cases superior to -- the U.S. military, or that of any other great power that the PRC views as a threat," the DoD's annual report to Congress said.

To that end, the PRC has "marshalled the resources, technology, and political will over the past two decades to strengthen and modernize the PLA in nearly every respect," the report said.

Under the national strategy pressed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, the result has been that "China is already ahead of the United States in certain areas" essential to its overall aim of progressing from homeland and periphery defense to global power projection, the report said.

"The PRC has the largest navy in the world, with an overall battle force of approximately 350 ships and submarines, including over 130 major surface combatants," the report said.


That's compared to the U.S. Navy's current battle force of 295 ships.


In addition, "the PRC has more than 1,250 ground-launched ballistic missiles (GLBMs) and ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers," while the U.S. currently fields one type of conventional GLBM with a range of 70 to 300 kilometers and no GLCMs, the report said.


In some respects, China is also ahead on integrated air defense systems with a mix of Russian-built and homegrown systems, the report said.


"The PRC has one of the world's largest forces of advanced long-range surface-to-air systems" -- including Russian-built S-400, S-300, and domestically-produced anti-air systems -- making up "part of its robust and redundant integrated air defense system," the report said.


Despite the advances, the PLA "remains in a position of inferiority" to the U.S. in overall military strength, said Chad Sbragia, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for China.


The 173-page DoD report "does not claim that China's military is 10 feet tall," but the Chinese Communist Party wants it to be, and has the plan and resources to reach that goal, Sbragia, a retired Marine officer, said at an American Enterprise Institute forum on China's military.


At an earlier Pentagon briefing on the report, Sbragia said Beijing's military strategy was driven by the view that the U.S. has decided upon a long period of confrontation to counter the global spread of China's influence.


He said that China "increasingly views the United States as more willing to confront Beijing on matters where the U.S. and PRC interests are inimical."


"The CCP leaders view the United States' security alliances and partnerships -- especially those in the Indo-Pacific region -- as destabilizing and irreconcilable with China's interests," Sbragia said.


The DoD report, titled "Military and Security Developments Involving the People's Republic of China" comes about two weeks before Congress is set to return from recess to convene a Senate-House Conference Committee on the National Defense Authorization Act and the defense budget for Fiscal Year 2021.


Defense Secretary Mark Esper has acknowledged downward pressures on the defense budget to offset the enormous costs of the COVID-19 response while arguing for sustained increases of 3-5% in defense spending in future years to maintain U.S. superiority and readiness.


This story will be updated.


-- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com.


Related: Russian and Chinese Military Harassment Is Increasing. Should the US Be Worried?

 

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ARRW To Mayhem To The Future Of Hypersonic Operations - Breaking Defense

"How are we going to employ hypersonic weapons, what do they bring to the battlefield?," asks Maj. Gen. Mark Weatherington, commander of the 8th Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center.

breakingdefense.com

ARRW To Mayhem To The Future Of Hypersonic Operations
"How are we going to employ hypersonic weapons, what do they bring to the battlefield?," asks Maj. Gen. Mark Weatherington, commander of the 8th Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center.
By Theresa Hitchens on August 31, 2020 at 6:08 PM

Maj. Gen. Mark Weatherington

WASHINGTON: The Air Force is still trying to craft its concept of operations (CONOPS) for hypersonic missiles — with the Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) providing the service’s first opportunity for real-world assessment.

Air Force Global Strike Command envisions a rolling wave of various hypersonic missile types hitting service inventories over the next few years as the service figures out how to employ such capabilities — with the ARRW leading as an “early to the fight” demonstrator, says Maj. Gen. Mark Weatherington, commander of the 8th Air Force and the Joint-Global Strike Operations Center.

“Obviously, they’re competing systems out there right now and I think everybody’s competing for the dollars that might be in this hypersonic capability area. But I think we will see kind of an uneven development. We’ll see some systems that are early to the fight — ARRW may be one of those to demonstrate some capability,” he told the Mitchell Institute today. “I think right now we’re learning. I think the ARRW is going to give us that first opportunity to learn.”

ARRW, a boost-glide powered missile, would be the first wave of hypersonics, followed by air-breathing missiles — including the Air Force Research Laboratory’s latest concept for a scramjet-powered missile to be carried on fighter jets. It’s being developed under the new Expendable Hypersonic Multi-Mission Air-Breathing Demonstrator (Mayhem) Program.

AFRL released a Request for Information (RFI) two weeks ago seeking industry responses by Sept. 25 outlining their interest and capabilities. AFRL is “interested in the design, fabrication, integration, and necessary research needed to enable a larger-scale expendable air-breathing hypersonic multi-mission flight demonstrator. The Mayhem System Demonstrator (MSD) will need to be capable of carrying larger payloads over distances further than current hypersonic capabilities allow. The payload bay will be modular and capable of carrying/delivering at least three distinct payloads in order to execute multiple Government-defined mission sets.”

The solicitation explains that Mayhem will bounce off earlier AFRL research activities under “the Enhanced Operational Scramjet Technology effort (Broad Area Announcement BAA-12-07-PKP), Enabling Technologies for High-speed Operable Systems (BAA-FA8650-17-S-2002), High Speed Strike Weapon Program, and Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept Program.”


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As Breaking D readers know, the Hypersonic Air-breaking Weapon Concept (HAWC) is a DARPA effort with the Air Force as the ‘customer’ for the transition into a program of record.

Weatherington said that the rolling delivery of multiple types of hypersonic weapons is a “good thing” because it will allow the Air Force to figure out the best mix of those optimized for delivery by bomber aircraft and those optimized by fighters. There are, he said, a whole host of questions to be answered:

“How are we going to employ hypersonic weapons? What do they bring to the battlefield? What are our considerations for planning and executing and integrating them in a fight? … How do we understand the target, where it’s at, where it may be going, and make sure we can we can close that kill chain on a particular target?”

As Sydney and I reported back in April, the Air Force wants $554 million in research for its various hypersonic missile efforts: $172 million in an S&T pot (where Mayhem funds lie); and, $382 million for ARRW.

Recommended Industry Says ‘Meh’ To DoD Cislunar Space Push
At the moment, industry sources say, there is no money to be had for developing systems for DoD’s cislunar operations.
By Theresa Hitchens

As with other senior Air Force leaders, Weatherington refused to be pinned down on just how many next-generation B-21 stealth bombers the Air Force believes it needs or the optimum size of the overall bomber force. A key issue is budgetary uncertainty and costs vs. benefits questions that he said will certainly require “a national debate.”

As Breaking D readers know, senior leaders including the head of Air Force Global Strike Command Gen. Timothy Ray, have been pushing for some time for the service to increase the officially planned buy of 100 B-21s, perhaps to as many as 145.
“But I would say my sense is the current force is too small to meet all the demands we place on it,” Weatherington added. “Air Force Global Strike Command is building decision points into the B-21 ramp … that would permit growth if required. And I think we’ll have to seriously look at it as we get farther down the stream of being bringing the B-21s online.”
While he wouldn’t be drawn on the expected initial operational capability (IOC) date for the B-21, he did reiterate that the Air Force does not see first flight before 2022.

Weatherington also noted the importance of the planned upgrades to the venerable B-52 Stratofortress fleet, which he said the service expects to cost around $3.5 million each. The goal is to keep the elderly bombers functioning until at least 2050. This includes the fierce contest for re-engining the aircraft — which pits Pratt & Whitney, GE Aviation and Rolls Royce against each other for a contract expected in 2021. While the service has not revealed the expected amount of the Commercial Engine Replacement Program (CERP), it is considered by the engine makers a high-stakes fight that will help prop up commercial sales lagging due to the COVID-19 pandemic and provide an income based for the next 17 years.

34 comments

J_kies NavySubNuke • 3 hours ago
Lets avoid stupid units and discuss the engineering constraints. (no lbs feet or miles need apply)
Hypersonic vehicles need extremely low drag contours or they rapidly stop being hypersonic. This constraint makes such vehicles long, skinny and have pointy noses in terms of the length over the width. E.g. very limited volume to place payloads as compared to the overall size of the vehicle. Your link to the AF advertising 'mag' shows a very small vehicle and it would have a correspondingly tiny volume for a warhead and an extremely ugly problem for a terminal seeker designer.
As to the 'kinetic warhead' aspect, the basic vehicle is a pretty bad explosive substitute as the pointy design and metals make for more of a 'penetrator' than anything else with extremely marginal lethal radius - recall TNT kinetic equivalence occurs at 2.9km/s. So without a terminal seeker, the CEP of a hypersonic vehicle is driven by time in winds and other issues like asymmetric erosion of the heatshield and you are likely to scare your target as you dig a small deep pit some 100s of meters away.
So bottom line CPS / conventional armed hypersonics are a bad idea. Lethal radius is tiny, ability to locate targets minimal / near zero, and the likelihood of military effect from the use of the weapon is 'poor'.

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  NavySubNuke J_kies • 2 hours ago
  "So bottom line CPS / conventional armed hypersonics are a bad idea"
  You haven't provided enough evidence to make that statement definitively. Especially since you haven't considered the sort of targets such a weapon would be used to target and why and what else the use of them in limited numbers might enable.
  "Lethal radius is tiny"
  Tiny is a relative term and you have not proven that what you define as "tiny" is a bad thing.
  "ability to locate targets minimal / near zero"
  You have provided no evidence that the weapon requires an ability to locate targets.
  "the likelihood of military effect from the use of the weapon is 'poor'."
  This is an opinion provided without any discussion as to what the intended or desired military impact would be.
  You also haven't provided any alternative solutions that would enable the same effect to be achieved at the same or lower cost and in this context a full comparative cost must be developed rather than a short-sighted look at only the R&D or procurement costs.
  Certainly a 2000 lb dumb iron bomb with a tail kit dropped precisely onto the target will always be a more effective weapon but what is the "cost" in plans and lives of getting a fighter aircraft into range and into position to drop that bomb? How many planes and pilots are you willing to sacrifice so that you can use that $25K bomb/tailkit instead of a shooting 5-10 $10M CPS missiles?
  Let's assume they end up costing $10M each. If it takes 9 of these to destroy a defensive emplacement that would have otherwise resulted in a loss of an F-35 it is still a net-win from a pure procurement cost perspective. It is even higher when you consider the human element cost that all we did was expend $90M in weapons and didn't lose a pilot.
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  J_kies NavySubNuke • 2 hours ago
  NSN - nice argument for large caliber artillery - however CPS isn't nearly equivalent to that need.
  I make simple engineering arguments without the use of sensitive or non-public data to point out that CPS will not be cheap - CPS has a small payload in comparison to the overall vehicle size/mass and the concepts cannot be 'accurate' due to the lack of terminal guidance (recall in real combat GPS will be contested).
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  NavySubNuke J_kies • 2 hours ago
  "CPS will not be cheap"
  No one disputes that.
  "CPS has a small payload in comparison to the overall vehicle size/mass"
  No one disputes that
  "the concepts cannot be 'accurate' due to the lack of terminal guidance"
  This is not a given and is heavily CONOPs dependent. Terminal guidance may not be required if you can, for example, take navigation fixes during travel up to and including just before diving in for the final few seconds of terminal flight. It's one thing to contest GPS on the ground or even at 40,000 ft. Contesting GPS at 100,000 ft is a different problem set.

 

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Classical Geopolitics for the 21st Century: Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

University of Reading (U.K.) professor Geoffrey Sloan, who also teaches at the U.S. Naval War College, has written the most important book on classical geopolitics since Colin Gray’s The Geopoli

www.realcleardefense.com

Classical Geopolitics for the 21st Century: Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History

By Francis P. Sempa
August 31, 2020
Comments 2

University of Reading (U.K.) professor Geoffrey Sloan, who also teaches at the U.S. Naval War College, has written the most important book on classical geopolitics since Colin Gray’s The Geopolitics of Super Power (1988).



BUY ON AMAZON

Geopolitics, Geography and Strategic History will appeal to academics, historians, and global strategists alike. Sloan defines geopolitics as the “interaction between geography, strategy and history,” and he uses case studies to show how classical geopolitics properly understood is both a “tool of analysis” for scholars, and a “guide to practice” for statesmen. The intensifying global competition and conflict today between the People’s Republic of China and the United States make Sloan’s book especially timely.



Sloan’s case studies include Britain’s intervention in the Russian Civil War after the First World War, the impact of geopolitics on British and U.S. policy during the Second World War and the Cold War, and the geopolitics of the rise of China in the 21st century.


Sloan unites the case studies by viewing these historical episodes through the classical geopolitical theories of Sir Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and more recent geopolitical theorists such as Colin Gray and Jacob Grygiel. But he gives pride of place—and rightly so—to Mackinder and Spykman.


Mackinder, a British geographer and statesmen, wrote three seminal works on global geopolitics—“The Geographical Pivot of History” (1904), Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), and “The Round World and the Winning of the Peace” (1943). Spykman, a Dutch-American professor at Yale University, wrote two articles—“Geography and Foreign Policy” (1938) and “Geographic Objectives of Foreign Policy” (1939) and two books—America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and The Geography of the Peace (1944)—on global geopolitics. Sloan carefully explores the similarities and differences in these two intellectual giants upon whose shoulders we still stand in the 21st century.


The continuing relevance of Mackinder and Spykman is due to their focus on the most permanent and enduring features of international relations—the idea that the globe is what Mackinder called a “closed political system” and the impact of technological change on the strategic meaning of geography.


Both theorists understood the significance to global geopolitics of Eurasia's vast continent, home—both when they wrote and now—to most of the world’s human and natural resources. Both understood the significance of the global oceans and seas as barriers and highways. Both appreciated the importance of certain geographical features to international politics and the rivalries among great powers. Mackinder identified the inner core of Eurasia as the pivot region or “Heartland” of world politics, while Spykman thought that the great arc of territory between the Eurasian inner core and the oceans (what he called the Rimland) was the key to global dominance.


Both Mackinder and Spykman understood that science and technological innovation changed the strategic meaning of geography. The industrial revolution and faster means of transportation enabled governments to expand their political reach over more territory and more people. In the first five decades of the twentieth century, railroads, motor vehicles, airplanes, and rockets made the world strategically smaller.


The First World War confirmed the truth of Mackinder’s observation in 1904 that, “Every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organism of the world will be shattered in consequence.” Today we call what Mackinder foresaw “globalization.” He wrote Democratic Ideals and Reality to persuade the democracies to adjust their ideals of freedom to the geopolitical realities of global power distribution. And he journeyed to Russia to witness the struggle for power between the forces of the old regime and the first totalitarian government.


Mackinder was perhaps the first Western statesman to warn about the danger to global security if the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Russia after World War I. Sloan details Mackinder’s diplomatic mission to South Russia to provide counsel and aid to General Denikin’s “White” armies in their struggle to crush Lenin’s government. "Mackinder's trip to South Russia," Sloan explains, "was completed in stages, and no opportunity was lost to meet exiled opponents of the Bolsheviks or to talk to people that could give him accurate insight into conditions that pertained in the Bolshevik-controlled areas." He learned, Sloan writes, that “[t]he Bolshevik army was held together mainly by terror.” When he finally arrived in South Russia in early 1920, Mackinder spent five hours discussing with Denikin the war and political situation. Mackinder later urged the British cabinet to provide financial aid to Denikin and organize Eastern Europe's peoples to help the Whites defeat Bolshevism. He believed and wrote that a Bolshevik victory would endanger not just British interests but all of the world’s democracies. “[T]here is today,” Mackinder warned, “a growing threat from Moscow of a state of affairs which will render this world a very unsafe place for democracies.”


Mackinder’s proposed policy prescriptions for the Russian Civil War—which the British government rejected—were based on his appreciation of the global strategic significance of control of the Eurasian pivot by a hostile and sufficiently armed great power. Eurasia's strategic geography was such that a great power that occupied the pivot region or Heartland could potentially expand into the European peninsula, the Middle East, Southwest Asia, and East Asia—the region that Spykman later called the Rimland—and thereby politically dominate the Eurasian landmass. Germany threatened Eurasian hegemony in the First World War. Mackinder warned that unless the democracies established an effective collective security arrangement, the struggle for Eurasian dominance would be renewed.


The struggle was indeed renewed for the next 70 years, as first Nazi Germany then Soviet Russia made bids for Eurasian hegemony, only to be blocked by British and American sea power allied to Eurasian continental powers. Sloan provides a sweeping strategic tour of the Second World War and the Cold War—again through the geopolitical lens of Mackinder and Spykman. President Franklin Roosevelt, who was familiar with the writings of Alfred Thayer Mahan from his days as Assistant Navy Secretary during World War I, became familiar with the works of Spykman through the counsel of Isaiah Bowman, a geographer who advised the American war cabinet. Sloan provides excerpts from FDR’s speeches and “fireside chats” that manifested a classical geopolitical worldview.


During World War II, Sloan writes, “geopolitics performed an educative function” for both policymakers and the public. Mackinder’s Democratic Ideals and Reality was reissued in 1942, and a paperback edition was published in 1944. In between those years, Mackinder's "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace" appeared in Foreign Affairs, then America’s leading journal on international politics. Spykman’s two seminal books on geopolitics also appeared during the war. And remarkably in those works, both Mackinder and Spykman provided geopolitical warnings of the emerging Cold War.


Sloan shows that the U.S. and Western policy of containment of Soviet Russia had its intellectual origins in the works of Mackinder and Spykman. George F. Kennan, the author of the Long Telegram (1946), the “X” article in Foreign Affairs (1947), and American Diplomacy (1951) described the Soviet threat in ideological and geographical terms. It was essential to the United States, Kennan wrote, "that no single continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian landmass . . ., conquer the seafaring fringes of the landmass, become a great sea power as well as land power . . . and enter . . . on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of Europe and Asia's interior." NSC-68—the classified guidance for U.S. national security policy in the early Cold War period—had what Sloan calls “a close congruence with a Mackinderite view of the world.”


The United States’ containment policy worked better in Europe than in Asia. The loss of China to the communists in October 1949, coupled with the failure to deter communist aggression on the Korean Peninsula, and the communist takeover of first North Vietnam then later South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia had consequences that continue to be felt today. Sloan is rightly critical of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations for leading the U.S. into the debacle that was Vietnam. He is, however, less critical of the Truman administration’s Asia policies, yet that is where the trouble started. Sloan gives higher marks—and rightly so—to the Nixon administration's Asia policies, which recognized that Vietnam was a peripheral interest of the U.S. and exploited the Sino-Soviet rivalry to America's benefit, at least in the short run. Nixon and his top foreign policy adviser Henry Kissinger, Sloan writes, “understood that international politics are inherently geographic” and that “much of the behavior of states is related to spatial relations.”


The end of the Cold War—which was facilitated in part by the successful U.S. exploitation of the Sino-Soviet split—also paved the way for China’s rise as the next potential Eurasian hegemon. The fall of the Soviet Union ended the greatest continental threat to China’s Asian predominance. After the Soviet collapse, Sloan explains, “[n]one of [China’s] neighboring states [could] compete [with China] in terms of military power.”


Sloan describes China’s geography and notes that it is both a continental land power and potentially a great sea power, with a long Pacific coast. Here, Sloan adds Mahan to the Mackinder-Spykman geopolitical analysis. These three classical geopolitical theorists wrote about China’s potential to be a great power based on geography and relative population size. Sloan’s analysis explains the true strategic meaning of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has both a continental and maritime component. Mackinder’s geopolitical nightmare was a Eurasian power supreme both on land and at sea.


Sloan believes that China “is in the process of creating a new geopolitical reality” that involves “the expanded geographical scope of its foreign policy.” The Chinese Communist leadership has deployed a powerful navy to promote the “development of . . . [a] ‘continental-oceanic nexus,” that includes constructing ports on the Indian Ocean that “have the potential to dissolve the Rimland and the Heartland divide so central to containment” and to the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia.


Sloan faults U.S. policymakers for “the absence of a sophisticated geopolitical understanding” of China’s strategic threat. But his book was written before the recent series of speeches by high-level Trump administration officials that demonstrated an appreciation of the nature of the Chinese geopolitical threat and the Trump administration’s defense budget increases and military deployments that have begun to put meat on the bones of the U.S. “pivot to Asia.”


Geopolitics is not stagnant. Sloan foresees an evolving geopolitics whereby the Mackinder-Spykman Heartland-Rimland framework will change. “What will emerge,” he predicts, “will be a new geopolitical configuration on the Eurasian continent.”


Geography is not deterministic. The evolving geopolitics of the 21st century will be decided by policymakers and include economic, demographic, military, political, information, and geographic factors. As Sloan rightly concludes, "classical geopolitics has a pivotal role to play in enabling policymakers to comprehend and react to the geopolitical realities of the twenty-first century."



Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21stCentury, America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews on National Security, Geopolitics and War, and Somewhere in France, Somewhere in Germany: A Combat Soldier’s Journey through the Second World War. He has written lengthy introductions to two of Mahan’s books, and has written on historical and foreign policy topics for The Diplomat, the University Bookman, Joint Force Quarterly, the Asian Review of Books, the New York Journal of Books, the Claremont Review of Books, American Diplomacy, the Washington Times, and other publications. He is an attorney, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.

 

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https://www.usnews.com/news/world-report/articles/2020-09-01/us-reveals-first-assessment-of-chinese-nuclear-weapons-stockpile

U.S. Reveals First Assessment of Chinese Nuclear Weapons Stockpile
A new report from the Pentagon documents the scale of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal at a time the Trump administration is pressuring China to join nuclear talks with Russia.

By Paul D. Shinkman, Senior Writer, National Security Sept. 1, 2020, at 2:53 p.m.

The Defense Department for the first time Tuesday revealed the number of nuclear warheads it believes China possesses, saying in a new report that Beijing's arsenal will double over the next decade – while still lagging far behind America's and Russia's capacities.

China possesses at least 200 warheads now with plans for a dramatic increase, according to the annual China Military Power Report, released Tuesday. The expansion of its arsenal will also include developing more sophisticated nuclear weapons, as well as modernizing the methods to launch them to include submarines, bombers, road-mobile carriers and new ground-based silos.

The 2020 report studies the Chinese armed forces through the end of 2019 and is prepared for Congress and the public. It had previously documented the potency of Chinese nuclear weapons but had not provided such specifics.

The new information comes at a time the Trump administration is pressuring China to participate in talks to renegotiate the New START treaty with Russia, set to expire in February failing a new agreement. A top official said shortly after the report's release that the Pentagon made the decision to release the information to better demonstrate the threats China poses and the importance of a U.S. response.

"We should be attentive – certainly we are – and that's the rationale for why we ensured we included the best number and best understanding we could have in this report," Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for China Chad Sbragia said at an event organized by the American Enterprise Institute think tank to accompany the report's release.

The U.S. currently has 5,800 nuclear warheads, 3,800 of which are still active with another 2,000 awaiting dismantlement, the Arms Control Center reports. Russia has roughly 6,400 with roughly 4,300 still active. Prior estimates, including from the Arms Control Center, had placed China's arsenal at significantly higher than the Pentagon's assessment.

Tuesday's revelation comes as the U.S. continues to work toward modernizing its own nuclear arsenal, which is far larger than China's but is also aging, with many components dating back to the Cold War. The Trump administration announced earlier this year it would not participate in talks to renew its last remaining nuclear limitation pact with Russia if China did not also participate.

Some analysts, however, expressed concerns that the report furthers an incomplete argument that U.S. and Russian limits on nuclear weapons development must now be tied to China as well.

[ READ: Pompeo’s China Speech Draws Widespread Rebuke ]

"Even if DoD is correct and China doubles its arsenal by 2030 to 400-500 warheads, China's arsenal will remain far smaller and less capable than that of the U.S. and Russia," Kingston Reif, director of Disarmament and Threat Reduction Policy at the Arms Control Association, wrote on Twitter. "The foolishness of throwing away an extension of New START due to concerns about China can't be overstated."

A separate section of the report highlighted a key shift in U.S. understanding of the Chinese Communist Party's intentions for its military – that it's ambitions to use it are global.

"The CCP does not intend for the PLA to be merely a showpiece of China's modernity or to keep it focused solely on regional threats," the report states.

Sbragia said China's leadership "does have an aspiration for great power status by virtually every measure. … They have to have global convergence at the broadest possible scale."

Paul D. Shinkman, Senior Writer, National Security
Paul Shinkman is a national security correspondent. He joined U.S. News & World Report in 2012 ... Read more
Tags: China, nuclear weapons, world news, Department of Defense, Pentagon


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#Reviewing U.S. Policy Toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik

Ambassador Herman Cohen is one of many career diplomats, along with ambassadors like John Campbell and David Shinn, who devote personal time to researching, understanding, and commenting on African affairs. Cohen’s most recent work traces U.S. foreign policy in Africa from Franklin Roosevelt to Dona

thestrategybridge.org

#Reviewing U.S. Policy Toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik

Caleb Slayton

September 2, 2020

U.S. Policy Toward Africa: Eight Decades of Realpolitik. Herman Cohen. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2020.


Buy on Amazon
Ambassador Herman Cohen is one of many career diplomats, along with ambassadors like John Campbell and David Shinn, who devote personal time to researching, understanding, and commenting on African affairs. Herman Cohen held numerous Africa posts, including serving as Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President George H. W. Bush. Cohen’s most recent work traces U.S. foreign policy in Africa from Franklin Roosevelt to Donald Trump, intertwining historical files and personal insights to weave a picture of what the author titles, Eight Decades of Realpolitik.

While the book’s chapters are arranged in chronological order of U.S. presidential administrations, this review is based on themes. The initial theme lifts key U.S. policy examples from the book on crucial countries that span multiple administrations. The second theme extrapolates from Cohen’s book placing historical security considerations, past Cold War fears, and U.S. political culture in a contemporary context. The extrapolation shows that Cohen’s work is as much about history as it is about building better partnerships and diplomacy for tomorrow. Finally, returning more directly to Cohen’s book, the last theme discusses how U.S. policy toward Africa influences presidential legacies and even American identity.

Today, the African continent is made up of 54 separate countries. However, Cohen’s book shows that from 1960 to 2020, four countries and one region held a prominent place in U.S. foreign policy in Africa: Congo, Liberia, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Southern Africa. As demonstrated in the book, preoccupation with the Congo, by the U.S. or Congo’s neighbors, has often been directly or indirectly related to its resources. Ethiopia and Somalia’s story is part of a World War II legacy relationship and a later U.S. counterterrorism strategy. South Africa’s apartheid regime and Portugal’s Angola were both side-stepped for political and economic reasons in the 1950s and 1960s until Southern Africa boiled over into hot conflict in the 1970s and 1980s.

In a time when respectful political discussions are increasingly difficult, Cohen’s account gives an honest, if even unflattering, take on history.

In a time when respectful political discussions are increasingly difficult, Cohen’s account gives an honest, if even unflattering, take on history. When Africa might have given the U.S. a clean bill in terms of colonialism, Cohen contends that had early America not been engaged in expanding westward under the Louisiana Purchase or engaged in colonial-type activities in the Philippines, America’s history in Africa could have looked differently.[1]

Liberia, America’s earliest interest in Africa, Cohen writes, was often considered an embarrassment to U.S. policy in Africa. A country founded by returned slaves, the Americo-Liberians comprised only 5% of the population but treated the local ethnic groups as second-class citizens for over a century. At the same time that Eisenhower applauded Ghana’s independence, it also chastised the Liberian elite’s dismal political rights record.[2] Liberia’s unequal society eventually led to a civil war that breathed violence into the region in the 1980s and 1990s.

The National Intelligence Estimate (NIE)-83, in 1953, focused on tropical Africa. Africa had great trade potential and was a source of essential metals, uranium—especially in the Congo, and minerals.[3]

History shows that late information or surprise intelligence can cause knee-jerk reactions that lead to poor decision-making. Cohen describes how the Congo’s first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, surprised U.S. officials with a turn to Communist Cuba and the Soviet Union. The Central Intelligence Agency station in Kinshasa never followed the order to assassinate him, but as Cohen explains, Lumumba was still killed in the ensuing realpolitik between the United States, Belgium, and Congo’s nascent political and military cronyism.

In general, following Eisenhower’s lead, consecutive U.S. administrations were consistent in their support for the independence of Europe’s colonies and the end of colonialism. U.S. policy was “squarely on the side of African democratic majority rule.”[4] The realpolitik that frustrated the counter-colonial policy was Cold War competition. The Portuguese colonies in the 1950s and even early 1960s were estimated to have little or no resistance to Portuguese rule. Portugal was an important NATO ally, so the U.S. preferred to ignore but also under-estimate the resistance movements in Portugal’s African colonies.

Forty years ago, Southern Africa’s political challenge the transition from colonial rule to independence. Today, almost every African country is struggling to complete an economic transition, create jobs for millions of youth, and create development outside of their capital cities. Instead of Communism and civil war, countries like Angola and others battle corruption; a national problem with international dimensions. While African countries are justifiably shocked by racial tensions in the United States, they are also wise to their own prejudicial or ethnic divides. Africa’s relationship with China is on the mend after struggling to balance their relationship when Africans in China complained of racially motivated discrimination.

The themes of non-intervention and racial conflict that Cohen prescribes to the 1960s have their contemporary corollary. Cohen writes how Africans cheered at the passing of America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act. Barry Goldwater’s ardent opposition to the act, if even only a reflection of U.S. election maneuvering, was still noticed on the African continent. Today’s political climate reeks of the same racially charged disputes. Media of all flavors dissect personal statements made by presidential candidates even if it has little bearing on policy. With the addition of social media, Africans are likely watching more now than in the 1960s.

As Cohen mentioned, there was a time when the U.S. and China deconflicted their construction of a crucial road and rail line, respectively, from Zambia to the Indian Ocean in the early 1970s. The very idea today, due both to caustic political rhetoric and political foul play, is inconceivable. Today China, with the same stated policy of non-intervention in internal affairs as U.S. presidents in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, is challenged to prove its stated policy amidst so many backdoor deals and is tempted to redefine its policy in the face of conflict that threatens its economic investments in places like Sudan, Mali, the Congo, and Nigeria.

Forty years ago, South Africa suffered one of the hottest chapters of the Cold War. That Cold War is over but now another, some Chinese and Western diplomats warn, is brewing between the United States and China. In the opinion of well-known Angolan writer João Melo, it may already be in motion. Learning from eight decades of realpolitik might inform the United States, China, the European Union and, especially, a more robust and independent system of African states, how best to avoid another one.

It is unlikely the U.S. and China will engage in physical conflict in Africa. However, COVID-19 is too tempting a crisis not to be politicized by both. It is the latest in realpolitik tactics. Conflict between two of Africa’s largest trading partners would not end well for Africans. But COVID-19 is also exposing the economic, production, and development fragility of many African states. Cohen’s focus countries and regions have serious debt challenges. Angola, who has tried in vain to diversify away from oil dependence, is perhaps hit the hardest. China has decided to cancel small portions of Africa’s debt and, in the case of Angola, may pause repayment requirements for three years.

Sensing the eve of great power competition and the whiff of realpolitik, many contemporary Africans echo the words of João Melo in saying, “keep your cold war out of Africa.” Cohen would remind us that as the 1950s ideological rivalries heated up, keeping the Cold War out of Africa happened to be President Eisenhower’s policy as well; desiring instead robust partner and diplomatic engagement

In reference to Africa’s security challenges, Cohen suggests that regional organizations, not just bilateral interventions, must share a common responsibility. Cohen also accuses the Organization of African Unity, later the African Union, of doing too little in the face of conflict. Until the U.S. insisted Tanzania intervene in a 1972 genocide occurring in Burundi, Cohen claimed that there was no African response.[5] Still hesitant after the Blackhawk Down experience in Somalia, President Clinton says his biggest regret is not intervening in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. As Cohen put it, Clinton’s administration was content to sit back as a regional war ousted Mobutu from power, and Rwandan troops massacred hundreds of thousands. Waiting for U.S. diplomatic intervention to get serious, roughly 5 million lives were lost in what came to be known as Africa’s continental war.[6] While President Obama was determined not to make the same mistake in Libya in 2011, his most significant foreign policy regret is poor preparation for a post-Qaddafi Libya.[7]

Many consecutive U.S. administrations can be called out for ignoring the colonial elephants in the room, Portugal’s Angola, and South Africa’s apartheid until the injustice of blatant discrimination reached its tipping point. In a discussion that is even more poignantly present in the summer of 2020, Cohen points out the inconsistency of highlighting the horrors of racism while tolerating the atrocities of Africa’s leaders; a concept promoted by Africa’s youth and the brave protestors who have flooded the streets in places like Sudan, Burkina Faso, Mali, and across North Africa to demand human rights, dignity, and the rule of law.[8] The continent of Africa, its people, and their history have always provided a challenging perspective to Western political thought that is too often near-sighted.

Contemporary U.S. political passions have many historical Africa connections. Cohen writes about how in the late 1980s Paul Manafort lobbied on behalf of President Mobutu of Congo, and for Jonas Savimbi, the Angolan rebel leader, as late as the early 1990s, even after U.S. policy had distanced itself from both. The Heritage Foundation, in the 1980s and early 1990s housed or hosted Angola’s UNITA (União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola) and Mozambique’s RENAMO (Resistência Nacional Moçambicana) members as both rebel groups fought against Marxist governments.[9]

What is fascinating about U.S. foreign policy in Africa is that it describes a lasting legacy of U.S. presidents that is different, often contrary, to the common perception. Here are just a few examples highlighted in the book in relation to Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama. Richard Nixon served as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, visited and researched the continent, and was known as one of the smartest politicians on the topic amongst his contemporaries. Cohen writes how Nixon advanced the idea of African neutrality in the Cold War and U.S. non-intervention in Africa’s internal affairs.[10] Despite Eisenhower’s robust support for Africa’s transition out of colonialism, his legacy in Africa is tarnished with his order to assassinate Patrice Lumumba.

President Ronald Reagan’s legacy is mixed but his Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, toiled endlessly to realize a settlement between warring South Africa, Angola, Cuba and guerrilla movements in the region.[11] According to Crocker, the U.S. response to African events was slow and clunky. Crocker described African affairs as the “stepchild of U.S. foreign policy.”[12] George W. Bush is credited with having the most creative and positive development impact on the continent with the creation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and other programs.[13]

In contrast, events in Africa recall some of its darkest examples of U.S. policy during the Clinton and Obama administrations; each president admitting that their most significant foreign policy regrets were linked to events on the African continent.[14] Often considered the lowest in U.S. foreign policy priorities, Africa reveals much about the character and evolution of U.S. leadership investment and partner interaction.

With such a deep and fascinating history between the U.S. and Africa, it will be easy to point out what is lacking in Cohen’s concise account. Readers might be surprised to find less mentioned about Kenya or Mali, given the influence both have on contemporary U.S. counterterrorism policy. Cohen hits the high points concerning Sudan, South Sudan, the Darfur region, and Niger’s role in supporting counterterrorism operations. Finally, despite Cohen’s extended involvement in executing and formulating U.S. Africa policy, the book is not a memoir. In only a handful of instances does Cohen contribute his personal reflections on specific occurrences. Even so, there is enough present to give even the novice to African affairs a glimpse of why and how Africa had a considerable influence on American policy and identity.

In conclusion, what keeps Africa’s populations, voters, entrepreneurs, media, and journalists from arbitrating their countries’ development; holding their leaders accountable to good investment policies that promote universal advancement and increased economic sustainability? Africa has its choice of partners between the European Union, Turkey, Brazil, India, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Russia, China, the United States, and others, not to mention the recently inaugurated Africa Continental Free Trade Area between African countries. Whatever the U.S. policy toward Africa in the next decades, Africa seeks sincere engagement.


Caleb Slayton is a U.S. Air Force foreign area officer who has lived and worked in east, central, and west Africa for over 12 years. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

 

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'I Don't Believe China' Is Serious About Nuke No First Use: DASD Nukes Soofer - Breaking Defense

A top Pentagon official today expressed skepticism over China's nuclear intentions, but he maintained the US wants Beijing at the table for New START talks with Russia

breakingdefense.com

• Pentagon, Threats

‘I Don’t Believe China’ Is Serious About Nuke No First Use: DASD Nukes Soofer
A top Pentagon official today expressed skepticism over China's nuclear intentions, but he maintained the US wants Beijing at the table for New START talks with Russia

By Paul McLeary on September 02, 2020 at 5:16 PM

Russian Iskander tactical nukes in Kaliningrad

WASHINGTON: In the latest swipe in an increasingly contentious back and forth between Washington and Beijing over nuclear weapons, a senior DoD official said today: “I don’t believe China when they say they have no first use policy” for their nuclear weapons.

The remarks by Robert Soofer, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear and missile defense policy are part of a larger push by the Trump administration to talk tough on China, while trying at the same time to get Beijing to participate in three-way talks with Russia on arms control.

On Tuesday, just a day before Soofer’s remarks during a virtual Mitchell Institute event in Washington, a new Pentagon report lamented the “ambiguity,” in Chinese statements about its commitment to no first use. “China’s lack of transparency regarding the scope and scale of its nuclear modernization program, however, raises questions regarding its future intent as it fields larger, more capable nuclear forces,” the report said.

The Pentagon estimates that China is working to double the number of nuclear warheads in its arsenal over the next decade to around 400, though even with that expected growth China’s nuclear force would still be dwarfed by the estimated 3,800 US warheads in active and reserve status.

Despite already falling under the limits of the New START treaty between the US and Russia, China has refused to engage in any talks alongside the two countries in joining the pact, despite US pressure.

New START limits each country to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads and 700 deployed missiles and bombers. The agreement expires Feb. 5 unless the two sides agree to extend it for another five years.

“Now we’re waiting to see if Russia has the political will now to come and talk to us about it,” Soofer said, noting he’s been involved in the early discussions in Vienna.

The Trump administration has been seen by some as uninterested in extending the agreement, and walking away just as it has the INF and Open Skies agreements with Russia and other international pacts signed by previous Democratic and Republican administrations. But Soofer said the US is willing to extend the agreement if Russia meets three conditions laid out by lead US negotiation Marshall Billingslea.

The first is to address concerns with the Russian build-up of its unconstrained nuclear weapons, or so-called non-strategic nuclear weapons which include short and medium range systems. Second is to strengthen the verification mechanisms under the existing New START, and third to include China in nuclear arms control discussions and other future arms control agreements. So there are some conditions that have been laid out for a possible new start extension.

“Whether and how Ambassador Billingsley will recommend to the president to pursue a New START extension will depend on how much progress we’re making with Russia,” Soofer said. “We have given them proposals during these meetings, and now we are waiting to see if Russia has the political will to come talk to us about it.”

So far, Russia has not joined the US in calling China to the table, but has said if China does take a seat, France and the U.K. should also participate. “I won’t speak for allies, but you may eventually see a much larger multilateral approach as opposed to just the three-way approach” that exists right now,” Soofer said.


Recommended China Is Ahead in Ship, Missile & Air Defense Tech: DoD Report

“The report does not claim that China’s military is currently 10 feet tall,” but “Beijing is working to overcome [its faults],” says Deputy Assistant Secretary for China, Chad Sbragia
By Paul McLeary

 

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Pentagon Official Outlines US Nuclear Deterrence Strategy

By David Vergun There is broad, bipartisan support for the modernization of the nuclear triad, which includes bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and the systems that cont…

www.eurasiareview.com

Pentagon Official Outlines US Nuclear Deterrence Strategy
September 3, 2020 DoD News 0 Comments
By DoD News

By David Vergun

There is broad, bipartisan support for the modernization of the nuclear triad, which includes bombers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and the systems that control them, a Defense Department expert said.

Robert Soofer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy, also said support is more divided for the creation of W76-2, which is a class of low-yield, tactical nuclear warhead that is different from those in the nuclear triad. An example would be a submarine-launched ballistic missile nuclear warhead.

To understand the divide over support for W76-2, one must have an understanding of the two schools of thought on the best approach to nuclear deterrence, Soofer told the Air Force Association Mitchell Institute’s Nuclear Deterrence Forum today.

Each school of thought has its advocates, including members of Congress, interest groups and think tanks, he noted.

The first school of thought is known as simple nuclear deterrence, sometimes referred to as minimum deterrence. The thought is that deterrence is best achieved with a limited number of nuclear weapons that, for example, could destroy a certain number of an adversary’s cities, Soofer said. The viability of the deterrence is created by an adversary’s fear of uncontrolled nuclear escalation.


The second school of thought is known as complex nuclear deterrence. This recognizes that nuclear deterrence can be more complicated, requiring an understanding of the adversary and various scenarios that could play out, he said. This strategy also pays close attention to the nuclear balance and places a premium on ensuring the survivability of nuclear forces that can threaten the adversary.

The complex nuclear deterrence approach has been the basis of U.S. nuclear policy since about the 1960s, and it rests on presenting the president with a number of options and capabilities — particularly in a regional conflict — that would deter Russia’s nuclear use in any scenario, he said.

This is particularly important since Russia has expanded its nuclear capability, and has espoused a doctrine of limited first use, meaning the use of low-yield tactical nuclear warheads, Soofer said.

Having W76-2 capability demonstrates to Russia that the U.S. has taken practical steps to ensure that adversaries can derive no benefit from even limited nuclear use, he said.

There is a very high bar that must be met before the president, who is the only one who can order the use of nuclear weapons, will contemplate the use of W76-2 warhead, or any other nuclear weapon for that matter, Soofer said.

Having a range of nuclear weapons capabilities not only deters nuclear attacks, but it also deters large-scale conventional and biological and chemical attacks and reassures allies and partners, he said.

That is why the U.S. has not adopted a “no use first” policy when it comes to using nuclear weapons, he said, adding that circumstance for first use would have to be extreme, meaning to defend the vital interest of the U.S., allies and partners.

The objectives of the U.S. nuclear strategy are two-fold, he said. “First and foremost is to deter war, both conventional and nuclear; second, should nuclear deterrence fail, [is] to deter further nuclear use and hopefully bring the war to an end before the worst imaginable nuclear catastrophe unfolds.”

Therefore, the U.S. nuclear strategy doesn’t rely solely on massive and immediate attacks against an adversary, he said, though the U.S. maintains this capability to deter adversaries from contemplating a first strike against the United States. “Massive attacks would represent the failure of our nuclear strategy. Rather, our nuclear strategy as articulated in the [2018] Nuclear Posture Review calls for tailored deterrence with flexible capabilities, including an appropriate mix of nuclear capability and limited, graduated response options — something administrations over the last six decades have valued,” Soofer said.

In sum, U.S. nuclear strategy is one of resolve and restraint, he said. “Our limited use of nuclear weapons in response to a Russian or Chinese attack is intended to demonstrate resolve, convincing the adversary that it has really miscalculated when it contemplated the use of nuclear weapons.”

The strategy also communicates restraint, sending a message to the adversary that it has much more to lose if it continues down the path of nuclear escalation, he said.

 

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Dueling with Dragons and Sparring with Snakes: US Strategy in an Era of Varied Threats - Modern War Institute

David Kilcullen, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West (Oxford University Press, 2020) What do bicycles, Syrian refuges, synthetic opioid fentanyl, hotel acquisitions, Android […]

mwi.usma.edu

Dueling with Dragons and Sparring with Snakes: US Strategy in an Era of Varied Threats

Kelsey Worley | September 2, 2020


What do bicycles, Syrian refuges, synthetic opioid fentanyl, hotel acquisitions, Android phones, Djiboutian ports, fishing boats, and African coups have to do with each other? They are all elements of how opponents of the United States and its Western allies have learned and adapted since the Soviet Union collapsed and the era of American unipolarity began. This is the subject of David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West. The book’s title plays on former CIA Director James Woosley’s 1993 warning to Congress about the post–Cold War challenges ahead: “We have slain a large dragon. But we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes.” Kilcullen describes today’s strategic environment as one in which America and its allies face the emergence of dragons, large (China and Russia) and small (North Korea and Iran), while at the same time must continue to deal with the threat of terrorism and Woosley’s other snakes.

For anyone who has read the US National Security Strategy or National Defense Strategy—or who has not been living under a rock for the past decade—Kilcullen’s cast of characters should not come as a surprise. But that is the sad part, really. Despite these strategic documents’ emphasis on both dragons and snakes, we continue to be “blindsided” Kilcullen writes, “with new subversive, hybrid, and clandestine techniques of war.” That is because “our existing military model [is] ineffective [and] maladaptive.”

Kilcullen uses examples throughout the book to underscore this point. Syrian fighters use smartphones to conduct precision indirect fire targeting. Taking advantage of loopholes in border regulations, Russian agents ferry Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees across the Norwegian border on bicycles, testing European borders, fueling dissent over European refugee policy, and infiltrating intelligence assets. Chinese companies with ties to the People’s Liberation Army buy hotels overlooking US and UK bases, and acquire a strategic Australian port. The only thing missing from these examples is the NBA/China controversy and Maverick’s new aviator jacket. Both would fit perfectly in Kilcullen’s chapter on China.

Some readers may be turned off by Kilcullen’s use of evolutionary theory, anthropology, and ecology to relate how state and nonstate actors adapt intentionally or unintentionally under pressure in a “fitness landscape” characterized by Western technological superiority. Others may scoff at his coining of terms like “liminal warfare”—for which he apologizes “for adding yet another term in the burgeoning lexicon”—to describe Russia’s thriving in and exploitation of ambiguity. And “conceptional envelopment,” which is how Kilcullen describes China’s use of “unrestricted warfare” to outmaneuver America, sounds like a DiCaprio film. Yet, despite his use of big words, Kilcullen packages these concepts into easily digestible chapters with vivid examples, including personal anecdotes of sipping whiskey, hiking through snow, and blowing up insurgents.

The Dragons and the Snakes is surely a wake-up call to America and the West. There is a real risk of losing the next global conflict without even knowing it. As a solution to the decline of American preeminence, which he ties to the decline of the Western way of war over the last quarter century, Kilcullen advocates for “going Byzantine”—a logical suggestion if his rather dispiriting assumption that this decline is inevitable is in fact accurate. Instead of either “doubling down on American conventional dominance” or “embracing the suck” of our inevitable decline by “seek[ing] a soft landing” and accepting our new place, Kilcullen says we should play for time by “influencing the environment to shape our adversaries’ next cycle of evolution in directions favorable to us, and adopting military methods that optimize long-term affordability and sustainability rather than short-term battlefield dominance.” This is what the Byzantines did, and they lasted nearly a millennium after the fall of Rome.

Kilcullen makes it clear that we cannot continue to do more of the same. Unfortunately, the National Defense Strategy is exactly this. With its focus on lethality and modernization and language like “peace through strength,” the strategy sounds a lot like “doubling down.” Yet readers might not be fully convinced that Kilcullen’s recommendations avoid the other path he warns against. His strategy of maintaining a light footprint abroad and “selectively copying” our adversaries facilitates what he calls “long-term civilizational sustainability” and “delay to allow an acceptable successor order to emerge.” But it’s hard to see how this is much different than “embracing the suck.” Moreover, while Kilcullen only cursorily mentions Western values—democracy, human rights, rule of law, free speech—there does not seem to be any semblance of an “acceptable successor” that supports these values or is capable of defending them. Nevertheless, Kilcullen makes a credible case that “going Byzantine” offers the best chance to achieve the goals of the National Defense Strategy to “sustain American influence and ensure favorable balances of power that safeguard the free and open international order.”



Maj. Kelsey Worley is a US Army foreign area officer specializing in the Middle East and North Africa. He still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up.

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.

 

[Housecarl]

Posted for fair use.....

How China's Ballistic Missile And Nuclear Arsenal Is Ballooning According To The Pentagon

Beyond rapidly growing its ballistic missile force, the report says China could double its nuclear stockpile in the coming years.

www.thedrive.com

How China's Ballistic Missile And Nuclear Arsenal Is Ballooning According To The Pentagon
Beyond rapidly growing its ballistic missile force, the report says China could double its nuclear stockpile in the coming years.
By Joseph TrevithickSeptember 3, 2020

• The War Zone

Kyodo via AP Images / DOD
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A new report from the Pentagon offers an updated public assessment of China's ballistic missile arsenal, which shows a notable increase in its size and the scope of its capabilities. The annual review of the Chinese military also indicates that these developments are, at least in part, tied to important developments in the country's nuclear posture and the doctrine and policies surrounding it.
The Pentagon released the latest iteration of its report on the Chinese military and its capabilities, an updated version of which it is required to send to Congress every year, by law, on Sept. 2, 2020. It warned that the People's Liberation Army is continuing to make strides in a variety of important and advanced technologies, including, but certainly not limited to hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, cyber warfare, counter-space systems, air defenses, and the construction of large capital ships and advanced submarines. The review's discussion about ballistic missiles and nuclear capabilities, including a first-ever public estimate from the Department of Defense about the size of the Chinese nuclear arsenal, was especially significant.



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"The PLARF [People's Liberation Army Rocket Force] develops and fields a wide variety of conventional mobile ground-launched ballistic missiles and cruise missiles," the report said. "The PRC [People's Republic of China] is developing new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that will significantly improve its nuclear-capable missile forces."

The Pentagon estimates that China has added 10 new ICBMs to its arsenal since its 2019 report, as well as 10 more launchers, including silos and road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers, to fire them. This brings to the estimated size of the country's total operational IBCM force from 90 to 100.

The most notable addition are examples of the new DF-41 ICBM, also known to the U.S. intelligence community as the CSS-X-20, which reportedly has the ability to deploy Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle warheads, or MIRVs, allowing a single missile to strike multiple targets. You can read more about the DF-41, which represents a significant technology leap over previous Chinese ICBMs and that the Chinese government publicly paraded for the first time last year, in this past War Zone piece. China has also been developing DF-5C and DF-31B variants of those existing ICBM types.





There is no year-over-year change in the number of short-range ballistic missile (SRBM) and medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM) launchers, though the number of total missiles in both cases have been revised. In 2019, the Pentagon said that China had between 750 and 1,500 SRBMs and between 150 and 450 MRBMs, while it simply said that the country had more than 600 SRBMs and more than 150 MRBMs in 2020. SRBMs are defined as ballistic missiles with ranges between 300 kilometers (186 miles) and 1,000 kilometers (621 miles), while MRBMs can reach distances of between 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) and 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles).

The most dramatic change in the Pentagon's assessment of the PLARF's ballistic missile inventory between 2019 and 2020 was with regards to intermediate-range ballistic missiles (IRBM), which have ranges between 3,000 kilometers (1,864 miles) and 5,500 kilometers (3,417 miles). At present, China's sole operational IRBM is understood to be the DF-26, "which is capable of conducting both conventional and nuclear precision strikes against ground targets, as well as conventional strikes against naval targets," according to the Pentagon. The Chinese military highlighted its long-range anti-ship ballistic missile capabilities in a recent major exercise in the South China Sea.

Imaginechina via AP
DF-26s on parade.
The new report says that the total number of DF-26 road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers has surged from 80 to 200, while the total number of actual missiles has risen from between 80 and 160 to over 200. The DF-26 is rapidly becoming one of the most important missiles in China's arsenal, but there does not appear to have been any public discussion from Chinese authorities about such a significant expansion of this part of the PLARF. The Pentagon offers no context for how it arrived at this estimate.

DOD
The DOD's estimates of the size of China's ground-based ballistic missile and ground-launched cruise missile (GLCM) arsenals as of 2020.

DOD
Those same estimates as of 2019.
Adding 120 new TELs would very likely reflect a notable increase in the overall DF-26 force, as well as supporting elements and infrastructure. Experts have openly questioned whether this might be a typo, with the launcher figure being an accidental copy-paste of the missile figure, or some kind of other error. There is at least one clear quantitative error elsewhere in the new Pentagon report, with another section of the text saying the PLARF only has 200 SRBM launchers, instead of 250, as found in tables in both the 2020 and 2019 editions.

Good point by @dex_eve - That claim by new DOD China report that DF-26 has increased from 80 to 200 in one year is not reflected in increase in mapped bases for all those new launchers.

How could they flush out 120 launchers in one year?

How to fit all that into existing bases? https://t.co/JHKanVfent
— Hans Kristensen (@nukestrat) September 2, 2020​

It’s odd. You’d think the administration would have made more noise about China’s rapid deployment of DF-26 brigades given everything else they complain about.
— Ankit Panda (@nktpnd) September 1, 2020​

In addition to the ground-based ballistic missiles, the Pentagon report also notes that the People's Liberation Army has six Type 094 Jin class ballistic missile submarines, "four operational and two outfitting at Huludao Shipyard," each of which can carry up to 12 nuclear-tipped JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles. The combination of the Type 094s and the JL-2s, which China also paraded publicly last year, represent "the country’s first viable sea-based nuclear deterrent." The Chinese are also working to develop a follow-on ballistic missile submarine, known as the Type 096, as well as an improved submarine-launched ballistic missile, the JL-3.

China Military
JL-2 submarine-launched ballistic missiles on trucks during a parade in 2019.
The DOD report also raises the possibility that the People's Liberation Army Navy's Type 055 warships, which it classifies as cruisers, rather than destroyers, may be able to carry anti-ship ballistic missiles of some kind in the future. It has been previously reported that the CM-401 short-range anti-ship ballistic missile, which the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation unveiled in 2018, might be a future armament for the Type 055. The assessment does not appear to be talking about the integration of larger ballistic missiles, such as anti-ship variants of the DF-21 or DF-26, onto these ships.
"In October 2019, China signaled the return of the airborne leg of its nuclear triad after the PLAAF publicly revealed the H-6N as its first nuclear-capable air-to-air refuelable bomber," the report adds. "The H-6N features a modified fuselage that allows it to carry externally either a drone or an air-launched ballistic missile (ALBM) that may be nuclear capable."

Chinese Internet
A view of the underside of an H-6N bomber showing a semi-recessed area at the rear of the fuselage that could be used to carry an air-launched ballistic missile or other oversized payloads.

Continued.....

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.....

The report further notes that China continues work on a reportedly flying wing-type stealth bomber, known as the H-20, but it remains unclear when that aircraft may enter service. You can read more about the H-20 in these past War Zone pieces. There is no mention of a potential advanced regional bomber program, which the Defense Intelligence Agency discussed in its public report last year and is commonly referred to as the JH-XX. You can read more about that aircraft in this previous War Zone story.
The Pentagon says that these developments are, at least in part, a component of broader efforts to expand the size and scope of the People's Liberation Army's nuclear capabilities. The 2020 assessment includes, for the first time ever, an estimate of how many nuclear warheads China has – "in the low-200s" – with the possibility of that stockpile doubling in the coming years. As many as 200 warheads may be capable of threatening the United Staes within the next five years, according to the review.

DOD
A map showing the respective ranges of China's existing nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, including the CSS-4 (DF-5) ICBM, CSS-5 (DF-21) MRBM, and CSS-10 (DF-31) ICBM, in addition to the DF-26 IRBM and DF-41 ICBM.

DOD
Another map showing the range of China's various SRBMs, as well as the DF-26, in comparison to other conventional strike capabilities, including ground and air-launched land-attack and anti-ship cruise missiles. The DF-17, a ballistic missile-type rocket booster armed with hypersonic boost-glide vehicle is notably included in the "land attack missile" ring.

The report offers limited detail about how the Pentagon arrived at this assessment, saying that it is due in part to the expected introduction of more MIRVed DF-41s. However, it also says "China probably has enough nuclear materials to at least double its warhead stockpile without new fissile material production," but that it "will require increased nuclear warhead production" in order to make this a reality. The "low-200s" warhead estimate is also notably lower than past Defense Intelligence Agency assessments, as well as those from experts outside of the U.S. government, and may only reflect deployed weapons and not those held in reserve.

This assessment itself is based in part in the Pentagon's belief that China is looking to reorganize and improve its nuclear forces to better withstand a potential first strike. It says specifically:

"The PRC’s nuclear weapons policy prioritizes the maintenance of a nuclear force able to survive a first strike and respond with sufficient strength to inflict unacceptable damage on an enemy. China is enhancing peacetime readiness levels for these nuclear forces to ensure their responsiveness. In addition, China insists its new generation of mobile missiles, with warheads consisting of MIRVs and penetration aids, are intended to ensure the viability of its strategic nuclear forces in the face of continued advances in U.S. and, to a lesser extent, Russian strategic ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance], precision strike, and missile defense capabilities. India also plays a factor in China’s nuclear threat perceptions."

Part of this increased peacetime readiness could include the expansion of the PLARF's silo-based ICBM force, according to the Pentagon. With regards to this development, it says:

"Commercial imagery from 2019 has revealed that China has constructed an ICBM silo at one of the PLARF’s Western training ranges that is smaller than China’s existing CSS-4 (DF-5) silos. According to state media, the CSS-X-20 (DF-41) ICBM can be launched from silos; this site is probably being used to at least develop a concept of operations for silo basing this system. There are also some indications that China may be building new CSS-4 (DF-5) ICBM silos."
...
"Their size precludes use by the DF-5 and may support concept development for a silo-based DF-41 or one of China’s smaller ICBMs. When taken with China’s past concerns about silo survivability and ongoing strategic early warning developments, these new silos provide further evidence China is moving to a LOW [launch-on-warning] posture."

Launch-on-warning refers to a nuclear deterrent policy to launch a massive counterstrike upon detecting incoming nuclear threats. This helps ensure that a retaliatory strike can be successfully initiated before the hostile weapons reach their targets.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was the first to spot the silo at the PLARF's nuclear missile training site near Jilantai in the Gobi Desert and released its own assessment in September 2019. FAS said that it was possible that this silo, which is a distinctly different design from the ones China uses for the DF-5, could be part of the development of an alternate basing option for the DF-41 or for some other future solid-fuel ballistic missile.

DOD
Satellite imagery of the silo at the PLARF training site near Jilantai that DOD included in its 2020 report on China's military to Congress.

However, at present, there does not appear to be any further public evidence of new Chinese silo construction for the DF-41 to further support the Pentagon's assessment. There is also mention of possible rail-mobile DF-41s, something China reportedly tested in 2015, but it is unclear how seriously the PLARF is exploring this capability. The Soviet Union notably did deploy a similar system during the Cold War, the RT-23 Molodets, and Russia more recently looking into bringing that capability back before shelving those plans in favor of missiles armed with nuclear-armed hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, known as Avangard.

The Pentagon also separately said that China's nuclear arsenal could grow to include new warheads, including a potential lower-yield warhead for the DF-26, and new delivery systems. A lower yield nuclear weapon could indicate that the Chinese military may bee looking at a so-called escalate-to-deescalate policy, in which a limited nuclear strike could be used to bring a quick end to a conflict before outside powers might be able to intervene or to otherwise dissuade them from doing so. The U.S. government says that Russia has such a policy in its nuclear doctrine, but experts dispute that it exists.
The U.S. government has accused China, as well as Russia, of conducting low-yield nuclear tests in violation of international agreements, which could support the development of new nuclear weapons, but has not publicly provided evidence to substantiate this. In addition, as The War Zone, among others, has pointed out in the past, so-called sub-critical nuclear testing, in which there is no actual nuclear detonation, is permitted under existing arms control regimes and the U.S. conducts such experimentation, as well.

All of this comes as the United States is engaged in negotiations with Russia about extending the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which limits the number of nuclear warheads and various strategic delivery systems that each country can have, and is otherwise set to sunset next year. The U.S. government has been campaigning to bring China into the discussions and potentially expand the deal into a trilateral arrangement.
China has expressed virtually no interest in doing so. Beyond a spike in geopolitical friction with Washington over a host of different issues, Beijing is unlikely to see any benefit in making itself a party to such an agreement in the near future given that its existing nuclear arsenal is so small compared to that of the U.S. and Russian militaries. The Pentagon looks to be making a case in its latest China assessment for getting them to accept limits now before they can expand the size of their stockpile. Chinese officials have already countered these calls by saying it would be willing to talk nuclear arms control with the United States if it agreed to reduce its arsenal to China's level first.

Whether or not the Chinese grow their ballistic missile and nuclear forces in the ways that the Pentagon expects, it is clear that the People's Liberation Army is working to significantly expand its capabilities in both regards to better challenge the United States, as well as other potential adversaries.

Contact the author: Joe@thedrive.com

 

[jward]

Hans Kristensen
@nukestrat
42m

Nuclear-capable B-52 over Ukraine heading toward Crimea. Just days after another B-52 was harassed by Russian fighter. What could possibly go wrong?


Hans Kristensen
@nukestrat
37m

And more: extraordinary decision to send nuclear bomber so close to contested and tense areas. Lots of other planes fly there, so why a B-52? h/t

2x

#USAF Boeing B-52H Stratofortress entering the territory of Ukraine from Poland. JULIA51/61-0034 JULIA53/60-0044
As
@GDarkconrad
pointed out, first time in history US strategic bomber enters the Ukrainian airspace.
Worth reminding all B-52s deployed at RAF Fairford in August are nuclear-capable.
2 US B52s (JULIA51 and JULIA53) flying over the Kherson Oblast near Crimea.
Wow, B52s heading towards the Azov Sea. Extraordinary.
Turning back just over the coast of Azov Sea and now heading southwest.

Aircraft Spots
@AircraftSpots

Replying to
@nukestrat
There’s actually 3 of them! JULIA52 doesn’t have Mode-S equipped unfortunately. I can definitely say this is the first time I’ve been nervous while watching positions update on the screen. Wild!

IN GOD WE TRUST.
@HusseinChindo
20m

Replying to
@AircraftSpots
and
@nukestrat
The US is desperately asking for it......it will end in premium tears for all the war mongers.

_____________________________________

ETA:

Crisis Intel
@Crisis_Intel
7m

BREAKING Russian strategic bombers now airborne in what I presume is a response to the 3 B-52 American air force bombers circling over #Ukraine

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1301839844042256385

View: https://twitter.com/Crisis_Intel/status/1301839844042256385?s=20

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

Petri Mäkelä
@pmakela1
·
9m

This is the most intensive SIGINT bait I've seen in a while. At least two USAF RC-135V/W Rivet Joint SIGINT planes recording the Russian emissions (radar, comms etc.) from #Crimea and #Russia as a flight of B-52H bombers circle along the Azov coast in Ukrainian airspace.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1301841799309336576

View: https://twitter.com/pmakela1/status/1301841799309336576?s=20

------------------------------------------------------------------
Crisis Intel

@Crisis_Intel
23m

This operation including Nuclear-capable B-52 bombers would need very senior approval if not presidential approval. American bombers have never even entered Ukrainian air space before today let alone coming close to Crimea. Trump poking the Russian bear before the election?
Crisis Intel
https://twitter.com/Crisis_Intel/status/1301843577782366211?s=20

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

Posted for fair use.....

Norway Expands Key Arctic Port For More US Nuke Sub Visits - Breaking Defense

"The Seawolf deployment, the joint B-52 flights over Norway last month, and our carrier going north of Arctic Circle...all speak to a greater show of US presence in the Arctic/High North,” said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe Program at the Washington-based CSIS.

breakingdefense.com

Norway Expands Key Arctic Port For More US Nuke Sub Visits
"The Seawolf deployment, the joint B-52 flights over Norway last month, and our carrier going north of Arctic Circle...all speak to a greater show of US presence in the Arctic/High North,” said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe Program at the Washington-based CSIS.

By Paul McLeary on September 03, 2020 at 4:54 PM

CORRECTION: There are three Seawolf-class submarines, not four.

WASHINGTON: A key Arctic port in Norway has been improved and additions made to pave the way for increased visits by US nuclear submarines, providing a major new jumping off point for watching Russia’s active Northern Fleet as it transits into the North Atlantic.

Twice over the past year, the US Navy has made public displays of its nuclear submarines docking in Norway, sending a clear signal to Russia about the American presence in the region and providing a rare glimpse into the secretive world or undersea deployments. Of course, Norway would have been asked to approve those releases, sending its own signal to the Russians. But those visits were brief, and mostly for effect. The new work will allow American and NATO submarines to pull into the port and replenish, allowing for longer deployments to the critical Arctic region.

A senior US defense official speaking on background told me, “the US and Norway have a great relationship, and our ability to use facilities in and around Tromso would provide a strategic location for our visits,” which happen about four times a year. “It would give us flexibility for not only the US but allied countries to exercise in the High North.”


Those visits are “a hedge against malign actors in the region,” Cmdr. Kyle Raines, spokesman for US Navy Europe, said. “The US Navy will continue to work closely with the US Embassy and the Norwegian Ministry of Defense to coordinate submarine access to Tromso.”

The work done at Tromso, which sits about 190 miles above the Arctic Circle, has been completed, but local officials are now doing “necessary adjustments and changes to various local regulations and plans,” Marita Isaksen Wangberg, a spokesperson for the Norwegian military told me via email. “This work has to be finalized before nuclear submarines can visit the actual harbor.” Getting the regulations squared away is the last step, as “the physical adaptation of the port facilities has been completed,” Wangberg added.

Tromso has long been a hub of military activity given its proximity to Russia’s Kola peninsula, home to Moscow’s powerful Northern Fleet.

On August 21, the US fast attack submarine USS Seawolf parked off the coast of Tromso to take on new crew members, the Navy acknowledged in a rare statement commenting on the activities of its secretive submarine fleet. The namesake boat of just three Seawolf-class fast attack submarines which specialize in intelligence collection, the Washington-based submarine was likely operating under the Arctic ice before stopping off the coast of Tromso.




Just days before the visit, the Navy also publicized the visit of destroyer USS Roosevelt to Tromso on Aug. 17 as it wrapped up a 50-day patrol in the High North.

“Norway’s support illustrates how much we depend on our NATO allies to conduct at-sea operations,” Capt. Joseph Gagliano, commander, Task Force 65 said in a statement. “Tromso’s support to Roosevelt demonstrates Norway’s commitment to us.”

Likewise, Seawolf’s deployment from Bangor, Wash., to Norway “demonstrates the Submarine Force’s global reach and commitment to provide persistent and clandestine undersea forces worldwide to execute our unique missions,” Navy Vice Adm. Daryl Caudle, the service’s top submarine officer, said in a statement.

Just a day before the Seawolf’s arrival, six B-52 bombers landed in the UK after flying from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota. The aircraft subsequently flew with the Norwegian air force and passed over each of NATO’s 30 nations in a flyover that clearly caught Moscow’s attention, leading to a series of incidents stretching from the Baltic to the Black seas.

On Aug. 28, a pair of Russian Su-27 jets passed about 100 feet in front of two B-52s over the Black Sea in what US officials described as an “unsafe and unprofessional” pass-by. Days later, another Su-27, flying from Kaliningrad, briefly chased another B-52 into Danish airspace

Just days before these high-flying antics, Russian army vehicles injured seven American soldiers in northern Syria when they rammed US MRAPs in a high-speed chase.

Cold War-style provocations are becoming increasingly common, but the changing face of the port in Tromso will likely have long-lasting strategic effects for NATO and how it operates in the increasingly important Arctic.

“The Seawolf deployment, the joint B-52 flights over Norway last month, and our carrier going north of Arctic Circle for Trident Juncture all speak to a greater show of US presence in the Arctic/High North,” said Rachel Ellehuus, deputy director of the Europe Program at the Washington-based CSIS. “Interestingly, they all had an element of strategic surprise,” she added, “which I’m sure makes our Norwegian allies nervous as they prefer predictability in the region. I’d also note that the US is still behind in fielding some basic capabilities needed to work in an Arctic environment.”

The last publicized US submarine visit to Norway came back in November, when the US 6th Fleet tweeted photos showing MK-48 Advanced Capability torpedos being loaded aboard the USS Minnesota at Haakonsvern Naval Base.

The sub showed up just after 10 Russian submarines were detected moving into the North Atlantic where they conducted live-fire tests while playing a game of cat-and-mouse with US and NATO subs and sub-hunting aircraft.

More changes for the US posture in the High North may be coming. Washington and Oslo are wrapping up a protracted negotiation period meant to update their existing defense cooperation agreement, a document which governs how US forces can posture themselves within the country, and how the two nations will work together military.

Much like the agreement just reached with Poland, the pact will push the relationship between the two countries into the new era of increased aggressiveness by Moscow, which ranges from disinformation campaigns on social media to unsafe fly-bys and other provocations.

 

[jward]

Malian soldiers killed in attack near Mauritania border
At least 10 soldiers killed in the attack in the country's west, according to the Malian military’s Twitter account.

5 hours ago

Four soldiers were killed and 12 others wounded in an ambush on an anti-poaching unit last week [John Kalapo/Getty Images]
more on Mali

• French forces in Mali kill civilian, wound two2 days ago
• What does the coup mean for Mali's spiralling security crisis?4 days ago
• Mali military rulers delay first meeting over transfer of powers6 days ago
• W African bloc wants civilian transition in Mali, polls in a yearlast week

At least 10 Malian soldiers have been killed in a night-time attack in the country's west near its border with Mauritania.
In Thursday's attack, the biggest on the military since it staged a coup on August 18, the Malian army mission in Guire suffered deaths, injuries and material damage in the attack on Thursday, according to the Malian military's Twitter account.
"Reinforcements have been dispatched there," it said.
The attack comes as Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, the Malian president overthrown in the military coup, was moved to his residence after hospitalisation at a private clinic under the tight security of the military government, according to family members.

The 75-year-old's health condition was not immediately known and it is unclear if he will be evacuated abroad, though leaders of the military government have said they are open to whatever treatment he needs to get, even if in another country.
The military government, which calls itself the National Committee for the Salvation of the People, is now running Mali under the leadership of Assimi Goita.
They have proposed taking three years to set up a transition to civilian rule.
The country's longtime political opposition, international community and the West African regional bloc are demanding the military government speed up that transition.

The regional bloc, known as ECOWAS, has cut financial flows to Mali, and neighbouring countries have closed their borders in a bid to step up pressure on the coup leaders.
Attacks on the army have continued, including one last week when four soldiers were killed and 12 others wounded in an ambush on an anti-poaching unit by fighters in central Mali about 25km (15 miles) from Konna, the military said.

SOURCE: AP news agency
posted for fair use
Malian soldiers killed in attack near Mauritania border

 

[danielboon]

.
Russia scrambles jets to escort U.S. bombers over Black Sea: news agencies
.

4 hours ago https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...CoAQ&usg=AOvVaw21299KRot_SLTacZ44hecY&ampcf=1

 

[jward]

Iran Caught Stockpiling Enriched Uranium Needed for Bomb
Nuclear watchdog: Tehran 3.5 months away from weapon

The Arak heavy water plant in Iran / Getty Images
Adam Kredo - September 4, 2020 8:00 PM


The United States has evidence that Iran is stockpiling enriched uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon, in direct violation of international restrictions on Tehran’s use of the fissile material.
Nuclear experts predict that Iran is now just 3.5 months away from the "breakout time," a measurement of how close the country is to having the technology and materials to construct a nuclear weapon. It also now has the fuel to potentially construct two separate bombs.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) disclosed on Friday that Iran has nearly doubled its stockpiles of enriched uranium, generating concerns about the country’s continued progress on a nuclear weapon. Iran granted the IAEA access to several contested nuclear sites that had previously been off limits. A report on Tehran’s nuclear activities was shared with the United States and other United Nations members.

It is just the latest attempt by Iran to breach restrictions written into the original nuclear agreement governing the amount of uranium it can enrich and keep in the country. Iran has also been building advanced ballistic missiles, contrary to U.N. regulations. The revelations about its uranium enrichment are likely to provide fresh grist for the Trump administration as it seeks to reimpose a set of international sanctions on Iran.

A State Department official, speaking to the Washington Free Beacon only on background, said the IAEA’s report "highlights Iran’s ‘significant nonperformance’ of its commitments under the Iran deal that led the United States to take decisive action to restore U.N. sanctions on Iran."

The official would not comment on specific claims in the report until it is made public by the IAEA.
However, the official said there is conclusive proof that Iran is violating its commitments under the nuclear deal.
Iran’s enriched uranium store "now exceeds by 10-fold the limit set in the" nuclear deal, according to the Institute for Science and International Security, a nuclear watchdog group that has closely tracked the IAEA’s inspections. The group said "Iran's estimated breakout time as of September 2020 is as short as 3.5 months."

"A new development is that Iran may have enough low enriched uranium to produce enough weapon-grade uranium for a second nuclear weapon, where the second one could be produced more quickly than the first, requiring in total as little as 5.5 months to produce enough weapon-grade uranium for two nuclear weapons," the group said Friday.
The State Department official said the administration will keep increasing pressure on Iran until it backs away from the pursuit of a nuclear weapon.

"There is no reason for Iran to expand its nuclear program other than to engage in continued brinkmanship," the official said. "We will continue imposing maximum pressure on the Iranian regime until it ceases its destabilizing activities and negotiates a comprehensive deal. That is why we took decisive action last month to initiate the ‘snapback' of U.N. sanctions on Iran."

As part of its pressure campaign at the U.N., the Trump administration has sought to reimpose international sanctions on Iran that were lifted as part of the 2015 nuclear agreement. The success of this effort remains unclear in light of opposition by European powers, as well as Russia and China.
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Iran Caught Stockpiling Enriched Uranium Needed for Bomb

The United States has evidence that Iran is stockpiling enriched uranium, the key component in a nuclear weapon, in direct violation of international restrictions on Tehran’s use of the fissile material.

freebeacon.com